The originality of Gerard Manley Hopkins

One strange fact about Hopkins’s originality is that it had absolutely no impact or influence on his contemporaries. When he died in 1889 (at the age of 44) his poetry was only known to a small number of people (most notably his friend and literary executor Robert Bridges), and it was not until 1918 that an edition of his work was published by Bridges. Indeed, only when the second edition was published in 1930 did Hopkins’s name become widely known and his poetry appreciated.

With hindsight, we can see that Hopkins was the only Victorian poet who made a radical attempt to reconsider the nature of poetic expression. He can with justice be regarded as the Vincent Van Gogh of poetry, and indeed there are many parallels between the two men, including the fact that they were both “posthumous geniuses”.

It is not possible in a short article to do justice to all the original features of Hopkins’s revolutionary approach to poetry, so a few pointers will have to suffice.

Poetry as music

In their respective media, both Van Gogh and Hopkins bypassed the rules in order to seize the indwelling essence of the object being represented. What Van Gogh did with paint, Hopkins did with words, contravening the rules of standard English in order to seize a poetic experience. If a conjunction or standard mode of expression got in the way, out it went. The result was poetry that was immediate, irreducible and untranslatable.

The analogy above was with post-impressionist art, but Hopkins’s poetry can also be considered as a form of music with words as the notes. Hopkins liked to use the word “explode” to describe what he desired his poems to do. The sound that the words made was part of the total experience, such that the meaning could only be conveyed by those words, and not in any other way. Meaning, to Hopkins, had to be felt as well as understood.

A typical example 

To take an example, consider the opening of “The Windhover” (subtitled “To Christ our Lord”):

“I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! …”

It would be a crime to analyse these lines, because they must make their impact on the reader as they stand, and each reader will hear the words differently, just as they will hear a piece of music in their own way, without the need for an academic gloss. It is also a crime to present only part of a Hopkins poem, because the “explosion” is the result of the total impact of the poem. Hopkins often uses language as a means of preventing meaning from escaping prematurely before the total expression has been achieved.

However, a few comments can be offered as regards “The Windhover” in terms of indicating its features of originality.

One aspect is Hopkins’s melding of meaning between the sacred and the profane. Apart from the opening subtitle, there is no mention of the name of Christ in the rest of the poem, the closest being “O my chevalier!” towards the end. But this is an intensely Christian poem all the same. The poem is about the flight of a falcon, but within the first two lines it is representative of the Trinity, as “king”, “minion” and “dauphin”, ruler, servant and heir.

Sprung rhythm 

The poem is also an exemplar of another original feature of Hopkins’s poetry, namely “sprung rhythm”. The second, third and fourth lines contain 16, 15 and 12 syllables respectively, but each can be read as having five stresses. This is therefore a form of syncopation, a series of rhythmic pulses that here represent the beats of the bird’s wings.

This diction has a clear connection to musical rhythm, in which the number of notes can vary while the beat stays the same, and its syncopated nature is highly reminiscent of ragtime, which would have been familiar to many of the first readers of Hopkins’s poems in the early 20^th century.

Hopkins’s own view of sprung rhythm was that it was the rhythm of speech, unforced and natural. It was therefore the most emphatic of all possible rhythms in terms of conveying feeling and meaning. It is also significant that Hopkins spent several years as a Jesuit teacher in North Wales, where he learnt Welsh and became enchanted by the musical nature of Welsh poetry and the lilt of the Welsh speaking voice.

His use of alliteration, which is very evident in “The Windhover” is also reminiscent of Welsh poetry. It is interesting to compare this poem, for example, with the opening lines of “Under Milk Wood” by the much later Anglo-Welsh poet Dylan Thomas:

“To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea.”

The influences on Thomas could have been both Hopkins himself and the common thread of Welsh tradition.

It should also be noted that sprung rhythm owed much to the Anglo-Saxon tradition, with which Hopkins was familiar. It must also be stressed that Hopkins wished his poetry to be read aloud rather than on the page. This accorded with the bardic tradition both of the Celts and the Anglo-Saxons, and it is ironic that so few of his own poems found an audience in his lifetime. Hopkins would have appreciated the medium of radio, which was of course how “Under Milk Wood”, a “play for voices”, was first made public.

It has to be admitted that not all of Hopkins’s poetry was of uniformly high quality, and he was quite capable of writing poorly, mainly through trying too hard. However, Hopkins’s greatest achievement was to break out of both the elegiac mode of Victorian poetry, as exemplified by Tennyson, and the mode of nature poetry typified by Wordsworth. These two giants dominated the Victorian poetry scene, but not Hopkins. His tradition was one that he discovered for himself. Although his truly great poems are not that many in number, they were to prove highly influential in the 20^th century and certainly deserve the accolade of originality.

© John Welford