The following extract, from a book by a member of this Department, is
another
example of how ‘close reading’ may be practised. Professor
Prickett’s focus is Hopkins’s sonnet, ‘As kingfishers catch
fire’; he writes about the poem in the context of Hopkins’s concept
of ‘selving’, and (in the opening paragraphs) in relation to Robert
Lowth’s pioneering work of biblical criticism, his Lectures on the
Sacred
Poetry of the Hebrews, to which ‘we owe the rediscovery of the Bible as
a
work of literature within the context of ancient Hebrew life’
(Prickett,
p.105). If you find the opening paragraphs difficult, just move on to
the point
at which ‘As kingfishers’ comes in; and see (in the final
paragraphs) just how much may be done with a single (important) word –
here, ‘an outrageous seven-fold pun’ on ‘plays’!
From: Stephen Prickett, Words and the Word: Language,
Poetics and Biblical Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press,
1986), pp. 188-23
In his essay on ‘Poetic Diction’, written as an
undergraduate for Jowett, the Master of Balliol, in 1865, Gerard Manley
Hopkins
returns to Wordsworth’s theory of poetic diction – in the context
both of Lowth’s theory of parallelism [OED, 3: ‘Correspondence, in
sense or construction, of successive clauses or passages, esp. in
Hebrew
poetry’] and of Coleridge’s ‘antithetical’ definition
[parallelism as a kind of mental dialectic, seeking ‘the balance or
reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities’]:
The structure of poetry is that of continuous parallelism,
ranging from the technical so-called Parallelism of Hebrew Poetry and
the
antiphons of Church music up to the intricacy of Greek or Italian or
English
verse. But parallelism is of two kinds necessarily – where the
opposition
is clearly marked, and where it is transitional rather or chromatic.
Only the
first kind, that of marked parallelism is concerned with the structure
of verse
-- in rhythm, the recurrence of a certain sequence of rhythm, in
alliteration,
in assonance and in rhyme. Now the force of this recurrence is to beget
a
recurrence or parallelism answering to it in the words or thought and,
speaking
roughly and rather for the tendency than the invariable result, the
more marked
parallelism in structure whether of elaboration or of emphasis begets
more
marked parallelism in the words and sense. And moreover parallelism in
expression tends to beget or passes into parallelism in thought. This
point
reached we shall be able to see and account for the peculiarities of
poetic
diction. To the marked or abrupt kind of parallelism belong metaphor,
simile,
parable, and so on, where the effect is sought in likeness of things,
and
antithesis, contrast, and so on, where it is sought in unlikeness. To
the
chromatic parallelism belong gradation, intensity, climax, tone,
expression (as
the word is used in music), chiaroscuro, perhaps emphasis:
while the
faculties of Fancy and Imagination might range widely over both kinds,
Fancy
belonging more especially to the abrupt than to the transitional
class.[1]
The paragraph starts with Lowth and ends with Coleridge. The
Lowthian argument, that Hebrew poetry is of a fundamentally different
kind and
structure from European poetry, is now ingeniously turned back upon
itself. The
principle of parallelism is not peculiar to Hebrew verse,
Hopkins argues,
but is merely a special example of a structure that is in fact common
to all
poetry – and is, indeed, essential to it. The eighteenth-century
rediscovery of the structure of biblical verse was not, as Lowth and
his
successors had imagined, just the discovery of a special case, but
served to
highlight a hitherto neglected quality latent in all verse, and so
effectively
to modify poetic theory as a whole. So far from implying that there is
no
difference between the language of poetry and that of prose,
parallelism
accentuates the difference because modifications of structure are
direct
modifications of meaning:
An emphasis of structure stronger than the common construction
of sentences gives asks for an emphasis of expression stronger than
that of
common speech or writing, and that for an emphasis of thought stronger
than that
of common thought. And it is commonly supposed that poetry has tasked
the
highest powers of man’s mind: this is because, as it asked for greater
emphasis of thought and on a greater scale, at each stage it threw out
the minds
unequal to further ascent. The diction of poetry could not then be the
same
with that of prose, and again of prose we can see from the other side
that its
diction ought not to be that of
poetry...[2]
For Hopkins the rediscovery of the Bible as
‘poetry’ did not mean the progressive obliteration of formal
distinctions between verse and prose so much as a rediscovery of the meaning
behind the traditional constructs. Because of the nature of human
language,
the Coleridgean redefinition of poetry in terms of a particular complex
state of
mind had immediate structural and formal linguistic consequences.
For an illustration to Hopkins’s point we need
look no further than a sonnet he wrote some seventeen years later:
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw
fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung
bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its
name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and
spells;
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
I say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps grace: thát keeps all his goings
graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is
–
Christ – for Christ plays in ten thousand
places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father though the features of men’s
faces.
In spite of its superficially unconventional appearance, this
is a perfectly regular sonnet consisting of an octet of eight lines,
divided
into two four-line rhyming quatrains (abba, abba) and a six-line sestet
(cdcdcd). What will be unfamiliar to those coming to Hopkins for the
first time
will be a certain originality and neologism of diction (‘Selves’ and
‘justices’ as verbs) and an apparent irregularity of line-length. The
latter – Hopkins’s famous ‘sprung
rhythm’[3]
– is a direct application
of the principle of emphasis enunciated in the 1865 essay. In any poem
there is
a natural tension between the basic rhythm of the verse (which in this
case is
iambic pentamenter: the common ten-syllabic line with five stresses)
and the
normal rhythm of English speech, which moves rapidly over unstressed
syllables
and pauses, for emphasis, on the key stressed syllables of each
sentence. Hopkins has made this basic fact about English verse into a
principle of
construction. He counts only the stressed syllables. There can
be as
many unstressed syllables in the line as are necessary for the unforced
sense
desired. ‘Why do I employ sprung rhythm...?’ he wrote to Robert
Bridges in 1877, ‘Because it is the nearest to the rhythm of prose,
that
is the native and natural rhythm of speech, the least forced, the most
rhetorical and emphatic of all possible rhythms, combining, as it seems
to me,
opposite, and, one would have thought, incompatible excellencies,
markedness of
rhythm – that is rhythm’s self - and naturalness of
expression...’.[4]
It is not, he is quick
to point out, his invention: Shakespeare, Milton, and Coleridge (whose
phraseology he has again been echoing) all used it. What he has done is
state
as a principle what previous poets have practised. Thus, for instance,
the
first line of our sonnet has not ten but eleven syllables, and
since his
own accenting gives us the final two stresses, we know what the stress
pattern
must fall like this:
As kingfishers catch fire, drágonflies dráw
fláme;
For Hopkins, verse accepts, incorporates, and uses the rhythms
of prose speech. The antithesis of speech-rhythm and formal metre is
but one of
a whole series of parallelisms that are central to his poetic strategy.
This
sonnet is actually about parallelism. Each parallel is related
to the
next so as to form an ascending (or descending) scale of parallel
parallels
linking structure and meaning.
Underlying and informing the whole poem, of course, is
the parallelism inherent in nature itself: the great parallelism of the
Elijah
story. Nature and God are both separate and intimately connected:
meeting
perhaps at infinity, but in our experience only to be understood in
terms of
comparison, resemblance, contrast, and analogy (or verbal parallelism).
Thus
each sharply individuated link in the Great Chain of Being (that
ultimate
mediaeval apotheosis of parallelism) reveals both itself and its
relationship to
the whole. The essential quality of each thing, be it the vivid beauty
of
kingfishers or dragonflies in sunlight, or the noise of a falling stone
in a
well, is experienced externally. In a dramatic post-Kantian
reversal of
Thomist philosophy, ‘substance’ is known by its
‘accidents’. What each thing ‘does’ reveals its
particular ‘being indoors’. We know a thing not by its essence, but
by the way it is perceived. Individuation is defined here in terms of
communication; specifically by analogy with music, as a harmony: ‘each
tucked string tells, each hung bell’s/Bow swung finds tongue...’ The
keyword is the Hopkins coinage, ‘Selves’: used as an
Anglo-Saxon verb to mean roughly the same as the Latinate ‘to
individuate’. The Aristotelian process by which each thing strives more
and more fully to become itself is now seen in a most un-Aristotelian
way in
terms of its interaction with everything else. The mediaeval
world-picture has
been, as it were, turned inside-out. We are reminded, yet again, of the
importance of the concept of individuation to Romantics and Victorians.
Just as
words and meanings were perceived as progressively desynonymizing, so
too, as we
have been seen, the associated objects of human experience are
perceived in
ever-sharper clarity as ‘not-self’, to be appreciated fully only
when they are separated from the undifferentiated matrix of primary
perception. Part of the intense vigour and freshness of Hopkins’s
nature poetry is due
simply to the fact that it was not until the nineteenth century that
this
separation of man and nature could be said to be finally complete. It
was, in
this sense, speaking and spelling ‘myself’ almost for the
first time to Hopkins’s generation. One thinks, for instance, of
Ruskin’s endless detailed studies of rocks and plants, or Cozens’s
and Constable’s sketches of cloud-shapes. The ‘fire’ of the
kingfisher’s flight or the dragonfly’s wing is deliberately and
self-consciously subjective, dependent on the observer’s knowledge of
the
interactivity of the perception in a way that Elijah’s or the
Pentecostal
‘fire’ never were – and, for that reason, it is also more
consciously objectified: a part of nature, not of divine
intervention.
When we come to the sestet, however, this externality of
nature is paralleled by the corresponding internality of man. What
distinguishes him is not his outward appearance, but his inwardness
as a
vessel of God’s grace. The depth and complexity of this inwardness of
Christ in man for Hopkins is achieved by a piece of ‘emphasis’
almost unequalled in English literature. Sense and structure come
together in
a pun that encapsulates the entire action of the poem: ‘Christ plays in
ten thousand places...’. The focal word is, of course,
‘plays’, and its various layers of overlapping meaning reach out to
every part of the poem’s imagery. If Christ ‘plays’ in man
as a musician, it is to take up the theme of musical harmony in
creation with
which the octet was charged: ‘each tucked string tells, each hung
bell’s/Bow swung finds tongue to swing out broad its name...’. If
Christ is taken as ‘playing’ as an actor, it is to ‘act’
the just man’s part, ‘that keeps all his goings graces’. If
Christ ‘plays’ as a child might play a game, it is to express the
joy of creation as a Great Dance in which the dragonfly and the
kingfisher play
their parts – and deal out their being as a card-player deals
out a
deck of cards: seen from the back, identical, but from the front,
distinct,
individuated, and unique. If Christ is taken as ‘playing’ as a
fountain of water, we are reminded of the well[5]
wherein stones ring, the fountain in the midst of the garden, and the
river of
life – not to mention the older, more Catholic conceit where
‘Christ’s blood streams in the universe...’. If Christ
‘plays’ across the face of all nature like the subtle play of light
and shade, he is the Light of the World that catches the kingfisher and
the
dragonfly and reveals their individual
inscape.[6]
If Christ is to be found in the free
‘play’ of the mind over its subject, and thus, here, the mind of the
poet, we are brought back reflexively to the poem itself as creative
artifact. If Christ is thus held to be at ‘play’ within the pattern of
words
in language, and is even present within such an outrageous seven-fold
pun, it is
only a minute example of the involuted complexity of the ten thousand
places
where he is to be glimpsed, fleetingly as the flash of fire on a bird’s
wing in sunlight, in the creation of new meaning.
As an illustration of his own poetic principles,
Hopkins’s poem could hardly be bettered. Though it shares all the
freshness and originality of his finest work, it is also, we have
indicated, a
profoundly traditional piece. Behind it stands Keble and the whole
mediaeval
world of correspondences and the parallelisms of the Great Chain of
Being so
painstakingly reconstructed by the Tractarians; behind it, too, is
Coleridge’s sense of the ‘balance or reconciliation of opposite or
discordant qualities’, and behind him, Lowth, and the rediscovered
parallelism of the Psalms revealing the glory of God in a creation yet
transcended by, and separate from, Him.
[1]
A Hopkins Reader,
ed. John Pick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), p.80.
[2]
Ibid.,
pp.80-1.
[3]
Hopkins writes about sprung
rhythm in a letter to Everard Hopkins, 5/8 November 1885:
metre is a matter of arranging lines, rhythm is one of
arranging feet; anapaests are a rhythm, the sonnet is a metre; and so
you can
write any metre in any rhythm and any rhythm to any metre ... Every art
then and
every work of art has its own play or performance. ... [This is] the
true nature
of poetry, the darling child of speech, of lips and spoken utterance:
it must be
spoken, till it is spoken it is not performed, it does not
perform, it is
not itself. Sprung rhythm gives back to poetry its true soul and self.
As poetry
is emphatically speech, speech purged of dross like gold in the
furnace, so it
must have emphatically the essential elements of speech. Now emphasis
itself,
stress, is one of these: sprung rhythm makes verse stressy; it purges
it 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.
[4]
Ibid.,
p.96.
[5]
See for instance stanza 4
of [Hopkins’s poem] The Wreck of the Deutschland:
I steady as water in a well, to a poise, to a pane,
But roped with, always, all the way down from the
tall
Fells or flanks of the voel, a vein
Of the gospel proffer, a pressure, a principle, Christ’s
gift
A ‘voel’ is a Welsh word meaning
‘hill’. The elaborate simile links the water-level in the bottom of
the well with the entire system of the catchment-area and the resulting
underground water-table. Christ is thus seen as the hydraulic pressure
system
invisibly underlying the whole landscape.
[6]
Another Hopkins coinage.
The word is formed by analogy with ‘landscape’ to mean the
‘inner landscape’ of each individual thing, and hence its own
principle of individuation. This sonnet is about the theology of
inscape.