Hopkins’s “Ribblesdale”: Sifts and Riddles

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“Ribblesdale” (1882) is a “sifting” together in which the poet interrogates his beliefs, desires, and relation to his predecessors. One approach to this essentially sifting procedure at the heart of Hopkins’s “Ribblesdale” can be furthered by considering Walter Pater’s “Diaphaneitè” (1864). He defines this diaphanous quality as the power of letting one thing be seen through another: chiefly, the property of a personality or character possessing “a fine edge of light, where the elements of our moral nature refine themselves to the burning point.” This hints, nonetheless, at a substance of such finesse that it can provide a filtration and distribution facility for the sifting of impalpable qualities associated with light. It is itself a “subtle blending” and a “moral expressiveness” that can transmit to every part of the moral world a “lifegiving” impulse arising “in the established order of things,” crossing, however, rather than following “the main current of the world’s life.” He who is looking for “a breaking of the light he knows not” is able to note “with a strange heedfulness the faintest paleness in the sky.”¹

In Hopkins’s case, any lurking preciousness would be sifted out by the discipline of dogma: “my life,” he wrote, “is determined by the Incarnation down to most of the details of the day.”² And so, not for Hopkins’s delight alone, but for the world’s salvation, God’s light is “sifted to suit our sight” by the consenting intervention of the Virgin, by whose prompting the “azuring-over grey bell” makes of the spring woodland a shimmering lake of light. Moreover, the air we breathe is kept breathable by the same “atmosphere” or “bath of blue” that intervenes to slake the “blear and blinding” power of the unmitigated Sun. The air that “riddles” us is thereby not merely “pervading” or “sifting” our bodies, but “challenging,” “perplexing” and “testing” our moral will. In “The Wreck of the Deutschland” (1876) the speaker is “soft sift,” as he is suavely transposed by the same divine force that makes and unmakes galaxies. If “life” is a “river,” conversion is something that “rides time like riding a river,” an “instressing of the affective will” that makes foolish the wisdom of the world.³

In his shipwreck poem of 1878 Hopkins laments the “loss” (material, and perhaps eternal) of the “Eurydice,” a name that suggests the entanglement of motivated art and motivating desire. He envisions a “sea-corpse” that has been “strained to beauty” by its own exertion, and by the sifting process of sea and air. He begins in prayer: “The Eurydice—it concerned thee, O Lord.” In a letter to Robert Bridges he uses “concerned” to describe a reader’s involvement in a “bidding” poem,⁴ and concludes his “Ribblesdale” meditation with the same term. The Latin concernere means “to sift together.”⁵ (For Augustine, it can even be used to define the Incarnation.)

To an extraordinary extent, “Ribblesdale” is monosyllabic, so that the eleven dissyllables semaphore their own litany of alarm. The text sifts from a range of earlier English writers—from Geoffrey Chaucer to Christina Rossetti— characteristic words the tone and implication of whose original context enriches Hopkins’s own meditation on the human creature’s relation to creation. Was he taking a clue from Tennyson’s much-publicized poem of September 1882, “To Virgil,” which lauds the Latin poet’s capacity, as well as being a “Landscape-lover,” to concentrate his powers into a “lonely word?”⁶ Or was he struck by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s habit, described by Bridges, of placing words like “separate gems” to achieve a concentrated mosaic?⁷

Our first riddle is the title. Where and what exactly is Ribblesdale? Lesley Higgins suggests that Hopkins relies on keywords for many texts and that this sonnet invites readers to supply their own “specificity.”⁸ Hopkins, by his partisan title, compels us to consider a “specificity” that is (like much of our planet) compiled of historical divisions and incompatible memories. Languages articulate landscapes. “Ribblesdale” is a Teutonic form that defines the Ribble and its shores as belonging to the...