Stinging gold swarms upon the spires. Silver [_i.e._ a voice or tone of silver] chants the litanies The great bells are ringing with rose-- The lewd fat bells-- And a tall wind is dragging the sea with dreams. Nor could we allow ourselves to be stopped by the length of the poem, since by thus limiting the number of possible discoveries to its length we should be implying that the virtue of a poem was in its length. Even if we had exhausted all the possibilities in a poem of thirty-one words--the grammar, the metre and other technical aspects, the context and the association of images--we should still have the fact that the poem had thirty-one words, and perhaps find in it another formalism. Can it be a coincidence that this is also the standard length of the tanka, the dominant verse-form in Japanese poetry--thirty-one syllables, each of word value? The Japanese influence is further intimated by Cummings’ tendency to suggest and symbolize rather than to express in full. In Japanese, according to the conventional arrangement of the thirty-one word-units in lines of five, seven, five, seven, seven, this poem would be set down like this: stinging gold swarms upon the spires silver chants the litanies the great bells are ringing with rose the lewd fat bells and a tall wind is dragging the sea with dreams. But stronger than the Japanese influence in modern English and American poetry is the French, which in turn has borrowed so much from the Japanese. Mallarmé, the father of French symbolism, turned the art of suggestion in poetry into a science. He found the tradition of his national poetry so exhausted by sterile laws of prosody that he had to practise poetry as a science to avoid malpractising it as an art. Rimbaud, with all Mallarmé’s science behind him and endowed with a natural poetic mind as well, was able to practise poetry as an art again. Similarly Cummings and other experimentalists--Cummings is to be regarded rather as an inspired amateur than a scientist--may be preparing the way for an English or American Rimbaud. As Paul Valéry, the French critic and poet, says of Mallarmé and Rimbaud, discussing their employment of the vehicles of sense in poetry: “What is only a system in Mallarmé becomes a domain in Rimbaud”. So modernist poets are developing resources by mechanical means to which a future poet will have easy access when he turns the newly opened-up territory into a personal poetic domain.