The effect of regularity is here again achieved by the recurrence of ideas in varying alternations to show the movement of the poem. As in Mr. Crane’s poem a parallelism exists between the first and third lines and the second and fourth, the third and fourth carrying the imaginative experience of the first and second to a more specialized meaning, from which the direction of the remainder of the poem may be taken; so in the Biblical lines quoted a parallelism also exists between the _beauty of Israel_ and _the mighty_, and between _slain upon thy high places_ and _fallen_ of the first and second lines. The scorn with which the last four lines here must be pronounced is obviously dictated by the ironic contrast between the _high places_ of Israel and the _streets_ of Gath and Askelon (the streets of these cities being generally trenches below ground-level) and between the _beauty of Israel_ and the _daughters of the Philistines_. In Mr. Crane’s poem the sympathetic connection between the first four lines and the rest of the poem depends not so much on the general technical symmetry of the poem as on the use of the images directly stated in these lines in a more indirect and complicated sense in the following lines. Poetry so treated is nothing more than a single theme subjected to as many variations as its first or simplest statement will allow, even to the point where it ironically contradicts itself. There is in it no room for, and no reason for, a separate element of form. Obvious mechanical form imposed on a poem, unless the poem is deficient in the balance of its ideas, is like architectural dressing that spoils the natural proportions of a building and has not even structural usefulness. How, now, does the question of form affect the long poem? Let us take Tennyson’s _In Memoriam_, which embroiders the theme of his friend’s death in a sequence of episodes, and T. S. Eliot’s poem, _The Waste Land_, which enlarges the introductory theme of the death and decay implicit in Spring to embrace the death and decay implicit in all forms of hopeful human energy. In the first, the same rhymed stanza is maintained through all the varying moods of the poem; in the second the progress of the poem is marked by the most sensitive change--not only from episode to episode but from passage to passage. It is just at these delicate transitions from one atmosphere to another, where the separate parts are joined into a single continuous poem, that the poetic quality is to be looked for. No such transitions are to be found in Tennyson’s poem, or for that matter in a poem like the _Aeneid_: length in such poems means bulk. The poem is as long as the poet’s endurance and the reader’s patience permit.