Most poems about wonder try to produce it. Carl Solomon's reads more like a list of errands: go here, look at that, tick it off. The title and first line give the reason, "Lest the spirit of wonder be lost", and then the poem sends the reader around the sands, the library, the gardens, the aquarium, the workplace and the cemetery. Only in the last two lines does it turn on its own instructions. The speaker says "you have never lost the spirit of wonder," and admits that "perhaps I had and have now regained it from you." The person who seemed to be doing the prescribing turns out to be the patient, and the "cure" turns out to be the listener.
The poem is in free verse, with no rhyme and no steady metre. The lines are long and prosy, and they wrap awkwardly. "Trees" is left stranded alone on its own line, and "travail" is split by a hyphen as "tra-/vail." The poem sounds like someone talking, not singing. The repeated "Go to…" works like a drumbeat, but a flat one, closer to a tour guide or a sign in a municipal building than to a prophet.
The poem's humour and its feeling both come from its verbs. Wonder is supposed to be "behold"-ing, an old, almost biblical word, and the poem uses it for the beach and then for "the magnificent variety of books and periodicals." That second use is deliberately comic, since the grand verb is attached to "consult the card catalogue", one of the dullest bits of library business imaginable. Then the verbs sag: "stare at the palm trees," then "see the fish." The language goes from awe to glazed looking to a child's plain sentence. It is hard to tell whether the speaker is mocking the idea of scheduled wonder or sincerely trying to recover it, and the poem seems to want that doubt.
One word is repeated with a twist. The sands have an "infinity", and later work has an "infinite nature." The same word is meant to dignify a beach and to describe a job, and the effect is double-edged. Infinity can be thrilling or it can be exhausting. "Travail" is an effortful, slightly old word for labour, close to suffering, and it makes "work" sound less like a paycheck than an ordeal. If wonder can be found even here, the poem suggests it is not a luxury reserved for pretty places. It may also mean that the speaker's own days feel endless, in the wrong way.
The cemetery is the last stop, and it is the quietest. The poem just says "behold old tombstones," with none of the earlier enthusiasm. After beaches, books and fish, it adds mortality to the sights. The list moves from the vast and natural, through the human and organised, to labour and death. Wonder, on this reading, covers the whole range of life and not just its pleasant corners.
Then the tone changes. "You can't fool me" is casual, teasing and intimate, the kind of thing said across a table. The general "you" of the commands becomes a particular person, who is accused, almost fondly, of having kept their wonder all along. The speaker's confession follows in a long, unpunctuated rush that ends on "from you." The place names in the list start to look like props. What actually restored the speaker's wonder, according to the poem's last line, was not a palm tree or a fish tank but another person's attention to the world.
That is the poem's real significance, and it is a modest one. It does not announce a grand theory of wonder. It admits, a little sheepishly, that wonder is contagious and that people lend it to one another when the sands and the stacks of periodicals stop working. Because the advice is so deadpan and the ending so warm, the poem takes the reader through the same turn as the speaker. It starts as an instruction, becomes a joke, and ends as a thank-you.