The envoi of Before. “Poets, tell us please, if it isn’t hard, how to become a poet.” How to put thoughts in “a poetic form, simple and usual for you”; how to convey beauty, desire, joy and freedom in verse; how to drive “life’s discord” from the soul; how thoughts “flew up into the sky with the birds” — the transparent boundlessness of The Bird and the Birds again. Tercets, modest and a little mischievous: “tell us without arrogance, dear poets — well, at least a stanza each.” An apprentice’s petition, placed at the end of eighty poems that have already answered it.