But musicalness in modern French verse means something else, the treating of word-sounds as musical notes in which the meaning itself is to be found. This makes poetry curiously like acrostics and takes it even further from its natural course than Victorianism in its worst coloratura effects. The bond between the Victorian poet and his reader was at least an agreement between them of a common, though not an original, sentiment. The meaning of a poem was understood between them beforehand from the very title, and the persuasion of the word-music was intended to keep the poem vibrating in the memory long after it had been read. The bond, however, between the French modernist poet and his reader is one of technical ingenuity, in the poet in setting the meaning down in combinations of sounds, in the reader in interpreting words as combinations of sounds rather than as words. Actually there is very little poetic thought in Victorian poetry because of the compromise it makes between ideas and their pleasurable expression. But the compromise in this other poetry, though less apparent, is still more destructive of poetic thought. It is between ideas and typography, and as such means the domination of ideas by mechanics. By giving the letters of words a separate personality we have a new psychology of letters entirely distinct from the psychology of images. A striking illustration of the attempt to reconcile these two psychologies is a poem of Rimbaud’s on the colours of the vowels. It is plain that the colours associated with vowels will vary widely with the person and may be determined by so irrelevant a cause as the colour of the alphabet blocks which one used as a child. A better case might perhaps be made for the meaning-associations of consonants, particularly of combinations of consonants such as _st_, as in _stinging_, _strike_, _stench_, to denote sharp assault, and the final _nch_, as in _clinch_, _munch_, _wrench_, to denote strain. But such imitation by the letters of a word of its meaning is only occasional: it cannot be made a general rule. There are many more instances of letters out of harmony with word-meanings than in harmony with them. The word _kiss_. Is this _iss_ any gentler than the _iss_ of _hiss_? Or is the _k_ in _kiss_ gentler than the _k_ of _kick_? Logically such a theory should mean that a French poem written in this way would produce the same effect on a person who did not understand French as on one who did.