Repetition has the effect of breaking down the possible historical senses still inherent in the words. So has the infantile jingle of rhyme and assonance. So has the tense-changing of verbs, because restoring to them their significance as a verbal mathematics of motion. Miss Stein’s persistence in her own continuousness is astonishing: this is how she wrote in 1926, and in 1906. She has achieved a continuous present by always beginning again, for this keeps everything different and everything the same. It creates duration but makes it absolute by preventing anything from happening in the duration. And after that what changes what changes after that, after that what changes and what changes after that and after that and what changes and after that and what changes after that. The composition has a theme because it has no theme. The words are a self-pursuing, tail-swallowing series and are thus thoroughly abstract. They achieve what Hulme called but could not properly envisage--not being acquainted, it seems, with Miss Stein’s work--a ‘perpendicular’, an escape from the human horizontal plane. They contain no reference; no meaning, no caricatures, no jokes, no despairs. They are ideally automatic, creating one another. The only possible explanation of lines like the following is that one word or combination of words creates the next. Anyhow means furls furls with a chance chance with a change change with as strong strong with as will will with as sign sign with as west west with as most most with as in in with as by by with as change change with as reason reason to be lest lest they did when when they did for for they did there and then. Then does not celebrate the there and then. This is repetition and continuousness and beginning again and again and again. Nothing that we have said here should be understood as disrespectful to Gertrude Stein. She has had courage, clarity, sincerity, simplicity. She has created a human mean in language, a mathematical equation of ordinariness which leaves one with a tender respect for that changing and unchanging slowness that is humanity and Gertrude Stein. Miss Stein’s sterilization of words until they are exhausted of history and meaning must be distinguished from sophisticated abandonment of meaning in the midst of a feverish pursuit of meaning, a blasé renouncement of significance to confusion. The following from a poem by Mr. Sacheverell Sitwell is an instance of such a renouncement: Y. “... a thundering motor drumming its persistence on the giggling air. Persistence, and I mean the everlasting life.... And in feet the rolling drums should rattle in the square before a thick curtain that no eye can pierce And trumpets should sound out from all the square-set towers.... Persistence, I said--I mean the giggling air, rather I should say I mean the giggling drums or rolling drums: persistence--and I mean the....”