This is not the prose summary of the poem, that is to say, the common-sense substitute for a piece of poetical extravagance. A prose summary cannot _explain_ a poem, else the poet, if he were honest, would give the reader only a prose summary, and no poem. The above is rather the expansion, the dilution, even the destruction of the poem which one reader may perform for another if the latter is unable to face the intensity and compactness of the poem. The indignity of literary criticism is largely due to the fact that it has had to perform this levelling service for generations of plain readers. It has never yet performed any services for poetry itself, which it tries to suit either to philosophy or to the reader. Poetry cannot be judged by its adaptability to a philosophical system, and criticism’s services to the reader are doubtful. By encouraging him in his reading vanity and in his demand for poems to be written down to him it has reduced him to critical imbecility. Perhaps from the above expansion of the poem the spoiled reader may be able to infer the greater accuracy and truthfulness of the poetic version. The irregularity of the lines as printed in the poem is evidently intended to give two movements in one, the jerking and the rocking of the train. ‘Blueandgreen’ is printed as a single word to show that it is not parti-coloured paper but paper which is blue and green at once, the colours run together by the rocking motion. ‘scorchbend ingthem’ represents the up-and-down rhythm of the diagonal spiral movement. ‘--selves--’ stresses the realistic character of this movement. The capitalized ‘U’ and ‘E’ enlarge the mounting copperplate curves. The parentheses enclosing the syllable ‘climb’ means perhaps a slight catch of the breath at that point. The comma after the ‘E’, the colon after ‘into’ are used as pauses of a certain length marking the rhythm of the spirals. The word ‘spiral’ is distended by hyphens to mark the final large spiral that sweeps the sky out of view at the letter ‘l’. ‘Satanic’ is capitalized to make the goat personally diabolic. The full stop after ‘jerk’ probably marks a sudden jolt back to a consciousness of the inside of the train and the purposefulness of the journey. There is no experience here with which the plain reader cannot sympathise, and only a little imaginative recollection has been needed to make this analysis; no key from the author except the poem itself. The poem combines two qualities of clearness: clearness of composition in the interests of the poem as a thing in itself, clearness of transmittance in the interests of the reader. It is obvious that the poet could have given the poem this double accuracy in no other way. Can it be that the poet has been wrong in paying too much attention to the rendering of the poem for the reader: that if he had allowed it to be more difficult, if he had concentrated exclusively on the poem as a thing in itself, it would have seemed less freakish?