the institution of meter 83
Milton produced both accentual and syllabic verse experiments. From the be-
ginning of his poetic career, Bridges was able to investigate and attempted to
master and stabilize multiple metrical systems, recognizing them as distinct
and endeavoring to explain his understanding of these multiple systems to a
wider audience.
Though Bridges had published at least two poems in sprung rhythm by
1880 (“On a Dead Child” and “London Snow”) that became widely known,
the poem, titled simply “Sonnet” in his 1879 collection Poems, is a direct con-
versation with Hopkins on the issue of metrical mastery.^13 Donald Stanford
has noted that the four accentual poems Bridges published in this volume
were distinguished by their small type, a practice Bridges continued in his
1880 edition of Poems.^14 Though these poems could be scanned according to
an accentual-syllabic model, Bridges’s practice of signaling his experiments
with different types shows that he is also indicating the variety of verse forms
possible in English—a pedagogical practice that he will continue throughout
the course of his career.
MacKenzie speculates that Hopkins composed “The Windover” in 1877
and gave it to Bridges sometime in the middle of 1878, so it is possible that
both Bridges’s Sonnet 22 and Hopkins’s “The Windhover” may be read pro-
ductively in conjunction; Bridges was actively corresponding with Hopkins
about “The Windhover” between 1878 and 1884.^15 Whereas “The Wind-
hover” has become the most famous of Hopkins’s entire oeuvre, and a favorite
of critics, few have noticed the way that the poem is in dialogue with Bridges’s
sonnet.^16 In Hopkins’s sonnet, the bird of the title, a windhover or a kestrel
(falcon), is an allegory for Christ and for poetic inspiration. In the last two
lines of the octave, Hopkins writes, “[m]y heart in hiding / Stírred for a bird,
—the achieve of, the mástery of the thing” (l. 8).^17 Written only a year after he
completed “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” with its destabilizing opening
salvo, “[t]hou mastering me, God,” (in which we do not know which two syl-
lables to emphasize according to Hopkins’s own rules of the meter) the “mas-
tery of the thing” here refers to Christ’s mastery in creating the falcon, to the
falcon’s mastery of his flight (able to balance on its wings, stationary, as it re-
buffs the “big wind,” two words with diacritical marks for emphasis), but also
to metrical mastery.
The WindhoverTo Christ our Lord
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, 5