Blood Ruminant

It would seem that this poem was about the struggles children have in learning something about language.  Waldrep calls words trees which hide things.
Otherwise it seems that the narrator is talking about the child trying to figure out how to speak while playing with old (leaden) toy soldiers.
The reason that I think that the child is trying to learn to speak is that at the end of the poem it says that the lips are moving.
 It talks about melting them down.  My grandfather used to make leaden soldiers.  The melting point wasn't that high which was probably a part of the reason that lead was used so frequently in the past. In addition, lead is easy to shape by bending or hitting, which is probably why the poem includes the phrase "if the figures be melted down, cast, and sharpened."  It probably alludes to the way that the toy soldiers were made.
It makes another illusion to play with the phrase "Here is the church, and here is the steeple." which is a hand-play game somewhat similar to the itsy-bitsy spider.  (To do this put your hands palm up, with fingers interlaced atop.  Then flip your hands so that the fingers are on the inside of your connected fists.  Free your index fingers and connect them on the outside of your fists.  The two index fingers are the steeple.  Your thumbs are the doors, and the remaining fingers are the people inside of the church (your fists).

I am not really sure how accurate that meaning to this poem might be because there is a large amount of imagery which would seem to be what the child is playing at.  Because of the detail of the images it seems that a child who is not yet able to speak would not imagine something nearly so vivid.



One of my guess at a meaning in this poem was that the main character of the poem was trying to learn to read and was reading a war story (probably one with pictures if he or she is trying to figure it out at all).


The narrator mentions smells a couple of times with the phrase "musky scents," and "loamy odors."