And at that time it lay quite in the line of his development that by inner necessity he was forced to break his old instrument and create himself a new one. For the nervous unrest, the passionate agitation of Verhaeren's later poems is unthinkable in regular verse. If verse is to describe in its own inner passion the immense multiplicity of modern impressions--their haste, their fire, their precipitous revulsion, their unexpectedness, their gloomy melancholy, and the overwhelming vastness of their dimensions--it must be strong and yet flexible, like a rapier. Such poems must be emancipated from rules: they must stride along like a real crowd, noisily seething; they must not walk in step, like soldiers on the march. And if they are to be spoken, they must not be recited in the stiff, cold, pathetically vibrating, self-conscious declamation of the Comédie Française; they must be spoken as though to a crowd; they must cry out, they must hail; and this-whipping up of an audience cannot be harmonious. These poems must be spontaneous and impulsive. Manifold is the diversity which Verhaeren's poetry has achieved by its deliverance from the monotony of the Alexandrine. Now and now only can the verse reproduce the plastic side of an impression and the inward agitation of it; not only by a pictorial description, but in a purely external manner too; by the sound, by the music of the rhythm. The lines, sometimes darting far beyond the margin, sometimes, like an arrow, sharpened to a single word, have the whole key-board of feeling. They can pace with a grave step like long black funeral processions, if haply they would express the monotony of solitude, 'Mes jours toujours plus lourds s'en vont roulant leur cours';[1] they can dart up like a falcon, white and glittering, soaring to the exulting cry 'la joie,' swift and as high as heaven over all the sad heaviness of earth. All the voices of day and night can now be represented onomato-poetically: all that is brusque and sudden by brevity; all that is ponderous and grandiose by a vast sweep of fulness; an unexpected thing by sudden harshness; haste in a feverishly accelerated movement; savagery by a precipitous change of velocity. Every line can now express the feeling by its rhythm alone. And one might without knowing French recognise the poetical intention of many of these poems merely by listening to their consonantal music, nay, often by looking at their typographical arrangement.