the before- and afterlife of meter 189
“must never be treated as a field of mental exercise remote from ordinary life”;
it certainly shows agreement that “if a child is not learning good English he is
learning bad English, and probably bad habits of thought.”^15 But the report
and poem diverge; the report states the classics “will always remain, among the
best of our inherited possessions, and for all truly civilized people they will
always be not only a possession but a vital and enduring influence . . . ,” yet the
status of “civilization,” postwar, is less redeemable in Bridges’s eyes than New-
bolt’s. It would seem, through his Neo-Miltonic syllabic meter, that Bridges
had discovered and wanted to promote a modern poetic form to replace the
classical model, a more capacious, yet still historically respectful English verse
form in the post–First World War moment. And yet, like Eliot’s The Waste
Land, Bridges’s “Poor Poll” expresses grave doubts that any form can hold in
the wake of such tragedy.
Whether Eliot could have spoken to the poet laureate about his metrical
experiment is speculative. “Poor Poll” was published in June of 1923, a month
before Virginia Woolf finished setting the type on The Waste Land (and after
years of Ezra Pound “tightening [its] meter”), so there is little hope for the
critical discovery that Bridges’s poem is a kind of shadow poem for Eliot’s. The
two poems side by side show Bridges, the elder statesman of English meter,
and Eliot, the up-and-comer, engaging with the waning power of the classical
concept of “meter” in English. Both poems are macaronic: Eliot’s The Waste
Land includes lines in German, French, and Italian as well as references to
Swinburne and Tennyson. Bridges’s “Poor Poll” includes lines in German,
French, Italian, Latin and Greek (all solidly resting in the twelve-syllable lines)
and references Pindar, Dante, and Goethe; Bridges’s Sibyl at Cumae is a parrot
in a Miltonic cage. The 97-line poem, at first glance, seems an idle, Brown-
ingesque narrative about a man discussing the nature of knowledge with his
house parrot, but the poem twists and turns into a metametrical allegory and
anticipatory eleg y for the loss of a particular understanding of English meter
and national culture.
I saw it all, Polly, how when you had call’d for sop
and your good friend the cook came & fill’d up your pan
you yerked it out deftly by beakfuls scattering it
away as far as you might upon the sunny lawn
then summon’d with loud cry the little garden birds 5
to take their feast. Quickly came they flustering around
Ruddock & Merle & Finch squabbling among themselves
nor gave you thanks nor heed while you sat silently
watching, and I beside you in perplexity
lost in the maze of all mystery and all knowledge 10
felt how deep lieth the fount of man’s benevolence
if a bird can share it & take pleasure in it.^16