"And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor;"
he gave a slight shiver or shrug of the shoulders—an expressive motion habitual to him—and the pencil came down with an emphatic stroke beneath the six last words.
This was one of the hardest knots, he said, nor could he find a way of getting over it. "Ember" was the only word rhyming with the two preceding lines, but in no way could he dispose of it except as he had done—thus producing the worst line in the poem.
We "pondered" over it for awhile and finally gave it up.
(But I may here mention that I have since, in studying the poem, made a discovery which, strangely enough, seems never to have occurred to the author. This was that in this particular stanza he had unconsciously reversed the order or arrangement of the lines, placing those of the triple rhymes first and the rhyming couplet last. Thus all his long years of worry over that unfortunate "ember" had been unnecessary, since the construction of the verse required not only the omission of the word as a rhyme, but of the whole line of
"And each separate dying ember;"
when the succeeding objectionable words,
"Wrought its ghost upon the floor,"
could have been easily altered; and the addition of a third line to the succeeding couplet would have made the stanza correct.)