The more a text has design, the more it has designs — on the reader. But if design is multiplied beyond encompassment or is ambiguated, then the text's rhetorical effectiveness is sprung. But the ‘springing’ of rhetoric depends, of course, as much on the reader as on the text; the reader is always at liberty to persuade himself towards the perception of unity or consistency, or towards giving priority to one design over another. Rhetorical effectiveness can only ever be a result of a complicity, the complicity between a reader and a perceptible design. But such a complicity can only take place if the reader feels authorised to participate in it. That authority can come from many sources: an author hypothesised through the medium of a poet or narrator, generic conventions, recognisable and recognised formal principles, and so on.

Rhythm — and, for the moment, this term includes both rhythm and metre — is certainly one source of authority, since if it can be recognised, it allows the identification of the poem's semantic focuses and their articulations, and thus of the distribution of the poem's expressive and rhetorical resources. Rhythm is the informing design of the poem's power to communicate and makes its communication persuasive; rhythm, in short, guarantees that the poem means and means to mean; conversely, utterances without meaning can have no rhythm since they carry within them no principle of utterability; and as a corollary, utterances which have a patently emphatic or transparent rhythmic structure, even though they may semantically elude us temporarily or indeed permanently, equally have an inbuilt guarantee of their intelligibility and significance.