Kryptos K4 Plaintext

I’m honestly not 100 percent sure about this precise answer, but I have enough confidence in the solution process to quietly park this here for now:

                           SHUT

SDUALFUMEVENTWAFTEASTNORTHEASTF

UMEDUCTSWELDBYFOOTSHIFTSGRIPBER

LINCLOCKWOMANDECRYPTSMAGICJOLTS

Three books are required to get there, in this order:

Beckett, Samuel. “Rockaby And Other Short Pieces”. Grove Press, Inc. New York. 1981.

Davis, Robin J. and Butler, Lance St. J. “Make Sense Who May: Essays on Samuel Beckett’s Later Works”. Barnes & Noble Books. Totowa, New Jersey. 1988.

*Wordsworth, William. “The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth”. Volume II. Little, Brown and Company. Boston. 1859

*Wordsworth was so widely published that this particular edition may not be necessary, and/or another edition could be more useful.

The method is many-layer and relies on clues expressed in the ciphertext at each layer. A careful, thorough explanation is necessary, but for now here’s the basic structure:

  1. Pull a custom alphabet from the K4 ciphertext itself by eliminating duplicate characters. Include the ?.

  2. Apply a “CORYMB” transposition, which mimics the inflorescence structure (take off the first character, then the last, then the second, then second-to-last, etc.).

  3. Use the final 98 characters of the six endings in “Rockaby” as running keys over and over, choosing each depending on the previous clue. There are some transpositions in there as well, indicated by the clues.

  4. Shift every character in the entire ciphertext by values 1 - 6, alternating positive and negative, based on the sequence of six endings used.

  5. Apply a running key from one of the previous Kryptos solutions.

  6. Assemble a new ciphertext by sequentially grabbing a character from the previous 97 layers.

  7. Apply running keys from “Make Sense Who May” based on the clues.

  8. Apply 27 running key simultaneously from Wordsworth’s “The Wishing Gate” and “The Wishing Gate - Destroyed”. Keys are chosen based on the presence of the terms VOWS, TEAR, and LOVE.

  9. The previous 17 layers produce a grid, from which the K4 plaintext can be painstakingly extracted. Use a sequence from the custom alphabet as markers, and use the running keys from “Make Sense Who May” and Wordsworth to guide selection.

-Zackery Belanger
05 November 2025