the institution of meter 101
The eye, directed by signs that may be visible to all and therefore less interpre-
tive, less dependent on an elite education, might be frighteningly democratic.
Saintsbury did not invent the concept of an “English ear” (it was already
evident in schoolbooks and elocution manuals); nor did this concept resemble
the “natural” pronunciation that Murray may have intended in the Grammars
that I discussed in chapter 1. For Saintsbury, the “English ear” meant a certain
kind of pronunciation coupled with refined hearing. Prins notices how Saints-
bury’s discussion of Tennyson’s “Hollyhock Song” in volume three of his His-
tory of English Prosody is especially striking for the way it emphasizes a particu-
larly English reader: “One reads it,” Saintsbury writes, “wondering how any
human ear could be ‘tortured’ by it, but wondering still more how any English
ear could be in the least puzzled by its metre.”^59 Above mere human under-
standing, the English ear is undeniably privileged. In this statement, Saints-
bury claims that the true English ear is able to detect true English meter. He
exclaims: “Our business is with English; and I repeat that, in English, there are
practically no metrical fictions, and that metre follows, though it may some-
times slightly force, pronunciation.” Though at times he focuses on the regular
combination and alternation of metrical feet in various forms, the book also
makes a case for iambic meter and, specifically, for ballad meter, as particularly
English. The ballad meter is “very much ours”; “the ballad quatrain, or com-
mon measure . . . perhaps the most definitely English—blood and bone, flesh
and marrow—of all English metres. It comes the most naturally of all to an
English tongue and an English ear.”^60 Joining the forms of English verse to the
forms of English bodies, Saintsbury emphasizes the instinct, the internal feel-
ing that English speakers and hearers should have for prosodic forms. Not
only do these forms prove that you are an Englishman, they bind you to other
Englishmen, with whom you also share “blood,” “bone,” “flesh,” “marrow,”
“tongue,” and “ear.” This rhetoric sounds particularly Anglo-Saxon, and it is
the same one called upon on the other side of the Atlantic by prosodists such
as Sidney Lanier and Frances Gummere, but here the blood and bone of the
collective Anglo-Saxon body is yoked, idealistically, to a classically educated,
trained, and civilized English ear.
Not only must one’s ear be tuned, like Saintsbury’s own, to hear, for exam-
ple, blended classical feet in English verse, but one must also (it is his hope)
understand and absorb the characteristics that these blended, natural feet cre-
ate. Saintsbury’s narrative of the evolution of English feet is imbued with the
same militaristic swagger as the patriotic poems that were being taught in
state-funded schools: English feet evolved into their “orderly and soldierly
fashion” over time, grouped into syllables and then into lines like so many regi-
ments. Indeed, English metrical feet form “vast armies” that English citizens,
future armies, are conditioned to hear “naturally.” It is a matter of national
pride that English readers should, can, and do cultivate their faculties in order
to correctly appreciate poetry.