Look at the page before you read a word of it: a few scraps of text scattered across white space, none longer than five words. It resembles a light snowfall with the ground showing through, and that resemblance is the poem's quiet trick. Louis Zukofsky gives us a wintry stretch of shore in the act of being seen, and he lets the grammar thin out just as the snow does.
The title sets the scene. "After Reading, a Song" suggests that someone has put a book down and looked up at the world, and that what arrives is not an argument but a handful of things. The poem never says where the speaker stands, so it is best read as a movement from sentences into pure noticing.
Only the opening tries for a sentence, and even that stumbles. "a light snow / a had been fallen": the article "a" appears twice, the second time stranded, cut off from any noun, and "had been fallen" is a slightly off, almost foreign construction. It sounds like speech caught mid-correction, or like seeing something before the words for it have arrived. It is also the poem's only use of the past perfect. After this, the snow is simply a condition of the ground, and time drops away.
Perception takes over from there. "the brown most showed" can be read two ways: the brown showed most, or brown was mostly what showed through. Either way, the thin snow lets the earth speak. Then comes "knoll trunk knot treelings' U's", five nouns with no verb and no punctuation, crowded together the way objects crowd when you scan a field. The sounds organise them. "Knoll," "trunk" and "knot" share hard k and n sounds, so the line clicks along like twigs underfoot. "Treelings' U's" is the most inventive moment. The diminutive "treelings" suggests young, slight trees, whose forking branches make the shape of the letter U. Perhaps a mind still tuned to print after reading sees the alphabet in the branches, so that book and landscape blur.
"The Sound marsh water" stands alone as a single line. The capital S suggests a named stretch of water, though the poem doesn't say which, and it also echoes the "Song" of the title, as if the place itself were the music. The three words move from a large body of water to wetland to plain water, flat and low like a horizon.
"ice clump / sparkling root etc" brings the poem's one openly lyrical word, "sparkling," and then undercuts it with "etc," a word from lists and bookkeeping. It admits that the scene is bigger than any inventory and that the poet can't, and needn't, name everything. It is a shrug, but an honest one.
The last line, "and so far out.", is the only one that begins with a conjunction, as though continuing a sentence that never existed, and it carries the poem's only full stop. The unstressed "and so" slides into the stressed "far out," and the gaze goes with it, past the marsh and past the poem. It could describe the water stretching away, or the speaker's distance from the book. The poem leaves that open.
There is no rhyme scheme, but sound still binds the poem. A long o runs through "snow," "showed," "knoll" and "so," and "brown" shares its vowel with "out," so the first half and the last line quietly answer each other. The rhythm is built from heavy monosyllables like "knoll trunk knot" and "ice clump." Each word demands its own beat, so reading slows to the pace of someone crossing frozen ground. Only the closing "and so" lets the pace loosen.
What makes the poem worth studying is how much it asks of the gaps. Add the missing verbs and you get a pleasant but ordinary description of a snowy marsh. Leave them out and the reader has to look the way the speaker looks, one thing at a time. The poem treats syntax as part of the landscape, and it makes the "song" of the title out of the sounds and spacing of the words themselves.