What, now, has happened to the formal features of the Cummings’ poem when reproduced in the rewritten poem? The expansion of the poem by the addition of the suppressed words has necessarily multiplied the number of _s_’s in the poem, because these suppressed words show a high proportion of _s_’s. This alliteration, sustained over several couplets, does not match the alliteration of the shorter poem, especially since we have been obliged to use many _s_’s that have no alliterative significance (“To windows rosy as the skies”). Neither has the gradual slowing down of the rhythm in the last half of the poem been effectively reproduced. In the actual poem the slowing down extends over the sestet of this fragmentary sonnet (the fragmentary line, _-S_, being an alliterative hang-over). But as in the formal treatment Cummings’ simple octave develops a prolixity which destroys the proper balance between it and its sestet, we have had to abandon the sonnet form and pack into two lines words which should have had the time-value of six. The best we have been able to do is to keep fourteen lines (or rather seven rhyming couplets, one of which has an extra line). The rhymes, too, in the new poem have mutilated the sense: they express the remoteness of the scene by a series of echoes instead of by silences: for Cummings’ lines can definitely be regarded as sonnet-lines filled out with musical rests. So by putting the poem into a form in which a definite metrical scheme could be recognized we have entirely altered the character of the poem. We have not even been able to save the scraps of quite regular iambic rhythm with which we started. Certain admissions must, therefore, be made. We have not only rejected the formal poem in favour of the Cummings poem: we have seen that the Cummings poem itself was an intensely formal poem. Indeed, its very technicalities caused it to be mistaken for a mere assemblage of words, a literary trick. But as it is apparently capable of yielding the kind of experiences customarily expected from poetry, in fact the most ordinary of such experiences, our conclusion must be that the plain reader’s approach to poetry is adequate only for poems as weak as the critical effort that he is ready to apply to them; and that Cummings, to disregard the satiric hilarity in which many of his poems are written, really means to write serious poetry and to have his poetry taken seriously, that is, read with the critical sympathy it deserves. The importance of any new technical methods that he makes use of to bring this about lies not in their ultimate permanence or impermanence, but in their establishment of what the poet’s rights are in his poem: how free he is to proceed without regard to the inferior critical efforts to which the poem will probably be submitted. What, then, of the plain reader’s rights? They are, presumably, like the poet’s, whatever his intelligence is able to make them.