“Excuse me, it’s not. Since we’re talking in that sort of jargon, it’s a spondaic resolution of a dactylic line.” “What do you mean?” “Well, you’ve put in four extra syllables for your resolution. I’ll put in a fifth, the word “in.” Now listen! Swimmery | floatery | bobbery | duckery | divery-- _I_ saw the | cherries moon | frozen in | delicate | ivory In this case the cross-rhythm, which my friend explained was meant to suggest the curious ethereal look of cherry blossoms in moonlight, had so swamped the original metre that it was completely stifled. The poet has a licence to resolve metre where the emotion demands it, and he is a poor poet if he daren’t use it; but there is commonsense in restraint. L MY NAME IS LEGION, FOR WE ARE MANY One goes plodding on and hoping for a miracle, but who has ever recovered the strange quality that makes the early work (which follows a preliminary period of imitation) in a sense the best work? There is a fine single-heartedness, an economy of material, an adventurous delight in expression, a beginner’s luck for which I suppose honest hard work and mature observation can in time substitute certain other qualities, but poetry is never the same again. I will attempt to explain this feeling by an analogy which can be pressed as closely as any one likes: it is an elaboration of what has been said of the poet as a “peculiarly gifted witch doctor.” Cases of multiple personality have recently been investigated in people who believed themselves to be possessed by spirits. Analysis has proved pretty conclusively that the mediums have originally mimicked acquaintances whom they found strange, persons apparently selected for having completely different outlooks on life, both from the medium and from each other, different religions, different emotional processes and usually different dialects. This mimicry has given rise to unconscious impersonations of these people, impersonations so complete that the medium is in a state of trance and unconscious of any other existence. Mere imitation changes to a synthetic representation of how these characters would act in given circumstances. Finally the characters get so much a part of the medium’s self that they actually seem to appear visibly when summoned, and a sight of them can even be communicated to sympathetic bystanders. So the Witch of Endor called up Samuel for King Saul. The trances, originally spontaneous, are induced in later stages to meet the wishes of an inquisitive or devout séance-audience; the manifestations are more and more presented (this is no charge of charlatanism) with a view to their effect on the séance. It is the original unpremeditated trances, or rather the first ones that have the synthetic quality and are no longer mere mimicry, which correspond to Early Work.