The Rise and Fall of Meter

200 chapter 6

The Laws of Verse

Dear Laws, come to my breast!

Take all my frame, and make your close arms meet

Around me; and so ruled, so warm, so pressed,

I breathe, aware; I feel my wild heart beat.

Dear Laws, be wings to me!

The feather merely floats. Oh, be it heard

Through weight of life—the skylark’s gravity—

That I am not a feather, but a bird.

Here, Meynell addresses Shelley, Bridges, and the laws of verse themselves. The
laws of verse seem to be the laws of Christ, of devotion, but she is also the mas-
ter of these laws.
Addressing meter as “English” in “The English Metres” staunchly positions
Meynell among those who believe that classical feet are not only acceptable
but perhaps also laudable as representatives of the measure of English poetry.
Meynell does not bother to justify her terminolog y—she writes as if the Greek
words for metrical feet are not only appropriate but as if they have become a
crucial part of an English landscape. Despite her adoption and naturalization
of these laws, this is another subtle eleg y for an understanding of meter that
will disappear along with classical education. Like Saintsbury, Meynell asserts that
“English meters” exist and have characteristics that align them with the nation,
and yet there is a metametrical narrative at work in this poem as well, in which
the poet mourns the poem’s inability to be understood as a metrical allegory.

The English Metres

The rooted liberty of flowers in the breeze

Is theirs, by national luck impulsive, terse,

Tethered, uncaptured, rules obeyed ‘at ease’

Time-strengthened laws of verse.

Or they are like our seasons that admit 5

Inflexion, not infraction: Autumn hoar,

Winter more tender than our thoughts of it,

But a year’s steadfast four.

Redundant syllables of Summer rain,

And displaced accents of authentic Spring ; 10

Spondaic clouds above a gusty plain

With dactyls on the wing.