the institution of meter 85
and considerations of metrical mastery. In Bridges’s interpretation, he is not
observing the mastered bird but has himself replaced the bird by mastering its
form. Unlike Hopkins’s observation, “I caught this morning’s minion,” in “The
Windhover,” here, the conditional “would be” of the first line also expresses an
ambivalent desire, imagined in the octave as a bird metaphor that has no prob-
lem in a variety of climates:
I would be a bird, and straight on wings I arise,
And carry purpose up to the ends of air:
In calm and storm my sails I feather, and where
By freezing cliffs the unransom’d wreckage lies:
Or, strutting on hot meridian banks, surprise 5
The silence: over plains in the moonlight bare
I chase my shadow, and perch where no bird dare
In treetops torn by fiercest winds of the skies.The most “sprung” moments of these first two lines are at the beginning, when
Bridges sets up a series of what feel like trisyllabic substitutions, conventionally
called anapests: I would be a bird, and straight on wings I arise. The emphasis
on “bird” and the lack of stress on both pronouns “I” folds the “I” into the ac-
tion of “arise,” so that the subject is at once imagining the bird but also mi-
metically putting the bird’s flight into the rising vowel sounds—Bridges is al-
ready experimenting with the phonetic effects that he explored in greater
detail later in his career. Though not conventionally “sprung” in the sense of
putting stressed syllables beside one another, the anapest in the middle of line
2 similarly hurries the bird’s purpose, and the poem’s, through the unstressed
syllables after “up” to the end of the line:
“And carry purpose up to the ends of air”:“[U]p” is suspended, midline, just before the line swerves into “to the ends
of air.” Of course “air” is already in “carry,” so the meter itself is “carried” by the
internal rhyming in the line. “In calm and storm my sails I feather, and where”
seems a syntactic inversion for no other reason than to suspend the final two
syllables “and where” as if on a cliff, and similarly, the setup of “surprise” in line
5 seems expressively perched as if to make us aware of the metrical movement,
the shifty, slightly crooked flight, rife with internal assonance and consonance,
of the bird-poet. The octave struts expressively that it can contain both slightly
experimental lines and a number of regular lines. Whereas Bridges could
flaunt the experiment more, he is tentative with the slightly accentual rhythm
in the octave. Hopkins responded to these accentual experiments in February
of 1879, writing, “the pieces in sprung rhythm—do not quite satisfy me. They
do read tentative, experimental; I cannot well say where the thought is dis-
torted by the measure, but that it is distorted I feel by turning from these to