I yearned for the kind of unseasoned telling found
In legends, fairy tales, a tone licked clean
Over the centuries by mild old tongues,
Grandam to cub, serene, anonymous.

In these lines Merrill contrasts his own self-conscious, literary modern voice with the impersonal clarity of traditional storytelling. He longs for an “unseasoned telling”—a narrative stripped of stylistic flourish or authorial ego—like the speech of legends and fairy tales that has been “licked clean” by repeated oral transmission. The image of language passed from “Grandam to cub” evokes intergenerational, communal inheritance: stories refined by use until they become “serene, anonymous.” The yearning suggests both admiration and envy: such tales achieve authority and durability precisely because no single speaker owns them, whereas the lyric poet must speak in a marked, individual register.