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; Spondaic 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; Unknown 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.
Alice Meynell’s other poems: