Gerard Manley Hopkins, "The Windhover" (23rd Friend)

Did you forget this series? It’s only been, well, a long while since we met our last friend, but I’m going to reintroduce it now. You needn’t worry about it quickly falling off again, either, because the next few posts have already been written. How’s that for planning ahead?

Anyway, today we’ll meet Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins. He was born in 1844, converted to Catholicism from Anglicanism as a young man, joined the Jesuit order, and worked as a Classics teacher and parish priest around England, Wales, and Ireland. Unsurprisingly, given that he was an old-school Jesuit, his work is a mainstay in Catholic literature curricula.

For a long time, I’ll admit that I’ve been ambivalent about his poetry. His imagery and use of sound devices were well ahead of their time, and even today can be difficult to follow. When I revisited his work earlier this year, then, I decided to do a little homework and read a couple other books about his work, in addition to the editor’s introduction and notes to my edition of his poems.

So, I’m prepared to write at length about his use of inscape, sprung rhythm, outrides, and various other concepts and techniques. Those interested in that may enjoy the same books I read, namely, Penguin’s collection of his poems and prose, Wimsatt’s Hopkins’s Poetics of Speech Sound, and MacKenzie’s A Reader’s Guide to Gerard Manley Hopkins, or some of the many other books about him.

Really, though, the key to appreciating Fr. Hopkins is much the same as appreciating most great poets: You must read these poems out loud. Take, for example, one of his most famous works, and the one I chose to memorise, “The Windhover.”

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn
Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend:
the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

You read it out loud, right? If not, go back and do so. I don’t care if you’re in public, those other people could use some culture anyway. Put a paper bag over your head if you’re too embarrassed.

Anyway, the first thing you likely noticed is the heavy use of various sound techniques; alliteration, assonance, internal and end rhymes, basically everything you learned in high school English is here. Some next-level enjambment, too, which makes a poem harder to memorise since the line breaks are less in line with the sense of the poem. Milton’s sonnet “When I Consider How My Light is Spent” is another example of this.

The stress also seems a bit wonky, which is what makes his poems sometimes feel unnatural. There’s always a logic to it, though, and here I’ll go ahead and quote Wimsatt:

Hopkins, then, consistently conceives of the stress of sprung rhythm as an ‘actual’ stress that is always realized in the reading. It often carries emotional emphasis through loudness, pitch, and/or duration, thereby conveying a properly linguistic meaning, an iconic significance above and beyond the usual symbolic sense signalled by arbitrary sound contrasts. At the same time, while Hopkins’s markings of sprung rhythm stress can indicate displacement of more usual phrasal or sentence stressing, reconfiguring the stress and intonation patterns, he almost never alters word accent, which, as he explicitly recognizes, often would alter the word meaning (J 270; he instances ‘présent’ and ‘presént’). As a result, his stressing seldom leaves in doubt the ‘logical’ sense of a sprung-rhythm sentence. The poet’s addition of emotional significance through his marking generally enhances rather than interferes with the meaning. Thus, his markings of Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves, which Schneider cites as examples of misplaced stress, if accepted as operative markers add substantially to the poetical significance: ‘self ín self stéepèd and páshed - quite’ (line 5); ‘thoughts against thoughts ín groans grínd’ (line 14). Though the stresses on the prepositions ‘ín’ and ‘agáinst’ replace usual contrastive stresses on ‘self,’ ‘thoughts,’ and ‘groan,’ the logical sense is clear, and the emotional content is phonetically augmented.

On a final note, while reading about Fr. Hopkins I came across one author who mentioned that he could be classed as either among the lesser of the English language’s great poets, or among the greater of our lesser poets. He placed Fr. Hopkins in the latter group which, and though I’ll always wave the pom-poms for great Catholic writers, I think that is a fair assessment. Whatever tier of poet you want to place him on, though, he’s our good friend now, so please do go pick up a book of his poetry and remember, read it out loud!