Chapter 4: The Discipline of Meter
Rather than content himself with this prefatory material, Bridges wanted
to circulate these prosodic rules beyond Beeching’s edition; he published a
separate edition of the essay in pamphlet form the same year. Bridges did not
believe that he had produced the definitive account of Milton’s prosody be-
cause the prosody was not the same poem by poem. Therefore, Bridges ex-
panded his study by publishing The Prosody of Paradise Regained and Samson
Agonistes as a supplement in 1889, the year of Hopkins’s death. It is arguable
that most of Bridges’s ideas about the prosody of Samson Agonistes would not
have been possible without his correspondence with Hopkins, whose own
work with the speech rhythms of Samson Agonistes, in particular, was forma-
tive in the concept of “sprung rhythm.” Though the supplement appears, at
first, merely to give a sense of the further variations that Milton explored in his
other poems, it quickly turns polemical, and could read as a defense of Hop-
kins’s own experimental poems. After quoting a few lines with inverted first
feet, he asserts: “Those who think such verses rugged and harsh are unfit to
criticize Milton—as the most must always be, because the more elaborate
the rhythm, the fewer can appreciate it; and Milton’s rhythms require of the
reader more than what commonly passes for a good ear.”^27 He continues, vehe-
mently: “Most ‘lovers of poetry’ merely love sing-song. Ritum, ritum, ritum, is
rhythm to them, and anything which will not go ritum is harsh; or that and
diddledy diddledy are all their notion of rhythm. But that the University of
Oxford should print such a vulgar instruction of the youth of the country may
well astonish” (8).
The sophisticated knowledge of metrical complexity would render a stu-
dent more, not less civilized. Here, Bridges distinguishes between the regular
“lover of poetry,” conditioned in school to discard all but the most regular
rhythms, and sets out to correct these miseducated readers by directing them
to the text for which this is a supplement. In so doing, Bridges is redeeming
Milton as well as English meter from a simple, conventional understanding of
metrical form as associated with rhythmic regularity (a trend that is explored
in further detail in the following chapter).
But Bridges was far from finished; in 1893 he published, in limited issue, a
revised and expanded version of the text, titled Milton’s Prosody: An examina-
tion of the rules of the blank verse in Milton’s later poems, with an Account of the
Versification of Samson Agonistes, and general notes, bringing the same book
out in regular issue the following year. In this, he expanded his (rather syllabic)
view of Paradise Lost and continued to make his case for the stress-prosody of
Samson Agonistes. Finally, in 1901, Bridges published a more definitive vol-
ume, titled simply Milton’s Prosody, alongside William Johnson Stone’s On the
Use of Classical Metres in English Verse. The fact of Bridges’s constant revisions
shows that as he was working through Milton’s blank verse he was trying to
think through his own ideas of English meter. Although he did not name it as
such, the 1901 version of Milton’s Prosody is actually a treatise about all meter