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its urgent wings / Or, if she deign her wisdom she doth show / She hath intel-
ligence of heavenly things / Unsullied by man’s mortal overthrow” (ll. 9–10).
The awkward mixed metaphor (a boat with wings?) hardly clangs since the
romantic notion of a voice “taking flight” with passion or song seems so com-
monplace. The way the song “wins” the ear is significant, because Hopkins’s
first objection to this poem is the fact that Bridges’s song does not win his ear,
though it may trick his eye. Hopkins writes: the “barbarous rhyme of prow and
show: I can’t abide bad rhymes and when they are spelt alike I hate them more.”^6
Despite specific criticisms like those addressing the sonnet about which he
seemed to obsess, Hopkins praised the twenty-four sonnets that would make
up The Growth of Love much more generously than Bridges had responded to
“The Wreck of the Deutschland.” Hopkins writes: “[t]he sonnets are truly
beautiful, breathing a grave and feeling genius, and make me proud of you.”
After a few more quibbles Hopkins moves to a discussion of Bridges’s rhythm:
“About the rhythm. You certainly have the gift and vein of it, but have not
quite reached your perfection. Most of your Miltonic rhythms (which by the
way are not so very marked as your letter led me to suppose they would be, and
I think many modern poets employ them, don’t they?) are fine” (34–38).
Hopkins continues with a discussion of Milton’s prosody (“I have paid
much attention to Milton’s rhythm”), writing that he is thinking about writing
something about the remarkable choruses of Samson Agonistes: “I think I have
mastered them.” Hopkins mentions the paper by J. A. Symonds, “The Blank
Verse of Milton,” 7 as part of an ongoing interest in the prosody of Milton that
he and Bridges shared. Both Hopkins and Bridges were working on rhythmic
experiments (“you will see that my rhythms go further than yours do in the
way of irregularity,” writes Hopkins), experimenting with a new system that
they wanted to master. Bridges writes to his friend Lionel Muirhead about his
revisions to the first twenty-four sonnets as early as 1878: “They will be better
than anything I have done, and 2 of them are I hope successful in a new metri-
cal system of which I hope great things.”^8 Mention of the new system leads to
a discussion of Hopkins, but he returns to his new ideas for the revisions and
expansions of The Growth of Love, closing the letter by saying that the new
poems will provide an “[e]ntirely new system of rhythm introduced into
sonnett-writing. [sic] See what excitements we have.”^9 Bridges’s enthusiasm for
the “entirely new system of rhythm” mirrors Hopkins’s description of sprung
rhythm in his author’s preface (which Hopkins wrote in 1883 “or not much
later”),^10 in which he comments that “the rhythm in which the following poem
is written is new,”^11 and, as he says in his 1878 letter to Dixon, “I had long had
haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm which now I realized on paper.”^12
Critics have discussed how both poets were experimenting with sprung
rhythm, though Bridges’s experiments with rhythm were not limited to Hop-
kins’s system; indeed, Bridges’s concept of metrical mastery extended beyond
the “new system” that he and Hopkins were inventing. Whereas Hopkins’s
focused on traditional meter and sprung rhythm, Bridges’s investigations of