Six words, no verb, no punctuation, and a title that is only three asterisks. Robert Grenier's poem gives a reader almost nothing to hold, and that is where its interest begins. "all the beauties / of the swing" is a fragment, a phrase that seems to have drifted in from the middle of a longer thought. What it says is simple: someone is struck by the beauty of a swing. But the poem does not describe that beauty. It points at it and stops.
The central idea sits in the gap between the two lines. "All the beauties" promises something large, even total, and the plural suggests a list too long to write out. Then the second line brings that grand abstraction down to a humble, concrete object. The swing might be the playground kind, or it might be the motion itself. The poem never says which, and the definite article ("the swing", not "a swing") makes it feel like a particular swing, one the speaker has in mind. Judging by the wording, the tone is part wonder and part tenderness. It sounds like something said out loud, almost to oneself, while watching.
The construction makes the poem behave like its subject. The first line ends on "beauties" and the sentence hangs there, unfinished, the way a swing seems to pause at the top of its arc. Then "of the swing" carries it back down. The two lines are also nearly mirror images: each begins with a small unstressed word ("all", "of") followed by "the", and each lands on a stressed noun. The rhythm rocks, with the beat falling on BEAUties and then on SWING. The second line is a syllable shorter, four against three, and it ends on a single stressed syllable. The word "swing" closes on the nasal "ng", a sound that hums on briefly before the page goes silent. There is no rhyme, which suits a poem this small. A rhyme would click shut like a latch, and this poem wants to stay in motion.
The key words reward slow reading. "Beauties" is an unusual choice. The more natural phrase would be "all the beauty of the swing", singular and abstract. The plural turns beauty into a set of separate things: the rise, the drop, the held breath at the top, the creak of the chain, the shadow on the ground. We have to supply them ourselves. "All" works in two directions. It sounds generous, and it also admits that the speaker cannot possibly name everything. And "swing" carries other meanings on its back, such as a pendulum's rhythm, the way jazz is said to swing, or a change of direction. None of these is stated, but the word is loose enough to let them in.
Then there are the asterisks. A row of three asterisks usually marks a break in a text, a pause between sections. Using them as a title means the poem announces that it has no name and that it begins in the middle. This fits the fragment that follows: we arrive after something has already happened, and we leave before it ends. The asterisks are also tiny stars, but that is the sort of reading the poem lets us make without insisting on it.
What makes the poem significant is how much it asks of its reader while offering so little. The compression recalls a haiku, though it has no season word and no neat syllable count, and it refuses the usual neatness of a finished sentence. Nothing grammatically happens, since there is no verb to make the swing move, yet by the end the swing is moving in the reader's head. The motion is supplied by the white space, the line break and the reader's memory of being pushed higher as a child. The poem makes a quiet argument that beauty does not need to be explained or catalogued. Sometimes it is enough to say "all the beauties" and trust the reader to fill in the rest.