By contrast, in the following lyric of Elinor Wylie, even though it is a repudiation of something accustomed, beautiful, and comforting, there is so clear and deft an employment of symbol, so perfect a fusion of mood with image, that the effect of totality is achieved; the peace denied to this orthodox landscape (or universe) is momentarily attained in the very denial of it, and thus one of the functions of poetry is discharged. INNOCENT LANDSCAPE[50] Here is no peace, although the air has fainted, And footfalls die and are buried in deep grass, And reverential trees are softly painted Like saints upon an oriel of glass. The pattern of the atmosphere is spherical, A bubble in the silence of the sun, Blown thinner by the very breath of miracle Around a core of loud confusion. Here is no virtue; here is nothing blessèd Save this foredoomed suspension of the end; Faith is the blossom, but the fruit is cursèd; Go hence, for it is useless to pretend. “The transport ... that the poet kindles in us,” observes Professor De Selincourt in his Inaugural Lecture at Oxford, “springs from our instinctive recognition that his form, a term that includes both rhythm and diction, is an entirely faithful rendering of his experience, so that we gain from it a sudden clear sense of fulfilment, such as we can hardly hope to gain outside the ideal world of art.” That may be a rather narrowly æsthetic interpretation of Longinus’s doctrine of the poetic “transport,” but certainly “a sudden clear sense of fulfilment” is an experience which it is easy to miss in the poetry of our contemporaries. In fact, this “sense of fulfilment” is precisely what the typical modernist, experiencing nothing of the sort in life itself and disdaining an “ideal world” thus cut off from reality, avoids giving us. He would regard it as part of the old hocus-pocus of orthodoxy. Life being to him fragmentary, inchoate, he would say that his poetry, if it is to be “an entirely faithful rendering of his experience,” must itself produce an effect of inchoateness, fragmentariness. THE END OF THE WORLD[51] Quite unexpectedly as Vasserot The armless ambidextrian was lighting A match between his great and second toe And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb-- Quite unexpectedly the top blew off: And there, there overhead, there, there, hung over Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes, There in the starless dark the poise, the hover, There with vast wings across the cancelled skies, There in the sudden blackness the black pall Of nothing, nothing, nothing,--nothing at all.