And so he proceeds to detail how he composed "The Raven." First he decided on a length of about one hundred lines that could be read at one sitting; on beauty as its province; on sadness as its tone; on a variation of the application of the refrain--it remaining for the most part unvaried--to obtain what he termed "artistic piquancy;" proceeding only at that stage to the composition of the last verse as the first step. All this of course has little to do with "Derelict" and yet I cannot but see a sort of analogy of effect by processes wholly divergent, particularly as Allison once told me that the central idea of the last verse for consigning the bodies to the deep was ever in his mind and that this verse was first projected, although its development was the most difficult and its perfection did not come until later. So much for that! In the five verses he had arrived approximately at a consummation of the sea burial, the introduction very properly repeating the quatrain of Billy Bones before concluding: We wrapped 'em all in a mains'l tight, With twice ten turns of a hawser's bight, And we heaved 'em over and out of sight-- With a yo-heave-ho! And a fare-you-well! And a sullen plunge In the sullen swell-- Ten fathom-lengths of the road to hell-- Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! While this composition is fine and tight as a drum in poetic meter and conception, the real perfection was not arrived at until he made it "Ten fathoms _deep on_ the road to hell." In the five-verse revision a part of the last verse as it appeared in "A Piratical Ballad" went into the second, a part of the second verse was shifted to the third and a fourth was added to give an implied reason for the riot of death in an inferred quarrel over the "chest on chest full of Spanish gold, with a ton of plate in the middle hold." Strangely enough all these shifts and additions do not appear to have altered the sentiment in the least and at times I am amazed, in reading over old versions, that I do not appreciably miss certain lines and ideas that seem vital to the finished product.