Here again no strict connection can be construed. That the section opens in this strain is probably due to a reaction against the prosy scientific language he used in the previous section. Casting about for a more elegiac tone, the poet is naturally brought back to Milton’s _Lycidas_, from which he borrows the image of the setting sun, emblem of his dead friend. It is all very well to be able to account for Tennyson in this way. It does not, however, justify his binding together of random leaves from his poetic notebook into a long poem. The division into sections has certainly done away with the padding that would have been necessary had the poem been treated as a continuous piece without breaks. But it does not conceal the fact that these sections have no logical connection with one another. Deprive the poem of its sectional division; deprive it of its metrical regularity; and it will appear the loose and ill-assorted bundle of lost ideas it really is. Such feeble and false material would certainly not be tolerated in a poem which, like _The Waste Land_, had to invent its metrical changes as it went along. It is especially in the long poem that the distinction between form and subject-matter has the most vicious effect. In a short poem, even if form and subject-matter are not made identical, it is possible to keep them proper to each other: as in Milton’s _L’Allegro_. Compare this with its companion piece _Il Penseroso_, which is a praise of pensive melancholy as the former is a light-hearted denial of melancholy; and the metre will be found to be identical, though it is used with a different effect in both. But come thou Goddes fair and free, In Heav’n ycleap’d Euphrosyne, And by men, heart-easing Mirth, Whom lovely Venus, at a birth With two sister Graces more To Ivy-crownèd Bacchus bore; is exactly the same metre as: But hail thou Goddes, sage and holy, Hail divinest Melancholy, Whose saintly visage is too bright To hit the sense of human sight; And therefore to our weaker view, Ore laid with black staid Wisdom’s hew. But in the first all is hurried, little punctuation is used; in the second all is slowed down, there is comparatively more punctuation, we get heavy internal rhymes, such as _Ore laid_ with _black staid_, and the rhythm is further delayed by _s’s_ used in close juxtaposition, as _Goddes_, _sage_, _Whose saintly visage_, etc. Neither the tripping movement nor the slow-pacing movement, however, could have been effectively kept up if the poems had been any longer. Certainly if they had been printed together as the two halves of a single poem, the contrastive use of the metre would have not been so striking, a greater uniformity would have been necessary.