¹ Letter of October 1878, nearly three years after the Deutschland was begun. Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott (London, 1935), p. 14. This volume is hereafter referred to as Letters, ii.

² “Wordsworth and Kipling” and “Letter … on English Prosody,” Collected Essays and Papers, ii (London, 1933), 30–31, 71; Thompson, Robert Bridges (Oxford, 1944), p. 79. The American George P. Marsh, in lectures that Hopkins cited in his own lectures on rhythm in 1872–73, was already, in 1859, commenting on the effort of modern poets “to invent new forms and combinations … and to infuse fresh life and spirit into movements of the muses which perpetual repetition has made wearisome”; and added, “The English language cannot long supply the necessities of poetry without the introduction of new elements of verse”—referring to the exhaustion of rhymes and his suggested substitution of assonance and half-rhyme. Lectures on the English Language (New York, 1859), pp. 525, 540, 579.

³ The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Humphry House and Graham Storey (London, 1959), pp. 267–290. For evidence of the date, see the Preface, pp. xxvi–xxvii.

⁴ On grounds of taste and “sincerity,” Bridges and C. C. Abbott doubted Hopkins' authorship of this poem in spite of rather strong evidence that it is his. Their opinion, with which on critical matters I should ordinarily find myself in agreement, seems to have been influenced partly by the fact that the Jesuit Father who discovered the poem printed it (posthumously) as a production of Hopkins' last years, which it certainly could not have been. Gardner's evidence for placing it in 1871–73 is beyond dispute, as is its strong resemblance to the other poem of this period, Rosa Mystica, of which Hopkins' authorship is proved by the existence of an autograph manuscript with his own revisions. The earlier date removes the only solid basis for doubting the authenticity of Ad Mariam, and Hopkins' authorship seems now unquestionable though one may well wish he had written neither of these poems. See Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W. H. Gardner, 3rd ed. (London, 1960) (hereafter referred to as Poems), pp. 49–52, 218–219; The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott (London, 1935) (hereafter referred to as Letters, i), p. xvii; W. H. Gardner, Gerard Manley Hopkins (New Haven, 1948–49) (hereafter referred to as Gardner), ii, 91–94. One other poem exists in an autograph copy dated August 1871, but it yields nothing for our purpose: it is a revised version of Winter with the Gulf Stream, originally published in 1863, the year Hopkins entered Oxford. Both versions are in competently handled terza rima; the revision remains conventional metrically, the changes being all directed toward improvement of language and imagery and the weeding out of poetic archaisms. The date of this autograph may not represent the date of the revision. Poems, pp. 23–24, 213.

⁵ Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins, second ed., ed. Claude Colleer Abbott (London, 1956) (hereafter referred to as Letters, iii), pp. 228–229; Letters, i, 44–45. Both for talents and scandal, Swinburne of course was the talk of Balliol. He had left the University not long before Hopkins entered and had maintained friendship with his former tutor Jowett, who was also Hopkins' tutor. No literary and classical undergraduate could have escaped the excitement of his reputation. Hopkins recorded that he saw Swinburne on the day he (Hopkins) took his degree in 1868. His interest did not flag. Shortly before his death he wrote to Bridges about Swinburne's latest volume, “There is some heavydom, in long waterlogged lines (he has no real understanding of rhythm, and though he sometimes hits brilliantly at other times he misses badly).” Usually there is a mixture of admiration and reprehension: his “genius is astonishing, but …”; his work a “strange phenomenon … a powerful effort at establishing a new standard of poetic diction …”; “for music of words and the mastery … of a consistent and distinctive poetic diction … it is extraordinary. But …”; “a delirium-tremendous imagination.” Letters, i, 304, 79, 202; ii, 99, 156–157.

Apart from comments in the letters, there are enough verbal and stylistic reminiscences, chiefly of Atalanta, the first Poems and Ballads, and Songs before Sunrise (1871), in Hopkins' poetry to show how closely he read these works. For brief illustration, cf. Swinburne's “towery tresses” of Crete and “The firewhite faith of Poland without spot” (from Ode on the Insurrection in Candia and The Eve of Revolution) with Hopkins' Duns Scotus's Oxford, “Towery city” and “Who fired France for Mary without spot” (also, in Deutschland, st. 13, “white-fiery”).

⁶ Conventional prosodic terminology seems the only possible one here. Inaccurate and ambiguous though it is in certain respects, it is too closely associated with what poets thought they were doing and what readers thought they were hearing, to be supplanted at present in this kind of study. Space is lacking here for discussion of prosodic theory or for justifying the use of particular terms and concepts that may be debatable.

⁷ For reasons too complicated to be set forth here, this description seems to me to represent the metrical effect a trifle more accurately than use of the term ionic a minore.

⁸ Swinburne, Complete Works, Bonchurch ed., ed. Sir Edmund Gosse and T. J. Wise (London, 1925–27), vii, 333. Apart from the rhythm, cf. the image of unmaking man here and later (“To make me and unmake me,” p. 348) with a similar image in the first stanza of the Deutschland.

⁹ There are other possible ways of reading the line (“máde mărn,” for example), but they would be even farther from the blank verse norm.

¹⁰ See A Christmas Carol, Works, i, 346–347.

¹¹ During his summer holiday in 1873, Hopkins read with interest the volume of Arnold containing Rugby Chapel and Heine's Grave, the meter of which, described by Enid Hamer as “the saddest and sombrest of all anapaests” and by others as cadenced or free verse, is, however classified, logaoedic. These may have reinforced the influence of Swinburne. Letters, iii, 58.

¹² Elsewhere Hopkins explicitly rejected the usual emendation regularizing the line, “Why should this a desert be” (Letters, i, 45).

¹³ Swinburne's 1866 volume contains a longish poem, St. Dorothy, on the same subject. It is odd that both men independently should have selected this minor saint, yet the poem of Hopkins seems to have been composed in 1864. Gardner's tentative date, 1866, would resolve the mystery, but House and Storey's account of the MS seems to rule out any but the earlier date; and there is no evidence and probably not much likelihood that either poet knew the other's unpublished work. So we have tentatively to suppose the two poems independent or only indirectly connected through some common source. There is no resemblance between the poems apart from their subject (Hopkins, Poems, pp. 39–40, 217; Journals, pp. xvii–xviii; Swinburne, Works, ii, 1–15). Mabel P. Worthington, who kindly checked exhibition records, informs me that a water color by Burne-Jones, “The Martyrdom of St. Dorothea,” was exhibited at the Royal Water Colour Society in 1867, but this was after both poems had been written.

¹⁴ As we should expect, he also had a good deal to say about alliteration. Gardner notes (ii, 138–140) that some of the discussion derives from the lectures of Marsh. But Hopkins had long been familiar with the alliterative devices and the assonance and consonance employed by Swinburne: not only the familiar twins (“mother of months,” etc.), but elaborate interlaced patterns. “A flower-bud of the flower bed” might have been written by Hopkins under the influence of his later Welsh studies, but it is in Atalanta (p. 301).

¹⁵ “Sprung Rhythm,” Gerard Manley Hopkins: By the Kenyon Critics (Norfolk, Conn., 1945), p. 41, and cf. pp. 35–36. Cf. Letters, ii, 22, “an easily felt principle of equal strengths” [Hopkins' italics]; i, 81–82, “Since the syllables in sprung rhythm are not counted, time or equality in strength is of more importance than in common counted rhythm, and your [Bridges'] times or strengths do not seem to me equal enough.”

¹⁶ See Robert Bridges' discussion of accentual verse in Milton's Prosody (Oxford, 1921), pp. 89–93.

¹⁷ Cf., for another example, the twelfth line of Hurrahing in Harvest, a five-stress line: “Wanting; which two when they once meet …” Several readings are possible, but neither the meaning of the context nor the established rhythm suggests a satisfactory reading.

¹⁸ Letters, ii, 41. His accounts were not altogether consistent. At first his outrides were to be used only in standard rhythm. Later he combined them with sprung rhythm also. Cf. Letters, i, 45 and elsewhere.

¹⁹ In Part the First only. In Part the Second, the first line has three stresses. The remaining lines are the same throughout the poem: l. 2, three stresses; l. 3, four stresses; l. 4, three; ll. 5 and 6, five; l. 7, four; l. 8, six.

²⁰ In Hopkins the stresses cannot always be determined by either the alliteration or the rhyme; he frequently employs alliteration in obviously unstressed syllables and occasionally uses an unstressed syllable for his end rhyme. Though I incline towards the reading I have given, the opening might, in deference to the rhyme, be read, “Thou mástering mé / Gód,” which seems to me preferable to Gardner's reading.

²¹ Sermons and Devotional Writings, ed. Christopher Devlin (London, 1959), pp. 175, 195.

²² The stresses in lines 6 and 7 are so marked in MS “B,” either by Hopkins himself or by Bridges, perhaps under Hopkins' direction. The MS is in Bridges' hand with corrections by Hopkins. Line 2 is typical of the uncertainties of stress in sprung rhythm. It is a three-stress line with four possible stressed syllables. I interpret the capitalization and hyphen in Yore-flood as a hint that flood is subordinated; stress then falls on Yore, year's, and fall.

²³ Blessed among Women, Stanza 11, Works, ii, 126. This poem, which appeared in Songs before Sunrise, suggests Hopkins a good deal throughout in style, imagery, rhythm, and stanza form.

²⁴ See nn. 5 and 23, above; still better, see the poems; and cf. the similar stanza employed in To Victor Hugo, published in Poems and Ballads. Works, i, 274–280.

²⁵ The present study has been aided by a grant in aid of research from Temple University. Certain stress marks are cited from MS. B by permission of the curators of the Bodleian Library.