THE PATTERN OF A POEM

Not long ago a geologist made a collection of claystones found near a great river. They were marvellously designed in whorls and loops and medallions of clay that had once been plastic, not to the hands of man, but to the living fingers of water, heat, cold, pressure, and to the unnamed forces that began and have carried on the evolution of our earth. "They were lying there," said the geologist, "loose in a clay bank." And he added, "Is it not wonderful?"

It is indeed wonderful. Why should a handful of clay, here and there in the great bank, gradually take to itself this form of beauty? Why should the great bank of clay show no such strongly marked and easily perceived design? Why does Nature give such perfect and perceptible designs to claystones, quartz crystals and butterflies, while she lets the small hillocks ramble at will across the surface of the land? Why does she spread the forests about in uneven patches upon the hills, cut jagged gashes chaotically through the august sides of mountains, and make no regular plan for the windings of rivers? In small things Nature seems to perfect her designs and to work them out in strict symmetry. What is the law for great things?

Great things, also, have a pattern or design. All mountains are clearly manifest to us as mountains. We can see that a river is a river, though rivers have many ways of winding. It is just possible that great things have a symmetry which we, potent to the extent of five and a half feet, or so, of flesh and blood, eyes the size of a robin's egg and brains that could be carried in salt sacks, are not well able to perceive. Perhaps Nature's larger designs are too large to seem symmetrical to us, who see them only in part. The far away worlds in space may be arranged in sequence, in a gigantic and balanced com

position of which we know very, very little. This much is certain-in all the large things that we do know we find order and design as an expression of the primal genius, even though we do not find a symmetry as strict as the symmetry of design in little things. And in every design variety pulls against symmetry as love pulls against law, the dynamic against the static, life against death.

Symmetry and variety, then, in the natural world, pull against each other and create order, design. When symmetry is sacrificed to variety there is bad design-failure. When a tree grows with all of its branches on one side, that tree is in peril; a great wind after a heavy rain may blow it down. And again, when variety is sacrificed to symmetry we have bad design-failure. When no alien pollen is brought to fertilize the flower, the seed of a plant deteriorates. Self-fertilization causes the plant's strength to dwindle. But, always, when the forces that make for symmetry are pulling hard against the forces that make for variety, so that a tension is created and an equilibrium maintained between them, we have the design at its very best in the world where Dame Nature is artist.

Now all of our human arts, to a certain degree, are subject to the same laws that govern nature. We human beings, little artists, possessed of some small share of the primal genius, have risen through many ranks of being and consciousness into that humanity of which we are inordinately proud. And when we are proud, it is often because we alone, of all living creatures, can consciously create patterns for our own pleasure. In all that we make for use, beauty and enduring life, we use patterns, good and bad. And in all patterns we find that the law of symmetry and the law of variety must be remembered. The penalty of forgetting either law is failure. Let us see how this applies to poetry, and especially to the poetry of our own period.

First of all we must realize that in all times when poems have been well made poets have made patterns for them; and these patterns have been of many kinds. The Psalms in our Bibles,