On 27 October 1915 Ernest Shackleton wrote, of the ship that had carried him into the Weddell Sea and been held there for most of a year: the end of the Endurance has come.

This week’s poem prints that sentence as the end has come.

What has been taken out is signed at the bottom of the page.

The poem is an erasure. Every word in it was written by Shackleton, or by Frank Worsley and quoted by Shackleton, in South (1919); the poet has contributed nothing but the choice of what to remove. All four sections are strict in-order subsequences of the source — five hundred and fifty-two words, none added, none moved. The only liberty is punctuation at the seams, where a deleted and leaves a comma behind. The material is not gathered from across the book. It comes out of a single chapter, taken in order: Chapter IV, which Shackleton titled “Loss of the Endurance.”

Seventeen times in that chapter, up to the last line the poem uses, Shackleton writes the name of his ship. The poem contains it not once. Four separate cuts land on sentences carrying the name, and three of those sentences are otherwise kept nearly whole. The end of the Endurance has come becomes the end has come. To a sailor his ship is more than a floating home, and in the Endurance I had centred ambitions, hopes, and desires stops dead at floating home. In the source, after the rudder-post and stern-post are torn out, the ice loosened and the Endurance sank a little; in the poem the line after stern-post is The decks were breaking upwards. Worsley’s tribute ends, in the poem, at ever put up by a ship — one sentence before Shackleton adds that the Endurance deserved all that could be said in praise of her.

One instance survives. In Worsley’s diary the word appears in lower case, as an ordinary noun: her staunchness and endurance have been almost past belief. The poem keeps that. The proper noun goes everywhere it occurs and the common noun stays, and the signature restores the capital in the one position where the two cannot be told apart.

The same passage is cut a second way. Worsley writes: She has been nipped with a million-ton pressure and risen nobly… She has been thrown to and fro like a shuttlecock a dozen times. She has been strained, her beams arched upwards. Three times the poem deletes the subject along with the auxiliary, leaving nipped… risen… Thrown… Strained. The ship stops being something to which these things happened and becomes the things. It loses its grammatical standing in the same passage where it loses its name, and the passage is the one in praise of its endurance.

The second section is cut on a different principle. Shackleton’s entry for 7 September is a competent piece of optics. He explains refraction: a tabular berg fifty feet high and ten miles west serves as an index; on ordinary days it shows clear-cut from the mast-head; with much refraction the pack behind it lifts into view; refraction usually produces too large an altitude when you shoot the sun, but today the horizon is thrown up so far that the altitude comes out twelve minutes too small. It is a man explaining an atmosphere to himself in order to correct for it.

The poem keeps the phenomena and deletes the explanation. A tabular berg about fifty feet high ten miles west becomes A berg — the figures that would let you place it are the first thing to go. The ordinary-day comparison goes. So does refraction generally results in and the but to-day that turns the general rule into an exception. What is left is a sequence of things not being where they seem: the pack beyond lifting into view, bergs at first sight, lost that after closer scrutiny appear as large lumps, dark masses, well below the horizon, and a horizon thrown up so much the altitude is wrong. Shackleton was accounting for a distortion. The poem has removed the accounting and kept the distortion, and then reports, four lines later, that no land is visible.

The first section works the same way in miniature. Shackleton’s terra-cotta cloud could conceivably have come from some of the Graham Land volcanoes, now about 300 miles distant; the poem has it travelled / from some Graham Land volcanoes, distant — the conjecture promoted to a report, the distance struck out.

The pairing that closes the second section is Shackleton’s own; those sentences are adjacent in the source. But their force is not, because by the time the poem reaches them it has removed every reassurance that looking is reliable. Both log sections then close on the same four words: No animal life observed. That repetition is Shackleton’s too — the entries for 4 and 7 September both end there, because that is what a log does, and the phrase is the kind of thing a man writes to fill a column. In the source it sits inside a paragraph, unremarkable, between the rime and the tow-net readings. Lifted out and set at the end of two sections, a formula of record-keeping turns into a statement about what is not there.

The first section reads No land for 22 miles; the second, No land visible for twenty miles. Numeral, then word. That inconsistency is Shackleton’s own — it is exactly how the two entries stand in South — and an erasure has no means of tidying it, because tidying would require writing.

I counted, for each section, how much of its source entry survives. The 4 September log keeps fifty-three per cent, the 7 September log fifty-five, Worsley’s diary sixty-seven. The October section keeps forty-six — three hundred and twelve words of six hundred and eighty-five, three hundred and seventy-three struck out. The most heavily cut passage in the poem is the one everybody already knows.

I had expected the opposite. The weather logs are unpromising material, and Shackleton’s account of losing his ship is among the most quoted passages in the literature of polar exploration; a poet who wanted that ending’s power without doing the work could have lifted it nearly whole and been thanked for it. This one takes more out of it than out of anything else. What the cutting cannot control is that a reader’s response to those lines will still be substantially Shackleton’s, but that is a condition of the form and not a failure of this instance of it. An erasure of a great passage inherits its greatness. The only thing available to the poet is to decline to coast, and the numbers say this poet declined.

Here is what I would hold against it. Everything I have described is invisible on the page. The poem gives the residue and a citation; it does not give the record. Nothing in these ninety-four lines shows that seventeen instances of a ship’s name were removed to produce them, and a reader who does not go to South cannot see the poem’s central act at all — they will find a spare, cold, well-made arrangement of Antarctic prose and miss the thing that makes it a poem rather than a selection. The tradition offers alternatives. Ronald Johnson kept the page architecture of Paradise Lost so that Radi os reads as a text with holes in it; Jen Bervin prints Shakespeare’s sonnets in grey behind the words she retains, so the erasure and its source occupy the same page. Either would have made this poem’s best decision legible without a library. As it stands, the strongest thing here is a fact about a book most of its readers will not open.

What an erasure can be failed on is whether the cutting produces meaning the source did not have, and here it plainly does. The end has come is a larger sentence than the end of the Endurance has come, because Shackleton is reporting the loss of a vessel and the poem is not reporting anything; it has removed the object and left the event. A ship’s name is a thing you can put in a signature and it is also a word for holding out. The poem takes it away from the ship seventeen times and gives it back at the bottom, where it means both, and where there is no longer anything for it to be the name of.