Few questions are as slippery as the one that opens Wheatgrass007's poem: what does it mean to think? The poem never answers it. It circles, speeds up, runs short of breath, and ends on the exact words it began with. That loop is the poem's argument. A mind trying to understand thinking has only thinking to do it with, so it can never step outside itself and look.
The first guesses are small and almost comic. Thinking might be to "mull over how the apples taste" or to "ponder the coolness of a drink." Both are sensory, domestic and unhurried, and the verbs "mull" and "ponder" sound like someone sitting still. The next line pulls the other way: "Oh, how we question, ever in haste." The poem sets two kinds of thinking against each other, savouring and rushing, and the speaker seems to suspect that people have swapped the first for the second.
The rushing produces the poem's sharpest image. We hurry "to learn and learn / Before our minds reduce to paste." Paste is an unappealing word, soft and shapeless, somewhere between glue and baby food. It also continues the food imagery from the apples and the drink. Tasting has turned into mashing, and knowledge is something swallowed so greedily that the mind itself becomes pulp. The apple may also call up the fruit of knowledge in the Eden story. The poem never says so, but the association sits comfortably beside the later word "Man."
The form behaves like the restlessness it describes. The first four lines run in a tidy alternating pattern: think, taste, drink, haste. "Paste" then returns to the "-aste" sound two lines later, like a pattern snapping shut around the warning. But the lines are already shrinking and breaking. "To learn and learn" is a stutter of four syllables. "We learn and yearn still" changes one sound to turn learning into longing, as if the two were almost the same word, which is the poem's point. We cannot learn without wanting more.
The longest line is the most breathless: "For more 'cause Man won't rest. No! Not until". It is full of stops, a casual "'cause," and an exclamation, as though the speaker interrupts and corrects themselves mid-thought. Its final word, "until," rhymes with "still" from the line before, and it hangs open at the line break, so we wait a beat for the clause to finish. When it does, "think" arrives to rhyme with "drink" from line three. The poem has gone all the way around and come back to its first sounds.
Then comes "And then he'll ask," a short line with no rhyme to lean on. The final line repeats the opening question word for word. There is a neat logical trap here. If Man ever had "thought all there is to think," that would include thinking about thinking, so the question ought to have been answered. The poem says he will ask it anyway. Either the question is the last and hardest one, or it can never be answered, and the poem leaves both readings open. It also leaves open whether "Man won't rest" is admiration or complaint. The speaker sounds both amused and a little exasperated by humanity's appetite.
The poem matters because it is light and serious at once. The bouncing rhymes, the "Oh," and the apples and drinks make it feel like a nursery verse, yet the puzzle underneath is one philosophers have spent whole careers on. Its structure also does what it describes, with the rhyme looping, the refrain returning and the ending pointing back to the start. For a student reader it is a good example of form carrying meaning. The poem does not tell us thinking is endless. It makes us finish the last line and feel ourselves being sent back to the first.