Even the "watchful sun" cannot match the "master-work you've done, / England, my own." With full trust in England's moral probity the speaker affirms his willingness to sacrifice himself for the greater glory of England: '''Take and break us: we are yours, / England, my own!'" Kipling and Henley were by no means the only poets writing such patriotic verse: they were merely the best known. At the time, a critic observed "a tendency among contemporary verse-writers to return to martial and inspiriting themes, and especially the glories of England."
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Less concerned with the fortunes of the Empire, Robert Bridges pursued his quest for beauty, convinced that poetry was "non-moral" that is, "only in so far as we take morals to mean the conventional code of conduct recognised by society." He was convinced, like most Victorian poets, that "pure ethics is man's moral beauty and can no more be dissociated from Art than any other kind of beauty, and, being man's highest beauty, it has the very first claim to recognition." Bridges consequently had no sympathy with the fin-de-siècle Aesthetes and Decadents, who advocated the exclusion from art of political, religious, and philosophical discourse (although he often excluded such elements in his own verse). He maintained a lifelong conviction that the aim of art was to create beautywhich involved the "satisfaction of form, the magic of speech, lying as it seemed to me in the masterly control of the material" beauty being "the highest of all those occult influences / . . . that thru' the sense / wakeneth spiritual emotion in the mind of man."
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One of Bridges's best-known poems, "London Snow," combines the Victorian fascination with the city with the Romantic vision of naturethe varying rhythms of its lines move as though in synchrony with the falling snow. For a number of years Bridges had experimented with varied stresses within lines, which he called "stress prosody" (his friend Gerard Manley Hopkins called this metrical device "sprung rhythm," which contains an irregular distribution of stresses per line). Bridges's "London Snow" provides an example of what he regarded as a significant revolution in English metrics, whereas the poem itself presents familiar subject matter and imagery with the precision of objective detail:
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 | | When men were all asleep the snow came flying,
In large white flakes falling on the city brown,
Stealthily and perpetually setting and loosely lying,
Hushing the latest traffic of the drowsy town;
Deadening, muffling, stifling its murmurs failing. . . .
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