She sees by formless gleams
She hears across cold streams
Dead mouths of many dreams that sing and sigh.
Little beyond vague thoughts of the things the words stand for is here required. They do not have to be brought into intelligible connection with one another. On the other hand, Hardy would rarely reach his full effect through sound and sense alone—
‘Who’s in the next room?—who?
I seemed to see
Somebody in the dawning passing through
Unknown to me.’
‘Nay: you saw nought. He passed invisibly’.
Between these and even more extreme cases, every degree of variation in the relative importance of sound, sense, and further interpretation, between form and content in short, can be found. A temptation to which few do not succumb is to suppose that there is some ‘proper relation’ for these different parts of the experience, so that a poem whose parts are in this relation must thereby be a greater or better poem than another whose parts are differently disposed. This is another instance of the commonest of critical mistakes, the confusion of means with ends, of technique with value. There is no more a ‘proper place’ for sound or for sense in poetry than there is one and only one ‘proper shape’ for an animal. A dog is not a defective kind of cat, nor is Swinburne a defective kind of Hardy. But this sort of criticism is extraordinarily prevalent. The objection to Swinburne on the ground of a lack of thought is a popular specimen.