Few poems announce their trick as quickly as this one. The title, "unbecoming," is a single lowercase word, and the first line immediately pries it open: "It's become unbecoming, / this becoming / becoming less." The word has two meanings that the poem plays against each other. "Unbecoming" can mean unseemly or unattractive, and it can also mean the reverse of becoming, a process of undoing. Scudellari lets both meanings run at once, so that growing smaller is both a physical fact and something faintly embarrassing. The speaker sounds like someone who has noticed a diminishing and is irritated by it.
The second stanza turns to a saying everyone knows, the one about rain falling into every life. The poem starts to quote it, stops, and corrects itself: "Into each life... no, / into (and after) each rain, / a little life." That small reversal is the poem's best moment. The proverb is meant to console, since some sorrow falls on everybody. Here life is not the container but the thing that arrives afterward, a "little life" that rain brings up. The parenthesis "(and after)" sounds like a speaker revising mid-thought, which makes the poem feel spoken rather than polished. Notice, too, that "little" can be affectionate or dismissive. This is not a flourishing, only a small, reduced aliveness.
What the rain produces is not flowers. The poem asks, "Must the flies come?" and answers itself flatly: "They've come." The question has some weariness in it, and the answer shows it was never really a question. The flies are "falling / back into stories no one // needed to tell." The poem doesn't explain these stories, so any reading is an inference. Judging by the imagery, though, the stories seem to be the old, repeated tales attached to flies and decay, ones we already know and do not want retold. The phrase "falling back" fits this, since it suggests a lapse into habit as well as the physical drop of insects. Then come "the crawls of / unwelcome spiders." Making "crawls" a noun is a nice touch. It turns movement into something you endure, and the word is slow and a little creepy to say.
Look at how the lines break. The poem ends several lines on weak, hanging words: "no one," "The crawls of," "and more." The sentence keeps leaning forward before it can settle, which gives the sense of things arriving one after another without permission. The stanza breaks do similar work. There are four tercets, then a last stanza of a single line, "unbecoming." The poem shrinks from three lines to one, enacting its own opening claim about "becoming less." It also closes by returning to its title, so the word that began as a puzzle ends as a verdict. The final "and more // unbecoming" is ambiguous in a useful way: more unseemly things, or more of the undoing itself. Either way, nothing is resolved.
There is no rhyme and no regular rhythm. The poem relies on repetition and sound instead. The three variations on "becoming" in the first stanza work like a stammer. The *f* sounds of "flies" and "falling" and the hiss of "spiders" and "follow" give the second half a buzzing, skittering texture. Because the lines are short and the vocabulary plain, each bit of wordplay stands out.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It takes the comforting idea that hard times lead to renewal and keeps the renewal but removes the comfort. Life does return after rain, but it comes as flies and spiders, and the poem declines to pretend otherwise. It never says what has been lost or who is speaking, and that restraint lets readers fill in their own sense of diminishment, whether it is age, season, mood or something else. A poem about becoming less has to practise what it says, and this one does, ending on a single word.