Of itself in warm motion
Through the barrack windows;
It rattles a sheet of flypaper
Tacked in a smear of sunshine on the sill.
A voice and other voices squirt
A slow path among the room's tumbled sounds.
A ukelele somewhere clanks
In accidental jets
Up from the room's background."

Here the stark truthfulness of the images does not prevent an instinctive
"Well, what of it?" "And afterward, what else?" Unless we adopt the
Japanese theory of "stop poems," where the implied continuation of the
mood, the suggested application of the symbol or allegory, is the sole
justification of the actual words given, a great deal of imagist verse, in
my opinion, serves merely to sharpen the senses without utilizing the full
imaginative powers of the mind. The making of images is an essential
portion of the poet's task, but in memorably great poetry it is only a
detail in a larger whole. Miss Lowell's "Patterns" is one of the most
effective of contemporary poems, but it is far more than a document of
imagism. It is a triumph of structural imagination.


_7. Genius and Inspiration_

Whatever may be the value, for students, of trying to analyse the
image-making and image-combining faculty, every one admits that it is a
necessary element in the production of poetry. Let Coleridge have the
final statement of this mystery of his art: "The power of reducing
multitude into unity of effect, and modifying a series of thoughts by some