360 The Future Poetry
variations which obviate monotony altogether. For example —
In the dawn-ray lofty and voiceless
Ida climbed with her god-haunted peaks|into diamond lustres,
Ida first of the hills|with the ranges silent beyond her
Watching the dawn in their giant companies,|as since the ages
First began|they had watched her,|upbearing Time on their
summits....“Hero Aeneas, swift be thy stride to the Ilian hill-top.
Dardanid, haste! for the gods are at work; they have risen with the
morning,
Each from his starry couch, and they labour. Doom, we can see it,
Glows on their anvils of destiny, clang we can hear of their hammers.
Something they forge there sitting unknown in the silence eternal,
Whether of evil or good it is they who shall choose who are masters
Calm, unopposed; they are gods and they work out their iron caprices.
Troy is their stage and Argos their background; we are their puppets.
Always our voices are prompted to speech for an end that we know not,
Always we think that we drive, but are driven. Action and impulse,
Yearning and thought are their engines, our will is their shadow and
helper.”There are many other devices for variation: there is overlap-
ping, — but it must be skilfully managed so as to coincide with
perceptible movements of the thought, not used merely as a
customary technical device; there is the constant attention to the
right vowellation and consonant harmonies which can give an
individual character to each line and are also intimately con-
nected with the rhythmic rendering of significance. Even though
the free rhythmic placing of intrinsic long syllables is taken away,
since they are now bound down to a metrical use, still much can
be done with the distribution of stressed long vowels and stressed
short vowels among the six beats; for the predominance of either
in a line or passage or their more or less equal distribution in
various ways creates different psychologies of sound and dictates
large or wide or narrow or subtle motions of both rhythm and
feeling. In this opening of a poem —