202 chapter 6
and trapped parrot, has become the metrical foot itself: not the poet or the
poem, but that term with which we describe the poem is “on the wing.”
Nor does Meynell adhere to a strict iambic meter, though she could be al-
luding to “heroic” and “urgent” iambs in Saintsbury’s terms in stanza 5. The
poem welcomes dactyls and spondees, and it is not, though it seems like it al-
most should be, a lesson in expressive reading. Unlike Coleridge’s “Lesson for
a Boy,” Meynell does not employ dactylic feet in the line “with dactyls on the
wing,” nor are there spondees in the line “spondaic clouds above a gusty plain.”
Authentic spring, in Meynell’s metrical allegory is not configured in the line
through displaced accents, and even the amphibrach and dactyl of “redundant
syllables” seem altogether necessary. There is no stanza in which the form, ac-
tual or allegorical, imposes itself; the three lines of pentameter followed by
one of trimeter never succumb to a strict iambic except in the playful line in
stanza 4: “Our metres; play and agile foot askance.” In Meynell’s poem, agile
feet of English meter can play without fear of reproach.
And yet, the fourth stanza alludes to Common Law versus Equity, thus re-
ferring to a legal, rather than natural, origin of “our metres.” English meters
have “Equity” instead of “Common Law,” where metrical form would be de-
cided solely on precedent and custom (despite how they are rooted in history).
By using this legal terminolog y, Meynell alludes to the British and American
system of ethical modification to the rule of law. Modification based on fair-
ness is the rule to which Meynell refers here, and this flexible interpretation of
the laws of verse is “unknown to classic France,” and “unknown to Italy” (in
stanza 5). Though the English meters are natural, their modification—indeed,
codification—might be seen as unnatural or external. The English meters are
defined in opposition to their continental counterparts. Even the Latins are
seen as too strict, “with eye foreseeing on the time / And numbered fingers,
and approaching fate, / On the appropriate rhyme,” their verses leading inevi-
tably and predictably to a conclusion we can count on.
“Nay nobly our grave measures are decreed:” she refers to the history of
English verse in this final stanza—the heroic couplet, (those “distant, beckon-
ing, blithely rhyming pairs”) and the Alexandrine, but again, “decreed” and
“stay” have a slightly legal tone to them. English meters have all the freedom
they need in 1923, and yet unless they are “decreed” noble, deliberate, they
might take on too much speed. John (20:1–9) outruns Peter “urgent in the
break of day,” to see the resurrected Christ. Here, the poem favors the nobility,
the heroism, and the deliberation of the national meters, fearing that without
a lawful decree, without the “rooted liberty,” verse might be too young, too
eager, too quick to discard the careful wisdom of the past. Because both John
and Peter are disciples to a “higher law” (Meynell is Catholic), their reticence
to let go of the laws of English meter and the freedom they entail, coupled
with the eagerness to rush into a new poetic era, are written into this final
stanza.