Having the rhyme quite free to myself, I didn't mind reading this; but if ever I have to give up either, I shall keep the rhyme.
Having discovered, then, that every poem must have been written as it was written, on purpose, I took a little more pains with those I cared for least. In some even then I could not quite piece out the meaning; in others I could not easily catch the beat and rhythm and tune. But I learned to read them very slowly, so as fully and quietly to fill up the time allowed for each line and to listen to its music, and to see and hear all that the words were saying.
Then, too, what Miss Taroone had said came back to my mind. Even when Mr. Nahum's poems were about real things and places and people, they were still only of places and people the words made for me in my mind. I must, that is, myself imagine all they told. And I found that the mention in a poem even of quite common and familiar things—such as a star, or a buttercup, or a beetle—did not bring into the mind quite the same kind of images of them as the things and creatures themselves do in the naked eye.
Now the day is over,
Night is drawing nigh;
Shadows of the evening
Steal across the sky....
This was one of the earliest poems in Mr. Nahum's book. I had often, of course, seen the shadows of evening—every grass-blade or pebble casts its own; but these words not only called them vividly into my mind, but set shadows there (shadows across the sky) that I had never really seen at all—with my own eyes I mean. I discovered afterwards, also, that shadows are only the absence of light, though light is needed to make them visible. Just the same, again, with the sailors in the same poem:
Guard the sailors tossing