  The meson eigenstates of the light-cone Hamiltonian in a coarse transverse
lattice gauge theory are investigated. Building upon previous work in pure
gauge theory, the Hamiltonian and its Fock space are expanded in powers of
dynamical fields. In the leading approximation, the couplings appearing in the
Hamiltonian are renormalised by demanding restoration of space-time symmetries
broken by the cut-off. Additional requirements from chiral symmetry are
discussed and difficulties in imposing them from first principles in the
leading approximation are noted. A phenomenological calculation is then
performed, in which chiral symmetry in spontaneously broken form is modelled by
imposing the physical pion-rho mass splitting as a constraint. The light-cone
wavefunctions of the resulting Hamiltonian are used to compute decay constants,
form factors and quark momentum and spin distributions for the pion and rho
mesons. Extensions beyond leading order, and the implications for first
principles calculations, are briefly discussed.
