the before- and afterlife of meter 195
hope for pronunciation reform; his own private shorthand, which “should be”
recognized but was never adopted. Likewise, he effaces the hope from earlier
in the poem that the bird might have some desire for understanding and now
accuses it of the sort of “puzzlement” he experienced at the beginning. He
gives up, essentially, in lines 57 and 58: “you can never have cherish’d a deter-
mined hope / consciously to renounce or lose it,” as the poet has, and, post-
war, as the nation has. The bird is “idle and puzzle-headed” and lacks “what we
men understand / by Understanding.” Despite this conclusion, the poet still
asks the bird, still asks his poem and his hope for poetic meter: “would you
change?” He answers his own rhetorical question in the next twenty lines by
showing that ignorance is preferable to eventual dismemberment—both phys-
ical and metrical.
Lines 63 (“Well, well”) and 64 (“mais”) are the only lines with definite cae-
suras and both seem to indicate a reckoning ; the pause creating a transition
between the renounced hopes of the poet for his caged-bird-free-verse and an
attempt at justifying his activities in the face of these lost hopes. He begins his
address again, “Well! well! that’s the difference / C’est la seule différence, mais
c’est important.” The poem immediately imagines the dangers of all of the acts
from which reason has been detached:
Ah! your pale sedentary life! but would you change? 65
exchange it for one crowded hour of glorious life,
one blind furious tussle with a madden’d monkey
who would throttle you and throw your crude fragments away
shreds unintelligible of an unmeaning act
dans la profonde horreur de l’éternelle nuit? 70
Why ask? You cannot know. ‘Twas by no choice of yours
that you mischanged for monkeys’ man’s society,
‘twas that British sailor drove you from Paradise —
Ειθ ωφελ ‘ Αργους μη διαπταασθαι σκαφος!
I’d hold embargoes on such a ghastly traffic. 75
Why ask?, he seems to ask himself, concluding again, “you cannot know.” But
then the freedom to have “one crowded hour of glorious life” freed from the
civilized cage, even if that hour risks destruction and dismemberment, is called
“Paradise.” The Greek line he quotes in line 74 is telling—it’s the first line of
Euripides’s Medea, in which the nurse wishes that the ship had never set sail
from Argos to arrive in Colchis^18 (where Medea commits the darkest of her
tragic acts). Medea, the foreigner who is accused of speaking a “barbarous”
language to go along with her “barbarous” acts, has also, in effect, been “stolen
away” across the water. Bridges, in his ironic stance against all unregulated
foreignness in the English language, writes, “I’d hold embargoes on such