Most thematic treatments of Lamartine's verse have found beneath the intricate tissue of commonplace and allusion a real enough existential drama. But while thematic treatments uncover for us the concealed organisation of a poetic mentality, pick out those lexical items which have a peculiar loadedness in a poet's work and explore their relationships, they do not usually concern themselves with the more intimate lives of these items, the variations of emotional colouring, modality and projection which they undergo within a poetic corpus, thanks to their changing location in verse-structure. In this chapter, I would like to isolate a set of lexical items from a given Lamartinian corpus by undertaking my own brief thematic analysis, an analysis indebted to those works listed in the first note to this chapter, and select from this set of lexical items a small body of words upon which to practise a more thorough, prosodic analysis. From this analysis, which will concentrate on the syllabic position of words in the line, on their syllabic proportions, on the measures and combinations of measure they create, I wish to try and construct the range of activity of these words, the diversity of their moods, the tones that inform them. At the same time I wish to discover, through the study of these words, something more about the energies and the conditioning capacities inherent in the line of verse, and in particular, in the alexandrine.