'Poor Poll' is a poem written by Robert Bridges

Robert Bridges

Robert Seymour Bridges, OM, was a British poet, and poet laureate from 1913 to 1930.-Personal and professional life:...

 in 1921, and first collected in his book New Verse (1925). The poem is the first example of Bridges' Neo-Miltonic Syllabics

Neo-Miltonic Syllabics

Neo-Miltonic Syllabics is a group of poems written by Robert Bridges between 1921 and 1925, and collected in his book New Verse . The poems are based on a syllabic meter, which Bridges arrived at through his detailed analysis of Milton's poems, which is explained in detail in his book Milton's...

.

"Poor Poll" was composed at the same time as T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...

 was writing The Waste Land

The Waste Land

The Waste Land[A] is a 434-line[B] modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922. It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century." Despite the poem's obscurity—its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its...

. Both Eliot and Bridges were searching for a medium which would allow the incorporation of a wide variety of material, including phrases in foreign languages.

It has been suggested that Bridges' poem was a conscious parody

Parody

A parody , in current usage, is an imitative work created to mock, comment on, or trivialise an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation...

 of Eliot's. Like The Waste Land, Poor Poll includes many classical allusions and phrases in foreign languages (including French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

, German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

, Latin, and polytonic Greek). Also like Eliot's work, Bridges' was published with a set of footnotes supplied by the poet. Bridges' footnotes are headed "Metrical Elucidations", and offer advice on the poem's scansion

Scansion

Scansion is the act of determining and graphically representing the metrical character of a line of verse.-Overview:Systems of scansion, and the assumptions that underlie them, are so numerous and contradictory that it is often difficult to tell whether differences in scansion indicate opposed...

 as well as explaining some of the allusions.

Here are a few lines from Bridges' poem:

Why ask? You cannot know. 'Twas by no choice of yours

that you mischanged for monkeys' man's society,

'twas that British sailor drove you from Paradise —

Εἴθ᾿ ὤφελ᾿ Ἀργους

Argo

In Greek mythology, the Argo was the ship on which Jason and the Argonauts sailed from Iolcos to retrieve the Golden Fleece. It was named after its builder, Argus.-Legend:...

μὴ διαπτάσθαι σκάφος!

I'd hold embargoes on such a ghastly traffic.

I am writing verses to you & grieve that you sh^d be

absolument incapable de les comprendre,

Tu, Polle, nescis ista nec potes scire: —