Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins Part 11

HARK, hearer, hear what I do; lend a thought now, make believe We are leafwhelmed somewhere with the hood Of some branchy bunchy bushybowered wood, Southern dene or Lancashire clough or Devon cleave, That leans along the loins of hills, where a candycoloured, where a gluegold-brown Marbled river, boisterously beautiful, between Roots and rocks is danced and dandled, all in froth and water- blowb.a.l.l.s, down.

We are there, when we hear a shout That the hanging honeysuck, the dogeared hazels in the cover Makes dither, makes hover And the riot of a rout Of, it must be, boys from the town Bathing: it is summer's sovereign good.

By there comes a listless stranger: beckoned by the noise He drops towards the river: unseen Sees the bevy of them, how the boys With dare and with downdolphinry and bellbright bodies hud- dling out, Are earthworld, airworld, waterworld thorough hurled, all by turn and turn about.

This garland of their gambols flashes in his breast Into such a sudden zest Of summertime joys That he hies to a pool neighbouring; sees it is the best There; sweetest, freshest, shadowiest; Fairyland; silk-beech, scrolled ash, packed sycamore, wild wychelm, hornbeam fretty overstood By. Rafts and rafts of flake-leaves light, dealt so, painted on the air, Hang as still as hawk or hawkmoth, as the stars or as the angels there, Like the thing that never knew the earth, never off roots Rose. Here he feasts: lovely all is! No more: off with-- down he dings His bleached both and woolwoven wear: Careless these in coloured wisp All lie tumbled-to; then with loop-locks Forward falling, forehead frowning, lips crisp Over finger-teasing task, his twiny boots Fast he opens, last he offwrings Till walk the world he can with bare his feet And come where lies a coffer, burly all of blocks Built of chancequarried, selfquained rocks And the water warbles over into, filleted with gla.s.sy gra.s.sy quicksilvery shives and shoots And with heavenfallen freshness down from moorland still brims, Dark or daylight on and on. Here he will then, here he will the fleet Flinty kindcold element let break across his limbs Long. Where we leave him, froliclavish while he looks about him, laughs, swims.

Enough now; since the sacred matter that I mean I should be wronging longer leaving it to float Upon this only gambolling and echoing-of-earth note-- What is ... the delightful dene?

Wedlock. What the water? Spousal love.

Father, mother, brothers, sisters, friends Into fairy trees, wild flowers, wood ferns Ranked round the bower . . . . . . . . . .

EDITOR'S NOTES

PREFACE TO NOTES

AN editor of posthumous work is bounden to give some account of the authority for his text; and it is the purpose of the follow- ing notes to satisfy inquiry concerning matters whereof the present editor has the advantage of first-hand or particular knowledge.

_Sources_ The sources are four, and will be distinguished as A, B, D, and H, as here described.

_A_ is my own collection, a MS. book made up of Autographs--by which word I denote poems in the author's hand- Writing--pasted into it as they were received from him, and also of contemporary copies of other poems. These autographs and copies date from '67 to '89, the year of his death. Additions made by copying after that date are not reckoned or used. The first two items of the facsimiles at page 70 are cuttings from A.

_B_ is a MS. book, into which, in '83, I copied from _A_ certain poems of which the author had kept no copy. He was remiss in making fair copies of his work, and his autograph of The Deutsch- land having been (seemingly) lost, I copied that poem and others from _A_ at his request. After that date he entered more poems in this book as he completed them, and he also made both corrections of copy and emendations of the poems which had been copied into it by me. Thus, if a poem occur in both _A_ and _B_, then _B_ is the later and, except for overlooked errors of copyist, the better authority. The last entry written by G. M. H.

into this book is of the date 1887.

_D_ is a collection of the author's letters to Canon Dixon, the only other friend who ever read his poems, with but few exceptions whether of persons or of poems. These letters are in my keep- ing; they contain autographs of a few poems with late corrections.

_H_ is the bundle of posthumous papers that came into my hands at the author's death. These were at the time examined, sorted, and indexed; and the more important pieces of which copies were taken were inserted into a sc.r.a.p-book. That col- lection is the source of a series of his most mature sonnets, and of almost all the unfinished poems and fragments. Among these papers were also some early drafts. The facsimile after p. 92 is from _H_.

_Method_ The latest autographs and autographic corrections have Been preferred. In the very few instances in which this principle was overruled, as in Nos. _1_ and _27_, the justi- fication will be found in the note to the poem. The finished poems from _1_ to _51_ are ranged chronologically by the years, but in the section _52_-_74_ a fanciful grouping of the fragments was preferred to the inevitable misrepresentations of conjectural dating. G. M. H. dated his poems from their inception, and however much he revised a poem he would date his recast as his first draft. Thus _Handsome Heart_ was written and sent to me in '79; and the recast, which I reject, was not made before '83, while the final corrections may be some years later; and yet his last autograph is dated as the first 'Oxford '79'.

_Selection_ This edition purports to convey all the author's serious Mature poems; and he would probably not have wished any of his earlier poems nor so many or his fragments to have been included. Of the former cla.s.s three specimens only are admitted--and these, which may be considered of exceptional merit or interest, had already been given to the public--but of the latter almost everything; because these sc.r.a.ps being of mature date, generally contain some special beauty of thought or diction, and are invariably of metrical or rhythmical interest: some of them are in this respect as remarkable as anything in the volume.

As for exclusion, no translations of any kind are published here, whether into Greek or Latin from the English of which there are autographs and copies in _A_ or the Englishing of Latin hymns occurring in _H_: these last are not in my opinion of special merit; and with them I cla.s.s a few religious pieces which will be noticed later.

_Author's Prosody_ Of the peculiar scheme of prosody invented and developed by the author a full account is out of the question. His own preface together with his description of the metrical scheme of each poem--which is always, wherever it exists, transcribed in the notes--may be a sufficient guide for practical purposes. Moreover, the intention of the rhythm, in places where it might seem doubtful, has been indicated by accents printed over the determining syllables: in the later poems these accents correspond generally with the author's own marks: in the earlier poems they do not, but are trustworthy translations.

_Marks_ It was at one time the author's practice to use a very elaborate system of marks, all indicating the speech-movement: the autograph (in _A_) of _Harry Ploughman_ carries seven different marks, each one defined at the foot. When reading through his letters for the purpose of determining dates, I noted a few sentences on this subject which will justify the method that I have followed in the text. In 1883 he wrote: 'You were right to leave out the marks: they were not consistent for one thing, and are always offensive. Stilt there must be some. Either I must invent a notation applied throughout as in music or else I must only mark where the reader is likely to mistake, and for the present this is what I shall do.' And again in '85: 'This is my difficulty, what marks to use and when to use them: they are so much needed and yet so objectionable. (_Punctuation_) About punctuation my mind is clear: I can give a rule for everything I write myself, and even for other people, though they might not agree with me perhaps.' In this last matter the autographs are rigidly respected, the rare intentional aberration being scrupulously noted. And so I have respected his indentation of the verse; but in the sonnets, while my indentation corresponds, as a rule, with some autograph, I have felt free to consider conveniences, following, however, his growing practice to eschew it altogether.

Apart from questions of taste--and if these poems were to be arraigned for errors of what may be called taste, they might be convicted of occasional affectation in metaphor, as where the hills are 'as a stallion stal- wart, very-violet-sweet', or of some perversion of human feeling, as, for instance, the 'nostrils' relish of incense along the sanctuary side ', or 'the Holy Ghost with warm breast and with ah! bright wings', these and a few such examples are mostly efforts to force emotion into theological or sectarian channels, as in 'the com- fortless unconfessed' and the unpoetic line 'His mystery must be instressed stressed', or, again, the exaggerated Marianism of some pieces, or the naked encounter of sensualism and asceticism which hurts the 'Golden Echo'.--

_Style_ Apart, I say, from such faults of taste, which few as they numerically are yet affect my liking and more repel my sympathy than do all the rude shocks of his purely artistic wantonness-- apart from these there are definite faults of style which a reader must have courage to face, and must in some measure condone before he can discover the great beauties. For these blemishes in the poet's style are of such quality and magnitude as to deny him even a hearing from those who love a continuous literary decorum and are grown to be intolerant of its absence. And it is well to be clear that there is no pretence to reverse the condemnation of those faults, for which the poet has duly suffered. The extravagances are and will remain what they were. Nor can credit be gained from pointing them out: yet, to put readers at their ease, I will here define them: they may be called Oddity and Obscurity; (_Oddity_) and since the first may provoke laughter when a writer serious (and this poet is always serious), while the latter must prevent him from being understood (and this poet has always something to say), it may be a.s.sumed that they were not a part of his intention. Something of what he thought on this subject may be seen in the following extracts from his letters. In Feb. 1879, he wrote: 'All therefore that I think of doing is to keep my verses together in one place-- at present I have not even correct copies--, that, if anyone should like, they might be published after my death. And that again is unlikely, as well as remote. . . . No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness. I hope in time to have a more balanced and Miltonic style. But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music and design in painting, so design, pattern, or what I am in the habit of calling inscape is what I above all aim at in poetry. Now it is the virtue of design, pattern, or inscape to be distinctive and it is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer. This vice I cannot have escaped.' And again two months later: 'Moreover the oddness may make them repulsive at first and yet Lang might have liked them on a second reading. Indeed when, on somebody returning me the _Eurydice_, I opened and read some lines, as one commonly reads whether prose or verse, with the eyes, so to say, only, it struck me aghast with a kind of raw nakedness and unmitigated violence I was unprepared for: but take breath and read it with the ears, as I always wish to be read, and my verse becomes all right.'

_Obscurity_ As regards Oddity then, it is plain that the poet was Himself fully alive to it, but he was not sufficiently aware of obscurity, and he could not understand why his friends found his sentences so difficult: he would never have believed that, among all the ellipses and liberties of his grammar, the one chief cause is his habitual omission of the relative p.r.o.noun; and yet this is so, and the examination of a simple example or two may serve a general purpose:

_Omission of relative p.r.o.noun_ This grammatical liberty, though it is a common convenience in conversation and has therefore its proper place in good writing, is apt to confuse the parts of speech, and to reduce a normal sequence of words to mere jargon. Writers who carelessly rely on their elliptical speech-forms to govern the elaborate sentences of their literary composition little know what a conscious effort of interpretation they often impose on their readers. But it was not carelessness in Gerard Hopkins: he had full skill and practice and scholarship in conventional forms, and it is easy to see that he banished these purely constructional syllables from his verse because they took up room which he thought he could not afford them: he needed in his scheme all his s.p.a.ce for his poetical words, and he wished those to crowd out every merely gram- matical colourless or toneless element; and so when he had got into the habit of doing without these relative p.r.o.nouns--though he must, I suppose, have supplied them in his thought,--he abuses the licence beyond precedent, as when he writes (no. _17_) 'O Hero savest!' for 'O Hero that savest!'.

_Identical Forms_ Another example of this (from the 5th stanza of no. _23_) will discover another cause of obscurity; the line

'Squander the h.e.l.l-rook ranks sally to molest him'

means 'Scatter the ranks that sally to molest him': but since the words _squander_ and _sally_ occupy similar positions in the two sections of the verse, and are enforced by a similar accentuation, the second verb deprived of its p.r.o.noun will follow the first and appear as an imperative; and there is nothing to prevent its being so taken but the contradiction that it makes in the meaning; whereas the grammar should expose and enforce the meaning, not have to be determined by the meaning. More- over, there is no way of enunciating this line which will avoid the confusion; because if, knowing that _sally_ should not have the same intonation as _squander_, the reader mitigates the accent, and in doing so lessens or obliterates the caesural pause which exposes its accent, then _ranks_ becomes a genitive and _sally_ a substantive.

Here, then, is another source of the poet's obscurity; that in aiming at condensation he neglects the need that there is for care in the placing of words that are grammatically ambiguous.

English swarms with words that have one identical form for substantive, adjective, and verb; and such a word should never be so placed as to allow of any doubt as to what part of speech it is used for; because such ambiguity or momentary uncertainty destroys the force of the sentence. Now our author not only neglects this essential propriety but he would seem even to welcome and seek artistic effect in the consequent confusion; and he will sometimes so arrange such words that a reader looking for a verb may find that he has two or three ambiguous monosyllables from which to select, and must be in doubt as to which promises best to give any meaning that he can welcome; and then, after his choice is made, he may be left with some homeless monosyllable still on his hands. (_h.o.m.ophones_) Nor is our author apparently sensitive to the irrelevant suggestions that our numerous h.o.m.ophones cause; and he will provoke further ambiguities or obscurities by straining the meaning of these unfortunate words.

_Rhymes_ Finally, the rhymes where they are peculiar are often repellent, and so far from adding charm to the verse that they appear as obstacles. This must not blind one from recognizing that Gerard Hopkins, where he is simple and straightforward in his rhyme is a master of it--there are many instances,--but when he indulges in freaks, his childishness is incredible. His intention in such places is that the verses should be recited as running on without pause, and the rhyme occurring in their midst should be like a phonetic accident, merely satisfying the prescribed form. But his phonetic rhymes are often indefensible on his own principle. The rhyme to _communion_ in 'The Bugler'

is hideous, and the suspicion that the poet thought it ingenious is appalling: _eternal_, in 'The Eurydice', does not correspond with _burn all_, and in 'Felix Randal' _and some_ and _handsome_ is as truly an eye-rhyme as the _love_ and _prove_ which he despised and abjured; and it is more distressing, because the old-fashioned conventional eye-rhymes are accepted as such without speech- adaptation, and to many ears are a pleasant relief from the fixed jingle of the perfect rhyme; whereas his false ear-rhymes ask to have their slight but indispensable differences obliterated in the reading, and thus they expose their defect, which is of a disagree- able and vulgar or even comic quality. He did not escape full criticism and ample ridicule for such things in his lifetime; and in '83 he wrote: 'Some of my rhymes I regret, but they are past changing, grubs in amber: there are only a few of these; others are una.s.sailable; some others again there are which malignity may munch at but the Muses love.'

_Euphony and emphasis_ Now these are bad faults, and, as I said, a reader, if he is to get any enjoyment from the author's genius, must be somewhat tolerant of them; and they have a real relation to the means whereby the very forcible and original effects of beauty are produced. There is nothing stranger in these poems than the mixture of pa.s.sages of extreme delicacy and exquisite diction with pa.s.sages where, in a jungle of rough root-words, emphasis seems to oust euphony; and both these qualities, emphasis and euphony, appear in their extreme forms. It was an idiosyncrasy of this student's mind to push everything to its logical extreme, and take pleasure in a paradoxical result; as may be seen in his prosody where a simple theory seems to be used only as a basis for unexampled liberty. He was flattered when I called him _perittutatos_, and saw the humour of it--and one would expect to find in his work the force of emphatic condensation and the magic of melodious expression, both in their extreme forms. Now since those who study style in itself must allow a proper place to the emphatic expression, this experiment, which supplies as novel examples of success as of failure, should be full of interest; and such interest will promote tolerance.

The fragment, of which a facsimile is given after page 92, is the draft of what appears to be an attempt to explain how an artist has not free-will in his creation. He works out his own nature instinctively as he happens to be made, and is irresponsible for the result. It is lamentable that Gerard Hopkins died when, to judge by his latest work, he was beginning to concentrate the force of all his luxuriant experiments in rhythm and diction, and castigate his art into a more reserved style. Few will read the terrible posthumous sonnets without such high admiration and respect for his poetical power as must lead them to search out the rare masterly beauties that distinguish his work.

NOTES

PAGE 1. AUTHOR'S PREFACE. This is from B, and must have been written in '83 or not much later. The punctuation has been exactly followed, except that I have added a comma after the word _language_ in the last line but one of page 5, where the omission seemed an oversight.

p.4, l. 21. _rove over_. This expression is used here to denote the running on of the sense and sound of the end of a verse into the beginning of the next; but this meaning is not easily to be found in the word.

The two words _reeve_ (pf. _rove_, which is also a pf. of _rive_) and _reave_ (pf. _reft_) are both used several times by G.M.H., but they are both spelt _reave_. In the present context _rove_ and _reaving_ occur in his letters, and the spelling _reeve_ in 'The Deutschland', xii. 8, is probably due to the copyists.

There is no doubt that G. M. H. had a wrong notion of the meaning of the nautical term _reeve_. No. 39 line 10 (the third pa.s.sage where _reeve_, spelt _reave_, occurs, and a nautical meaning is required--see the note there--) would be satisfied by _splice_ (nautical); and if this notion were influenced by _weave_, _wove_, that would describe the inter- weaving of the verses. In the pa.s.sage referred to in 'The Deutschland' _reeve_ is probably intended in its dialectal or common speech significance: see Wright's 'English Dialect Dictionary', where the first sense of the verb given is to bring together the 'gathers' of a dress: and in this sense _reeve_ is in common use.

p. 7. EARLY POEMS. Two school prize-poems exist; the date of the first, 'The Escorial', is Easter '60, which is before Poems G.M.H. was sixteen years old. It is in Spenserian stanza: the imperfect copy in another hand has the first 15 stanzas omitting the 9th, and the author has written on it his motto, _Batraxos de pot akridas os tis erisda_, with an accompanying gloss to explain his allusions.

Though wholly lacking the Byronic flush it looks as if in- fluenced by the historical descriptions in 'Childe Harold', and might provide a quotation for a tourist's guide to Spain. The history seems competent, and the artistic knowledge precocious.

Here for a sample is the seventh stanza:

This was no cla.s.sic temple order'd round With ma.s.sy pillars of the Doric mood Broad-fluted, nor with shafts acanthus-crown'd, Pourtray'd along the frieze with t.i.tan's brood That battled G.o.ds for heaven; brilliant-hued, With golden fillets and rich blazonry, Wherein beneath the cornice, hors.e.m.e.n rode With form divine, a fiery chivalry-- Triumph of airy grace and perfect harmony.

The second prize-poem, 'A Vision of Mermaids', is dated Xmas '62. The autograph of this, which is preserved, is headed by a very elaborate circular pen-and-ink drawing, 6 inches in diameter,--a sunset sea-piece with rocks and formal groups of mermaidens, five or six together, singing as they stand (apparently) half-immersed in the shallows as described

'But most in a half-circle watch'd the sun,' &c.

This poem is in 143 lines of heroics. It betrays the in- fluence of Keats, and when I introduced the author to the public in Miles's book, I quoted from it, thinking it useful to show that his difficult later style was not due to in- ability to excel in established forms. The poem is alto- gether above the standard of school-prizes. I reprint the extract here:

Soon--as when Summer of his sister Spring Crushes and tears the rare enjewelling, And boasting 'I have fairer thing's than these'

Plashes amidst the billowy apple-trees His l.u.s.ty hands, in gusts of scented wind Swirling out bloom till all the air is blind With rosy foam and pelting blossom and mists Of driving vermeil-rain; and, as he lists, The dainty onyx-coronals deflowers, A glorious wanton;--all the wrecks in showers Crowd down upon a stream, and jostling thick With bubbles bugle-eyed, struggle and stick On.tangled shoals that bar the brook a crowd Of filmy globes and rosy floating cloud: So those Mermaidens crowded to my rock.

But most in a half-circle watch'd the sun; And a sweet sadness dwelt on every one; I knew not why,--but know that sadness dwells On Mermaids--whether that they ring the knells Of seamen whelm'd in chasms of the mid-main, As poets sing; or that it is a pain To know the dusk depths of the ponderous sea, The miles profound of solid green, and be With loath'd cold fishes, far from man--or what;-- I know the sadness but the cause know not.

Then they, thus ranged, gan make full plaintively A piteous Siren sweetness on the sea, Withouten instrument, or conch, or bell, Or stretch'd chords tuneable on turtle's sh.e.l.l; Only with utterance of sweet breath they sung An antique chaunt and in an unknown tongue.