the before- and afterlife of meter 201
Not Common Law, but Equity, is theirs —
Our metres; play and agile foot askance,
And distance, beckoning, blithely rhyming pairs, 15
Unknown to classic France;Unknown to Italy. Ay, count, collate,
Latins! With eye foreseeing on the time
And numbered fingers, and approaching fate
On the appropriate rhyme. 20Nay, nobly our grave measures are decreed:
Heroic, Alexandrine with the stay,
Deliberate; or else like him whose speed
Did outrun Peter, urgent in the break of day. (ll. 1–24)Though these poems were published in 1923, we see that they are rooted in
Edwardian concepts of metrical freedom and wartime conceptions of poetic
form. For instance, the first stanza calls English meter “by national luck im-
pulsive, terse, / Tethered, uncaptured, / rules obeyed ‘at ease’ / Time-strength-
ened laws of verse.” Meter itself is like a soldier ‘at ease,’ still serving the coun-
try, but not bound to perform any duty. English laws of verse are “rooted” in
history, but this history has taught them to strive toward freedom. Her own
diction is “terse” and “tethered” here, as it describes the “impulsive” and “un-
captured” laws of verse, demonstrating that her own practice shows that she
admits to adhering to some sort of law, though she also admits that this law
has not been “captured” by any adequate description. The English laws of verse
are always rooted in England, but they are still “at liberty,” though “by na-
tional luck” (and the cultural contexts I outline in the six chapters of this proj-
ect), they have been strengthened and codified somewhat by the passage of
time.
Meynell measures time by metrical seasons (“a year’s steadfast four”) and,
like meter, the four seasons “admit inflexion, not infraction.” Just like meter,
the seasons might be different than our expectations of them: “winter more
tender than our thoughts of it.” Her own four-beat lines, here, are as inevitable
as the seasons but nonetheless subtler than any description. In the third stanza,
nature is allegorized into meter “redundant syllables of Summer rain, / And
displaced accents of authentic Spring.” The metrical feet, rather than taking on
the characteristics of actual feet, sprout wings and fly: spondees are clouds,
dactyls are “on the wing.” Rather than reference the standard iamb and trochee
here, Meynell inserts the most controversial metrical feet (the spondee and
dactyl) as if to show how natural these have become—an inevitable part of the
English landscape. The “bird” as inspiration, as metrical mastery, as repeating