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.

"RIVERS UNKNOWN TO SONG" James Thomson

Wide waters in the waste; or, out of reach, Rough Alpine falls where late a glacier hung; Or rivers groping for the alien beach, Through continents, unsung.

Nay, not these nameless, these remote, alone; But all the streams from all the watersheds-- Peneus, Danube, Nile--are the unknown. Young in their ancient beds.

Man has no tale for them. O travellers swift From secrets to oblivion! Waters wild That pass in act to bend a flower, or lift The bright limbs of a child!

For they are new, they are fresh; there's no surprise Like theirs on earth. O strange for evermore! This moment's Tiber with his shining eyes Never saw Rome before.

Man has no word for their eternity-- Rhine, Avon, Arno, younglings, youth uncrowned: Ignorant, innocent, instantaneous, free, Unwelcomed, unrenowned.

TO THE MOTHER OF CHRIST THE SON OF MAN

We too (one cried), we too, We the unready, the perplexed, the cold, Must shape the Eternal in our thoughts anew, Cherish, possess, enfold.

Thou sweetly, we in strife. It is our passion to conceive Him thus In mind, in sense, within our house of life; That seed is locked in us.

We must affirm our Son From the ambiguous Nature's difficult speech, Gather in darkness that resplendent One, Close as our grasp can reach.

Nor shall we ever rest From this our task. An hour sufficed for thee, Thou innocent! He lingers in the breast Of our humanity.