Hopkins' affective rhythm: Grace and intention in tension.

King, Joshua

"Why do I employ sprung rhythm at all?" the Victorian poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins asks fellow poet Robert Bridges in 1877. (1) Hopkins' question remains largely unanswered. I do not, however, intend yet another contribution to the eye-glazing debate over sprung rhythm's technical integrity, its viability versus impracticability; doing so would merely perpetuate the presumption, still active in most discussions of sprung rhythm since W. H. Gardner's foundational Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889): A Study of Poetic Idiosyncrasy in Relation to Poetic Tradition, that Hopkins poses his question in purely technical terms. (2) Unquestionably much has been and is yet to be learned from such formal scrutiny; but the assumption that analysis of sprung rhythm should begin and end at this level is entirely questionable. Hopkins answers his own question for Bridges, and his focus is not on pure technique. He champions his prosody's preservation of "the native and natural rhythm of speech" (Letters, p. 46). To presume to have captured in poetry the native character of spoken rhythm is to presume to have captured at least some of the native character of its speaker. (3) Sprung rhythm is more than a metrical novelty: in it Hopkins finds a means for apprehending and recommending to a reader kinds of affective and cognitive experience. In his earliest experiments with sprung rhythm, he connects its performance to an experience of grace. He wants to guide his anticipated reader's rhythmic voicing into an impression of grace.

My use of "anticipated" recognizes the tension between Hopkins' intention for his rhythm and his inability to ensure its fulfillment. In Hopkins' theology and prosody, the intentions--meanings, designs, purposes--of poetry and the experienced world are "uttered" by a person through intensive mental engagement and received by him as stresses of affective and cognitive energy. This process requires straining inherent qualities of the speaker and what is spoken into more vigorous states, just as potential energy is converted into kinetic: the activation of sprung rhythm's intentional tension necessitates conversion of a reader's "natural" inclinations in voicing. When Hopkins' few contemporary readers resist this conversion, he is confronted by the possibility that, rather than conveying the nature of grace, his cadences evidence his efforts to shape his reader's nature.

II. One's Own Utterances: Hopkins' Theology of Grace

"God, grant to men to see in a small thing, notices common to things great and small." (4) St. Augustine comments on our experience of time and grace, "notices" of which we encounter "in [the] small thing" of listening to ourselves speak. He recites a line of Latin verse, wondering how he measures its syllables, since each is instantly passing before he finishes hearing it. He does this, he believes, because his "'present [mental] intention (praesens intentio) [intentio: a straining, a tension]'" conveys before him a sequence of mentally preserved sensations. (5) A person's present intention can be drawn out of mental distension (distentio: a stretching asunder) between diverse impressions and toward God's eternal present through the mediation of the incarnate Word, Christ. Hopkins holds a similar conviction: humans are intended to interpret temporally and spatially distended impressions of the world's energies into spoken utterances, through which may be felt present, affective stresses of God's grace. He wrote his most systematic meditations on grace while on his 1881 Long Retreat, a thirty-day contemplation of St. Ignatius Loyola's Exercises observed by Jesuits. Yet, the meditations are Hopkins' exposition, with the aid of Roman Catholic theology, (6) of intuitions he had been working out in poetry and prose for over a decade: these temporally disparate writings can be used to interpret each other's uniting intentions.

We might begin with notes Hopkins made as an undergraduate at Oxford on the pre-Socratic philosopher, Parmenides. Parmenides believes the "is" invoked or implied by all speech acts (e.g. "blood is red") actually exists, everywhere indivisible and itself: every time we speak we can hear ourselves saying "Being is." Cotter identifies the significance of this statement for Hopkins: "The divine name of Scripture ... is, as Hopkins knew, I AM. The Lord of Abraham, Jacob, and Isaac greeted him in the pre-Socratic poem." (7) "The truth in thought is Being, [or] stress," Hopkins concludes, "and each word is one way of acknowledging being and each sentence by its copula is ["blood is red"] the utterance and assertion of it." (8)

Hopkins equates "Being" with "stress," and he figures the copula ("is") in "blood is red" as a "bridge" or "stem of stress" maintained by God's energy "between us and things to bear us out and carry the mind over" to them (Journals, p. 127). Between a person's idea--"blood"--and the essence unifying an array of distinct impressions--viscous flow, red hue, etc.--is a communicating "stem"--the "is"--upheld by the energy determining all things, God's "stress." Hopkins' paradigm is a force-field containing distinctive in-gatherings of energy that are bridged by lines of force (the "stem of stress"), all governed by an irreducible energy. He develops it out of his encounter with physics while at Oxford. (9) He joins contemporary physicists, such as James Prescott Joule and John Tyndall (whom he met), in reinforcing a theological view of nature against Darwinian accidental development by attributing all natural phenomena--heat, digestion, muscular force, consciousness--to forces held in equilibrious tension by "a single constant" but intangible "power" or "energy," often identified with God's creative activity and will.

The scientist William Rankine labeled a distinct equilibrium of stress within this universal energy an "'internal stress'" (Brown, p. 129; italics mine), which resembles "instress," Hopkins' word for a discrete unity of energy maintained by God's stress and engaged by the mind's "energy." "Indeed," Hopkins writes after recording Parmenides' statement that "IT IS" exists, "I have often felt when I have been in this mood and felt the depth of an instress or how fast the inscape holds a thing that nothing is so pregnant and straightforward to the truth as simple yes and is" (Journals, pp. 125, 127). Affective experience--"I have felt"--of an instress connects directly to "truth" (Journals, p. 125). In a note from the same time, Hopkins identifies "two kinds of [mental] energy" needed to "unlock" the instress of feeling and meaning in "successive arts" like poetry and music. The "transitional kind" actively assimilates or passively receives passing sensations; the "abiding kind" is "absorbed" by or "dwells upon" the unity obtained (Journals, pp. 125-126). The capacity to receive the affective instress is inseparable from the interpretive comparison drawing the sequences together, so Hopkins describes these energies in active and passive terms. He identifies cognitive interpretation with affective response, in defiance of the more familiar division between the two.

Hopkins' most famous coinage, "inscape," appears in the Parmenides' notes as inextricable from "instress": "the depth of an instress, or how fast [i.e. tightly, immediately] the inscape holds a thing" (Journals, p. 127; italics mine). The verb "holds" connects "inscape" with "the mind's grasp" (Journals, p. 129), which encourages the conclusion that inscape is the intention--Hopkins uses "design, pattern, or inscape" interchangeably (Letters, p. 66)--holding the "flush" of an instress purposively in tension for a beholder to grasp (Journals, p. 127). Pulled magnetically across the "stem of stress," beholder and beheld hold "fast" ("how fast the inscape holds" [p. 127]) in communicative tension as the beholder gives utterance to the inscaped instress (intention), and receives an affective--cognitive charge in his mind. The beholder instresses the energy of the beheld. Hopkins pairs states of tension with intentions--at one point he uses "extreme 'intention' or instressing" interchangeably. (10) This pairing reveals a consistent emphasis in his private, fluid uses of "instress" and "inscape." (11) "Intention" (meaning/means of understanding; purpose, design; forcible strain of the mind/will/eye upon a thing) and "intension" (straining; earnest attention or resolve; intensification of force; notable intensity or depth) derive from the same Latin verb intendere: "to stretch out or forth, to strain, direct, spread out, increase, turn one's attention, purpose, endeavour, maintain, assert" (OED). A beholder utters an inscaped instress, the intention in the tension purposively constraining an object's energy and engaging his attention.

The outer "scape" (Journals, pp. 125, 130) of an "inscape" provides the medium for uttering. A beholder's motion of vision catches a thing's "inscape" through its distinguishing "scapes" of motion, whether the "break ... of [a] wave" or millennial melt of a glacier's "opening out and reaching the plain" (Journals, pp. 223, 178). When the beholder utters and activates this intention displayed in tension, it seems to be uttering itself back at him. "A budded lime against the field wall" is interpreted as if it is tensely held in motion and made to speak by being strenuously observed: "[its] turn, pose, and counterpoint in the twigs and buds" are "the form speaking" (Journals, p. 163). On their own such "things" can but be, "the beholder / Wanting" ("Hurrahing in Harvest," ll. 11-12); present, the beholder utters as a full "name" the particular intention "each mortal thing" only "speaks and spells" by its sensible "scapes" ("As kingfishers catch fire," ll. 4,5,7). This "speaking" is progressive, as in Hopkins' poem "The Windhover": "morning's minion, king- / dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn" (ll. 1-2) are gestures with which the beholder keeps interpretive pace as he utters "Falcon." Into the beholder's strain of uttering, a startling instress of "that being [that] indoors ... dwells" ("As kingfishers," l. 6) may suddenly "flame out": "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" (ll. 9-11).

Hopkins' beholder converts energy mutely "flushing" temporal and spatial sequences into continued uttering, which in turn astonishes him with an overcharged stress (instress) of meaning, feeling, and intensity. An Augustinian dialectic of distentio ("splay" of impressions, or "scapes") and praesens intentio (engaged uttering and instressing) combines with a Coleridgean model of "the mind ... figured as a capacity for 'work' or activity" (Sermons, p. 152). (12) The engulfment of the Windhover reveals that if a beholder intensely catches and utters the intention in energy, this uttering will return upon him in an explosive instress far exceeding the original denotation--"Falcon." "Take a few primroses in a glass [i.e., strain the energy in their yellow petals] and the instress of--brilliancy, sort of stariness: I have not the right word-so simple a flower gives is remarkable" (Journals, p. 206). "Remarkable" because "flower" or "brilliancy" or "stariness" simply cannot name it. Hopkins was first seized in the Parmenides notes by the discovery that listening to one's own utterances can yield the astonishing awareness that something--God's stress and presence--simply is. "All things ... are charged with God and if we know how to touch them give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him" (Sermons, p. 195). Appropriately, "The Windhover" is dedicated "To Christ our Lord," whose presence, never explicitly mentioned in the poem, is indicated by the "billion / Times told lovelier" (ll. 10-11) explosion of "fire" that breaks from the small hawk. Instressing is a gift: "the flower gives [its] instress"; "the fire ... breaks from" the Windhover. (Sometimes "instress" simply "cannot come" [Journals, p. 228].) When so gifted, the beholder is free to intend what he receives in tension, responding "Yes" or "No" to the infinite, personal energy providing the "stem of stress" between him and things: "What I know of thee [God] I bless, / As acknowledging thy stress / On my being." (13)

When a person intends the stunning gift received through his own utterances, he begins correspondence with grace, for he is strained toward his own intention: "grace is any action, activity, on God's part by which, in creating or after creating, he carries the creature to or towards the end of its being, which is its selfsacrifice to God and its salvation" (Sermons, p. 154). In 1882, Hopkins comments on a phrase, "Man was created to praise" (Sermons, p. 122) in Ignatius' Exercises: God's utterance of himself in himself is God the Word [Christ], outside himself [it] is this world. This world then is word, expression, news of God. Therefore its end, its purpose, its purport, its meaning [its intention], is God and its life or work to name and praise him.... [T]he world, man, should after its own manner give God being in return for the being he has given it or should give him back that being he has given. (Sermons, p. 129)

All creation is God's speech act, caught and uttered back to him by humans in correspondence with his grace. The purpose of the world is therefore summed up in man: humans are "Earth's eye, tongue, or heart" ("Ribblesdale," l. 9). The transition from "eye" to "tongue" to "heart" reveals Hopkins' basic assumption: sensory "scapes" form a vast array of visible signs inviting interpretive conversion into uttered energy by humans, who then progressively intend (take to "heart") creation's and their own intention through the instresses received. By this uttering, a person participates in the "selfsacrifice" which is his "end," giving his and creation's being back to God as expressions of God. Later, Hopkins returns to this text with a revision: Man was Created--Say the man Christ was created to praise etc and so ... enter into his glory. And the other things ["on the face of the earth" (Sermons, p. 122)] as in his train[.] The love of the Son for the Father leads him to take a created nature and in that to offer sacrifice. The sacrifice might have been unbloody; by the Fall it became a bloody one. (Sermons, p. 257)

This is Hopkins' doctrine of "The Great Sacrifice": Christ is present in creation as in the "Eucharist" (pp. 196-197), since creation's beginning coincides with his going from the Father to offer himself in praise as an historical man. In 1881 Hopkins approaches this temporal paradox through the theology of Johannes Duns Scotus (1265-1308). (14) Like Scotus, he distinguishes between the order of intention, by which God wills the intentions of things in eternity, and the order of execution, which unravels and reveals them in time. God the Father's first intention in creating was Christ's human nature; God the Word (Christ) simultaneously intended to offer praise to God the Father (eventually as the man Jesus) in the yet-to-be-executed creation. So Hopkins describes "Time" as having "3 dimensions [past, present, future] and one positive pitch or direction," which ever-present intention extends--paradoxically--back toward God through Christ's historical self-sacrifice (Sermons, p. 196). Time has ever been intended to flow into God's eternal present through the Incarnation and Passion.

The "pitch" in "one positive pitch or direction" helps explain the "Fall" that drew Christ's blood. In regular usage, "pitch" can designate (a) the highness or lowness of voiced or musical sounds measured by intensity of vibration, and (b) the course of a hurled object. Both are important to Hopkins, who uses "pitch" to denote the individualizing degree of intensity with which a thing actualizes the intention--"design, pattern, or inscape" (Letters, p. 66)--of its instressed energy. "Each mortal thing" unravels from its bundled point in God's order of intention through the "three dimensions" of time, "spell[ing]" its intention through the "scapes" of its motion ("As kingfishers," 11. 3, 5, 7). When a beholder "tuck[s]" this "string" of force, it "tells" and "flings out" its "name" at a distinguishing pitch of intensity (11. 3, 4). (15) Save "dogged man," all creatures naturally utter their defining pitches ("Ribblesdale," 1. 10). A person, however, is like a string free to pitch itself with or against time's "one positive pitch," and one of the primary ways he shifts his pitch is by responding to what he receives in his utterances of creation's energy. Does he recognize and answer "yes" to the Christic "pitch" toward God--or does he answer "no"? Such is his "pitch." Christ's sacrifice became bloody because humans grew "selfbent" ("Ribbblesdale," l. 11) activating a potential--original sin--opposite to that of their natural instress. A fallen person lives "texturally at stress," straining after mere "scapes" of his own thoughts and actions against the natural "stress or energy" of his "whole being." The "strands of man" in such a person "untwist" as might the filaments of an instrument's string were it deprived of its tensile force (Sermons, pp. 136, 137; "Carrion comfort," 1.2). His pitch falls slack, flat. Christ's coming would have intensified the pitch after which all humans would already have strained, had the Fall not occurred. By the Fall his sacrifice was bloodied, forcefully exerting a redemptive "strain" in tension with humanity's self-destructive one (Sermons, p. 137).

How can God's grace pull a person into accord with Christ's pitch without violating free will? Such is Hopkins' dilemma in the 1881 meditations. He resorts to a distinction between natural inclination (the "affective will") and free intention (the "elective will"). A person's inclination is rooted in his natural instress and attracted toward several alternatives in any given situation, each of which shares some "quality and look of good," some affinity, however remote, with his true intention (Sermons, p. 152). He elects among the options his inclination singles out (pp. 151, 150). Without violating freedom of intention, "freedom of pitch" (p. 147), God can gracefully guide this person's circumstances or view so that only one object is or seems available--his elective will then "passively, ratifies the spring of the affective," "frozen in its last choice" until released from such constraints (pp. 149, 152). Such a "great change of perspective" guides a person's orienting affections, directing his freedom to interpret and utter the world and so to determine his pitch.

When he intends his otherwise distended affections into an utterance of one object, it arrestingly speaks back at him as if from "another self" (Sermons, p. 152). The closer to his true self "or bare personality" this instressed self comes the more necessary is his fusion with it. God gracefully, by the "inspiration [in-breathing] of" his "Spirit or Breath [Gr. pneuma: 'spirit' or 'breath']," inspires a person with an instress of a more perfect pitch of himself in correspondence with the "pitch" of Christ (p. 156). Magnetized, he must "ratif[y]" this "forestall" of himself. When left unconstrained, he is free to intend, affirm it, to give "this least sigh of desire," which Hopkins calls the "counter stress which God alone can feel" (pp. 155, 158). By a "continued strain and breathing on [of God's 'Spirit and Breath'] and man's responding aspiration or drawing in of breath" (p. 157), a person is lifted into a higher "pitch of being" (p. 156). "Aspiration" describes (1) the act of blowing in, (2) inhaling, and (3) exhaling, as well as (4) that of straining, sighing after something above one's self: God's breathing of graceful stress into a person by the Holy Spirit, or Christ's spirit, is simultaneously that person's breathing out to God.

A person encounters divine grace in the same way he receives the affective-cognitive stresses of his own utterances. In a sermon written near the same time as the 1881 meditations, Hopkins compares correspondence with grace over the whole stretch of history to a single person's rhythm of breathing: "for as the breath is drawn from the boundless air into the lungs and from the lungs again is breathed out and melts into the boundless air so the Spirit ["or Breath"] of God was poured out from the infinite God upon Christ's human nature and by Christ ... was breathed into his Apostles and by degrees into the millions of his Church, till the new heavens and new earth will at last be filled with it" (Sermons, p. 98). Each correspondent becomes "an AfterChrist," more and more perfectly repeating the Word who is God back to God through instressed and counter-stressed breathing; yet each is simultaneously engaging, and uttering back to himself, an intensified pitch of his own intention in Christ (p. 100).

III. "St. Dorothea": First Experiments

A basic definition of voiced poetic rhythm might be: stresses of breath perceived to be reoccurring at roughly equivalent temporal intervals. (16) Although complete alignment of this definition with Hopkins' theology would be strained, two connections are evident. Just as Voicing poetic rhythm punctuates the flow of speech with salient stresses, correspondence with grace converts energy flushing distended impressions into stresses of meaning and feeling received within one's own utterances. And Hopkins depicts the grace-inspired development of pitch as a rhythm of breathing governed by such intensified stresses. I must be careful not to represent this rhythm as more "graceful" than it is. A person responds to God's inspiration through "expiration": correspondence with grace is a form of death, at least to one's former pitch of self (Sermons, p. 156). Such assent finds its summit in Christ's own expiring breath. Inspired by God's "arch and original Breath [the Holy Spirit]," a person is drawn to participate in the rhyming counter stress: Christ's "body of lovely Death" ("Wreck," ll. 194, 196).

Hopkins' explication of grace in the 1881 meditations has already begun to suggest its affinity with the sprung rhythm he began developing fifteen years earlier. He first experiments with the rhythm in "Lines for a Picture of St. Dorothea--Dorothea and Theophilus" (c. 1866), the second of at least three versions of a poem written between 1864 and 1868/1871. (17) In revision, Hopkins departs from the complex theological metaphors of slightly earlier poems, trying to convey the affective quality of correspondence with grace by anticipating a reader's voicing. "Barnfloor and Winepress" (1864-65) is an example of the earlier poems, capturing grace-given participation in Christ's self-sacrifice in a tight conceit. Here is the conclusion of "Barnfloor": We scarcely call that [Eucharist] banquet food, But even our Saviour's and our blood, We are so grafted on His wood. (ll. 30-33)

This closing tercet stands out in a poem of couplets and extends the expected number of total lines from 32 to 33, numerologically embossing the already highly wrought typological conceit for the Eucharist. Worshippers commune with Christ through his sacrificial redemption in line 33--the age at which Christ was crucified--in a triplet recalling the Trinity. This is a declaration of grace through elaborate figures and formal allusions.

Hopkins' "St. Dorothea" poems, which he begins in the same period as "Barnfloor," are based on the martyrdom of St. Dorothea (c. 303) under the Roman governor Sapricius. According to tradition, a lawyer, present at the scene, named Theophilus mockingly requested that Dorothea send him apples and roses from Paradise. Immediately before the execution, an angel appeared, delivering the requested flowers and fruit to Theophilus. He confessed Christ and was also martyred (Works, pp. 256-257). Hopkins' poems recast the angel as Dorothea herself, so that the miracle takes place after her martyrdom: she reappears from Paradise, bestows the miraculous gifts upon Theophilus, and vanishes "into the partless air" ("St. Dorothea [c]," l. 30). The beautiful apparition that she presents is the result of her consent to a better, self-sacrificial pitch of herself in Christ. The "St. Dorothea" poems deny what "Barnfloor" assumes: figures and descriptions cannot be the final means of expressing God's grace, since it is experienced as a startling arrest of time and sensation, as is dramatically the case with the vanishing-and-reappearing St. Dorothea. Every effort to hold her transformation by grace in perceptual focus is frustrated. At last "We see / Nor fruit, nor flowers, nor Dorothy" ("For a Picture of St. Dorothea [a]," ll. 23-24).

If a poem cannot figure or imitate grace, perhaps it can intimate the emotive energy of this intangible experience by intensifying a reader's vocal performance of rhythm. (As early as 1864 Hopkins thinks of poetry as an "uttered" art [Journals, p. 38].) Features of sprung rhythm faintly surface in Hopkins' second version, "Lines for a Picture of St. Dorothea" (c. 1866). He disrupts the rhythm of the first version to encourage a reader to intone with expressive intensifications of stress the lines containing St. Dorothea's declaration of the fruits of grace and Theophilus' astonished response. Stanza three exemplifies the change. Hopkins replaces several originally iambic tetrameter lines with trochaic ones and retards their flow by engrafting extra spondaic strength. I have placed the original (left) and revised (right) stanzas next to each other. My scansions follow Hopkins' MS marks, and I have bracketed his spondaic intensifications: (1864, "Dorothea [a]," ll. 13-18) (c. 1866, "Dorothea [d]," ll. 13-18) But these were found in the But' they [came' from'] the South', East and South Where Winter is the clime Where winter-while is all forgot.-- forgot.-- The dewdrop on the larkspur's The dew-bell in the mallow's mouth mouth O should it then be quenched Is' it [quen'ched] or not'? not? In starry water-meads they drew In starry, starry shire it grew: These drops: which be they? Which' is [it', star'] or dew'?-- stars or dew?

In a letter to Robert Bridges, Hopkins cites two lines from Shakespeare to justify "the peculiar beat" that he has "introduced into St. Dorothea," explaining that Shakespeare retains four beats per line, even while reducing the number of syllables--eight, or at least seven--tetrameter normally requires (Letters, p. 32). The two lines from Shakespeare contain six syllables, as do all the lines--the first, fourths and sixth--that Hopkins compresses, thus indicating the principle according to which he revises them. Their six-syllable lengths would normally encourage reading them as trimeters or even dimeters. Hopkins' spondaic scansions, however, grant each four beats. If one follows his unnatural scansion, the "sprung" middle of "But' they [came' from'] the South'" lends to the whole line an impression of length and strength equal to the former "But these were found in the East and South" (my bolded scansion marks). The line's intention--meaning, governing design--is voiced in tension, as sequential elements (syllables) give way (by accentual strength) to a more concentrated affective charge. And the graphic scansions are a medium for the energetic conversion, asking the anticipated reader to strain his breathed stresses at line center in order to convey Dorothea's dramatic challenge to her executioners to account for her miraculous retrievals. Of the seven lines that Hopkins so revises, six are in the three stanzas spoken by St. Dorothea, and the remaining one is attributed by sense to Theophilus. Stunned, he wonders if she delivered the roses and apples herself, or if her "writ" was "Ser'ved [by 'mess]enger'?" (ll. 27-28). Hopkins wants his anticipated reader to emphasize the line so as to dramatize the impact of the heavenly apparition upon Theophilus. In all the sprung versions, Theophilus self-sacrificially counter-stresses God's grace, calling for his own martyrdom after witnessing Dorothea's miracle: "Proconsul! Is Sapricius near?- / I find another Christian here" (ll. 41-42).

IV. Poetry's True Soul and Self: A Theological Prosody

"St. Dorothea" reveals that Hopkins' sprung rhythm had long "been haunting" his "ear" before he "realized it on paper" in "The Wreck of the Deutschland" (1875-76). (18) The affinity of his prosody to his theology of grace is unmistakable in his developed principles of sprung rhythm, and it will help to review them before turning to "The Wreck." My interest is not in whether his rhythm actually works--which has been, and may always be, contested--but in the thought sustained by his theorization and (attempted) practice of it. When explaining sprung rhythm to R.W. Dixon, Hopkins makes what seems to be a merely self-serving remark: "nature even without help seems to prompt it of itself" (p. 21). Read in light of the emphasis Hopkins gives to natural inclination (the "affective will" [Sermons, p. 152]) in his theology of grace, however, this statement acquires greater depth. We remember that when facing the "dark and disputed matter" of God's mastery over a person's freedom of pitch in the 1881 meditations (Sermons, p. 150), Hopkins distinguishes between natural inclination (affective will) and free intention (freedom of pitch, or elective will): God directs a person's freedom to interpret and utter experience--to pitch his intention--by affectively inclining his "perspective" toward an object, which may be a better-pitched version of himself (Sermons, p. 152). A person inhabits this delimiting perspective according to a prepossessed disposition, which Hopkins early identifies as "a passion or prepossession or enthusiasm" (Journals, p. 125; italics mine). This prepossession is a bundle of affective investments that gives a person's inclination (affective will) local and historical character, and which is provided by his belief system, social values (e.g. "the Roman sense of duty to the father ... or the Chinese awe for parents" [Journals, p. 123]), and--most importantly--particular language.

A person's lingual prepossessions are affective-cognitive fusions--made by him and previous speakers--with objective realities across the "stem of stress." Prepossessions are therefore contingent upon personal and collective shifts in usage, "evolv[ing] in the man and secondly in man historically" (Journals, p. 125). Each utterance and each poem "representing real things" that a speaker makes or receives is "flush[ed]" and "penetrat[ed]" with the feeling and meaning of the realities represented (pp. 125-126). An expression's prepossession resembles the "flush and foredrawn [i.e., "firmly held"]," "the depth of an [inscaped] instress." It abides in the expressions just as potential energy is stored in an instressed body (p. 127). It therefore "bears a valuable analogy to the soul," since it is the instress of experience that words and poems discharge into an utterer's mind (p. 125). Hopkins' rhythm substantiates this valuable analogy. "Sprung rhythm," Hopkins informs his brother Everard, "gives back to poetry its true soul and self." (19) To receive an instress a person engages and utters the intention-in-its-tension; similarly, lingual prepossessions are activated and released as affective-cognitive charges by straining upon the "laws" or "inscapes" inherent in English speech. (20) By what inscape--intentional tension--does sprung rhythm restore to poetry its "soul"? Stress: 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. But this it does by a return from that regular emphasis towards, not up to the more picturesque irregular emphasis of talk--without however becoming itself lawlessly irregular. (Brown, p. 317)

English, Hopkins believes, innately surrenders spoken "meaning" and feeling to the governance of one of its "essential elements": "stress or emphasis" (Journals, p. 270). This potentially "lustrous" intention-governing-tension escapes attention because it is so freely exercised in irregular "talk" and so dulled in conventional poetic rhythm. Sprung rhythm will "purge" the "impurities" of talk and poetry, bringing spoken stress to a "livelier" pitch of intensity. It "is in fact the native rhythm of the words used bodily imported into verse," by which the soul-like prepossessions--"flushed" through the sequentially experienced, written "bod[y]" of a page--are "bodily" vivified in utterances (Letters, p. 46). As in "St. Dorothea," Hopkins assumes that graphic marks are but media for instressing one's own utterances; he writes to Bridges: "you must not slovenly read [a sprung poem] with the eyes, but with your ears, as if the paper were declaiming it at you" (pp. 51-52). He shares this valorization of speech with linguists whose works he read, and with many other nineteenth-century poets. (Wordsworth: "What is the Poet? ... He is a man speaking to men.") (21)

Sprung rhythm relies upon being a "natural" intensification of a heretofore tamely realized intention-governing-tension, stress, in English speech and "poetry in general." Hopkins searches assiduously for examples of this amplification having cropped up "of itself," even if unacknowledged, in Shakespeare, Milton, "Nursery Rhymes, Weather Saws, and Refrains" and, as a fully intended verse form, in Anglo-Saxon poetry (Letters, pp. 46, 45). (22) Yet, in what way does Hopkins believe this purposive tension to be present in English speech, and how will sprung rhythm strain it to a pitch? He looks to Shakespeare, we remember, to justify his first sprung experimentation in "St. Dorothea." A line's syllabic number can be curtailed, he ventures, so long as its accentual strength compensates the loss. This becomes a governing principle in the "Author's Preface" (c. 1884), which he wrote to guide friends and future readers in performing his poems (Hurley, pp. 491-493): a single "principal stress" begins each rhythmic unit, and potentially any number of non-beating syllables follow, normally "one, two, or three" (Poetical Works, pp. 45, 47).

This explanation is last in a series of self-contradictory statements made by Hopkins to Bridges and Dixon. Here he proposes a falling scansion for sprung rhythm (beginning on the primary stress), but he earlier argues for a rising one (ending on the stress) or a mix between the two (Hurley, pp. 491-493). These fluctuating scansions suggest his uncertainty over the intention in sprung rhythm's tension, since our scanning of a meter follows our perception of it. Yet, all his recommendations aim to elucidate "convenien[tly]"--rather than capture exactly--the "essence" of sprung rhythm as explained to Dixon: "This then is the essence of sprung rhythm: one stress makes one foot, no matter how many or few the [non-beating] syllables" (Poetical Works, p. 45; Letters to Dixon, p. 23). I remain skeptical of Edward Stephenson's final account of sprung rhythm, but he offers a convincing narrative for Hopkins' use of varying scansions to bring out the intention in sprung rhythm's tension: "I suspect that he began composing in sprung rhythm without regard to placement of bar divisions [sprung units or feet]" (p. 96), simply judging a rhythmic unit to be "set in motion" by a primary stress and to continue--across varying numbers of non-beating syllables--until the next. (I join Stephenson in using falling scansion, since this is Hopkins' final recommendation; I am aware, however, that there are many subtler rhythmic variations within this major movement.) (23)

Sprung rhythm's intention-governing-tension--"one [primary] stress makes one foot, no matter how many or few the syllables"--has two intensifying features: (1) each rhythmic unit is "equally long or strong" no matter its syllable count (Poetical Works, p. 116); (2) as a result, (theoretically) any number of primary stresses or beats may follow each other. Hopkins is aware that he is violating what he calls "common rhythm," the syllable-stress meter dominant in English since at least Chaucer, according to which there can be no more than two syllables between beats, and no more than two beats running. (24) Ironically, Hopkins defends his "violations" by appealing to two preconditions that the modern prosodist, Derek Attridge, has identified for English syllable-stress verse. The first Attridge labels "stress-timing": heavier breathed pulses tend "to space themselves out at equal intervals ([caused by] the effort made by our [vocal and pulmonary] muscles to function rhythmically as they produce stresses)," which tendency "override[s]" the weaker "pressure from [unstressed] syllables to maintain their own rhythmic identity." The second we might call "stress-grouping": non-beating syllables seem linked in pronunciation and meaning to the beats preceding or following them, since the muscles voicing beats use weaker syllables "to build up to the burst of [stressed] energy" and "subside" from it. (25) In a letter to Dixon, Hopkins identifies and provides examples for both tendencies (p. 22). He does not share Attridge's interest in identifying rhythm's physiological motivations, but he, like Attridge, describes the reader's necessary adjustments to keep stress-timing as energetic exertions. (26)

Syllable-stress verse achieves its "commonplace emphasis" by matching stress-timing with easily equalized numbers of syllables (one or two) between stresses: e.g., Pope's "The Sound must seem an Echo to the Sense." Hopkins would have his reader overturn this "predictability" by pronouncing syllables between primary stresses at "approximately equal" lengths determined by the strengths of the stresses alone. (27) Pronunciation of the following epithet for Christ in "The Wreck," for example, depends upon intensifying stress-timing to speed the voice over unstressed syllables in the first and second rhythmic units and hold it slightly longer on the strong stress of the third, so that all feel equal in strength and length: "[sup.1]Miracle-in | [sup.2]-Mary-of | [sup.3]-flame" (l. 268). Stress-grouping gives Hopkins support for his second violation. Like Attridge, he deduces from this principle that a single stress can form a rhythmic unit; the reader's voice, Hopkins argues, makes up lost syllables by dwelling on the stress (Letters to Dixon, p. 22). Any number of primary stresses should be able to follow one another. In "Hurrahing in Harvest" he uses this capability to evoke the astounding surge of energy in a beholder's "heart" when magnetized to Christ's pitch: "The [sup.1]heart | [sup.2]rears | [sup.3]wings | [sup.4]bold and | [sup.5]bo1der / And hurls for him [the beholder[, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet" ("Hurrahing in Harvest," ll. 13-14; additional bolded stress marks my own).

Hopkins informs Dixon that this second capacity earned sprung rhythm its name: "the word Sprung which I use for this rhythm means something like abrupt and applies by rights only where one stress follows another running, without syllable between" (Letters to Dixon, p. 23). Sprung rhythm is intended to spring. One year before beginning "The Wreck" and only a few after experimenting with sprung intensifications in "St. Dorothea," Hopkins records his memory of St. Winefred's well: "The strong unfailing flow of the water ... took hold of my mind," "so naturally and gracefully uttering the spiritual reason of its being," and "the spring in place leading back the thoughts by its spring in time to its spring in eternity: even now the stress and buoyancy and abundance of the water is before my eyes" (Journals, p. 261). According to legend, the well first sprang where St. Winefred, out of allegiance to Christ, resisted a Welsh chieftain's advances and was beheaded: Hopkins, taken "hold of" by the "stress" of the "unfailing flow of the water," "utter[s]" the "spiritual reason [intention] of" the spring's "being." This utterance springs back at him as a "spring in time" open to "its spring in eternity" through Christ's ever-present pitch.

Sprung rhythm intensifies the stress "native" to English so that the "soul" of speech might be "gracefully" uttered through the "spring" of breathed energy. Within the "small thing" of listening to oneself utter a sprung poem, there may be "notices" of the self-sacrificial intention of all human utterances. Recall Hopkins' instructions to Bridges: "you must not slovenly read [a sprung poem] with the eyes but with your ears, as if the paper were declaiming it at you" (p. 52). (He seems to have envisioned all his sprung poems being read aloud by individuals in private: "with a companion the eye and ear are for the most part shut and instress cannot come" [Journals, p. 228].) To do Hopkins' poem "justice," Bridges must attend to "the paper['s]" graphic "scapes"--its written words and scored scansion--which will guide him in offering his voice to its prepossessed affective-cognitive energy. Once Bridges' breathing has revived the poem with "its true soul and self," it will release charges of meaning and feeling at him. Yet this ignited "passion or prepossession" is a potential of Bridges' own speech, so that, in giving himself to the uttering of the poem, he will be startled, as it were, by himself at intensified pitch--much as when, suspended in time by the inspired stresses of grace, a person feels addressed by a higher-pitched version of himself. And, repeatedly arrested by his pulses of breath, Bridges may be further opened to the sense that something simply is.

Sprung rhythm might seem to sacrifice semantic meaning to mere energetic breathing in its confession of grace. This appears to be Brown's view: "Meaning itself is sacrificed, given back to God. Sprung rhythm ... gives primacy to the Kristevan 'semiotic' of bodily pulsations, as it is registered in stress, rhythm, and alliteration, over the 'symbolic,' the prescribed meanings of conventional linguistic signs" (p. 319). Hopkins himself, however, is unaware of having converted sprung stresses into a-logical, somatic pulses. "Be pleased, reader," he writes in his note to "The Wreck," to "let the stress be made to fetch out"--draw forth; clarify; develop and display (OED)--"both the strength of the syllables and the meaning and feeling of the words" (Poetical Works, p. 118; italics mine). Of course, Hopkins' statement assumes that spoken rhythm is, at a basic level, affective in itself. Attridge believes the arrangement of words in poetic meter engages "the fundamental modes of [vocal] energy expenditure that characterizes emotional and attitudinal conditions"--that is, "smoothly and steadily, restlessly, hesitantly, explosively" (p. 296). Asked to press boulder against boulder of stress or skim over wide, unstressed stretches, the anticipated performer of a sprung poem must reconcile strength and length by emphasizing, resting, and gathering pace. This vocal activity sustains a "substratum of affective energy" (p. 298).

Yet, all rhythmic energy acquires its specific meaning from semantic context: an "abrupt" rhythmic shift can signal fulfilled as easily as disappointed expectations. Sprung rhythm's full coordination of poetic stress with instresses of meaning and feeling depends upon the Augustinian dialectic between engaged intention and sequential distension that it shares with Hopkins' theology of grace. Douglas Oliver's discussion of poetic stress indicates why this might be. (28) Oliver wants to capture a paradox. All that gives a stress its quality--duration of its emphasized vowel; change in intonation and loudness; prominence granted its word by context; these qualities in previous syllables, words, phrases and lines; conceptualized emotions thus far conveyed (i.e., "longing"); affective impressions of sonic and rhythmic patterns, which in turn link these impressions to developing concepts-all this either has or has not yet happened when we feel the pulse. (Hopkins discusses many of these elements shortly before writing "The Wreck.") (29) "Our sense of poetic stress arises from our conscious belief," Oliver concludes, that all these components have just unified "outside time in a sort of minor, eternal present, a trembling instant which half stands still, partly resisting the flow" of the poem by which it is created (pp. 112, 19).

In all this, Oliver draws from the passage in the Confessions to which I have often given notice. St. Augustine believes that he can measure the incessantly-ceasing-to-be syllable lengths or quantities (basic units of Latin meter) of a Latin verse because his mind remembers impressions they have left ("a present of things past"), attends to them at present ("a present of things present"), and anticipates their continuation presently (a "present of things future") (XI.xx.26.239). Paul Ricoeur finds an active-passive dynamic in this triple-present most evident in the anchoring present attention, which is at once a "point of passage" and an active "intention" that "persists" and "relegates" the passage of expectation into memory. The mind paradoxically "'distends' itself," stretching behind and before, "as it 'engages' itself" intentionally in the present (Ricoeur, pp. 19, 21). Like Hopkins, Augustine finds in mental distension notices of the Fall ("texturally at stress" [Sermons, p. 136], stretched apart by one's own impressions and expectations), and, in increasingly arrested mental intention, increasing openness to the ever-present end and design of created time, the Word or Christ (XI.xxix.39.247).

Surely Hopkins was aware of this famous passage: he quotes more often from Augustine than from any other church father, cites De Musica when lecturing on rhythm, and distinguishes between three similar modes in the mind's temporal engagement). (30) Yet, any direct adaptation is less illuminating than the clarity that Augustine's temporal paradox (and Oliver's application of it to stress) brings to similar dynamics in Hopkins' theology and prosody. The resemblance is transparent in Hopkins' note on the mind's "two kinds of energy" quoted earlier, in which he first mentions "prepossession[s]." The "successive arts" "exact" the mind's "transitional" and "abiding" energies, both of which are simultaneously active and passive. "The deeper ... the prepossession flushes the matter" of a poem, the more necessary is the "power of comparison [and] ... capacity for receiving that synthesis of (either successive or spatially distinct) impressions which gives us the unity with the prepossession conveyed by it" (Journals, pp. 125-126). Sprung rhythm requires a reader's "power of comparison," straining forward (expecting) and backward (remembering), to convert distended "impressions" into an uttered "unity." This conversion "convey[s]" a present instress--"passion or prepossession or enthusiasm"--to his simultaneously increasing "capacity for receiving." A sprung poem keeps a reader in mental, emotional, and vocal tension to communicate its intention (design, meaning) in affective bursts. At the most persistent level of reading, the reader converts all that informs a stress--developing impressions of duration, intonation, and loudness; building emotional connotation and semantic meaning--into a charged pulse of breath, "a minor, eternal present ... partly resisting the flow," by which he receives poetry's soul.

V. Reading Aright: Sprung Performance in "The Wreck of the Deutschland"

Hopkins spiritually qualifies the reader's conversion of a poem's flow into sprung stresses when he requests that Bridges reread his first sprung poem, "The Wreck of the Deutschland" (1875-76): "I think if you will study what I have here said [about the rhythm] you will be much more pleased with it and may I say? converted to it.... You are my public and I hope to convert you" (Letters, p. 46; italics mine). Twice repeated by a poet unsparing in correcting the letters of friends, this slippage between conversion to sprung rhythm and conversion to Catholicism could hardly be accidental. When Hopkins writes this letter in 1877, his only "public" practically is Bridges; but in 1876 he was still holding out hope for a larger one: he tried (unsuccessfully) to get "The Wreck" published in the Month, a Jesuit journal. And ten years later (two before his death), he is still poignantly committed to the idea that poetry must influence: "by being known it works, it influences, it does its duty, it does good" (Letters, p. 231). As Jill Muller argues, "The Wreck" might be understood as Hopkins' earnest response to calls by Cardinals Newman and Manning "for a new Catholic literature to celebrate and promote the restoration of the [Roman] Church in England." (31) It closes by modeling a prayer for an imagined English audience: "[We ask for] Our King back, Oh, upon English souls! (l. 276).

We should not be surprised if a poem with evangelical motives tries to show its reader how to read. "The Wreck" is an elegiac ode for five German Franciscan nuns who perished in the 1875 wreck of the Deutschland off England's coast, and it focuses on one nun's plea to Christ before she drowns. She instresses and so fully consents to the pitch of Christ amidst the pounding storm that she incarnates him in her dying breaths: "But here [in the nun's cry] was heart-throe, birth of a brain, / Word, that heard and kept thee [Christ] and uttered thee outright" (ll. 239-240). The ode has two parts (stanzas 1-10, 11-35), each of which has a focalizing stanza sequence: 4-8 and 24-28. Each sequence narrates an instress of grace and guides the reader in performing sprung rhythm so as to convey this instress. The first--about a generic person's response to grace--does this by means of a dramatic enjambment. Stanza 8 opens with an exclamation that completes a sixteen-line sentence running through stanzas 6 and 7. (My scansion follows Hopkins' prescriptions in the poem's preface; to distinguish my markings from Hopkins', I use bolded letters for primary stress; grave accents (') mark strong but non-beating stresses.) (32) 7 The dense and the driven Passion, and frightful sweat; Thence the discharge of it, there its swelling to be, Though felt before, though in high flood yet What none would have known of it, only the heart, being hard at bay, 8 Is out with it! Oh, We lash with the best or worst Word last! How a lush-kept plush-capped sloe Will, mouthed to flesh-burst, Gush!--flush the man, the being with it, sour or sweet Brim, in a flash, full!--Hither then, last or first, To hero of Cavary, Christ,'s (33) feet-- Never ask if meaning it, wanting it, warned of it--men go.

The pronoun "it" in the first line of stanza 8 directs the reader to a subject identified thirteen lines before in stanza 6--that is, "Stroke and a stress that stars and storms deliver" (l. 45). Five iterations of this pronoun ("it") in stanzas 6 and 7 keep the memory straining back. The nature of this "Stroke and a stress" is itself revealed two stanzas earlier as the "pressure" of grace provided by "Christ's gift" and felt in creation (ll. 45, 32). Even as the stanzas strain memory back, they stretch expectation forward, since the swelling sentence begins in stanza 6 by promising to reveal the oft-overlooked origin of "Christ's gift": "Not out of his bliss / Springs the stress felt / Nor first from heaven (and few know this) / Swings the stroke dealt" (ll. 41-44). Staccato phrases in stanza 7 uncover the source: "the dense and driven Passion, and frightful sweat; / Thence the discharge of it, there its swelling to be" (ll. 53, 54)--instead of the full stop that one expects after this disclosure, however, another string of clauses follows, in which the outpouring of grace in the Passion is depicted as "in high flood yet." At last, strained memory and yet-unrelieved anticipation rush over the severe enjambment and release in a burst: the "heart ... Is out with it!" (ll. 56-57). The spring of blood from Christ's "heart" when pierced by the soldier's lance--the discharge of the stress of grace--coincides with a present individual's feeling of this pressure in his "heart."

Were this first line read in isolation, its opening beat--"out"--would hardly arrest a reader's attention. The constant exercise of "the power of comparing" things past, passing, and anticipated in the preceding stanzas, however, gives this beat a great store of force: syntactic (the sudden completion of a sentence several stanzas long); semantic ("out" is the linchpin in a phrase whose meaning and function is release); rhythmic (the enjambment severs a strong syntactic expectation after a longer vowel ["bay"], which causes the voice to pause before it can deliver the stress on "out"); emotional (the diction and the constant deferrals have created a strong feeling of pent-up pressure)--all this springs into an instant impossibly full. A few years before writing these lines, Hopkins describes the "strong emotion" that overtook him when hearing a description of Christ's agony at Gethsemane, likening it to the "pierc[ing]" of "a sharp knife ... pressed" against the skin without cutting until suddenly jolted, "a force which was gathered before it was discharged" (Journals, p. 195). The discharge of "out" depends on the reader's previously distended mental strain. And this present burst remains conceptually linked with the original "discharge" of the Passion that was, just before, "in high flood yet" (ll. 54, 55). By its "spring in time" the sprung beat leads "back the thoughts ... to" the simultaneous "spring in eternity" and in history of Christ's self-sacrificial "gift" at the pressure point of the Passion.

"Gush" and the other primary stresses in stanza 8 are reinforced by the dense alliterative and assonantal pattern they emphasize: "lush," "plush," "gush," "flush"; "lash," "flash"; perhaps even "best, "last," "worst," "burst." The resulting "phonetic rhythm" is a concrete example of how Hopkins works to convey the prepossessed "meaning and feeling" of an utterance through sprung stresses (Plotkin, p. 134). Plotkin notes the similarity between the "lush"-"flush" series (and, less directly, "lash," "flash") and the many word lists in Hopkins' journals, in which he proposes a spoken phonetic-semantic root for the member words, from which root he then infers an "'original meaning,'" "'common idea,'" or "'original connection'" (p. 100). In an early "phonosemantic group," for example, Hopkins postulates an "original meaning"--"to strike, rub, particularly together," including the "sound" and fragmented products of this action--that the consonantal cluster "Gr" flushes through a series of words: Grind, gride [scrape along], gird, grit, groat [crumb], grate" (pp. 74, 73). Hopkins believes all utterances, even when not "onomatopoetic" as in this example, can transmit their "souls" through their phonosemantic character.

A sprung poem, however, needs to "law out" or "inscape" this instressed potential, and word lists are not poetry. Plotkin argues that Hopkins finds inspiration for answering this challenge in Lectures on the English Language by the American linguist George P. Marsh, which he read shortly before writing "The Wreck." Marsh posits the "'natural'" "embodiment of characteristics proper to languages like English in principles of poetic construction." For example, he traces the use of alliteration by "'the Gothic races'" to the fact that alliterating words in these languages usually share meanings, so that alliteration lends "'a keen pungency'" to poetic lines. Hopkins follows Marsh in discerning such "natural" and native linguistic laws at work in Anglo-Saxon poetry, which, of course, he will later claim as a precedent for sprung rhythm (Plotkin, pp. 126-127; Journals, p. 284). Marsh closes by advocating fresh poetic exploitation of the resources inherent in English. Hopkins' use of strong stresses in stanza 8 to "detach" the phonosemantic "inscape" uniting words and convey "it to" the reader's "mind" (Journals, p. 289) indicates that he has responded to Marsh's appeal. A common idea or preposession--Plotkin suggests "extremity and its expression in explosion" (p. 122)--"flushes" through the stanza's phonosemantic particles: primary stresses fetch it out by momentarily holding an anticipated reader's attention on "lush" and "plush," so that, as the stanza continues, luxurious juiciness flows into its "Gush!" and outward "flush." The instressing occurs in intention-(meaning, design)-generating-tension with the "forward movement of narrative or description," mounting "phonetic and phonosemantic coherence upon and across the semantic linearity of the text" (Plotkin, p. 114). Not until the final lines is this instressed "Gush" fully extended back toward its source in the "thence" of the Passion's "discharge" ("Hither then ... / To hero of Calvary, Christ,'s feet--/ ...--men go"), so that, at the stanza's closing rest, the reader is once more led to the previously instressed "spring" between stanzas 7 and 8. The whole sequence of stanzas is an exercise in activating the intention in sprung rhythm's tension. The stanzas work to coordinate a reader's experience of the "eternal present[s]" in his own breathed stresses of meaning and feeling with a generic "man['s]" instress of Christ's ever-present redemptive pitch.

At the ode's climax in stanza 28, the speaker imaginatively transports himself into the mind of the drowning nun to witness her instressing of Christ. His animated but vicarious apprehension of Christ's redemptive pitch through the nun provides an exemplary parallel to the reader's intended role: to activate the rhythmically mediated impression of grace. Another aspect of sprung rhythm's intentional tension comes to the fore: visual description and graphic signs are media for--and thus secondary to--energetic uttering and instressing. In stanza 24, the speaker records the nun's urgent call to Christ--she "Was calling 'O Christ, Christ, come quickly'" (l. 191). Over the next three stanzas the speaker strains to catch the intention of her invocation. Was she eager to imitate Christ? Did she hope for eternal comfort? Was she filled with ardor for the Passion? At last he concludes in stanza 27: "it was not these" (l. 209). Having raised the reader's anticipation for the answer, the speaker projects himself into the nun's mind as she cries out amidst the "beat of endragoned seas," so as to "gather" what she witnesses (ll. 209, 216, 215): But how shall I ... Make me room there; Reach me a ... Fancy, come faster-- Strike you the sight of it? look at it loom there, Thing that she ... There then! the Master, Ipse, the only one, Christ, King, Head: He was to cure the extremity where he had cast her; Do, deal, lord it with living and dead; Let him ride, her pride, in his triumph, despatch and have done with his doom there. (ll. 217-224; my stress markings added)

As the speaker strains to discern what the nun has instressed, the vivid imagery of earlier stanzas recedes. Instead, grasping demonstratives--"make me room there"; "look at it loom there"; "There then!"; "have done with his doom there"--cooperate with the trailing ellipses to give the impression of a perspective thrown out of focus by whirling wind and pashing wave. In contrast to the visually suggestive "endragoned seas" of the previous stanza, the diction is abstract, made up of conceptual nouns (Thing, the living, dead), incomplete indefinites ("a ..."), indefinite definites (the sight of it, the extremity), and unspecific pronouns (it). For lack of concrete description, the lines must reveal their intention to the reader in the tension of his uttering. The speaker endeavors to name the "it" looming in line 219, but arrives only at an elusive designation in line 220: "Thing." His conjecture and its beat attenuate across two unstressed syllables, and the ellipsis guides the reader's voice into momentary silence. This trailing speculation suddenly breaks into a declaration as the ellipsis runs into the next beat, signaling the moment of fulfillment: "Thing that she ... There then!" Recognition of the "it" issues in a stream of epithets: "There then! the Master, / Ipse, the only one, Christ, King, Head." Curtailed syntax hurries the last three beats together in cooperation with the excited release from pent-up expectation; yet, each of these pulsed breaths requires the reader to pause before and after, so that each appears to halt the line's flow forcefully. In the absence of descriptive imagery, the reader's feeling of being arrested by his own declaration of Christ must convey the impression of Christ's ever-present pitch as it has been instressed by the nun and relayed by the speaker. "Right" reading of sprung rhythm is epitomized in the nun: She "Read the unshapeable shock night [i.e., the storm]" as an uttered instress of "him that present and past ... are word of, worded by," and offered as her expiring counter stress the "Word ... uttered" (l. 227, italics mine; ll. 229-230, 240).

VI. Against our Inclination: Grace and Intention in Tension

Sprung rhythm is intended "to explode" (Letters, p. 90) in breathed pulses of meaning and feeling by intensifying potentials "native" to an English reader's voice: stress-timing and grouping; the ability of stress to open out trembling, eternal presents in the flow of speech; the capacity of these arresting presents to convey affective-cognitive "souls" by activating phonosemantic inscapes. Hopkins' rhythm manifestly is what all prosodies are implicitly: an ontological enterprise (in this case nationalistically inflected). (34) For explicitly theological reasons, sprung rhythm follows an intuition recently expressed by Simon Jarvis: "Could we really say what a stress is,... we might be able to understand a single affective duration not as the endless repetition of an instantaneous passage from being into nothing, but as a real experience, the foundation of any possible ontology. In the printed melody of voice is heard, in the voice of the eloquent poet is read, news that such experience is." (35)

A basic intention of Hopkins' theologically ontological prosody--to return the reader's performing voice at him from the page--is surprisingly similar to the understanding of voicing that Margaret Linley discovers in Victorian poets who, unlike Hopkins, succeeding in publishing. "The human voice thus displaced" onto the printed page "only to be translated and re-embodied both in printed signs of voice"--one thinks of Hopkins' scored scansions--"and in the oral reading process might seem disconcertingly like a tool whose function is to ensure that humans are--and this is dehumanizing--more like themselves." (36) Linley's language ("tool whose function") exaggerates the manipulative designs of this voicing, but her description brings into stark relief Hopkins' effort to arrest a reader with an intensified, better pitch of self through performance of a poem. A question arises that has been just beneath the surface all along: does Hopkins too easily equate sprung rhythm's intention with the tension it introduces into a reader's "natural" speech inclinations? "Native" and "natural" ascribe inclinations to all English speakers, apparently, only to strain these tendencies past their habitual exercise. Hopkins confronts the tension between his intention for sprung rhythm and his reader's inclinations when his few actual readers ignore or repudiate his designs for sprung poems.

As is well known, outside of family members and a few close friends, such as Bridges and Dixon, no contemporaries read Hopkins' poetry. (37) Yet, this lack of readership is due in large part to his refusal of repeated attempts by Bridges and Dixon to publish his poems. When Dixon offers to find a venue for Hopkins' second sprung shipwreck elegy, "The Loss of the Eurydice," Hopkins objects, insisting that "few will read it and of those few fewer will scan it." He adds: "I know from experience" (Letters to Dixon, p. 31). He gained this "experience" several years earlier, when he submitted "The Wreck" and "The Loss of the Eurydice" to the Month, meeting with rejection both times (1876 and 1878, respectively): his description of these poems as "wrecks" to Bridges in 1879 may allude to their reception as much as their subjects (Letters to Bridges, p. 66). "Experience" has taught Hopkins how much the rhythm that haunts his ear differs from cadences that readers would be inclined to recognize. His intense dislike for publication, however, stems from more than fear of rejection. Partly it reflects his tendency to see publication at odds with his priestly vocation, but he is not consistent on this point. What does consistently bother him is the thought of losing control over his rhythm. He writes in frustration to his mother about "The Wreck": He [the Month's editor, Fr. Coleridge] wants me ... to do away with the accents that mark the scanning. I would have done without them if I thought that my readers would scan right unaided but I am afraid they will not, and if the lines are not rightly scanned they are ruined. (Further Letters, p. 138)

If readers pronounce his lines incorrectly "they are ruined." The ambiguity permitting "they" to join the fate of readers to the fate of sprung rhythm may not be accidental: perhaps Hopkins is concerned for the lost instress of grace that results from wrecking the rhythm of "The Wreck." What his tone certainly betrays is his rising suspicion that this new rhythm will not activate the natural inclinations of his readers and his unquestioned determination to preserve his intention for it. Even after his suspicions are confirmed by the rejection of "The Wreck," he can make the comment to Bridges with which I opened this article: "sprung rhythm ... is the native and natural rhythm of speech, the least forced, the most rhetorical, and emphatic of all possible rhythms" (Letters, p. 46). Sprung rhythm is, Hopkins insists, an emphatically "natural" cadence: in this and later assertions, the "emphasis" of sprung rhythm is indistinguishable from that of its author. As late as 1887, Hopkins is frustrated by the fact that his intention is not innately recognized: "My meaning," he writes to Bridges, "surely ought to appear of itself; but in a language like English ... written words are really matter open and indifferent to the receiving of different and alternative verse-forms, some of which the reader cannot possibly be sure are meant unless they are marked for him. Besides, metrical marks are for the performer and such marks are proper in every art" (Letters, p. 265). A poet cannot govern a reader's performance, Hopkins admits, because, as Eric Griffiths observes, "stress goes where emphasis lies, and emphasis lies on what people think important" (p. 333). "Metrical marks" self-consciously concede the absence of self-evidence that should be present.

This absence, of course, is not only due to Hopkins' readers: if only he hears the "naturally" developed intention of sprung rhythm, perhaps his ear is mistaken. Rather than conveying a feeling of grace, his prosody might simply record his attempts to control the voicing. There is unintentional irony in John Netland's phrase: "Hopkins adopts his peculiar poetic style as the medium through which to make a willing and perceptive audience recognize the divine inscape of life." (38) Will sprung rhythm enlighten an audience already willing, or make an audience willing to be enlightened? Perhaps the "mystery" that "must be instressed, stressed" (l. 39; italics mine) in Hopkins' sprung poems is that which Fr. Sydney Smith, co-editor of the Month, encountered when reading "The Wreck," "without ever being sure that he was reading it with the exact rhythm desired by G.M.H." (39)

Hopkins' tortuous use of sprung rhythm in a late sonnet, "Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves" (c. 1885), indicates that he has recognized in his rhythmic willfulness "notices" of a still darker difficulty in his theology of grace. Hopkins often feels compelled to set his adoration of natural beauty at odds with grace: "how meet ["mortal"] beauty?"--meet it, then "leave, let" it "alone," and "wish [for] God's better beauty, grace" (ll. 12, 13, 14). This and his chosen subjects for his first two ventures in sprung rhythm--martyred and drowned virgins--indicate his tendency to identify the right intention as that most in tension with "natural" inclination. Cotter (inadvertently) reveals this tendency when glossing Hopkins' theology: "Removing natural qualities, the beholder comes to the point which is left," instressed "unity" with Christ. (40) Although in the 1881 meditations Hopkins carefully argues for the grace-given reconciliation of intention (elective will) with natural inclination toward good and God (affective will), he later decides that the "memory, understanding and affective will are incapable themselves of an infinite object [God] and do not tend towards it," since "the tendency ... comes from the arbitrium [elective will]" alone (Sermons, p. 138). As Christopher Devlin notes, Hopkins would have found no support for this opinion in St. Ignatius or Duns Scotus (Sermons, pp. 291, 293). In the end, intention also determines poetry. When Bridges asks if Walt Whitman might have influenced sprung rhythm, Hopkins is indignant: "he [Whitman] does not mean it" and so "he does not do it" (Letters, p. 156).

If right intention exists in tension with private and collective dispositions, how is a person to know he intends well? Hopkins' theological prosody strives after intentional engagement threatened by its opposite: the fallen distention or textural stress endured when straining the mind after "scapes" of "selfbent" thoughts. Hopkins considers this dilemma in "Sibyl's Leaves," whose subject is the turmoil of a person's moral intentions when laid bare by God's judgment. Hopkins violently inscribes his intentions, scoring 57 of 112 beats in the fourteen eight-beat lines, often in blatant defiance of "the native rhythm of the words used." At the close, this tension reaches painful cacophony. Evening's stark shadows and "tool-smooth bleak light" foretell the moment when all of life's "variety" must be "part[ed]" and "pack[ed]" on the "spools" of two hues of intention: either the "black ... wrong" of refusing God's grace, or the "white; | right" of affirmation: Our tale, O our oracle! | Let life, waned, ah let life wind Off her once skeined stained veined variety | upon, all on two spools; part, pen, pack Now her all in two flocks, two folds--black, white; | right, wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind But these two; ware of a world where but these | two tell, each off the other; of a rack Where, selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless, | thoughts against thoughts in groans grind. (ll. 10-14)

Hopkins asserts nearly oppressive control over 34 of the 40 beats required. His suppression of "natural" accentuation is most obvious in the last line. He piles emphasis upon "in," an insubstantial preposition that would normally be overwhelmed by the accentually mightier "thoughts" and "groans." Long after the posthumous publication of this sonnet, readers have continued to identify the tension between Hopkins' inscription and the aural fiber of the words. We "cannot know what ... led him to eschew the natural speech-rhythm at the end" (Stephenson, p. 108). We "must go against our inclinations, against ourselves--everything in speech is made hard or difficult." (41) Hopkins' early defense of "The Wreck"'s prosody indicates he is aware of the cacophony he has introduced: in the anapestic scanning of "'Fiftytwo Bedford Square',... fifty might pass [without a beat] but Bedford I should never admit" (Letters, p. 44). This sonnet permits much severer transgressions. Yet, to demand that "in" be stressed between "thoughts" and "groans" against our inclination is to demand graceless rhythmic performance in painful correspondence with the inner grating of the speaker's opposed intentions. This is more than marriage of form to content. Hopkins conveys the textural stress of a divided will in the tension between his metrical marks and the agitation that experience has taught him a reader will feel. Sprung rhythm becomes an authorial self-indictment, incorporating the bewildered resistance of a reader into its meaning and measure.

VII. Conclusion: A Practiced Tension

Development of sprung rhythm is not the only means by which Hopkins confronts his tendency to suppress the "natural" inclinations he champions. It would be misleading, however, to presume that sprung rhythm offers Hopkins a form for theological ideas he could have explored otherwise without significant alterations to those ideas. He early concludes that the intention-in-the-tension of one's impressions--of the world or poetry--can be arrested in an utterance, and received as a startling, affective instress open to God's stress. His sprung experiments in "St. Dorothea" develop this intuition by connecting the stress of grace to an anticipated reader's breathed pulses when voicing poetic rhythm. After working this association into a full prosodic intention--and encountering the clash between his intention and real readers' inclinations--Hopkins makes the conflict between inclination and intention implicit in his theology explicit in the practiced tension of sprung rhythm. (42)

If nothing else, sprung rhythm should trouble the presumption that a poet's prosody is automatically a narrow, dated, and unrewarding subject of study. Hopkins "fetches out" sprung rhythm's intentional tension from a widely distended field of intellectual endeavor and personal experience: pre-Socratic philosophy, nineteenth-century physics, intense descriptions of natural phenomena, strains of idealist thought, Scotist and Augustinian theology, the Ignatian spiritual exercises, the history of English verse, and inquiries into lingual "laws" that parallel research in the field of Victorian philology. In this rhythm he finds a unique stimulation to thought, a measure for anticipating a reader's affective experience, and a form for aspiration and self-confrontation. Simon Jarvis' description of prosody is fitting: "It consists of experiences ... in which suffering, desiring, thinking, and judging are ... intertwined; experiences in which personal history, and the history of collective experience ..., collide." (43) To return to Augustine: in the "small thing" of prosody, "notices" are found "common to things great and small"--especially in the stresses incontestably conveying charges of feeling and meaning at contestable points of contested intention in a poem's flow.

Notes

(1) The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1935), p. 46. Hereafter cited as Letters.

(2) Paull F. Baum questions whether Hopkins' rhythm qualifies as poetic meter and concludes that "we are much better off to read the lines as they sound and throw [Hopkins' metrical] scansion to the winds" ("Sprung Rhythm," PMLA 70, no. 4 [1959]: 423). Edward Stephenson provides the most technically rigorous defense of sprung rhythm (Edward Stephenson and Carolyn Hudgins, What Sprung Rhythm Really Is [Alma, Ontario: The International Hopkins Association, 1987]). Fiona Vance explores the implications of Hopkins' association of sprung rhythm with music ("Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poetry as Music," HQ 29, nos. 3-4 [2002]: 109-125). One of the most recent discussions is by Michael D. Hurley; he insists upon what decades of critical crossfire have already illuminated: that Hopkins' conflicting explanations of sprung rhythm are purposefully reductive, aimed more at helping a reader than at accuracy ("Darkening the Subject of Hopkins' Prosody," VP 43[2005]: 485-497).

(3) Many nineteenth-century critics and poets claimed similar native status for more conventional meters. Brennan O'Donnell gives a specific instance of this from the first half of the nineteenth century: "During Wordsworth's lifetime," critics "argued against Pope's contractions and elisions as unnatural and called for looser restrictions on the number of syllables admitted per line, arguing all the while for the desirability of more 'natural' pronunciation" (Brennan O'Donnell, The Passion of Meter: A Study of Wordsworth's Metrical Art [Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Press, 1995], p. 10).

(4) St. Augustine, The Confessions, trans. E. B. Pusey (Oxford, 1840), XI.xxiii.29.240.

(5) Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 19.

(6) See Margaret Johnson's argument of this point (Gerard Manley Hopkins and Tractarian Poetry [Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 1997], p. 226).

(7) James Finn Cotter, Inscape: The Christology and Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), p. 13.

(8) The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Humphry House and Graham Storey (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959); hereafter cited as Journals.

(9) Daniel Brown, Hopkins' Idealism: Philosophy, Physics, Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 238.

(10) Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Christopher Devlin, S.J. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959), p. 136.

(11) "Inscape" never appears in his poetry, and he mentions it only sparingly in his letters to Bridges. Instress appears only once in his poetry, and (I believe) never in his letters. The terms form a private vocabulary, which he deploys freely to catch a wide range of meanings. Much more common in the poetry--which, although he did not publish, Hopkins did intend for friends and future readers to encounter--are figures of ontological and mental straining, stretching, and stress. See, for example, "Thee, God, I come from," l. 6; "Shakspere," l. 2; "The Handsome Heart," l. 14; "Thou art indeed just, Lord," l. 12; "St. Winefred's Well," l. 15; "The Loss of the Eurydice," l. 78; "Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves," l. 2 (The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Norman H. MacKenzie [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990]; unless otherwise stated, all future quotations are from this edition).

(12) Gerald L. Bruns, Inventions: Writing, Textuality, and Understanding in Literary History (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1983), p. 126.

(13) Journals, pp. 129, 127; "Thee, God, I come from," ll. 5-7.

(14) See Devlin's commentary on Hopkins' engagement with Scotist distinctions between intention and execution as they relate to the incarnation (Sermons, pp. 107-121, 288-289, 294-295, 303, 306-307, 338-351).

(15) Hopkins himself compares ontological degrees of difference to strings in a musical scale (Journals, p. 120).

(16) See Derek Attridge's lucid discussion in The Rhythms of English Poetry (New York: Longman, 1982), pp. 76-77.

(17) John McDermott, A Hopkins Chronology (London: Macmillan, 1997), p. 43. See Catherine Phillips' discussion of the dating for these three poems in Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works, ed. Catherine Phillips (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), pp. 316, 323, 327. Since Hopkins composed the first versions of "St. Dorothea" while still an Anglican, my description of grace according to his later Catholic theology risks anachronism. Given that he was probably working on the third and final version of the poem after the point of conversion, this difficulty is not as great as it appears. Furthermore, James Finn Cotter, in his recent essay on the connection between Hopkins' idea of inscape and the English translation of Philippe de Mornay's De la Verite de la Religion Chrestienne [1581] (The Treweness of the Christian Religion [1587]), suggests that Hopkins' religious worldview during his pre-conversion Oxford years may have shared more in common with his later Christology than is normally recognized ("The Inshape of Inscape," VP 42 [2004]: 195-200).

(18) The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1935), p. 14; hereafter cited as Letters to Dixon.

(19) "To Everard Hopkins," November 5, 1885. Quoted by Brown in Hopkins' Idealism, p. 317.

(20) Hopkins' inscaping of language has much in common with Victorian philological research at his time (Cary Plotkin, The Tenth Muse: Victorian Philology and the Genesis of the Poetic Language of Gerard Manley Hopkins [Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1989], pp. 38-40, 74, 86-87, 141).

(21) See David Perkins, "How the Romantics Recited Poetry," SEL 31 (1991): 656. Perkins draws attention to the custom of gathering privately and publicly to perform verse in the early nineteenth century, and the frequent inclusion of "instructions in reading verse aloud" in rhetorics and "manuals of elocution" (p. 656). He also provides several interesting contemporary accounts of the major Romantic poets reciting their poems. See also Eric Griffiths, The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), and Plotkin's discussion of the stress upon speech in Victorian philology, pp. 16-17, 134. William Wordsworth, Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), l:138; italics mine.

(22) For Hopkins' connection of sprung rhythm to Anglo-Saxon versification, see Plotkin (pp. 149-154) and Stephenson (pp. 11-16, 112).

(23) Stephenson acknowledges the evidence against his case. A dipodic foot is one which is governed by a major, beating stress followed by a more or less flexible number (usually between zero and three) of unstressed syllables and another stressed syllable of secondary importance and prominence. Nowhere does Hopkins mention the use of secondary stresses as a feature of sprung rhythm, and his early practice of the rhythm most certainly does not make use of dipodies. Stephenson conjectures that Hopkins may have consciously identified what he unconsciously practiced when he learned about the (later nineteenth-century version of the) prosodic principles of Anglo-Saxon poetry, but there is no evidence for this claim. At best, Stephenson is able to argue for a few of the later poems being composed in dipodic rhythm; I remain unconvinced that Hopkins ever consciously used dipodies, although I do think he carefully placed secondary stresses. See pp. 93, 96-97. For all this, Stephenson insightfully discusses the major (e.g., falling and rising) and minor (mixed) levels of Hopkins' rhythmic structure (pp. 60-61, 79).

(24) I use "syllable-stress meter" in the sense in which it is used by Derek Attridge in Poetic Rhythm (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), designating by it the metrical patterns which require that a line constrain itself to a certain number of syllables and metrical beats (stress verse--e.g., nursery rhymes, limericks-only counts the beats of a line; strong stress verse--e.g., Anglo-Saxon poetry--only counts dominant stresses, not metrical beats). Hopkins is clearly aware of the constraints of syllable-stress verse, according to which "the slack [unbeating part of the foot] must always be one or else two syllables, never less than one and never more than two, and in most measures fixedly one or fixedly two" (Letters to Dixon, p. 39).

(25) Attridge (1995), pp. 36, 38. Attridge uses the term "stress-timing" in his earlier and more rigorous work on the subject, Rhythms of English Poetry (1982).

(26) "If the beating syllable is of its nature strong, the stress laid on it must be stronger the greater number of syllables belonging to it, the voice treading and dwelling: but if ... it is by nature light, then the greater the number of syllables belonging to it the less is the stress to be laid on it, the voice passing flyingly over all the syllables of the foot" (Poetical Works, p. 118).

(27) Stephenson, p. 36; italics mine. Fiona Vance probably takes the resemblance between sprung rhythm and musical isochrony too far ("Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poetry as Music," HQ 29, nos. 3-4 [2002]: 113). Hopkins, in his lectures on rhythm, firmly distinguishes between the length-based prosody of languages such as Latin and the strength-based prosody of English (Journals, p. 271).

(28) Douglas Oliver, Poetry and Narrative in Performance (London: Macmillan Press, 1989).

(29) Among other things conditioning a stress, Hopkins mentions the relationship between syllables in a line, semantic context of any given point in a line and of the whole line itself, changes in intonation or pitch, quality of a stressed vowel, adjustments in volume or loudness, and the relative relationship between syllabic durations (Journals, pp. 270-271).

(30) Cotter, pp. 115-116. See Journals, p. 273; Sermons, p. 174.

(31) Jill Muller, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Victorian Catholicism (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 37.

(32) Hopkins had originally heavily marked and scanned "The Wreck," but the original manuscript has been lost (see Norman H. MacKenzie, "The Lost Autograph of 'Wreck of the Deutschland,'" HQ 3, no. 3 [1976]: 92, 97).

(33) Hopkins intended the unusual punctuation. The tmesis makes the possessive "'s" modify Calvary and Christ, so that "Christ" emphatically identifies the "hero" of "Calvary": "To [the] hero of Calvary, [that is] Christ,'s feet." ("Christ" stands in apposition to "hero of Calvary.") As Norman H. MacKenzie observes, "the apostrophe s is separated from its first noun Calvary by a parenthesis and from its second Christ by a comma" (A Reader's Guide to Gerard Manley Hopkins [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981], p. 37).

(34) Hopkins, writer of several stridently patriotic hymns, was an unabashed English nationalist. Writing of the "duty" of poetry to do "good," he compares a "great [poetic] work by an Englishman" to "a great battle won by England" (Letters, p. 231). Hopkins' desire to uncover the native potentials of English speech participates in widespread nationalist sentiments driving Victorian philological study of English dialects and roots: see Plotkin, pp. 22-24.

(35) Simon Jarvis, "Prosody as Cognition," Critical Quarterly 40, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 13.

(36) Margaret Linley, "Conjuring the Spirit: Victorian Poetry, Culture, and Technology," VP 41 (Winter 2003): 539.

(37) In 1884, Hopkins catalogues for Bridges the number of people to whom he has shown his poems, adding "that some of them ... have shown them to others." His list comprises eleven individuals, including the two editors for the Month who rejected his sprung poems (Letters, pp. 196-197).

(38) John T. Netland, "Linguistic Limitation and the Instress of Grace in 'Wreck of the Deutschland,'" VP 27 (1989): 190; italics mine.

(39) From Mgr. Barton's record of Fr. Smith's response to the poem, quoted in Norman H. MacKenzie, "The Lost Autograph of 'The Wreck of the Deutschland,'" HQ 3, no. 3 (1976): 97-98.

(40) Cotter, p. 47. Here Cotter is paraphrasing Clement of Alexandria to elucidate what he takes to be the central aim of Hopkins' theology.

(41) Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 93; italics mine.

(42) Any one-to-one correspondence between Hopkins' use of sprung rhythm and choice of subject matter is certainly less important than the points of tension and intention his theology and rhythm share: after "Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves," for example, he writes sprung sonnets that make no apparent connection between their rhythmic tension and self-tortured intention. It is telling, however, that Hopkins' last sprung poem, "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire" (1888), prompts the following rebuke from Stephenson: "the poem is difficult to recite, as if Hopkins were demanding more from the performer than can be delivered" (p. 109).

(43) Simon Jarvis, "Prosody as Tradition," The Dalhousie Review 79, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 163.