Slow and steady, this poem will win your heart | Hacker News Reader

Slow and steady, this poem will win your heart

nytimes.com

102 pointsmrholme35 comments

Gift link:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/12/books/kay-rya...

This works a lot better than the archive link—they have the same text, but the archive link loses all of the JS, and so the page doesn’t make a lot of sense. Here you see it interactive, and—it’s a fun way to read a poem :-)

What’s a gift link?

a link shared by a subscriber that lets nonsubscribers access an otherwise paywalled article

>She lives below luck-level, never imagining some lottery will change her load of pottery to wings.

nails the mindset where imagining change doesn’t even happen. it’s not about failing to win. it’s about never thinking you’re in the draw. that kind of mental floor sits deep.

Aaaagh nooo, why have you converted this lovely poem into a feeble fable about a "winning mindset"?

Poem itself is from 1994. If you'd like to read the text by itself, you can do so here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50611/turtle-56d22dd3...

Why this poem in particular?

It is not about the particular poem.. It was about the innovative ux aporoach of showing the poem stanza in context of the review.. but unfortunately the archive link strips this javascript feature. Try opening the page in private or alternate browser and If you are able to bypass the paywall, you can enjoy it.

yeah i got what it was going for eventually, but tbh it was annoying at first. the scroll interaction wasn’t clear and it broke the reading flow. felt more like a bug than a feature until i slowed down and figured it out. the context jumps were jarring too. didn’t really help with continuity.

> until i slowed down

Maybe the poem has a message

> It is not about the particular poem.

The particular poem itself is also quite nice.

A gift link was posted in this thread

Some things are best left to a youtube production team.

Because it's turtles all the way down.

Somewhere Beyond the Last Visible Dog .. https://delphine-angua.blogspot.com/2008/05/why-last-visible...

Why not?

> Because even as this poem is about what it’s like to be a turtle, it’s also about what it’s like for a turtle to be a metaphor. And — you could say therefore — about how looking at (or as) a turtle illuminates what it’s like to be a person, a woman, a poet.

No good reason! I'm genuinely curious.

I think maybe the reason is more arbitrary, as here look at this 90s author's symbolism, it's not just the old classics that are readable in-depth; contemporary style etc

I thought it was answered by the article and the line I quoted. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The "More from A.O. Scott" at the bottom of the article links to:

• "Life Isn’t Perfect. But This Poem Might Be." March 21, 2025 (“Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” by Adrienne Rich, 1951) https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/21/books/adrienn...

• "I Would Follow This Poem to Hell and Back" Feb. 21, 2025 (“my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell,” from SELECTED POEMS, copyright ©1963 by Gwendolyn Brooks) https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/02/21/books/gwendol...

• "Will You Fall in Love With This Poem? I Did." Dec. 18, 2024 (“Romantic Poet,” by Diane Seuss, 2024) https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/12/18/books/romanti...

• "A Poem About Waiting, and Wishing You Had a Drink" Nov. 1, 2024 (“Party Politics,” from “The Complete Poems,” by Philip Larkin. originally 1984?) https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/01/books/philip-...

So it appears that this one is part of a series (previously called "Close Read" as in the last link above: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/arts/close-read.htm...): every few weeks / months, A. O. Scott writes about some poem he's liked, in this format (all of them say "Produced by Aliza Aufrichtig, Alicia DeSantis, Nick Donofrio and Emily Eakin").

Here is another poem about a weak, slow creature:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57076/the-armadillo

There is a hint of war in there.

Patience, the sport of truly chastened things

"shell-y skylark" was brilliant (:

At first I thought the page was frozen, but then I realized it was designed to make you read one line at a time. It felt a bit awkward at first, but after a while the rhythm started to feel right.

You don’t see many websites that ask you to slow down, but for a poem like this, it actually works. It’s not something that grabs you instantly, but if you give it a few quiet minutes, it kind of gets under your skin.

https://archive.md/MeXgh

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