90 chapter 3
in English based on his study of Milton. Or, as one reviewer heralds, “Mr.
Bridges’s ambition, however, goes further than the analysis of Miltonic pros-
ody. He designs this essay, with its appendices, to be at least a basis for a scien-
tific scheme of English prosody at large.”^28 The 1901 edition of Milton’s Pros-
ody quickly sold out.
But what was Bridges’s scheme? Originally expanding his study of Milton
to include a consideration of Milton’s blank verse in Paradise Lost and his very
different, more various stress rhythm in Samson Agonistes, it was clear that
Bridges felt that there was more than one way to read English meter. In both
the 1901 and the 1921 revision, Bridges includes a chapter on the prosody of
accentual verse, explaining the differences between syllabic and accentual
verse and making a case that there was quite an explicit difference between the
two (a distinction he outlines toward the end of his appendix on the “Accen-
tual Hexameter”).^29 By the 1921 “definitive edition,” the title became Milton’s
Prosody with a Chapter on Accentual Verse.
Bridges’s impulse is to provide rules by which to understand and reeducate
readers about the whole of English verse in its bastardized and somewhat
backwards evolution. Despite his strenuous detail, he is careful to assert that
his “laws” are merely “the tabulation of what my ear finds in English stressed or
accentual verse: but they appeal confidently to the reader’s ear for confirma-
t i o n .”^30 He uses the words “heavy,” “light,” and “short” to denote the quantita-
tive value of syllables and outlines six hypotheses toward the rules of stress
prosody, but is careful to note in rule four that the ear may be tempted, or
tricked, into hearing regular metrical units (that which we have been trained
to call iambs and trochees, etc.) rather than the more important irregular
speech units of the stress. This outdated method is not, in his mind, “true
analysis”:
I am convinced that if any one who hankers after classical analogies will
provisionally cast his fancy aside, and examine the real English con-
struction of the verse, he will never, after understanding it, wish to su-
perimpose upon it a foreign and needless explanation. For the stressed
rhythm is a sufficient account of itself: its analysis is complete, and if it
is not altogether more beautiful, it is more variously beautiful than any
other. I would even say that the analog y with Greek or Latin verse is
confusing and worse than useless.^31Though elsewhere he demonstrates how English verse can be read as analo-
gous to Greek—that is, with similar primal importance of the verbal unit—
here he moves toward a definition that repudiates comparisons with what
could be seen as foreign, or non-English. This is not to say that Bridges did not
believe that experimentation based on classical meter was not possible (in-
deed, he explored this possibility thoroughly); rather, Bridges is attempting to