Great Regulars: As in dreams or some forms

of mental illness, the systematic becomes a form of derangement. Here, the zany yet orderly movement from thing to thing also feels fateful and pointed. Even the sudden introduction of the first person--" 'Twas like a lion at my door"--feels inevitable and foredoomed as well as crazy and unanticipated. The doubleness of deed, the doubleness of linked repetitions, the doubleness of couplet rhyme: How can these dual processes resolve themselves? With the disruptive, emphatic, and triple repetition in the final line.

There was a man of double deed,

from Robert Pinsky: Slate: "There Was a Man of Double Deed": The unhinged reason of an anonymous classic

~~~~~~~~~~~