that anything like a polemical return to the alliterative system had not been contemplated by the poets, the changes in this direction had by that date gone deeper than Lewis suggests.

In 1927 T.S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes provided a perfect instance of the old 4-beat stress metre adapted to modern needs:

She says will you ring up on Monday She hopes to be all right on Monday I say do you mind if I ring off now She’s got her feet in mustard and water I said I’m giving her mustard and water All right, Monday you’ll phone through.

Much of the early poetry of W.H. Auden, Cecil Day Lewis, and Stephen Spender was written accentually rather than syllabically, and in Auden, the most influential of the group, there existed from the beginning a strong interest in alliterative as well as in accentual effects. Day Lewis in From Feathers to Iron (1931) gives an excellent example of these preoccupations, in the poem ‘As one who wanders into old workings’:

Not shy of light nor shrinking from shadow Like Jesuits in jungle we journey Deliberately bearing to brutish tribes Christian assurance, arts of agriculture.

Eliot himself continued to make increasing use of stress rhythms, both in his poems and in his plays. As Helen Gardner has pointed out,1 the 4-beat non-syllabic line has in fact become ‘the norm to which the verse constantly returns’. It is seen very clearly in the opening passages of Burnt Norton and Little Gidding, or in these lines from The Dry Salvages –

And the ragged rock in the restless waters, Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it; On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,

1 The Art of T.S. Eliot, 1949, p. 29.

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