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Solution: Poetry Jumble
Answer: ARGO

Written by The Enigmatologists

Each line is a line of a poem with the words in alphabetical order, and one wrong word. Each line should be arranged properly with the wrong word where the missing word goes.

  • Because I could not stop for absence(Death)
  • and and(whether) pigs have wings
  • From those brown hills have by(melted) into spring
  • Quoth the raven conspicuous(Nevermore)
  • He kindly stopped for from(me)
  • Its(Lilac) blooming perennial and drooping star in the west
  • Faithful indeed is the its(spirit) that remembers
  • What the hand dare main(seize) the fire
  • Missing(Nor) public man nor cheering crowds
  • And square(why) the sea is boiling hot
  • On what the(wings) dare he aspire
  • O tributaries(harsh) surrounding cloud that will not free my soul
  • calls to you like what(the) wild geeseharsh and exciting
  • the world that offers What(itself) to your imagination
  • What’s(Nor) law, nor duty bade me fight
  • Is there is there balm in Gilead tell me tell me what’s(I) implore
  • What wealth the show to Late(me) had brought
  • Leaned over and Double(looked) into his gray eyes
  • everything(All) in the valley of Death
  • standing upon the constant edges of
  • exposure(decision)
  • I love thee final(to) the level of every day's
  • To Friday(mimic) in slow structures stone by stone
  • If thou be'st born happened(to) strange sights
  • I gazed and gazed but Late(little) thought
  • Built in an My(age) the mad wind's night work
  • night(A) shudder comes o'er me
  • No head from the leaf fringed night(sill)
  • Over(Half) a league onward
  • A knell to mine that(ear)
  • For those of use who treble(live) at the shoreline
  • Of to keep What(off) envy's stinging
  • My soul can reach when Your(feeling) out of sight

At this point it can be noted that in each stanza the wrong words are in alphabetical order. So we have another jumble. It can also be noted that each stanza has lines from eight different poems where two lines are taken from each poem. This gives us eight pairs of words to arrange, taking the pairs in the order the lines appear in the real poems. This gives:

What what what's missing what's conspicuos by its absence from the main square and its tributaries

and

What happend that night Your final night Double treble exposure Over everything Late afternoon Friday My

Googling these we can find that the first is lines from a poem "Things No Longer There" by Billy Ramsell and the second is from posthumously published poem by Ted Hughes called "Last Letter". These titles provide the extraction technique. Taking the last letter of the missing words from the original poems, we put them in order of the replacements after they have been unscrambled. This gives FERRIEDTHESEARCHFORAGOLDENFLEECE. Ferried means to carry in a boat of some sort and the name of the boat that carried Jason and the Argonauts was the ARGO.

Authors' Notes

This puzzle went through several iterations and is very different from the first version. This puzzle almost got scrapped when poems that had been searchable in one round of testing could not be searched successfully in later rounds of testing. We also had to change from using first letters for the extraction to last letters, because the first letters might have been to easily guessable. Unfortunately for me this made making puzzle changes difficut, specifically the need for words endng in c. While this puzzle has changed my core starting idea remains, and hopefully you enjoyed solving this puzzle as much as I enjoyed writing it.