MODERN AGE FALL 2015 pondering will do much to help readers to share the profound aesthetic wisdom inhering in Wilson's concluding image of the once-destructive boy who has matured into a man who has learned to "loose / The fist of art to fit the palm of nature." A metaphor for restraint-measured restraint-this image invites sustained reflection on how "the discipline of meter" may play its part in transforming the callow boy who, naturally enough, crushes a bird in hand then develops a different nature in coming of age as a poet who responds to the bird in hand with appreciative restraint. Wilson himself teaches us much about what a maturing creative mind might learn from meter in the sartorial metaphor he develops in his Verse Letter to his father. Meter is like clothing. Indeed, in comparing meter to clothing, Wilson goes beyond Robert Frost's famous jibe that writing free verse was like playing tennis with the net down. All mature humans need clothing; no one needs the particular form of recreation found in tennis. Meter connects with our human identity in a way no country club sport ever has. In developing his meter-as-clothing metaphor, Wilson sagely stresses the need for a fit-a natural fit-between the body and the garment. But the reader might pause a moment to acknowledge the importance of what Wilson takes for granted: mature humans wear clothing. Clothes wearing is so fundamental to our uniquely human nature that we might define man as the "clothes-wearing animal." True, a young child sees no need for clothing: as parents know well, a two- or three-year-old child will happily dance nude before strangers. Likewise, Adam and Eve were shamelessly nude in the Garden. But ever since Adam and Eve partook of the forbidden fruit (Gen. 3:6-7), mature humans 98