Mere verse, as an earlier section has attempted to show, is neither bad poetry nor fake poetry necessarily. It finds its own categories, good verse, bad verse and imitation. In its relation to poetry it stands as chimpanzee to man: only the theory that a conflict of emotional ideas is a necessary ingredient of verse to make it poetry, will satisfactorily explain why many kinds of verse, loosely called Poetry, such as Satire and Didactic verse are yet popularly felt not to be the “highest” forms of Poetry. I would say that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred these bear no real relation to Poetry, even though dressed up in poetical language, and that in the hundredth case they are poetry in spite of themselves. Where the writer is dominated by only one aim, in satire, the correction of morals; in didactic verse, instruction; there is no conflict and therefore no poetry. But in rare cases where some Juvenal slips through feelings of compunction to a momentary mood of self-satire and even forgets himself so much as to compliment his adversary; or in didactic verse where a sudden doubt arises and the teacher admits himself a blind groper after truth (so Lucretius time and time again) and breaks his main argument in digressions after loveliness and terror, only then does Poetry appear. It flashes out with the surprise and shock of a broken electric circuit. Even the _memoria technica_ can slide from verse into poetry. The rhyme to remember the signs of the Zodiac by, ends wonderfully:-- The Ram the Bull, the Heavenly Twins, And next the Crab, the Lion shines, The Virgin and the Scales, The Scorpion, Archer and He Goat, The Man who carries the Watering Pot, The Fish with glittering tails. The language of science makes a hieroglyphic, or says “The sign of Aquarius”; the language of prose says “A group of stars likened by popular imagery to a Water Carrier”; the language of Poetry converts the Eastern water carrier with his goatskin bag or pitcher, into an English gardener, then puts him to fill his watering pot from heavenly waters where the Fish are darting. The author of this rhyme has visualized his terrestrial emblems most clearly; he has smelt the rankness of the Goat, and yet in the “Lion shines” and the “glittering tails” one can see that he has been thinking in terms of stars also. The emotional contradiction lies in the stars’ remote aloofness from complications of this climatic and smelly world, from the terror of Lion, Archer, Scorpion, from the implied love-interest of Heavenly Twins and Virgin, and from the daily cares of the Scales, Ram, Bull, Goat, Fish, Crab and Watering Pot. The ready way to distinguish verse from poetry is this, Verse makes a flat pattern on the paper, Poetry stands out in relief. XLII A DIALOGUE ON FAKE-POETRY Q. When is a fake not a fake? A. When hard-working and ingenious conjurors are billed by common courtesy as ‘magicians.’