But, perhaps, the ultimate objection to this poem as it stands is the fact that I have an uneasy suspicion that some printer may have transposed some of these expressions. For would it not really have made better sense if the poem had spoken of a saffron oblong and a blue square? Certainly if I choose to think that that is what it must have been originally no other reader, on the face of the matter, could convince me otherwise. While, if another reader told me that Mr. Bodenheim had once studied geometry and therefore could not possibly have written about a “slim square”, I would be quite unable to convince him otherwise. But—it will be objected—it is quite unfair to any poem to analyze it word by word. It spoils its beauty. I challenge the assertion, and even assert the opposite. As a matter of fact, it is only by analysis that we can tell good poetry from bad poetry. For instance: Crown him with many crowns The lamb upon his throne. Analyze that and it straightway appears the nonsense that it really is. But, on the other hand, take this poem of Francis Thompson’s (I quote only a part): Does the fish soar to find the ocean, The eagle plunge to find the air— That we ask of the stars in motion If they have rumour of thee there? Not where the wheeling systems darken, And our benumbed conceiving soars!— The drift of pinions, would we hearken, Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors. The angels keep their ancient places;— Turn but a stone, and start a wing! ’Tis ye, ’tis your estrangèd faces, That miss the many-splendored thing. Now that poem, it will be observed, is not unrelated in subject to the two lines quoted just above it. And yet, how it defies any effort to analyze it out into anything else than itself. Rhythm, cosmic picturings, the homely metaphors of the dusty road, all combine to place us in an attitude toward, to give us a feeling for, reality, which is different from, and nobler than, those of the man who has either never read this poem, never read the same message in other poetic language, or—what is more to the point—never managed to get for himself the same experience which dictated that poem.