One doesn’t “listen” when reading prose, but in poetry or anything offered under that heading a submerged metre is definitely expected. Very few readers of Mr. Kipling’s “Old Man Kangaroo” which is printed as prose, realize that it is written in strict verse all through and that he is, as it were, pulling a long nose at us. The canny _vers librist_ gets help from his printer to call your attention to what he calls “cadence” and “rhythmic relations” (not easy to follow) which might have escaped you if printed as prose; _this_ sentence, you’ll find, has its thumb to its nose. XVI MOVING MOUNTAINS Perhaps some people who buy this book will be disappointed at not being told the correct way of writing triolets and rondeaux. Theirs is the same practical type of mind that longs to join a Correspondence School of Art and learn the formulas for drawing a washer-woman or trousers or the stock caricature of Mr. Winston Churchill. But poetry is not a science, it is an act of faith; mountains are often moved by it in the most unexpected directions against all the rules laid down by professors of dynamics--only for short distances, I admit; still, definitely moved. The only possible test for the legitimacy of this or that method of poetry is the practical one, the question, “Did the mountain stir?” XVII LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI The psalmist explains an outburst of sorrowful poetry as due to a long suppression of the causes of his grief. He says, “I kept silent, yea, even from good words. My heart was hot within me and while I was thus musing, the fire kindled, and at the last I spake with my tongue.” So it was I believe with Keats in the composition of this compellingly sorrowful ballad. Sir S. Colvin’s “Life of Keats” gives the setting well enough. We do not know exactly what kindled the fire but I am inclined to think with Sir S. Colvin, that Keats had been reading a translation ascribed to Chaucer from Alan Chartier’s French poem of the same title. The poet says:-- “I came unto a lustie greene vallay Full of floures ... ... riding an easy paas I fell in thought of joy full desperate With great disease and paine, so that I was Of all lovers the most unfortunate ...”