The base of Whalen's poetry is not so much the perception or even the object itself, the historic grounds of Imagist esthetics, but the phrase in which a sensation enters the language function of mind. That point of impact marks a transformation of outer to inner realm, a cross-over into the yielding human imagination which doesn't seek to translate or manipulate the experience, but enjoy it in a felicitous wording of the encounter. That can only be by flashes and intuitive leaps, so the phrase is necessarily like its antecedent, the image, a discrete entity lacking in emotional or psychological connections to anything else. The phrase or sentence in Whalen is in itself a complete occasion, bounded by the input of an experience which the words embed in a lucid perception. These three stanzas create cinematic units with the observer stationed at a particular angle of vision, from which selective detail is observed.
Unity is inherent in the scene itself, what the eye can reach and no more.
Within the scene are certain consonant objects from which to draw a modest conclusion. Whalen wants to put himself personally into the scene, and not be an Emersonian transparent eye, something that carries over into Williams and even Oppen. These conclusions are mainly rhetorical intrusions to deflate any humanistic importance his persona might convey to a scene. It is more important to be the receiver of pleasure than to be the privileged observer. The speaker has just pressed a doorbell and hears the sound echoing in the empty house, which resembles the cry of the nightjar.