Just how long this will be depends on the period in which it is written: we generally find long poems when poetic themes are limited to a few approved subjects, such as war, religion, lamentation or love. The length of the poem is then only a sign of the dignity of the subject. It has not until recent times been considered as something beside dignified bulk. A long poem was not thought to need the same unity as a short poem: the unchanging metre was enough to keep the loosely connected parts of the poem together. This is the case with _In Memoriam_, where the different sections are digressive rather than progressive. But _The Waste Land_ has to be read as a short poem: that is, as a unified whole. The reader can no more skip a passage in it than a line in a short poem and expect to understand the poem. For it is not a long poem in the usual sense of being a number of short poems in a uniform metre, joined by mere verse padding. When lovely woman stoops to folly and Paces about her room again, alone, She smooths her hair with automatic hand, And puts a record on the gramophone. This formal rhymed stanza, reminiscent of Goldsmith, is by Mr. Eliot ironically applied to a sordid modern love-scene. We are to go from here back to a romantic picture of Queen Elizabeth and Leicester in amorous progress down the same Thames over whose waters the noise of this gramophone is now carried. How is the transition between these two passages made? The ten-syllabled iambic line of the stanza quoted turns into blank verse beginning with a romantic quotation from _The Tempest_, getting more and more ragged as the music is interrupted by the Thames-side noises, and finally trailing off with syncopated phrases suggested by a mandoline. “This music crept by me upon the waters” And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street. O City city, I can sometimes hear Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street, The pleasant whining of a mandoline And a clatter and a chatter from within Where fishermen lounge at noon; where the walls Of Magnus Martyr hold Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold. The step is now made from the riverside to the river by allowing the rhythm to break up into short verse units proper to a river song. The river sweats Oil and tar The barges drift With the turning tide Red sails Wide To leeward, swing on the heavy spar. The barges wash Drifting logs Down Greenich reach Past the Isle of Dogs. Weialala leia Wallala leialala The lyrical quality of this passage is, according to the poet’s explanatory note, to be associated with the song of the Rhinedaughters in _Götterdämmerung_. And this operatic atmosphere imposed on a modern river-scene makes the fitting transition to the picture of Elizabeth and Leicester not in a barge foul with oil and tar but in a gilded state-barge: