The English Metres by Alice Meynell — Read

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.