But the age of poetry is not yet over if poets will only remember what the word means and not confuse it with acrostic-making and similar ingenious Alexandrianisms. Earlier civilizations than ours have forgotten the necessarily spontaneous nature of the art, and have tried (for lack of any compelling utterance) to beat the sophisticated critics of their day by piling an immense number of technical devices on their verses, killing what little passion there was, by the tyranny of self-imposed rules. The antithetical couplet of Pope or the Ovidian hexameter-and-pentameter are bad enough, but the ancient Irish and Welsh bards were even more restricted by their chain-rhymes and systems of consonantal sequence, the final monstrosity being the Welsh _englyn_ of four lines, governed by ninety-odd separate rules. The way out for Poetry does not lie by this road, we may be sure. But neither on the other hand do we yet need to call in the Da-da-ists. XXXIII RHYMES AND ALLITERATION Rhymes properly used are the good servants whose presence gives the dinner table a sense of opulent security; they are never awkward, they hand the dishes silently and professionally. You can trust them not to interrupt the conversation of the table or allow their personal disagreements to come to the notice of the guests; but some of them are getting very old for their work. The principle governing the use of alliteration and rhyme appear to be much the same. In unsophisticated days an audience could be moved by the profuse straight-ahead alliteration of _Piers Plowman_, but this is too obvious a device for our times. The best effects seem to have been attained in more recent poetry by precisely (if unconsciously) gauging the memory length of a reader’s mental ear and planting the second alliterative word at a point where the memory of the first is just beginning to blurr; but has not quite faded. By cross-alliteration on these lines a rich atmosphere has resulted and the reader’s eye has been cheated. So with internal and ordinary rhyme; but the memory length for the internal rhyme appears somewhat longer than memory for alliteration, and for ordinary rhyme, longer still. XXXIV AN AWKWARD FELLOW CALLED ARIPHRADES