The metrical tradition established by Chaucer is still popular today. Alongside it lives so-called free verse. In Samson Agonistes, Milton wrote verse that was remarkably free for the 17c, but this influenced only a few individual poets. It was largely the work of Hopkins, first published in the period of social readjustments brought about by the First World War, that began in England the widespread reassessment of the language of verse which ultimately led to today’s freedoms.
Gerard Hopkins (he disliked his middle name Manley, possibly because it was his father’s first name and they did not always see eye to eye) was born in Stratford, Essex on 28 July 1844, the eldest of eight children. He was unusual as a poet in that throughout his adult and productive life he had, as a Jesuit, very limited access to literature published in his lifetime, little contact with living poets and no access at all to a reading public. His verse was influenced both by the poetic traditions of earlier centuries and by his fascination with the rhythms of everyday speech. Hopkins’ highly original work was not published until thirty years after his death, when other writers were perhaps more ready to accept new ideas.His mother was devout and so was Gerard; his eldest sister became an Anglican nun. It is important to remember, in view of his later conversion to Roman Catholicism, that for half his life Hopkins regularly heard the Anglican prayer book and the Authorized Version of the bible, whose balanced rhythms strongly influenced the music of his poetry.
At Highgate School, he won many prizes, including several for poetry. His teenage style paid homage to the later Romantic poets and Tennyson, not least in his metre. Here are a few lines from his prize-winning poem on the set topic of The Escorial in 1860.
This is Tennysonian: Hopkins has not yet developed an individual voice, but he shows a fascination with light and damasking that reappears in his journals, letters and poems for the rest of his life. At this time he thought of becoming an artist, like two of his brothers.
He went up to Oxford at Easter in 1863 to read Greats (classics, ancient history, philosophy and Scripture) and gained a first class degree. He became an Anglo-Catholic and later, to the dismay of his family, converted to Roman Catholicism. His classical and philosophical reading inevitably coloured his poetry, as did his friendship with his tutor Walter Pater. Pater, an atheist, founded the new aesthetic movement (lampooned in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience) believing that beauty needed no moral justification but should be intensely experienced. For Hopkins, beauty was a revelation of God. The two men discussed paintings and went on long walks observing flowing water and the movement of light in grass and among leaves. Hopkins’ journal at this time is full of detailed observations of nature: trees, flowers, running water and skyscapes — especially sunsets. In later years these images illuminate his poems, which often pick up the actual wording of the journal. Here is a sunset from 1866:
In his struggle to capture precisely what he saw, Hopkins instinctively uses linguistic devices that several years later he exploits in his poetry. There are many hyphenated terms, for example “up-blown”, “fleece-of-wool”, “flat-topped”. There is much alliteration: “upper parts ruddled, some more, some less rosy”; “spits or beams braided or built in with slanting pellet flakes”. There is assonance: “a grey bank with moist gold dabs and racks”. Above all there is a sense of fluidity: clouds, light and dappling tumble out of most of his mature poems.
At Oxford Hopkins made many friends. He kept up a lifelong correspondence with Alexander W.M. Baillie, an agnostic, on a wide variety of subjects, including poetic language. In later years, the friends to whom he wrote were Hopkins’ only audience and critics. Robert Seymour Bridges, who became Poet Laureate in 1913, corresponded for years, but they could meet only rarely once Hopkins had joined the Society of Jesus in 1868. Luckily for us, Bridges kept Hopkins’ poems and published them in 1918. He also kept Hopkins’ letters to him, although he destroyed his own replies.
As a Jesuit Hopkins took a threefold vow of poverty, chastity and obedience. The vow of poverty meant that he could no longer own private property, including books. This meant that he rarely read contemporary literature and his adult writing was not influenced by that of other living poets. The vow of obedience meant that he no longer directed the course of his life and work. Although not obliged to, he decided to burn his poems — one or two survived in undergraduate notebooks — and resolved to write no more “as not belonging to my profession, unless by the wish of my superiors”.
In 1875 the Deutschland was wrecked in the Thames estuary, and five German nuns, exiled for their faith, were drowned. “I was affected by the account and happening to say so to my rector he said that he wished someone would write a poem on the subject. On this hint I set to work and, though my hand was out at first, produced one. I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm which now I realised on paper.”
The versification of The Wreck of the Deutschland was influenced partly by the rhythms of everyday speech, partly by the rhythms of classical Welsh poetry or cynghanedd — Hopkins was studying theology at St Beuno’s in North Wales at the time — partly by rhythms learnt from medieval English poetry, Milton and nursery rhymes. I shall describe Hopkins’ metrical theory later. The poem was sent in to the Jesuit magazine The Month and no doubt amazed the editor by its length and its strangeness. To Hopkins’ disappointment it was not published, and even his friend Bridges wrote that he found it too difficult to read for a second time. Here is the first of the thirty-five stanzas of the poem: I have noted in brackets the number of feet in each line.
Having broken his poetic silence, Hopkins felt free to go on writing. Many of his more popular poems were written in 1877, the year he was ordained as priest, as well as another long shipwreck poem The Loss of the Eurydice, which The Month again declined to publish.
In 1878, during a three-month spell at Stonyhurst College, Hopkins wrote to Canon Richard Dixon, who had once taught at Highgate School. This was the beginning of another long and affectionate correspondence, which helped to sustain him through some of the gloomier periods of his life. Dixon was an Oxford man, an Anglican country vicar, a poet and a friend of the Pre-Raphaelites. Receiving poems from Hopkins, he would write of his “deep and intense admiration” or of his “excited delight”. More generous in his praise than Bridges, he helped to boost Hopkins’ morale.
From 1878 till 1881 Hopkins served as a parish priest in London, Oxford, Liverpool, Glasgow and Chesterfield, then from 1882-4 was sent back to the Jesuit college at Stonyhurst to teach Latin, Greek and English. On Speech Day in 1883, the poet Coventry Patmore came to give the prizes, and thus began the fourth of Hopkins’ great letter-writing friendships. To Patmore he wrote mostly criticism of Patmore’s poetry. Eventually he sent some of his own poems, but Patmore, like Bridges, found them difficult. Although he conceded that: “no one who knows what poetry is can mistake them for anything but poetry”, he also commented less encouragingly: “ ... to the already sufficiently arduous character of such poetry you seem to me to have added the difficulty of following several entirely novel and simultaneous experiments in versification and construction, together with an unprecedented system of alliteration and compound words — any one of which novelties would be startling and productive of distraction from the poetic matter to be expressed.” Presumably Hopkins was by now used to such comments, although he must have been disappointed not to find another reader as sympathetic as Dixon. As so often happens with original and innovative artists, Hopkins’ true greatness was not appreciated until long after his death.
In 1884 Hopkins was sent to Dublin to take up the Chair of Classics at University College, which was managed and partly staffed by the Society of Jesus. He continued to write poems, and his last one, to Robert Bridges, was composed on 22 April 1889, six weeks before he died of typhoid.
It was chiefly earlier poets, not Victorians, that nourished Hopkins. His
isolation meant that he in his turn had no influence on his contemporaries,
but, once published, his work contributed a great deal to the development of
twentieth century English poetry, especially the rise of free verse.
LANGUAGE
Hopkins is often criticized for “odd” language. However, all
his “oddities”
are either devices already used by other poets (such as Milton or
Wordsworth) or they are derived directly from the grammar of the spoken
language, which helps to make his poems more direct. If you ignore
metre for
the moment, apart from his longer hyphenated words
he used no linguistic
tricks that Shakespeare did not employ, although perhaps Shakespeare used
them more sparingly. For example, he sometimes omitted a relative pronoun or
the verb to be or both; he sometimes omitted an indirect article or a
possessive adjective or a past participial ending; he occasionally used a
verb as a noun; when giving a noun two adjectives he occasionally put the
second adjective after the noun instead of before it (as in “grey lawns
cold” in The Starlight Night). He used colloquial expressions
such as “deep
down things” in God’s Grandeur or “realer” (instead
of “more real”) in
Hurrahing in Harvest. Such poetic devices are common enough elsewhere
not to
hinder a reader’s understanding. Like Shakespeare he rejoiced in puns,
especially at dramatic moments: for example “Buckle” in line 10 of
Windhover
seems to mean: “buckle to” (i.e. get down to the task), “buckle in” (i.e.
embrace), “buckle” (i.e. bend and give way) all at once.
Some of Hopkins’ oddities do puzzle readers, although when the poems are
spoken, listeners seem to understand readily enough. One example in
Windhover is “dapple-dáwn-drawn”: Hopkins
marked “dawn” as carrying the
metrical beat, while the other two words are unstressed, which makes it
clear that the falcon is drawn by the dappled dawn. The falcon is, of
course, implicitly dappled too. (Browning is much clumsier in Pretty Woman
with his phrase “fawn-skin-dappled hair”.)
VERSIFICATION
I now want to say something about Hopkins’ theory of versification.
The practice from Chaucer’s time till the beginning of the twentieth century
whereby poets counted syllables, most often having two per foot, Hopkins
calls Standard Rhythm or Running Rhythm and employs it himself
in God’s
Grandeur, a sonnet with the usual 5 feet per line.
In the opening line the first two feet set up a rhythm of di-dum di-dum, but in the next two feet Hopkins put a twirl over “with the” and “grandeur” to show that the rhythm there is the reverse of this expected pattern (dum-di dum-di). He calls this Counterpoint. As reversal in one foot is scarcely noticed, and is anyhow a very common occurrence in most poets’ verses, he reserved the name Counterpoint for two or more successive feet with rhythms that are, according to the pattern already set up by the poem, reversed. At the beginning of line 5 there is further counterpoint (dum-di dum-di) in “Generations”, as the rest of the line runs: “have trod, have trod, have trod” (di-dum di-dum di-dum).
This is one of the earliest sonnets Hopkins wrote and sent to friends: it was composed in 1877. Although you may hesitate occasionally as to where you think the metrical stress lies, there are really no difficult choices except in lines 4, 6 and 14. Whereas in seventeenth-century sonnets discussed in Chapter 11 there were optional phrasings, which offered two or more clear possibilities to choose from, including syncopation, Hopkins’ problematic lines here almost always require the kind of technique needed for Wordsworth’s “Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie”, that is, the suppression of a stress that might normally be expected if the words occurred in everyday speech. What choice did you make for line 4? I would stress: “crushed”, “why”, “now”, “reck” and “rod”. The scurry of unstressed syllables in lines like these is common in passionate speech and is characteristic of much of Hopkins’ emotionally charged verse.
Many of Hopkins’ poems are in what he called Sprung Rhythm. In this metre, a poet does not count syllables at all. He says that in practice, just as in ordinary speech, there can be anything from one to four syllables in a foot, the first of which is, of course, stressed. Hopkins not only listened carefully to speech, but he also read medieval alliterative verse, Piers Plowman in particular, and Welsh classical verse and nursery rhymes. In none of these, except Welsh cynghanedd, is there the syllable counting which you find in Wordsworth or Tennyson. He was also influenced by Milton’s rhythms in his poetic drama Samson Agonistes and by Shakespeare’s later plays. If you look at The Windhover, you will see that there are ten syllables in the first line, but sixteen syllables in each of the next two lines. Occasionally, as in impassioned speech, Hopkins feels the need for even more weak syllables in a foot. He calls these Hangers or Outrides, because “they hang below the line or ride forward or backward from it in another dimension than the line itself.” This is an unnecessarily fanciful description of a perfectly normal aspect of English phonetics. These Hangers or Outrides are marked by a loop underneath them. At the end, I give Hopkins’ own marking in The Windhover of some of the accents where he thinks the reader may be uncertain as to which are the beat-syllables, and all of the Hangers.
Hopkins used two other marks on his poems to help the reader. In the despairing sonnet No worst there is none he put a pause mark, like the one used by musicians, above the word “fell” in line 8, to encourage the reader to linger on the word. He sometimes ties together with a square bracket above the line pairs of syllables which, he says, “in the recitation stress are to be about equal”, though they count as just one beat metrically: this is a pattern we have already discovered in Chapter 8. In the sonnet To What Serves Mortal Beauty, where the lines all have six feet, there are three examples of this. In line 1, Hopkins brackets the second and third word:
|————|
To what serves mortal beauty — dangerous; does set dancing blood
There are further examples in “keeps warm” in line 3 and “men’s wits” in
line 4.
Here is the scansion for The Windhover, which Hopkins called “the best thing I ever did”. Accents are as marked by the poet, suggested foot boundaries are mine. His fascination with alliteration here and elsewhere comes from his reading of earlier poetry. In mediaeval English alliterative non-rhyming verse, three of the four beat syllables in each line alliterate (see Chapter 13). In classical Welsh poetry, too, four syllables in a line may alliterate, in a variety of traditional patterns.
The falcon, beautiful and disciplined, represents Christ, who for Hopkins was also beautiful and disciplined. He wrote in a sermon: “His body was framed directly from Heaven by the power of the Holy Ghost, of whom it would be unworthy to leave any the least botch or failing in his work ... In his Passion all this strength was spent, this lissomness crippled, this beauty wrecked, this majesty beaten down ... through poverty, through labour, through crucifixion his majesty of nature more shines.” The falcon must embrace and buckle to its task, as Christ did his passion and crucifixion, and at the same time buckle or bend or give way. The sternness and the yielding, the conscious, deliberate sacrifice of Christ our chevalier, our hero-knight, is a billion times more brilliant and beautiful than the stooping of the falcon out of the morning sky. Our little sacrifices, too, are beautiful — the feet of the peasant farmer plodding across his land makes the very ploughed soil shine as they compress and smooth it; even dying coals tear and wound themselves into a last blaze of gold-vermilion.
The fusion of several separate themes into one great paean of praise within
fourteen lines is masterly. Perhaps no other religious poet since Donne has
put such intelligent passion into a sonnet.