the institution of meter 81
- Though he failed to influence a large reading public with his new ap-
proaches to poetic form until just before his death, his revisions of the influen-
tial and controversial book, Milton’s Prosody, as well as his own commitment
to publishing poems in a number of new and experimental forms—along with
the apparatus of footnotes and explanatory prefaces—shows that, although he
did not succeed in changing the way poetry was taught, he seldom succumbed
to any expectation that there was only one tradition through which poetic
form should be read. What sets Bridges apart from other Victorian poets who
were experimenting with poetic form is that he was innovating in order to
standardize, in many ways, a more complex model for English meter. He, like
the modernists, believed that the old forms were “worn out,” but thought that
they could still be refreshed, properly understood, and reshaped to accom-
modate the dynamic and polyglossial future of poetry that was being imag-
ined in the early twentieth century. Perkins notes that, though Bridges’s poems
seem “curiously empty,” his popular Shorter Poems in 1884 contained no two
poems in the same verse form, and Edmund Gosse assigns to Bridges the first
specimens of the triolet printed in English.^3 But it was not only his command
of foreign verse forms in English that demonstrates Bridges’s importance as
a metrical experimenter: it was his insistence that the English language itself
was a treasure house of unrealized metrical and poetic potential that had been
misunderstood and, more importantly, mistaught. His poetic career and the
fate of that career today illustrates how the rise of English as a discipline both
shaped and reshaped the character of English prosody by suppressing the vari-
ous English metrical histories that Bridges hoped to restore, remake, and make
available to poets in the twentieth century.
Around the same time that Hopkins sent Bridges “Spelt from Sybil’s
Leaves” (1886), Hopkins also sent Bridges a translation, in Latin, of a poem
from Bridges’s own sonnet sequence, The Growth of Love, which Bridges began
ten years earlier in 1876 (the year after Hopkins composed “The Wreck of the
Deutschland”). Bridges’s sonnet is, like many of the poems in the collection,
about his love for his wife and about the tradition and perceived constraints of
writing a sonnet sequence. He writes in sonnet one, “Behold me, now that I
have cast my chains, / Master of the art which for thy sake I serve” (l. 14).^4 This
poem was a leitmotif in their letters; a poem to which Hopkins suggested revi-
sions multiple times. Perhaps perfecting it, somewhat, by translating it into
Latin in 1886 (from the original 1876 edition which, MacKenzie notes, Hop-
kins had imperfectly memorized for his translation),^5 Hopkins’s gesture (as
well as his final poem, “To R.B.”) shows Bridges’s importance as the one reader
who might still master a new metrical system for England and who could,
Hopkins hoped, read his verses with a kindred eye.
In Bridges’s sonnet, the beloved’s passionate voice can penetrate the ear like
the prow of a boat cutting through water: “Ah! But her launchèd passion when
she sings / Wins on the hearing like a shapen prow / Borne by the mastery of