THE ENGLISH METRES

The rooted liberty of flowers in breeze

Is theirs, by national luck impulsive, terse,

Tethered, uncaptured, rules obeyed “at ease,”

Time-strengthened laws of verse.

Or they are like our seasons that admit

Inflexion, not infraction: Autumn hoar,

Winter more tender than our thoughts of it,

But a year’s steadfast four;

Redundant syllables of Summer rain,

And displaced accents of authentic Spring;

Spondiac clouds above a gusty plain

With dactyls on the wing.

Not Common Law, but Equity, is theirs—

Our metres; play and agile foot askance,

And distant, beckoning, blithely rhyming pairs,

Unknown to classic France;

37Unknown to Italy. Ay, count, collate,

Latins! with eye foreseeing on the time,

And numbered fingers, and approaching fate

On the appropriate rhyme.

Nay, nobly our grave measures are decreed:

Heroic, Alexandrine with the stay,

Deliberate; or else like him whose speed

Did outrun Peter, urgent in the break of day.

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