"An Urban Convalescence" is designed to act out a false start and implicitly to suggest a search for more revealing and durable images. What he appears to be learning to do is to disentangle his own needs and style from the clichés of the world of fashionable destruction – a clarification of feeling signalled in the crisp rhymed quatrains [at the end of the poem: Kalstone cites the last stanzas]. Much of the poem’s feeling is gathered in the now charged associations of house: the perpetual dangers of exposure and change, of fashion and modishness; the sifting of memory for patterns which will truly suffice. [This poem] is just such a shifting of memory. Entangling inner and outer experience, it leads us to see the poem itself as potentially a "house," a set of arrangements for survival or, to use Merrill’s later phrase, for "braving the elements." Poems were to make sense of the past as a shelter or a dwelling place for the present.