194 chapter 6
La possa delle gambe posta in tregue (“The position of your legs after a moment
of repose”) is from Dante (also a favorite of Eliot’s) and shows the same metri-
cal variation—that is, a trisyllabic foot in place of a two-syllable foot. Bridges
absorbs these foreign lines into his English meter, but he has chosen the lines
because they demonstrate the three-syllable foot that he believes the “com-
monest” foot in the English language. These foreign lines, pardon the pun,
had their foot in the door, with Bridges’s invented foot for the new century—
the Britannic—marching back into a poem based on the meter of the English
master Milton. He seems to flaunt his ability to showcase these lines in the
narrative that follows, about Poll’s own ability to imitate a “Duke,” a mem-
ber of the “House of Lords,” or the “great intellectual nobs and literary nobs.”
The properly mastered meter will allow imitation in a number of languages
and classes, both high and low. Just as Eliot and Pound imitate lower-class
dialects, Bridges shows here how Dante’s vernacular form can be called upon
to represent elite learning—vernaculars and elite languages change depend-
ing on how those great intellectual and literary “nobs” choose to portray and
read them.
The performance of the poet’s virtuosity turns elegiac just after its mid-
point, around lines 50 to 60. Here, Bridges stops mocking the bird and starts
to sound like a man, in very old age, thinking about what he has or has not
accomplished:
nor lack you simulation of profoundest wisdom
such as men’s features oft acquire in very old age
by mere cooling of passion & decay of muscle
by faint renunciation even of untold regrets;
who seeing themselves a picture of that wh: man should-be 55
learn almost what it were to be what they are-not.
But you can never have cherish’d a determined hope
consciously to renounce or lose it, you will live
your threescore years & ten idle and puzzle-headed
as any mumping monk in his unfurnish’d cell 60
in peace that, poor Polly, passeth Understanding —
merely because you lack what we men understand
by Understanding. Well! well! That’s the difference
C’est la seule différence, mais c’est important.Indeed, the poem begins to personify its maker; Bridges has spent his life at-
tempting to educate himself and other poets about the true potential of Eng-
lish verse, only to arrive surrounded by those who are only interested in parrot-
ing, imitating, and abstracting meter without truly understanding the history
that lies behind it. The “wh: man should be” casually hints at Bridges’s lost