196 chapter 6
ghastly traffic,” and though he seems to assert that he would protect us from
ruin, we know that his attitude toward English meter has been, by the 1920s,
irreparably poisoned.
The sustained address to the parrot throughout the poem can be read as a
subjective slide into the poet’s consideration of his own dissatisfaction with his
self and his craft. The “I” in the poem moves through states of perception: “I
saw”; “I beside you in perplexity / lost in a the maze of all mystery and all
knowledge, felt how deeply”; “Thus reason’d I”; “I’d hold embargoes”; and fi-
nally, the movement that begins on line 76, “I am writing verses to you.”
Bridges flaunts the poem’s antivocality. The diacritical marks must be seen; the
dead languages cannot possibly be heard. Though the poet is writing to a bird,
his grief is for English poetry, and an audience for that poetry who may be
“absolument incapable de les comprendre, / Tu Polle, nescis ista nec potes scrire”
—both the French and Latin again telling, in a foreign tongue, how all reason
is foreign to a simple creature who can only imitate—she does not know these
things and is not able to know them.
I am writing verses to you & grieve that you shd be
absolument incapable de les comprendre,
Tu, Polle, nescis ista nec potes scrire: --
Alas! Iambic, scazon and alexandrine,
spondee or choriamb, all is alike to you — 80
my well-continued fanciful experiment
wherein so many strange verses amalgamate
on the secure bedrock of Milton’s prosody:
not but that when I speak you will incline an ear
in critical attention lest by chánce I míght 85
póssibly say sómething that was worth repeating :
I am adding (do you think?) pages to literature
that gouty excrement of human intellect
accumulating slowly & everlastingly
depositing, like guano on the Peruvian shore, 90
to be perhaps exhumed in some remotest age
(piis secunda, vate me, detur fuga)
to fertilize the scanty dwarf ’d intelligence
of a new race of beings the unhallow’d offspring
of them who shall have quite dismember’d & destroy’d 95
our temple of Christian faith & fair Hellenic art
just as that monkey would, poor Polly, have done for you.These meters, in particular, demonstrate our inability to realize the terms
of meter in the early twentieth century—our guide, the scazon from Mar-
tial, in which Bridges changes the name to “Polle,” should lead us to under-