106 chapter 3
on the rail arow / expectantly happy” (l. 1) and waiting for the professor to
endow them with knowledge. But the professor is no mystical scholar, he is
here an “authoritative old wise-acre” who “stood over us and from a desk fed us
with flies” (l. 10):
Dead flies — such as litter the library south-window,
That buzzed at the panes until they fell stiff-baked on the sill,
Or are roll’d up asleep i’the blinds at sunrise,
Or wafer’d flat in a shrunken folio.
A dry biped he was, nurtured likewise 15
On skins and skeletons, stale from top to toe
With all manner of rubbish and all manner of lies.Both a critique of “dry as dust pedantry” and an “experimental poem” in what
he calls “free rhythm,”^76 the poem exploits the pervading early twentieth-
century anticlassical sentiment in subject matter, turning Greek and Latin
words into corpses exhumed for each young generation of hopeful birds. The
useless continuity of the system, in which the professors teach what they were
taught to keep the system alive, is condemned as “rubbish and lies,” the dead
letters literally “litter,” and the classical “fly leaves” are transformed into dead
flies. The professor is reduced to his scientific and metrical classification of “a
dry biped,” (as in “two feet”) inhumanly droning grammatical shapes, skins,
and skeletons into the pupils.
Though the meter of the poem is, in 1913, still undeveloped, it previews
Bridges’s later experiments in neo-Miltonic syllabics, the lines not adhering to
a strict syllabic count as we understand it today, but instead observing the sys-
tem of English quantity that Bridges had carefully worked out in his study of
Milton’s prosody. The formal tension in this poem is not necessarily between
tradition and experiment; both accentual and syllabic patterns are irregular,
which brings the all too regular rhyme to the forefront (an effect that falls out
of Bridges’s later verses entirely). As if to mimic the droning repetition of a
typical lesson, Bridges ends the majority of his lines with rhymes on the word
“row,” a mockery of the kind of order expected in the classroom: arow, below,
ago, so, row, trow, aglow, window, folio, toe. The archaic “trow” appears as a
rhythmic jolt, to call attention to the artificiality of the scheme and the poet
casting for a word to fit into his composition. The repeated “oh” sounds add a
sickening echo of the possibility of punishment, as in line 13, “buzzed at the
panes until they fell stiff-baked on the sill” (read as “pains”) echoes both physi-
cal consequence and a futile longing for escape. The only other repeated rhyme
in the poem is “flies,” appearing always with the image of being fed, in lines 4,
11, and 18. We hear “lies” in “flies,” of course, lies that have been repeated from
generation to generation. No other sound is heard, here, other than the buzz-
ing to escape; the poem confirms the assertions that the imposition of classical