libre_; one
gets carried away by beautiful phrases and is brought up suddenly by
a complete absence of verbs. However at a pinch one can do without a
verb; that is the best of _vers libre_:--

Amber and gold,
Deep-stained in mystery
And the colours of mystery,
Inapprehensible,
Golden like wet-gold,
Amber like a woman of Arabia
That has in her breast
The forsaken treasures of old Time,
Love and Destruction,
Oblivion and Decay,
And bully-beef tins,
Tin upon tin,
Old boots, and bottles that hold no more
Their richness in them.
And I----

We might do a good deal more of this descriptive business, bringing in
something about dead bodies, mud of course being full of dead bodies.
But we had better get on. We strike now the personal note:--

And I,
I too am no more than a bottle,
An empty bottle,
Heaving helpless on the mud of life,
Without a label and without a cork,
Empty I am, yet no man troubles
To return me.
And why?
Because there is not sixpence on me.
Bah!
The sun goes down in the West
(Or is it the East?)
But I remain here,
Drifting empty under the night,
Drifting----

When one is well away with this part of the poem it is almost
impossible to stop. When you are writing in metre you come eventually
to the eighth line of the last verse and you have to stop; but in
_vers libre_ you have no assistance of that kind. This particular poem
is being written for instructional purposes in a journal of limited
capacity, so it will probably have to stop fairly soon; but in
practice it would go on for a long time yet. In any case, however, it
would end in the same way, like this:--

Mud, mud,
Nothing but mud,
O, my God!

That reasserts, you see, in a striking manner, the original _motif_,
and somehow expresses in a few words the poignant melancholy of the
whole poem. Another advantage in finishing a long poem, such as this
would be, in the same way as you began it is that it makes it clear
to the reader that he is still reading the same poem. Sometimes, and
especially in _vers libre_ of an emotional and digressive character,
the reader has a hideous fear that he has turned over two pages and
got into another poem altogether. This little trick reassures him;
and if you are writing _vers libre_ you must not lose any legitimate
opportunity of reassuring the reader.