198 chapter 6
and literature, one dependent on accumulation and standardization, the
intellect-as-excrement image is both humorous and damning. Bridges seems to
think that his intellectual experiment has already been buried in his lifetime.
Though, once spoken, the poem might be “worth repeating,” it laments its
own eventual future: both disremembered (never repeated) and its complex
metrics, its carefully composed skeletal structures of prosody, essentially “dis-
membered”^19 —torn limb from limb. The fate of classical prosody, the “temple
of Christian faith & fair Hellenic art,” is told in the last Latin tag, now se-
questered to the parenthesis piis secunda, vate me, detur fuga. This line, from
Horace’s sixteenth epode “to the Roman people” (Ad Populum Romanium),
tempts a reading of England’s future like the fate of Rome Horace describes:
“this land shall again be possessed by wild beasts. . . . The victorious barbarian
shall trample upon the ashes of the city . . . there can be no better destina-
tion than this; namely, to go wherever our feet will carry us... .”^20 But where
would England’s metrical feet carry her? The dismembered feet of En gland’s
meters were already scattered throughout the poetry of the 1920s, destined
to survive the rest of the twentieth century only in metrical fragments, ghosts
of a civilization that was never quite successful. Bridges, talking to his brass-
wire-entrapped parrot, changes the Latin form in his quotation from “datur”
to “detur,” a subtle move to the modal to show how escape from ignorance is
not just one possibility, but the only possibility; one he exemplified by a life-
time of metrical experimentation and one that we are only at the beginning
stages of recovering. If one studies the history of meter today, one will see that
it involves reassessing the myriad assumptions about meter, the confusions
and complications that he tried—as any metrists today tries in his or her own
way—to elucidate.
Alice Meynell’s “English Metres”
The story I have begun to tell here is a narrative of masculinity, of a male-
centric, Anglo-Saxon identification that suppresses and ignores the ways that
women poets writing concurrently were participating in and troubling con-
cepts of English national meter and English national identity. I have not in-
vestigated, nor have I given ample space to investigating the implications of
the homosociality in the communities imagined by Gerard Manley Hopkins
and Wilfred Owen. Nor does space permit me to theorize about the impli-
cations of homosexual identification in each of these poet’s oeuvres; both
of them were hostile toward women at different points in their careers and
believed women to be lesser poets: poetasters and poetesses, mere versifiers
(attributed with lesser intellect, in Hopkins, and home-front ignorance, in
Sassoon, though Owen was a great admirer of Elizabeth Barrett Browning ).
There is much work to be done in the ways that assumptions about gender and