86 chapter 3
other pieces, where the mastery is so complete.”^20 It is as if Bridges does not
want to admit that he does not yet have mastery over this experimental new
rhythmic form moving, instead, toward his own (more phonetic) exploration
of the speeding and slowing effects of accent. But he writes his desire for mas-
tery by imagining it in the sestet (ll. 9–14):
Poor simple birds, foolish birds! then I cry,
Ye pretty pictures of delight, unstir’d 10
By the only joy of knowing that ye fly;
Ye are nót what ye are, but rather, sum’d in a word,
The alphabet of a god’s idea, and I
Who master it, I am the only bird.Rather like a salvo, the sestet here turns the poet-as-bird into a writer who
observes the desire to step back from the form with which he is working. Un-
like the vision of “The Windhover,” which stirs the poet’s and reader’s heart
out of hiding, the sestet draws our attention to the simple conventions of the
sonnet and the bird trope and steps outside of its own metaphoric realm.
Beginning with two stressed syllables in a row: “Poor simple birds!” fol-
lowed by an extra unstressed syllable, there is a stumble at the end after the
comma, with “Foolish birds, then I cr y.” Emphasizing “cry” more forcefully
because of the comma and the parallel rocking stressed-unstressed-stressed
pattern preceding it (which we could just as easily read as another anapest),
the rhythm continues to deemphasize the “I” to focus on what the bird, on
what the bird’s form, or the bird-as-form, cannot experience. Unlike the typi-
cal Shelleyan bird trope of the poetic voice taking flight to the heavens, here
Bridges disdains how the birds, mere “pretty pictures of delight,” remain
“unstir’d,” knowing only the joy of flight, but none of the accomplishment.
Whereas Hopkins’s heart “stirred for a bird, the achieve of—the mastery of the
thing,” here Bridges responds that the bird cannot achieve mastery without
the poet’s hand. Line 12 forces us to focus on the word “nót” by using a dia-
critical mark for stress. This poem’s significance is heightened by both the vis-
ible idea of metrical scansion and the fact that this is the only diacritical mark
(other than a French accent on the word mêlée) that Bridges leaves in the en-
tire sixty-six sonnet sequence of The Growth of Love. Bridges is calling our at-
tention to his metrical project and demanding that we read the poem on a
deeper level. It is not the bird that is of interest here: “ye are nót what ye are,
but rather, sum’d in a word / The alphabet of a god’s idea.” The poet, who em-
ploys his own alphabet of metrical order, is able to “sum” in a word; it is the
poet, and not the bird, who is the master. Bridges employs a more clinical,
mathematical “sum” of the metrical parts that make a “whole” of the line and
of the poem, even getting rid of the “m” and “e” as if to show that he is adding
up only what is necessary, including removing the personal pronoun in all its