What Sprung Rhythm Really Is by Edward A. Stephenson (review)

116 LETTERS IN CANADA 1987 material which McMaster deals with needs to be approached with a more rigorous"and self-conscious methodology if it is more fully to illuminate Dickens's literary practice. (MARJORIE GARSON) Edward A. Stephenson. What Sprung Rhythm Really Is. International Hopkins Association. 133. $12.95 paper The title is defiantly assertive - with good reason. Nobody has had a precise understanding of what Hopkins intended by the term, and many commentators have acknowledged that sprung rhythm is not always to be distinguished from traditional rhythm. Unhappy with so much vagueness and inconsistency, Stephenson set out to write a monograph, and has brought clarity and certitude. All readers of Hopkins must be indebted. The book is divided into three parts, 'Theory,' 'Practice,' and some polemical conclusions against those who got sprung rhythm wrong. Hopkins's use of the paeon (a four--syllable foot, with the stress on any one of the four) has long been recognized, usually for the convenience of explaining any sequence of four syllables of which only one is stressed. S\ephenson clarifies by insisting that Hopkins uses only the'first paeon' (/\\\ e.g. 'questionably), and that all feet are in falling rhythm. Rarely, Hopkins has a stress followed by four slacks, but generally the 'first paeon' is the longest foot available to sprung rhythm. Stephenson's major illumination is a correction of Hopkins. As an example ofsprung rhythm, Hopkins scanned a nursery rhyme for Dixon: .I I I I / I Ding, dong, bell; Pussy's In the well. Stephenson claims, persuasively, that what Hopkins meant was Ding, dortg, MIl; PU:ssy's i~ the w~ll. Thisintroduces the secondary stress, and the conceptofdipodic metre. In dipodic metre there can be two, three, or four syllables, with one primary and one secondarystress. This is the common metre of Beowulf(asJohn C. Pope argued in 1942) and of Piers Plowman (according to George R. Stewart, Jr, in 1927). The problem with such an obvious source is that Hopkins did not begin to study Old English verse until 1882. (That is why the 'bone-house' in ~The CagedSkylark' of1877is so enigmatic, and not, it seems, adequate evidence of Hopkins's knowledge of Old English.) At any rate, dipodic metre is to be found in Greek: what Stephenson's study should stimulate is a deeper investigation of the classical rather than vernacular origins of Hopkins's metre. There are many other technicali- HUMANITIES 117 ties, of outrides, rests, and rove-over lines, through which Stephenson guides us. The second part, a full forty pages, is devoted to an analysis of 'The Windhover.' Metre and meaning are kept in tactful balance, the one justifying or elucidating the other. In matters of strict interpretation Stephenson weakens his case by reliance on the very critics to whose metrical understanding he has taken such objection. Elizabeth Schneider is metrically the major culprit, but Stephenson agrees entirely with her thorough and/but unambiguous explanation of 'buckle.' For Schneider the whole natural creation buckles in order that the Divine may break through. However, 'buckle' in the senseof'collapse' is derivative from its primary sense of 'fasten' or 'clasp.' The brilliance of the word is that Schneider's reading is right, but so is the reading that has the whole creation clasped and enfolded by the Divine, through the Incarnation. It is precisely the paradox of sacrament, inward and outward but no less outward for revealing the inward. The 'event' of the sestet is not, for Stephenson, the bird's dive after hovering, but the sunrise after the dappled dawn. MacKenzie relates the sunrise to an electric circuit whose completion, with resultinglight, could be termed a 'buckling.' Hopkins was certainly fascinated by electrical metaphors, most obviously in 'The world is charged.' I would add that 'God's Grandeur' ends with the sunrise that breaks through the resisting dark: 'Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs' - a line that wittily conceals and contains the unit of measurement of electrical resistance. Ohm - the term was officially designated in 1870 - is the very figure of anacrusis: the initial resistance before the line's rhythmbegins to flow. With such a careful and conscientious reader as Stephenson it is...