Creeley’s version of the contemporary responds to the traditional with an ironising edge. Whether it be irony about the mnemonic adhesiveness or rhyme or irony about recognized forms, the traditional is admitted because it has to be responded to like other facts of existence. Irony in relation to tradition is apparently in, for instance, ‘The Flower’. Here the language of the nursery rhyme (‘she love me / she loves me not / she loves me / she loves me not’) is reconstituted into ‘Pain is a flower like that one, / like this one, / like that one, / like this one.’