Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust,

it was his subject-matter that changed from line to line and not the poetic
emotion governing it, and to say that he ought to have made the metrical
and rhythmic form of the first line in itself suggest heat: of the second,
rough weather: of the third, work: of the fourth, wages: and of the fifth
and sixth the death of golden lads and girls and of chimney-sweepers
respectively, all things manifestly very different from each other, and
things which, if it were the function of verbal rhythms and metres to do
this sort of thing at all, could not with any propriety have the closely
related equivalents that they have here. No; to ask for this kind of effect
is really to ask for nothing more valuable than the devotional crosses and
altars into which a perverted wit led some of the seventeenth-century poets
to contrive their verses in unhappy moments, or Southey's _Lodore_, in
which there is a fond pretence that verbal rhythms are water.[3] It is just
as difficult to explain why verbal rhythms will not perform this function
as it is to explain why the moon is not a green cheese.

[3: Most poets will occasionally use onomatopoeia with success,
but this is a different matter, and even so it is quite an inessential
poetic device. One might sometimes suppose from what we are told, that
Virgil's chief claim to poetry was the fact that he once made a line of
verse resemble the movement of a horse's hoofs.]

But while it is true that the function of the rhythm of poetry is to
express the governing poetic emotion, and that, since the emotion in
itself is fixed rather than changing, it will best do this not by mere
irregularity, but by flexible movement that is contained in an external
symmetry, it does not follow at all that the subject-matter which the