the _s_ and _ee_ sounds are contrary to the sense. Suppose, however, we did actually choose the idea of a serpent’s talking, as we were meant to. What, then, is our clue to what the serpent is talking about? Or are the lines merely meant to represent a serpent talking, without any collateral meaning? No. They represent, as a matter of fact, a serpent talking about God. But how are we to deduce God from the sound of the poem or know indeed when the alliteration is to indicate the subject or the elocutionist? We must admit that for the special purpose of representing a serpent sneering at God such sound-combinations may be very wittily employed. But as a general thing a poetic practice like this becomes as tiresome and puerile as, say, the incessant puns and jokes of Goldsmith, Hood, or Calverley. Wit in poetry should be devoted to the irony in ideas rather than in phonetics. Phonetics, if they get the upper hand in a poem, turn it into an exercise in elocution. But let us try another Valérian specimen, one in which there is no speaking in character: Vous me le murmurez, ramures!... O rumeur déchirante. Because _murmurez_ and _rumeur_ are suggestive of their meanings in English, we might be able to get something of the intended sense (the murmur of wind among leaves) and even make a good guess at the meaning of the other words; if only because we have Tennyson’s immemorial elms And murmur of innumerable bees, as a classroom quotation to help us to it. Could we not, however, easily improvise a line of the same musical character but with a totally different meaning? More ordure never will renew our midden’s pure manure. This line will show how misleading to the sense letters can be, and makes us suspect that the aim of such poetry as Valéry’s is to cast a musical enchantment unallied with the meaning of a poem. The meaning becomes merely a historical setting for the music, which the reader need or need not be aware of. We are made to feel that the poet would not object to his reader’s adopting the same attitude to his poems as his own _Mme. Teste_ to lofty and abstract questions: instead of being bored by them, she was musically entertained by them. Valéry, perhaps realizing the strain put upon his reader by the preciousness of his images, holds his attention by the masterly skill of these musical distractions.