the institution of meter 87
forms: “sum’d in a word.” This metrical alphabet is neither poor, nor simple,
nor foolish, and it is the mastery of it that Bridges wants to transmit to his
readers. His metrical performance is mastery; there is no equivocation here as
there is in Hopkins’s poem, despite his reticence to fully embrace the experi-
ment in the octave. Here is an early instance in which Bridges asserts his hopes
for English meter, daring to display its possibilities in the guise of what will
become a long sonnet sequence—“and I / Who master it, I am the only bird.”
This poem shows Bridges as a young poet “stirred” by the joy of his own
achievement in mastering meter and working along the same lines as his col-
league. Though Bridges, in Hopkins’s mind, has not quite mastered his new
form, Hopkins still praises the final tercet about mastery, writing that “[t]he
Bird-sonnet shews the clearest distortion, though the thought of the last tercet
is truly insighted” (71). The bird-as-poetic-expression is recast (or re-sum’d) by
both Hopkins and Bridges in the mid-1880s as a metaphor for metrical mas-
tery, but it was Bridges who would carry out his obsession with mastery to
such an extreme that it would guarantee his obsolescence as a metrist, poet,
and even a historical figure in the twentieth century.
Inventing the Britannic
Though Gerard Manley Hopkins and Coventry Patmore are better known for
their metrical experiments, Robert Bridges was a crucial interlocutor for both.
His book Milton’s Prosody had a greater impact on the metrical landscape than
Patmore’s English Metrical Law. But in 1883, Bridges and Hopkins had not
yet popularized their ideas about accentual meter. Bridges wrote to Patmore
asking him to give an account of his experiments in accentual meter: “[I] hope
that you would not be disinclined to give an account of what Hopkins and I
call the new prosody.” Patmore was about to revise English Metrical Law for
reissue, and both Bridges and Hopkins wanted the revisions to reflect their
own experiments. (Patmore’s “new prosody” consisted not only of marking
meter as a “series of isochronous intervals” but also moving metrical “law” into
the metaphysical and mental realms.) Bridges told Patmore that his verses
demonstrated the “new prosody” more popularly or practically than Hop-
kins’s, though he was careful to note that Hopkins’s verses demonstrated the
new prosody more correctly. In the same letter, Bridges demurs, “I shall never
write on prosody myself.”^21 Of course, Bridges had by that time already written
on prosody. In the preface to his 1879 edition of Poems, he stressed speech ac-
cent as the key to a reading of the poems in sprung rhythm. He also agreed to
write an essay, “On the Elements of Milton’s Blank Verse,” for Henry Beech-
ing’s 1887 school edition of Paradise Lost, to be published by the Clarendon
Press. In the advertisement at the front of the edition, Beeching writes, “The
essay on Milton’s scansion is contributed by a friend. It is hoped that it will
succeed in making intelligible the really simple, but (to judge by the notes of