blic take
a peep behind the scenes at the elaborate and vacillating crudities
of thought, at the true purposes seized only at the last moment, at
the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity
of full view, at the fully matured fancies discarded as
unmanageable, at the cautious selections and rejections, at the
painful erasions and interpolations--in a word at the wheels and
pinions, the tackle for scene shifting, the step ladders and demon
traps, the cock's feather, the red paint and the black patches,
which in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred constitute the
properties of the literary _histrio_.

[6] Stone & Kimball Edition. Vol. 6; page 31.

And so he proceeds to detail how he composed "The Raven." First he decided
on a length of about one hundred lines that could be read at one sitting;
on beauty as its province; on sadness as its tone; on a variation of the
application of the refrain--it remaining for the most part unvaried--to
obtain what he termed "artistic piquancy;" proceeding only at that stage to
the composition of the last verse as the first step. All this of course has
little to do with "Derelict" and yet I cannot but see a sort of analogy of
effect by processes wholly divergent, particularly as Allison once told me
that the central idea of the last verse for consigning the bodies to the
deep was ever in his mind and that this verse was first projected, although
its development was the most difficult and its perfection did not come
until later. So much for that! In the five verses he had arrived
approximately at a consummation of the sea burial, the introduction very
properly repeating the quatrain of Billy Bones before concluding:

We wrapped 'em all in a mains'l tight,
With twice ten turns of a hawser's bight,
And we heaved 'em over and out of sight--
With a yo-heave-ho!
And a fare-you-well!
And a sullen plunge
In the sullen swell--
Ten fathom-lengths of the road to hell--
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!

While this composition is fine and tight as a drum in poetic meter and
conception, the real perfection was not arrived at until he made it "Ten
fathoms _deep on_ the road to hell." In the five-verse revision a part of
the last verse as it appeared in "A Piratical Ballad" went into the second,
a part of the second verse was shifted to the third and a fourth was added
to give an implied reason for