SOURCE: Vesterman, William. “The Motives of Meter in ‘Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter.’” The Southern Quarterly 22, no. 4 (summer 1984): 42-53.

In the following essay, Vesterman analyzes the meter of “Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter.”

… metre is fundamental in the problem posed to the artist … Here let us ask the question always in order against a Milton poem: What was the historical metrical pattern already before him, and what are the liberties he takes with it? For he does not cut patterns out of the whole cloth, but always takes an existing pattern; stretches it dangerously close to the limits that the pattern will permit without ceasing to be a pattern; and never brings himself to the point of defying that restraint which patterns inflict upon him, and composing something altogether unpatterned.

—John Crowe Ransom, “A Poem Nearly Anonymous” from The World's Body (1938)

The “nearly anonymous” poem is Lycidas. In...