The Columbia History of British Poetry (116 page)

Read The Columbia History of British Poetry Online

Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

Tags: #test

BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
10.47Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page 470
within language, especially poetic language, and expressing their uniqueness or specific individuality. "All the world is full of inscape," he wrote in his journal; "it is everywhere near at hand," and if we "had but eyes to see . . . it could be called out everywhere again." Inscapes are not subjective impressions, that is, but objective essential forms that can be recognized if the observer is in sympathy with the object or phenomenon observed. In poetry, individual inscape is what Hopkins will always seek to catch. (The term receives more complex elaborations in his notes on ''Poetry and Verse" and in his later reflections "On Personality, Grace and Free Will.")
Instress
, even more difficult to define simply, is not shape but energy, and particularly energy that upholds and communicates inscape to the perceiver across a "bridge" or "stem of stress." The source of this energy is, either immediately or mediately through the individual, God.
For seven of the nine years of his preparation and training for the Jesuit order Hopkins remained faithful to the terms of his self-imposed poetic silence; at St. Beuno's College in Wales, however, where he was sent to study theology, his resolution faltered. He began to study Welsh, attracted by its euphoniousness; and while he never mastered the language, he learned it well enough to hazard a few poetic translations into (flawed) Welsh. More important, however, was his discovery of
cynghanedd
, a technique of Welsh poetic composition that regulates the disposition of assonance and alliteration in a line. One element of the striking musicality of Hopkins's mature poetry is reducible to such sound patterning or "chiming." But the principle is not merely phonetic: in the world, tooin the world of nature, particularlyHopkins would seek echoes and correspondences, likenesses and variations, that not only form the basis of beauty (as he developed the idea in a dialogue written at Oxford, "On the Origin of Beauty") but bespeak the unifying presence of God behind the manifold world of phenomena (as he would write in "Pied Beauty").
One final technical question and one fastidious scruple remained before Hopkins could end the years of his poetic quiescence. Describing subsequently to another of his small circle of poet-readers the genesis of
The Wreck of the Deutschland
, he referred to the metrical or rhythmic innovations that he had introduced in it and that he calls "sprung rhythm": "I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm which I now realised on paper." Although not fully fledged at this point, the rhythmic system that he appears largely to have intuited from the
 
Page 471
nature of Englishas well as from nursery rhymes and jingles, and doubtless from bits of available Old English poetryis roughly that which underlies early Germanic verse, as in
Beowulf
.
Unlike traditional modern English meter, which is accentual-syllabic, sprung rhythm does not count syllables, only stresses. Provided the number of stresses is regular, the number of syllables is of no account. A foot consists, therefore, of one strong beat and either no weak beats or any (reasonable) number of them. So, for example, the following two lines are metrically equivalent (each having six stresses) even though syllabically they differ as nine to sixteen:
(1) The sóur scýthe crínge, and the bléar sháre cóme
(2) With the búrl of the fóuntains of aír, búck and the flóod of the wáve.
The object of this new rhythm was not simply to satisfy the echo haunting his ear but to restore to English poetry the rhythms of
spoken
English. It is a point Hopkins insists on repeatedly: his poetry is not to be read "slovenly with the eyes but with [the] ears." For Hopkins, poetry is essentially performative and spoken: "
till it is spoken it is not performed
, it does not perform, it is not itself. . . . [P]oetry is emphatically speech, speech purged of dross like gold in the furnace. . . . [S]prung rhythm . . . purges [verse] to an emphasis as much brighter, livelier, more lustrous than the regular but commonplace emphasis of common rhythm as poetry in general is brighter than common speech."
The final scruple to be satisfied before he could again write poetry was the one he had imposed on himselfnever to compose unless bidden to do so by a religious superior. In a furious storm and blizzard in early December 1875 the
Deutschland
, a transatlantic steamer under way from Bremen to New York, ran aground on the Kentish Knock, treacherous shoals of sand off the coast of Essex. Among the lost were five Franciscan nuns expelled from Germany in Bismarck's Kulturkampf. The wreck was extensively covered in the English press; Catholic periodicals carried Cardinal Manning's burial sermon; and one of Hopkins's superiors remarked generally that "he wished someone would write a poem on the subject." This remark sufficed to authorize implicitly Hopkins's poetic activity for the remaining thirteen years of his life. When the ode was completed he submitted it for publication in the Jesuit journal
The Month
, which rejected it as too difficult. Hopkins made only two subsequent efforts to publish any of his poetry and,
 
Page 472
these failing, too, resisted the efforts of others on his behalf. He was certain, however, that he would find an audience in good time.
Hopkins divides the ode into two parts of ten and twenty-five stanzas, respectively. Part the First is at once an invocation of God and an account first of the speaker's own creation, terrified submission, and glad acceptance of Him (stanzas 15) and then of the initiatory moment of Christian history and humanity's submission to it and acceptance of it (stanzas 610). Implicitly, these spiritual storms and calms prefigure the natural ones to come. Part the Second contains the necessary narrative elements of the drama and its pivotal event, the terror and passionate submission of the tall nun, which climaxes at stanza 24. After a moment of
kairos
, in which language itself appears at first to break down before the enormity of its task and which reveals the meaning of the shipwreck (stanzas 2830), the poem closes with a powerful prayer both in praise of God and for the conversion of England. That is, the three acts of submission that structure and give meaning to the poem are to be followed, if the prayer is answered, by a fourth.
As an ode,
The Wreck of the Deutschland
owes more to Pindar than to Wordsworth or other English models in the genre, and the difficulty of its linguistic and other innovations has caused more than one reader to incline to Bridges's exaggerated view that it lies at the beginning of Hopkins's mature work "like a great dragon folded in the gate to forbid all entrance." Some of this difficulty is owing to odic writing, which is highly charged and not primarily narrative; some, however, arises from the new poetic language that here erupts into English. In order to achieve the phonetic density and complexity that will yield the design, pattern, or inscape he seeks, Hopkins needs all the lexical and syntactic resources of current English; for "the poetical language of an age shd. be the current language heightened, to any degree heightened and unlike itself, but not . . . an obsolete one."
Consequently, while Hopkins refuses even such archaisms as were commonplace in Victorian verse, he exploits to the full the great word-hoard that was being monumentalized by Victorian philology in the form of the
Oxford English Dictionary
and the
English Dialect Dictionary
. Dialectal words, for example, scorned by Samuel Johnson, are now on an equal footing with literary language. Lexically, Hopkins favors words that stem from or convey the feel of the
formative
elements of English: Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, and Norman French. He forms compounds of every grammatical makeup permitted in English
 
Page 473
(and a few that are not permitted). He plays on the lability of grammatical categories: in English there is usually no mark or inflection to identify a noun, a verb, or an adjective, and Hopkins enjoys imparting to a noun the movement of its homologous verb and to a verb the solidity of its homologous noun. He presses into service any phonological device that causes sounds to accumulate, echo off one another, and thicken into aural shapes directly expressive of what they are conveyingnot only the standard devices of end rhyme, assonance, and alliteration but Icelandic
skothending
(the "rhyming" or chiming of final consonants regardless of preceding vowels, e.g., fi
nd
and ba
nd
) and variations on a single vowel (which he calls "vowelling off").
Syntactically, Hopkins again looks for his models and authority to
spoken
English, with its abruptnesses, suppressions (e.g., of relative pronouns), and parataxis. But he goes well beyond spoken syntax in order to achieve the rhythms, both accentual and semantic, that figure his meaning: "Thóu mastering mé / God!" In all, he is drawing or wrenching into the foreground of poetry the very elementsphonetic, lexical, syntactic, and rhythmicof which it is made. So, in
The Wreck of the Deutschland
, he prunes unneeded verbs ("I steady as a water in a well, to a poise, to a pane"); coins compounds ("I kiss my hand / To the stars, lovely-asunder"); thickens sound patterns (even to excess: "We lash with the best or worst / Word last! How a lush-kept plush-capped sloe / Will, mouthed to flesh-burst, / Gush!flush the man, the being with it, sour or sweet / Brim, in a flásh, fúll!"); breaches grammatical boundaries (''the hurtle of hell / Behind"); repeats and expands phrases with the breathlessness of panted speech ("where, where was a, where was a place?"); draws on rhetorical devices little favored since the Renaissance (dieremenon, splitting a compound word by another word or phrase: "Brim, in a flásh, fúll"); and combines the simple chiming of internal rhyme with voweling off ("Wíry and white-fíery and whírlwind-swivellèd snów").
These devices and techniques he will continue to develop and refine in his later poetry. But one must not, finally, permit the technical brilliance, verbal energy, and novelty of Hopkins's poetry to obscure the purpose that it always serves. Hopkins's work is a sustained and many-times refined meditation on both words and the Word, and on the world as their sphere of intersection. As a Jesuit reflecting on the "First Principle and Foundation" of Ignatius'
Spiritual Exercises
, he would write, "God's utterance of himself in himself is God the Word, outside
 
Page 474
himself is this world. This world then is word, expression, news of God. Therefore its end, its purpose, its purport, its meaning, is God and its life or work to name and praise him. Therefore praise [is to be] put before reverence and service."
It is because of this immanent presence in the world and in languagein the form of lawsthat Hopkins's work is both unified and charged. And it is therefore little wonder that much of his mature poetry has its initiatory moment in observation of the world, particularly the world of natureas in "The Windhover": "I caught this mórning morning's mínion, king-/ dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dáwn-drawn Falcon in his riding / Of the rólling level úndernéath him steady aír. . . ." But a poem almost never remains at this natural point of departure; almost always it penetrates beyond nature to the presence of a personal God that upholds its beauty. Even, indeed, in his most desperate late sonnets, it is the strain towards Christian transcendence that imparts energy to despair and informs the tension between despair and the consolation so fervently but unsuccessfully sought.
The poems of Hopkins fall, roughly, into five thematic or generic-thematic categories: (1) the two odes,
The Wreck of the Deutschland
and
The Loss of the Eurydice
; (2) poems whose point of departure is the natural world; (3) poems whose point of departure is the human world; (4) poems whose point of departure is the personal world; and (5) poems associated with particular religious occasions. In the 1990 MacKenzie edition, these are (1) nos. 101 and 125; (2) nos. 103, 104, 105, 111, 112, 115, 117, 118, 120, 121, 122, 124, 130, 146, 149, 167, 170, 174; (3) nos. 108, 113, 119, 129, 131, 133, 134, 137, 138, 141, 142, 143, 144, 148, 158, 160, 168; (4) nos. 140, 154, 155, 157, 159, 162, 163, 177, 178, 179; and (5) nos. 102, 126, 139, 151. One may see in this display a trajectory, again rough, of Hopkins's preoccupations, from nature (most poems prior to no. 130, "Binsey Poplars") to human subjects (most poems between nos. 131, "Henry Purcell," and 148, "The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo'') to Hopkins's own spiritual life (most poems from "Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee" to no. 179, "To R. B.")the more narrowly religious pieces being interspersed.
To some extent this distribution reflects changes in Hopkins's own life, as he moved from the natural settings of Wales and the environs of Oxford to the places of his pastoral and teaching duties in London, Oxford, Lancashire, Liverpool, and Glasgow, and on to University

Other books

Perfectly Ridiculous by Kristin Billerbeck
Brodeck by PHILIPPE CLAUDEL
Red Star Rogue by Kenneth Sewell
The Pearls by Michelle Farrell
Flame by Skylar Cross
Beyond Belief by Josh Hamilton, Tim Keown
Lifetime Guarantee by Gillham, Bill
The Sea-Quel by Mo O'Hara