But this is the new thing in Verhaeren, that he has transformed into rhythm not only the voice of Nature, but also the new noises, the grumbling of the multitude, the raging of cities, the rumbling of workshops. Often in his rhythm can be heard the beat of hammers; the hard, edged, regular whizzing of wheels; the whirring of looms; the hissing of locomotives; often the wild, restless tumult of streets; the humming and rumbling of dense masses of the people. Poets before him imitated in the harmony of their verse the monotony of sources and the babbling of water over pebbles, or the soughing voice of the wind. But he makes the voice of the new things speak; makes the rhythm of the city, this rhythm of fever and of unrest, this nervous moving of the crowd, this unquiet billowing of a new ocean, flow over into his new poem. Hence this up and down in his verses; this suddenness and unexpectedness; this incalculable element. _The new, the industrial noises have here become the music of poetry_. Since he does not seek to express his own individual sensation of life, but would himself only be a voice for the multitude, the rhythm is more roaring and restless than that of any individual being. Like the first poets, those of old time, before whom there were no outworn and exhausted words; like the poets whose feeling burst into flame at every word, every cry; who discovered themselves 'en exaltant la souffrance, le mal, le plaisir, le bien'; like them when they ... confrontaient à chaque instant Leur âme étonnée et profonde Avec le monde,[5] poets who would be modern must compare their own soul with that of their time, must always regulate their rhythm according to the mutation of their time. Their deepest yearning must be to find not only their own personal expression, but over and above it the poetic and musical representation of the highest identity between themselves and their time. For poets are the inheritors of a great patrimony: ... En eux seuls survit, ample, intacte et profonde, L'ardeur Dont s'enivrait, devant la terre et sa splendeur, L'homme naïf et clair aux premiers temps du monde; C'est que le rythme universel traverse encor Comme aux temps primitifs leur corps.[6] They must, in these days, only express themselves when they have first adapted the rhythm of their own feeling to that of the universe, to the rhythm of the cities they live in, to the rhythm of the multitude from which they have grown, to the rhythm of temporal as of eternal things. They must, like a vein in the heart of the world, reproduce every beat of the great hammer, every excitement, quickening of pace and obstruction of the feeling rolled round in the whole organism; they must learn from life the rhythm which shall again achieve the great harmony that was lost between the world and the work of art. FOOTNOTES: [1] 'Le Verbe' (_La Multiple Splendeur_). [2] _Ibid._ (_Ibid._).