the before- and afterlife of meter 197
stand that line 79 is a quantitative scazon in English; lines 80 and 82 are
also English quantitative lines, but though he is littering his lines with clues
about the foundations and future of his English meter, their meaning is
lost on us.
The poem elegizes what the bird-as-form, bird-as-English-tongue, cannot
know. “Alas! Iambic, scazon and alexandrine, / spondee or choriamb, all is
alike to you / — my well-continued fanciful experiment / wherein so many
strange verses amalgamate / on the secure bedrock of Milton’s prosody” (ll.
79–83). The metrical forms are named, here, like the proper names given to
the squabbling birds at the beginning of the poem. The geologic amalgama-
tion of these different forms on the bedrock of Milton should be triumphant,
and yet the poem throws its metrical names out as if to challenge the reader to
appreciate this gift, the parrot/poet here bored like the bird who shares with
the wild birds who disregard his generosity—take it: “all is alike to you.”
Who could go through the poem and truly distinguish one strange verse
form from another, the poem seems to ask. Who would even recognize the
bedrock of Milton? This lack of critical understanding is signified in the most
sustained use of diacritical marks to indicate accent in the entire poem. As if to
show that England will not and cannot believe what it cannot see, Bridges
writes: “not that but when I speak you will incline an ear / in critical attention
lest by chánce I míght / póssibly say sómething that was worth repeating” (ll.
84–86). The poem finally shifts the poet-parrot to the poet-reader, that is, the
listening reading public that can only hear experiments, not detect them visu-
ally. It is only “when I speak” that we “incline an ear” with critical attention,
not when we read. By slipping into iambic pentameter and then reversing the
foot in line 86, the poem mocks what is easily repeated out loud and demon-
strates that perhaps the preservation of these forms will never be correctly re-
peated because of the level of training required to read them correctly, and the
level of inquiry required to even detect that they exist.
After the “worth repeating :” we might expect to find a list of repeatable
forms, a final gesture of what we might still be expected to learn. His paren-
thetic statement asks us to reflect, finally, after an entire poem of proving that
our intellect is not capable of adequate reflection (do you think? [l. 59]). This
question at the end of the poem seems an ironic question to the answer his
other question set out: “Why ask? You cannot know,” you cannot think, you
do not think. Literature becomes mere “pages”— “that gouty excrement of
human intellect / accumulating slowly & everlastingly / depositing, like guano
on the Peruvian shore, / to be perhaps exhumed in some remotest age” (ll.
87–89). The reference to guano here is particularly telling because of the influ-
ence of Huck Gibb’s money on the progress of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Gibb’s family fortune, made by the export of Peruvian guano, loaned Gilbert
Murray enough funds to publish part one of the dictionary in 1884. Despite
this reference to the enormous success in preservation for English language