Romantic meter and form of the later Romantics for epithets, epigrams, lines written on objects, and other forms of inscription;47 Wordsworth’s aesthetic of the fragment and habit of incorporating versions of one poem into versions of another; the marginalia of Coleridge’s 1834 revision of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”; Charlotte Smith’s discursive footnotes to her poems, including her sonnets; the “mental theater” of Byron’s Manfred and Cain; Shelley’s Cenci and Prometheus Unbound as closet dramas; Wordsworth’s The Borderers “judiciously returned as not suitable for the stage”;48 Byron’s hilarious asides to his readers in Don Juan – these are all some of the ways poets reinforced the printed materiality of their work Indeed, the plethora of poems called simply “Lines,” or using “Lines on” in their titles, speaks to the way blank verse is most easily discerned as verse by the eye, as Johnson had complained An important and unusual innovation of Blake’s metrics was his consciousness of how meter might read visually amid his graphic art Consider, for example, “The Sick Rose”: O Rose, thou art sick The invisible worm That flies in the night In the howling storm Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy, And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy Which we can depict metrically as follows: -/ / / / -/ / / -/ -/ / -/ -/ / / / -/ Right side up, upside down, or backwards, this poem reveals a set of metrical repetitions (lines and 5; and 3; and 8; and 7) and reversals (lines and 4; and 8; and 8; and 5; and 8), while the sixth line, “of crimson joy,” remains unique – the damaged center of this little tightly wound bud of a poem 71 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008