Poem by Alice Meynell

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.

1. Free Will
2. To Silence
3. To Tintoretto in Venice
4. The Two Questions
5. Unlinked

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