Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out. Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.

All knots that lovers tie Are tied to sever. Here shall your sweetheart lie, Untrue for ever.

The laws of God, the laws of man, He may keep that will and can; Not I: let God and man decree Laws for themselves and not for me.

Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.

And how am I to face the odds Of man's bedevilment and God's? I, a stranger and afraid In a world I never made.

I think that to transfuse emotion - not to transmit thought but to set up in the reader's sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer - is the peculiar function of poetry.

And silence sounds no worse than cheers After earth has stopped the ears.