are only a starting-post to something which has not their sort of reality at all.

Ah, what avails the sceptered race!

Ah, what the form divine!
What every virtue, every grace!

Rose Aylmer, all were thine.

Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes

May weep, but never see,

A night of memories and sighs

I consecrate to thee.

Emotion, formless, chaotic, fluid in itself, has attained permanence, beauty, form. And in so doing it has become something which it is not. !

I have really been discussing, under the guise of illusion, the nature of poetic truth. For the very essence of poetic truth is accepted illusion. That illusion, in turn, as we have also seen, grows inevitably out of the limitations of the poet's medium. And illusion to which we consent, with all that that implies, is the taproot of the conventions of poetry. I wish now to turn, with the utmost brevity, to one of the major conventions which I shall discuss more fully in another chapter namely, rhythm.

The one and only thing I wish to say about poetic rhythm now is this: It serves notice that we are on the frontiers of illusion-"Enter

these enchanted woods, ye who dare!" That is, the expectation with which we approach poetry is utterly different from the expectation with which we approach prose. We stand ready to accept in the one what we reject, if we find it, in the other. And verse, whether directed to the ear or to the eye, is the outward and visible sign that we are entering the world where truth of literal fact yields place to another truth. It is the signal for that willing suspension of disbelief on which I have rung the changes. Consider a precisely parallel situation. What happens when we enter a theatre? We assume, more or less unconsciously, a definite attitude of mind towards what we know we are to see and hear: namely, time that is not real time; the heightening of make-up; tricks of light; asides and stage whispers that everybody hears; letters read aloud that no one ever reads aloud; it may be, long soliloquies; it may be, men and women speaking in blank verse. None of these things would we accept outside those walls. There, we know that what we are to be given is illusion, and we expect and we desire to undergo it. That is what we go for. Now the sight or sound of verse stands to poetry in precisely the relation in which the rising of the curtain stands to the play. When we hear verse or see it, we pass

from one world to another, and we expect to pass. We shall come back to this again, for it is fundamental in more ways than one. For the moment, I have said enough when I repeat that verse, metre, poetic rhythm or cadence (name it by what name you will) serves notice that we are on enchanted ground, and opens the door to the illusion that is poetic truth-a city built to music, therefore never built at all, and therefore built forever.

Such, then, as I understand it, is the essential nature of poetry a fabric of truth based on reality, but not reproducing reality. And the constituent elements of the fabric have their sanction in consent. Poetry is, in essence, of convention all compact.

II

THE WAYS OF CONVENTIONS

CONVENTIONS exist by virtue of usage, and usage is, of all things human, the most capricious. The clothes I should wear were I speaking at eight instead of five are consecrated by usage to the hours whose appurtenance is fashion and ceremony - provided that those hours fall after sunset. What, it is pertinent to ask, would happen, were one to give a morning lecture garbed in evening clothes? Yet there is obviously neither rhyme nor reason in the requirement that I shall wear a certain coat only between certain stipulated hours, on pain of feeling the weight of the imponderables that rule the world. But that is usage - precisely as it is linguistic usage that permits imponderables to have weight — and usage is the source and origin of conventions. Now convention in poetry (as has been well said) is only the costume in which emotion attires itself, and it comes, like clothes, under the same capricious sway.

It is the behavior of conventions, then, with which we have now to do. There are, as we

have seen, certain fundamental conventions inherent in the very nature of poetry itself. But all conventions are not so firmly rooted. Once started on their way, they multiply and ramify and split and merge, and it is the bewildering and phantasmagoric variety of the branches rather than their ultimate derivation from a common root that I wish, if I can, to exhibit.

With the birth of the individual conventions I shall not particularly concern myself. In one sense conventions are not born at all. For whatever their ancestry, they never come into being as conventions. It is only when they are taken up through acceptance into usage that they acquire conventionality. "The heroic couplet," says Professor Manly, with the utmost truth, “originated ... suddenly. Chaucer wrote heroic couplets, and there they were." But when Chaucer wrote heroic couplets, and there all at once they were, the heroic couplet did not thereby spring into existence as a convention. It became that later, when other poets, following Chaucer, looked upon it and saw that it was good, and wore it threadbare.

Yet it is sometimes possible to see how this, that, and the other convention began. Conventions frequently take their rise, for instance,