the before- and afterlife of meter 191
bird” in his Sonnet 21); her inability to recognize either the metrical or mental
“cage” in which she finds herself separates her from man. For a meter that is
supposed to avoid wrenched pronunciation, this diacritical mark reminds us,
too, that we are “in” a form of the poet’s making, that Bridges is mastering us
in a meter that we might not understand.
Bridges then describes how man, like the parrot, has been trained to “fol-
low along” or “mimic” without understanding—a model for metrical mimicry
that belies deeper ignorance. Whereas this mimicry in both man and bird is
commonly praised as “civilized,” the passage quickly turns to a violent indict-
ment of what the false civilization masks.
Yet Nature gave you a gift of easy mimicry
whereby you have come to win uncanny sympathies 25
and morsell’d utterance of our Germanic talk
as schoolmasters in Greek will flaunt their hackney’d tags
øωναντα συνετοισιν and κτημα ες αει,
η γλπσσ ομωμοχ, η δε øρην ανωμοτος
tho’ you with a better ear copy ús more perfectly 30
nor without connotation as when you call’d for sop
in irrepressible blind groping for escapeThere is much to sift through here; lines 27–29 directly criticized the pedantic
classical schoolmasters, who can have no ear for a dead language and yet flaunt
their skills nonetheless. It is also a critique of the pedantry Bridges finds in the
teaching of English verse—based on no unified theory of meter, English peda-
gogues model English verses on the classical system without understanding its
inadequacy (derived from the misunderstanding of Latin meter). The ictus on
the word “ús” in line 30 is the second diacritical mark that the poet employs in
the English text of the poem, guiding the reader’s eye to the word, the reader’s
voice to emphasize it, good pupils of (inaccurate, worse than useless) scansion
that we are.
In the following line (31), this perfect “copy” of our speech is “not without
connotation,” tempting us to dig more deeply in the two lines of Greek. Both
Greek lines reiterate through intertext Poll’s ability to mimic and inability to
truly reason or understand, and thus also refer to the schoolboys—grown up
into Bridges’s reading public—who have ironically repeated the forms of
grammar without the wisdom to which line 28’s first Greek tag alludes, from a
Pindaric Ode (01.22.04) “speaking to the wise.” To the non-classically trained
reader (a growing majority in the 1920s), these tags are mere repetitions to the
ignorant, and Bridges keeps it that way. In his gloss he only writes “a Greek
iambic line”—showing that the meter is the substance; there are three lines
here from three different writers—the second from Thucydides (1.22.4), “a
possession for all time.” Thucydides was referring to the afterlife of his own