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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
In a long essay apropos of Yeats's Oxford Book of Modern Verse, G. M. Young works himself around to modern versification and to G. M. Hopkins. What should have been a development, he says, has turned out to be a catastrophe. “It is common, too, I find to look on Hopkins as the chief legislator of the new mode. For Hopkins as a poet I have the greatest admiration, but his theories on metre seem to me to be as demonstrably wrong as those of any speculator who has ever led a multitude into the wilderness to perish. Unfortunately they have been used as a justification for the cacophonies which naturally result when the metrically deaf write verse, and the metrically deaf are a very large class.” Young is not sure of the right meaning of counterpoint, but “using it as Hopkins did,” he says: “You must counterpoint to avoid monotony, but you must not silence the pattern. You can only work within limits, and if you go beyond them the result is prose. It is no use saying like the Pharisees: ‘It is Corban, a sprung rhythm’: it will not be verse.” That Young uses Hopkins as a stick to beat the moderns is merely amusing; they had their own bit of chaos and needed a form in which to express it. But when he casts a doubt on Hopkins' theories on meter and forth-rightly accuses Hopkins of “an ignorance of his subject so profound that he was not aware there was anything to know”—that is, as he would say, certainly a bone for the dog. And when, on the other hand, Sir Herbert Read, lending his authority to the defense, says that “Hopkins shows that he understood the technique of English poetry as no poet since Dryden had understood it,” it is time to apply a few tests. A beginning was made ten years ago by Yvor Winters, rather more extreme than what follows here. But granted that both Young and Winters have a strong case, it still seems best to deal patiently with Hopkins, if only because he was an impetuous novice in prosody, too impatient to think his theories through before he began to explain them.
1 “Forty Years of Verse,” in Daylight and Champaign (London, 1937; 1948), pp. 176-191. The sentence which I have italicized tells the whole story.
2 Collected Essays in Literary Criticism (London, 1938), pp. 339 ff. (unchanged in 2nd ed., 1951). Sir Herbert, quoting and paraphrasing Hopkins, allows himself some rash statements, of which two examples will serve. “For running rhythm was only established in England in the sixteenth century” and “The only difference between this metre [that of Beowulf and of Piers Plowman] and Hopkins's is that Hopkins adds rhyme, and uses alliteration on no fixed principle.” Much has been written on the subject by others, notably Harold Whitehall in Gerard Manley Hopkins, by the Kenyon Critics (New York, 1945), pp. 33-57, and Sister Marcella Marie Holloway, The Prosodic Theory of Gerard Manley Hopkins (diss. Washington, D. C., 1947). Whitehall derives Hopkins' theories from Patmore; cf. also Margaret R. Stobie, “Patmore's Theory and Hopkins' Practice,” Univ. of Toronto Quart., xix (1949), 64-80. W. H. Gardner, Gerard Manley Hopkins (New Haven, 1948), explains “sprung rhythm” in his discussion of “The Wreck of the Deutschland” and devotes a whole chapter to “Sonnet Morphology”; and in the notes to his edition (1948) of the Poems gives many of the special marks (loops, twirls, etc.) in the manuscripts, omitted in the Bridges-Williams edition. See also “The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins,” repr. from the Hudson Review (1949), in Yvor Winters, The Function of Criticism; Problems and Exercises (Denver, 1957). As illustration of Winters' position one sentence may serve. “In The Windhover, however, the attempt to express violent emotion through violent meter has got out of hand and become merely preposterous” (p. 119).
3 In a letter to Dixon, 27 Feb. 1879 (ii, 23), Hopkins said: “Reading over what I have written above I find it very hurried and confused.” This should be a warning against pressing too hard the statements in his letters.
The letters are here cited as: i, The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges (Oxford, 1935; repr. 1955); ii, The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon (Oxford, 1935; repr. 1955); and Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Including His Correspondence with Coventry Patmore, rev. and enl. ed. (London, 1956)—all ed. by Claude Colleer Abbott.
4 The next statement is confusing. He recognizes both rising and falling feet (iambs and anapests, trochees and dactyls) and Rocking Feet or amphibrachs; then he reduces these for the purpose of scanning to trochees and dactyls (that is, falling rhythms only) and a mixture of the two, “what the Greeks called Logaoedic Rhythm.” He was pardonably ill informed about the meaning of logaoedic (it is still under dispute among specialists), but this would not be worth mentioning if the word had not unfortunately gained a kind of currency among the uninitiate through his misuse of it.
5 But not always, for he says (ii, 78) that Chaucer's frequent inversions are “not really counterpoint.” In another place (ii, 25) he compares the blend of word accent and syllabic length in Latin verse to counterpoint. Larger and more complex forms did not attract his attention. For example, in Swinburne's “The Triumph of Time,” stanza 14:
To have died if you cared I should die for you, clung
To my life if you bade me, played my part
As it pleased you—these were the thoughts that stung . . .
These are three four-stress lines in the pattern of the whole poem; but along with this four-stress pattern a three-stress tune is running concurrently:
To have died if you cared I should die for you,
clung To my life if you bade me,
played my part As it pleased you—
these were the thoughts that stung.
6 This is expressed more fully in a letter to Dixon (ii, 15). In the Samson choruses, he says, “each line (or nearly so) has two different coexisting scansions. But when you reach that point the secondary or ‘mounted rhythm,‘ which is necessarily a sprung rhythm, overpowers, the original or conventional one and then this becomes superfluous and may be got rid of; by taking that last step you reach simple sprung rhythm.” The meter of those choruses is a matter on which opinions differ still. Its kinship with that of “The Wreck of the Deutschland” is not easy to see or feel.
7 He wrote to Dixon of “an easily felt principle of equal strengths” (ii, 22), but did not explain; and (ii, 41) that “great attention to quantity is necessary”; also “We must distinguish strength (or gravity) and length. About length there is little difficulty.” In a long letter to Patmore (Further Letters, pp. 325 ff.), Hopkins offered “some remarks” on Patmore's “Study of English Metrical Law.”
8 “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo.” There is another in “Spelt from Sybil's Leaves” which is pointed out in his Notes. In both, the rest is signaled by suspension points.
9 Cf. the early statement to Dixon (27 Feb. 1879; ii, 23) that “sprung” is “where one stress follows another running, without syllable between”; but he adds that besides this “bare principle” he employs “various artifices.”
10 Gardner's scansion (i, 98-100, Poems, p. 228) differs from mine in details. Hopkins' “and” he calls a “very curious expedient,” which “could only be to point out that although the word counts in the scansion merely as a slack syllable, in the actual reading aloud it must be pronounced with speed and stress; by this means the poet hoodwinks the academic excise-man and slips in what is virtually a six-stress line under cover of a pentameter. And does not the sense justify the liberty?” But what justifies the liberty of Gardner's vaticination?
11 Gardner (i, 85) following MS. B. has accents on “ends,” “beauty,” “stooks,” “arise,” and a double accent on “bar-” with a loop under “-barous” to mark an outride (but runs into trouble because there is no noticeable pause after it), and finds it “convenient” to read the whole line as rising rhythm. In his edition (p. 229) he indicates other “outrides marked in the MSS.”—three of which are likewise not followed by pauses.
12 The curious will note Hopkins' own difficulty with Patmore's line, “Her virtue all virtue so endears.” He first complained that “all” would have to be slurred, but the next day he found that “with forethought” the line would run smoothly “even with a stress on ‘all.‘ I think however that how to do this will not strike everybody” (Further Letters, pp. 305 f.). Patmore must have smiled.
13 Trois poëtes: Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot (Paris, 1947), p. 26.