the before- and afterlife of meter 193
the bird figure is reduced to a physical object blindly groping for escape from
its artificial environment.
Poll’s savage need to escape is personified as “the very figure & image of
man’s soul on earth / the almighty cosmic Will fidgeting in a trap” (ll. 37–
38),^17 but the poet pities the bird, understanding how the rigidities of parrot-
ing Greek tags might inspire a kind of “quenchless unknown desire for the
unknown life.”
—a very figure & image of man’s soul on earth
the almighty cosmic Will fidgeting in a trap —
in your quenchless unknown desire for the unknown life
of which some homely British sailor robb’d you, alas! 40
‘Tis all that doth your silly thoughts so busy keep
the while you sit moping like Patience on a perch
— — — Wie viele Tag’ und Nächte bist du geblieben!
La possa delle gambe posta in tregue —
the impeccable spruceness of your grey-feather’d poll 45
a model in hairdressing for the dandiest old Duke
enough to qualify you for the House of Lords
or the Athenaeum Club, to poke among the nobs
great intellectual nobs and literary nobs
scientific nobs and Bishops ex officio: 50A British sailor has stolen the bird from its origin and the poem faults him (l.
40) for making the bird “endure” English country life. English and British, as
concepts, are called to question here: both have become unbearably tame (the
sailor is “simple”) and have forgotten some ancient, wilder, and nobler origin.
Bridges gestures to the ancient and noble founder of his meter in line 41: “Tis
all but doth your silly thoughts so busy keep,” from Milton’s hymn, 12 sylla-
bles—a simplified alexandrine line without the traditional caesura. Now, the
bird’s thoughts are also simplified, or “silly,” as she sits “moping like Patience on
a perch.” We are reminded that mastery is the only true “bird,” not this poor
simple model. But Bridges’s eagerness to demonstrate his own mastery causes
the poem to flounder a bit, and the next lines, in German and Italian, seem to
perform only the fact that they fit into his metrical experiment.
If one is fluent in German, one might recognize this line from Goethe’s
“Bericht: Januar”: “Wie viele Tag’ und Nächte bist du geblieben!” (“for how
many days and nights have you stayed”). From the notes, we learn that this
line earned inclusion because of another metrical variation—the second to last
foot is a dactyl in a line of trochees. Goethe’s poem is an address to Cupid,
and demands whether he has become “the only master in the house”—an-
other subtle reference to domesticity and domination. The line from Italian,