you begin to expect back and also a...

you begin to expect back and also

and with equal alarm, forward.

The metrical composition depicts more than the inexorable certainty of routine, bland, existential movement; it delineates the persona's recognition and acceptance of the mundane exigencies of daily life by means of a willing surrender to cosmological certainty, solidified and untouchable but nevertheless existent. This mind of suspension between the actual and the potential come into one's heads in The Price when Walter opposes Victor with the inescapable canon of both their lives: "We invent ourselves, Vie, to wipe without what we know. You invent a life of self-sacrifice, a life of excise but what never existed here cannot be upheld. . . And that is all that is standing between us now-an illusion. . ." (110). Bigsby discusses a similar enigma in his explanation of the universal of metaphysical distance in The Last Yankee; John Frick defines the passage of his life in times of time and money while Leroy Hamilton characterizes his life in its relation to time and the things he builds (119) the pair men depend upon cosmological notions to classify the essentials of their professions and their lives. Indeed, as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but men are doing exactly what the persona in "The Time Rate of Change" is accomplishing-losing themselves within the insubstantial and subjective metaphysical emanations that comprise one as well as the other the entity of money and the universal of building.

Ammons's poem "Showups" (34) depicts the repetitive and cyclical behavior in such a manner characteristic of many of Miller's protagonists; Willy, John Frick, Leroy Hamilton, Lyman Felt and plane John Proctor are manipulated according to self-imposed behavioral patterns that do not change, despite the apparent inefficacy of those patterns. The metrical composition adeptly portrays this kind of individual restrained by means of a recurrent sense of self:

Never to be the ninny I always play the nincompoop but

ready to be an smooth greater fool, sometimes

fail the part . . .

the sobriety of headhung

humiliation when the heart gives itself up

to sacrifice . .

then I, fool's buffoon . . .

test technique again beyond easy willing

failure . . the fool's

fool dies and the play reopen grief-wrenched

hair fabulous and startled, pants over-heisted,

face jacked up a millimeter or for a like reason above true.

The reader of this metrical composition gets the impression that one as well as the other internal and external forces are acting as catalysts for this persistent behavior of the persona. However, the nature and composition of these forces are not adequately defined, chiefly probably because the subjective and the metaphysical causes of behavior, the propensity to "play the fool" as Ammons states, are not readily comprehended. Similarly, the behavior of many of Miller's protagonists cannot be easily explained in confines of merely social or cultural issues (the Depression, McCarthyism, the American Dream), if it were not that that behavior encompasses indefinable parameters that transcend simple classification. In The Price, Walter faces Victor with the reality of their father's suppos want and the implication is that Victor is aware, upon some unconscious level, of the fantasy that his life has encompassed: "It's a fantasy, Victor. Your father was penniless and your brother a son of a bitch, and you play no part at all. I said to ask him because you could view in front of your face that he had a certain money. You knew it then and you certainly know it now" (104) Miller not explains why Victor refuses to admit to himself that his father was not destitute; Victor's behavior is like that explained in "Showups"-persistent and still not readily definable.