If I remember correctly, this was a critique her father, Robert Bridges, also faced. His monumental 1929 work The Testament of Beauty was greeted with a mixture of appreciation and perplexity; despite its excellence, it struck many readers as hopelessly out-of-touch with evolution in taste.
Have probably read to much Shakespeare, but missed noticing the whither and thine, and other older forms. There are worse things than not noticing it isn't modern, such as missing it all together.
Definitely more a thing that stood out to some critics as a deficit than a thing that I personally find irksome. I admire her work overall and agree (with Donald Davie and John Finlay, both admirable poets and critics) that to get hung up on elements like that, for whatever reason, is to miss the virtues and the virtuosity.
Fine use of syllabics here, as the analysis suggests, though I don't know why the first line has 14 syllables while the remaining lines have 13. Perhaps the poet is treating "doer" as a single syllable.
In my own modest practice of syllabics, I've found that they are most effective for me in lines with an odd number of syllables.
Actually, she has another line that is 15 (line 6, and I keep reading line 7 as 14 but I guess "heav'n" is meant to be 1 instead of 2)), but I "hear" all the lines as the same, metrically. Those lines that are "off" syllabically remind me of Hopkins' sprung rhythm, where the scansion is determined by the stressed syllables, with any number of unstressed syllables between them from 0 to 3 or 4.
Yes, in this very early poem I'm not sure how much she's concentrating on syllabics, per se. Her experimentation seems to have evolved throughout her life, and to have built on Robert Bridges' own experiments, which did exclude swallowable syllables (like possibly the second syllable of a word like "doer," which I can easily imagine eliding). So maybe here --- and again I'm just guessing --- very early in her career, she's making a syllabic choice that her father would have made. Later she diverged from his practice by counting as a full syllable any syllable you'd hear when the poem was read aloud, so her own counts would have been stricter and less prone to variation.
It seems like kind of a fine distinction, though. What if you truly didn't hear that unstressed syllable, reading the poem aloud? Things would always be up for grabs, though I guess they always are, whatever metrical rule you set yourself. I was about to say that metrical feet don't lie --- and I guess in a sense they really don't --- but how you hear them, and therefore scan a line, can be and often is a matter for debate. My own ear, as I increasingly realize, or my sense of pattern, is fairly eccentric and probably unreliable! But at least loosely, these lines seem to scan as hexameters, regardless of syllable count, and it's quite possible that that was what she was concentrating on, that six-pulse "beat," rather than strict counts.
I honestly just read this as iambic trimeter quatrains, alternating feminine and masculine endings, because the caesura is so strong and consistent. I mean, I know it's not how it's lineated, but it's how it sounded when I read it in my head.
Really cool figure and great discussion of her and her work in the post--thank you!
Thank you! And thank you so much for reading and commenting.
And yeah, to my ear hexameters can just sound like that, especially when there's a regular caesura --- you hear a single line as two trimeter lines. I hadn't really paid adequate attention to the endings, but I think you're right about that pattern, and it's a great observation. This is a really formally complex and interesting poem, and a form I don't think we've written about before. I hadn't really thought much about parallels between this form and the sonnet, but I think that's something worth paying attention to --- and I do really like the particular conventions of the ghazal, especially that gesture of naming in the last couplet.
The father, Robert Bridges, was as fascinated by prosody as any English poet has ever been — and, as Sally points out, it's his thinking about elisions that led to his book on Milton's Prosody.
This also explains his sympathy for Hopkins's prosodic innovations and his posthumous championing of Hopkins's work. Bridges was a good friend for Hopkins to have.
If I remember correctly, this was a critique her father, Robert Bridges, also faced. His monumental 1929 work The Testament of Beauty was greeted with a mixture of appreciation and perplexity; despite its excellence, it struck many readers as hopelessly out-of-touch with evolution in taste.
I like old poetry and Persian poetry, so I am very glad you featured Bridges.
Have probably read to much Shakespeare, but missed noticing the whither and thine, and other older forms. There are worse things than not noticing it isn't modern, such as missing it all together.
Definitely more a thing that stood out to some critics as a deficit than a thing that I personally find irksome. I admire her work overall and agree (with Donald Davie and John Finlay, both admirable poets and critics) that to get hung up on elements like that, for whatever reason, is to miss the virtues and the virtuosity.
Agree entirely. Things are as they are, if they are beautiful that way, one should not cry out that that way is wrong.
A wonderful poem, and thank you for saying that "older" sounding doesn't mean silly or outdated. I love the style.
Fine use of syllabics here, as the analysis suggests, though I don't know why the first line has 14 syllables while the remaining lines have 13. Perhaps the poet is treating "doer" as a single syllable.
In my own modest practice of syllabics, I've found that they are most effective for me in lines with an odd number of syllables.
Actually, she has another line that is 15 (line 6, and I keep reading line 7 as 14 but I guess "heav'n" is meant to be 1 instead of 2)), but I "hear" all the lines as the same, metrically. Those lines that are "off" syllabically remind me of Hopkins' sprung rhythm, where the scansion is determined by the stressed syllables, with any number of unstressed syllables between them from 0 to 3 or 4.
Yes, in this very early poem I'm not sure how much she's concentrating on syllabics, per se. Her experimentation seems to have evolved throughout her life, and to have built on Robert Bridges' own experiments, which did exclude swallowable syllables (like possibly the second syllable of a word like "doer," which I can easily imagine eliding). So maybe here --- and again I'm just guessing --- very early in her career, she's making a syllabic choice that her father would have made. Later she diverged from his practice by counting as a full syllable any syllable you'd hear when the poem was read aloud, so her own counts would have been stricter and less prone to variation.
It seems like kind of a fine distinction, though. What if you truly didn't hear that unstressed syllable, reading the poem aloud? Things would always be up for grabs, though I guess they always are, whatever metrical rule you set yourself. I was about to say that metrical feet don't lie --- and I guess in a sense they really don't --- but how you hear them, and therefore scan a line, can be and often is a matter for debate. My own ear, as I increasingly realize, or my sense of pattern, is fairly eccentric and probably unreliable! But at least loosely, these lines seem to scan as hexameters, regardless of syllable count, and it's quite possible that that was what she was concentrating on, that six-pulse "beat," rather than strict counts.
I honestly just read this as iambic trimeter quatrains, alternating feminine and masculine endings, because the caesura is so strong and consistent. I mean, I know it's not how it's lineated, but it's how it sounded when I read it in my head.
Really cool figure and great discussion of her and her work in the post--thank you!
Thank you! And thank you so much for reading and commenting.
And yeah, to my ear hexameters can just sound like that, especially when there's a regular caesura --- you hear a single line as two trimeter lines. I hadn't really paid adequate attention to the endings, but I think you're right about that pattern, and it's a great observation. This is a really formally complex and interesting poem, and a form I don't think we've written about before. I hadn't really thought much about parallels between this form and the sonnet, but I think that's something worth paying attention to --- and I do really like the particular conventions of the ghazal, especially that gesture of naming in the last couplet.
The father, Robert Bridges, was as fascinated by prosody as any English poet has ever been — and, as Sally points out, it's his thinking about elisions that led to his book on Milton's Prosody.
This also explains his sympathy for Hopkins's prosodic innovations and his posthumous championing of Hopkins's work. Bridges was a good friend for Hopkins to have.