the institution of meter 91
clarify that stressed rhythm in English makes more sense when we discard the
measuring system of Greek and Latin and so, in this way, aligns his views a bit
more closely with that of the Anglo-Saxonists Walter Skeat and, prior to him,
Edwin Guest. Though Bridges lists disyllabics and trisyllabics that still corre-
spond roughly to iambs, trochees, anapests, and dactyls, it is the patriotic
fourth stress unit, the mid-stress trisyllabic, that demonstrates his commit-
ment to inventing a truly English interpretation of stress. He proposes to re-
name this foot the “Britannic” (the name for the foot demonstrating its pro-
nunciation—unlike any other metrical terminolog y). By naming the stress
unit after the country it represents, Bridges is effectively wrenching the history
of the particular system from the sign—a complicated history about which he
just has taken great pains to educate us. Furthermore, he goes on to democra-
tize the new meter—“a ‘Britannic’ is the commonest trisyllabic unit of stressed-
verse.” Asserting that this newly named mid-stress, trisyllabic foot is the key to
understanding the nature of the commonest poetry, he compromises, provid-
ing visual signs with which to scan verses that, according to his earlier asser-
tions, should depend solely on the ear.
Granted, the “Britannic,” as it is the most democratic of feet, allows the
most freedom and so is not strictly bound to position on the line. He admits
the dynamic structure of the verse toward the end of the essay, writing “[t]his
is the account of these verses. A consistent prosody is, however, so insignificant
a part in what makes good English poetry, that I find that I do not myself care
very much whether some good poetry be consistent in its versification or not:
indeed I think I have liked some verses better because they do not scan, and
thus displease pedants” (99). Indeed, contemporary critic Donald Stanford
finds Bridges’s explanation of accentual verse unnecessarily complicated, since
“in accentual verse the number of stresses to a line is constant and the stress
must coincide with normal speech accent.”^32 Bridges’s propensity to justify his
hypothesis based on speech is caught again between what he knows his ear is
qualified to hear—the normal speech accent of English—and what he knows
others, who would be beginners to a standard way of speaking and hearing
English, would need to see in order to properly believe what they were ex-
pected to hear. Bridges’s lofty ideal would be to banish diacritical marks alto-
gether and trust the true phonetics of English (based on classical understand-
ing and scientific knowledge of English’s evolution), though he cannot begin
to convey these revisions for the vocalized, modern form of the language with-
out the appearance of diacritical marks—the visions of ancient signs marking
the skin of the versification to measure our distance from the skeleton within.
Dynamic Reading
In a telling account of the history of the volume that appears at the end of the
1921 edition of Milton’s Prosody, Bridges writes, explicitly, that his main goal