There is an obvious difference in the Apollinaire pieces when it comes to their visual representation of their texts.  The piece "It's Raining" features its words dripping down the page in an obvious representation of the continued metaphor of rain throughout the piece.  "Voices" and "marvelous encounters of my life" are raining down, slipping through their holder's hands as droplets of rain.  The voices bemoan the great number of deaths caused by the war, yet more than that, they lament the totality of the insignificance in these deaths...the pointless murder of those "dead even in memory".  They can no longer remember the happy moments of life, the sunshine cannot reach through the rain. In relating these deaths and the war to rain, an eternal element of nature, the poem itself is becoming part of the "ancient music" which the war has caused.  The "ancient music" is the cycle of human life, the seeming necessity of war as a cleanser of humanity, just as rain is a natural and cyclic cleanser of the earth.

In Apollinaire's second piece, there seems to be little, if any, relevance of the form of the poem to its content.  "Thunder's Palace" has regular strophes as any poem of any era.  However, considering the poem's discussion of the warring sentiments of old vs. new, perhaps the traditional form of the poem is itself Apollinaire's comment on the Avant-Garde movement.  The piece reminded me of the Leon Trotsky quote from the Perloff reading for tomorrow:

"Futurism...has meaning only insofar as the Futurists are busy cutting the cord which binds them to the priests of bourgeois literary tradition.  But the meaninglessness of this call becomes evident as soon as it is addressed to the proletariat.  The working class does not have to, and cannot know the old literature, it still has to commune with it, it still has to master Pushkin, to absorb him, and so overcome him" (153).  

Apollinaire's writing in "Thunder's Palace" seems to reinforce this notion of needing to accept the past (rather than obliterate it) in order to achieve new heights in the future.  His piece is full of images of shapes, lines, bold colors, and machinery/technology , drawing on the traditions of the emerging modernists, while at the same time the form of the work fits much older standards and could be seen as a possible betrayal of the modernist movement.  Here, the content of Apollinaire's poem is key, particularly with the clarity he reaches at the work's close:

"And still everything seems old in this new house / So you can understand men had a love for antiquity / Even when they lived in caves / Everything there was so precious and new / Everything here is so precious and new / That something older or something already used seems / More precious still / Than what is at hand ...

You can see that what's simplest and newest is / nearest to what's called antique beauty / And what's overladen with ornaments / needs to age before it can acquire the beauty labeled antique."

Apollinaire is comparing the clashing literary movements and their outrage towards one another, simplifying them by placing them in the greater context of the universe of Time.  Just as the Futurists, Vorticists and other Avant-Gardists and Modernists rebel against their ancestors, so will future generations rebel against the poets of the early 20th century.  The only way to achieve a poetry of maturity is to accept this fact of art and life, drawing on the work of predecessors to help pave the path to "beauty".