"refrain" is the lure wherewith a poet or a musician holds the wandering
ear,--the recurrent longing of Nature for the initial strain. I have always
admired the beautiful refrains of the English songstress,--"The
Nightingales, the Nightingales," "Margret, Margret," "My Heart and I,"
"Toll slowly," "The River floweth on," "Pan, Pan is dead," etc. She also
employed what I term the Repetend, in the use of which Poe has excelled all
poets since Coleridge thus revived it:

"O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware."

Poe created the fifth line of his stanza for the magic of the repetend. He
relied upon it to the uttermost in a few later poems,--"Lenore," "Annabel
Lee," "Ulalume," and "For Annie." It gained a wild and melancholy music, I
have thought, from the "sweet influences," of the Afric burdens and
repetends that were sung to him in childhood, attuning with their native
melody the voice of our Southern poet.

"The Philosophy of Composition," his analysis of _The Raven_, is a
technical dissection of its method and structure. Neither his avowal of
cold-blooded artifice, nor his subsequent avowal to friends that an
exposure of this artifice was only another of his intellectual hoaxes, need
be wholly credited. If he had designed the complete work in advance, he
scarcely would have made so harsh a prelude of rattle-pan rhymes to the
delicious melody of the second stanza,--not even upon his theory of the
fantastic. Of course an artist, having perfected a work, sees, like the