Gerard Hopkins and His Influence

GERARD HOPKINS AND HIS INFLUENCE LAURENCE BINYO N IN the summer term of 1890, when I was half-way through my time at Oxford, I was invited by the President of my College and his wife (Margaret L. Woods, the poet and novelist), to dine and meet Robert Bridges, whose name I then heard for the first time. The President had a cottage on Boar's Hill, the only house then existing on that heathy ridge which has since become thick-sown with the dwellings of dons and poets. We dined at this cottage and walked down after dinner to Oxford in the midsummer twilight. Bridges impressed at first sight by his splendid presence, his lean stature, handsome features, thick black hair and beard, and leonine eye. In talk he was friendly and encouraging. Before parting, he and his wife asked me to stay for a night at their home, an eighteenthcentury manor-house at Yattendon village in Berkshire. There we had much talk on poetry; and in the evening Bridges brought out and read me some poems by his friend Gerard Hopkins, who had died the year before, and who, Bridges said, had invented a new prosody for English verse, a prosody which he himself had experimented in. Among the poems I then heard were one or two of the "tragic" sonnets, which greatly impressed me. Manifestly this unknown poet who had never published was a poet of extraordinary originality, utterly unlike any other. I did not see at this time examples of Hopkins' more difficult manner, which I probably should not have appreciated. I was especially interested by his new prosody; it seemed to promise scope for fresh effects and for admitting a frc::sh kind of matter into verse; and very soon I ventured on experiments in it myself. The younger generation today can, I think, have no conception of the angry passions and resentment caused among critics of that day by any liberties taken with traditional metre. The Tennysonian tune had got into their heads, and nothing would drive it out. A reversed accent in an iambic line, though common enough in Milton -but they had forgotten Milton-raised storms·which raged even in the columns of an evening newspaper, and actually appeared on a poster, as I well remember. Hopkins' poems, if not wholly ignored , would have been thought a deliberate outrage, and simply 264 266 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY stress on one syllable in a word and more or less slur the rest is universal. They are common in nursery rhymes. But it was something new to found a consistent prosody on stress alone. It is true that Coleridge in the preface to Chris/abel announced that the poem was written on this principle, with four accents in each line, whatever the number of syllables. But already in the fifth lineHow drowsily it crewhe has lapsed into the ordinary syllabic metre, and throughout he shows no consistency. Very different was Hopkins' rigorous application and expansion of the principle. Take the first stanza of The Wreck of the Deutschland, the poem in which the new prosody was first established and its possibilities explored: Thou mastering me Godl giver of breath and bread; World's strand, sway of the sea; Lord of living and dead; Thou hast bound bones and veins in mc, fastened me flesh And after it almost unmade, what with dread, Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh? Over again] (eel thy finger and find thec. Here was something beyond anything conceived of by Coleridge; a new organization ofmetrical structure, with cadences unheard before in English verse. Novelty of itself is no merit in a work of art. What was the gain, the value, of this innovation? ·Hopkins claimed that his sprung rhythm is "the most natural of things. It is the rhythm of common speech and of written prose, when rhythm is perceived in them." In ordinary English verse the metre is one thing and the rhythm another. The metre supplies the underlying pattern, the rhythm arises from the interplay between this and the speech-accents. If the speech-accents and the metrical beats always coincide, the verse soon becomes...