Jimmy had already decided that he wanted to write a long, book-length poem of about a hundred pages during the visit. Two or three days after arriving in East Aurora, he sat down at the typewriter to begin. To himself he designated that morning as “the morning of the poem,” and that became the title. From that point on, he spent most of his mornings at the typewriter.
As he had done in writing “The Crystal Lithium” and “Hymn to Life,” he began by setting the margins of the typewriter as wide as they would go, and typed each line more or less to the end of the page. He soon recalled, however, that in setting the two earlier poems in type for their original publication, many of the lines had had to be broken and anything from one to four words at the end were dropped to an indented line below. It made a strong visual and rhythmic effect, and although it was not his original intention, Jimmy came to like the syncopation of the alternating longer and shorter lines. Although “The Morning of the Poem” was also begun in long unbroken lines, early on Jimmy decided to preempt the typesetter and retype the poem, making his own secondary line breaks and indenting the shorter lines. While the first part of each original line retains its initial capital letter, the second, indented part is not capitalized, a deliberate move “to indicate that it was all one line.”
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