his rhythms. Here they are:

Dawn enters with little feet
Like a gilded Pavlova.

There is a certain humorous charm of epithet here, and a rhythmic
suggestion of metrical beat to follow. That, no doubt, is why the line
has stuck in my memory. But the metrical beat did not follow, and the
rest of the stanza has gone from me. I am sure even a gilded Pavlova
would be at some difficulty to dance to Mr. Pound's rhythms.

But Miss Monroe is catholic in her choice of new poets. She includes,
for instance, Walter de la Mare, if in less than two pages. She
selects his wonderful poem _The Listeners_, and the quaint, haunting,
_Epitaph_. It is a little hard to see just why _The Listeners_ is new
poetry, except chronologically. Its odd, apparently simple but really
intricate and triumphantly fluid metrical structure, so unified that
there is no break from the first syllable to the last; its lyric
romanticism of subject; its obvious delight in tune; even its
occasional lapses into the ancient "poetic" vocabulary (the traveler
"smote" the door, the listeners "hearkened," and so on), are all a
part of the nineteenth-century tradition of English verse. It is no
more modern than _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_--which, to be sure, is
quite modern indeed to some of us. And it has lyric beauty, it has
lines of unforgettable musical loveliness, it creeps in through the
ear and echoes in the memory. You surely remember the close:

Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the stillness surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

Is there really any loss of sharpness in the imagery here because of
the rhyme and metre? Could any phrase, of any rhythm, however free,
render any better and more economically the peculiar noise of a horse
turning on a hard drive and starting away in the night, than "the
sound of iron on stone"? The last two lines, surely, are close to
perfection. A genuine new poet would probably have hunted long for a
less hackneyed word than "plunging," but though it would possibly have
sharpened his final image, it would, at the same time, in all
probability, have robbed it of that very vagueness sought and
captured. No, the passage pictorially and emotionally is as