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The Stigma of Meter

It is quite plain that writing is but an external and necessarily

imperfect vesture, while the true and natural and real form of language

is that which is made of sound, and addressed to the ear.

—John Earle, “Of Prosody,” The Philolog y of the English Tongue

A word exists as truly for the eye as for the ear, and in a highly advanced state

of society, where reading is almost as universal as speaking . . . in the written word

moreover is the permanence and continuity of language and of learning.

—Richard Chevenix Trench, On the Study of Words

Oh which one? Is it each one?

—Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Carrion Comfort”

And is it to the eye only that the metre is to be marked? The eye, which,

of itself, can form no judgment of measure in sounds, nor take any pleasure

in such arrangements of words; and shall the ear, the sole judge of numbers,

to which nature herself has annexed a delight, in the perception of metre,

be left without any mark, to point out the completion of the measure?

—Thomas Sheridan, “Rhetorical Grammar,”

A General Dictionary of The English Language^1

Metrical Irrelevance

Meter in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England was indelibly
marked by the culture around it; those who wished to transform or redefine
meter were also attempting to transform or redefine aspects of English culture.
There is no better test case for the oppositions inherent in English metrical
form (private vs. public, spiritual vs. national, visual vs. aural, native vs. for-
eign) than the poetry, journals, and letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins. De-
spite the disappointment that he had published only a few poems in his life-
time (a few early poems, three comic triolets, Latin versions of an epigram by
Dryden, and two songs by Shakespeare),^2 Hopkins remained hopeful about
the place of poetry in public culture, writing to his friend Robert Bridges in