"Common Language Heightened"

Gerard Manley Hopkins and the archaeology of language

In the preface to his 1883 manuscript, Gerard Manley Hopkins described sprung rhythm, the meter whose name he coined, as “the most natural of things,” since it is “the rhythm of common speech and of written prose.”¹ The preface would remain his only public-facing comment on sprung rhythm, perhaps because, in my experience, those who hear it tend to burst out laughing. Take the opening of “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves”:

Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, | vaulty, voluminous, . . . stupendous
Evening strains to be tíme’s vást, | womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night.

Not exactly giving you John Q. Public, is it? Yet Hopkins, as far as I can tell, was quite sincere. He made a similar claim in a letter to Bridges² in October 1879, saying that he allowed himself only those constructions which “belong to” or “could arise from, or be the elevation of, ordinary modern speech.” Here, he gives us a little more to work with, granting that poetic language isn’t just everyday speech, but rather “current language heightened, to any degree heightened and unlike itself.”³ This does reassure us that Hopkins is not so insane as to think that ordinary people talk like his poems, but it doesn’t exactly settle the question. Hopkins coined neologisms like a man compelled; the poem we’re about to look at has at least five in the first four lines. I think both the neologisms and his other idiosyncrasies can be squared with his professed fealty to current language, but to do so we first need to understand his incarnational theology, his interest in linguistic history, and his life-long struggle to come to grips with his attachment to the visual beauty of a fallen world. I hope I can give a passable introduction to all three in the course of reading his dazzling and intricate late sonnet,⁴ “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection.”

Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
Built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs | they throng; they glitter in marches.
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, | wherever an elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle ín long | lashes lace, lance, and pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous | ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
Of yestertempest's creases; | in pool and rut peel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed | dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks | treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, | nature's bonfire burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest | to her, her clearest-selvèd spark
Man, how fast his firedint, | his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned. O pity and indig | nation! Manshape, that shone
Sheer off, disseveral, a star, | death blots black out; nor mark
                            Is any of him at all so stark
But vastness blurs and time | beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart's-clarion! Away grief's gasping, | joyless days, dejection.
                            Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. | Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; | world's wildfire, leave but ash:
                            In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.⁵

Hopkins insisted in his letters to Bridges and Dixon that his poems be recited rather than perused; I would advise doing the same, if only under your breath, less out of respect for his wishes and more because I think it will help to feel out the energy and arc of the poem, just through close attention to the sound, before getting into the thorny weeds of Hopkinsian syntax. For a poet with a prominent and not undeserved reputation for difficulty, Hopkins yields a surprising amount through “vibes” alone. The neologisms are generally composed of words or particles with which we are familiar, the compounds are suggestive if not always precise, and the “sprung rhythm” is far more intuitive to read than to analyze. I think the sense of “knowing in advance” that I often get from his poems is no accident. But I’m getting ahead of myself: to the first line.⁶

Or at least in a bit. In 1869, almost twenty years before Hopkins wrote “Heraclitean Fire,” we find in his journal the following curious line: “But a penance which I was doing from Jan. 24 to July 25 prevented my seeing much that half-year.” His lack of elaboration points toward the severity of the penance. We know from other sources that this penance was the “custody of the eyes” in which he intentionally kept his eyes downcast, preventing him from examining and describing (as he often did in that same journal) the “peach-coloured sundown” and “simple gilded messes of cloud,” or waterfalls “like milk chasing round blocks of coal; or a girdle or long purse of white weighted with irregular black rubies, carelessly thrown aside and lying in jutty bends, with a black clasp of the same stone at the top,” or a clear sky, seen through an upraised hand and thus seen anew, “not transparent and sapphire-like but turquoise-like, swarming and blushing round the edge of the hand and in the pieces clipped in by the fingers, the flesh being sometimes sunlit, sometimes glassy with reflected light, sometimes lightly shadowed in that violet one makes with cobalt and Indian red.”

This anecdote has sometimes been presented as evidence of the tension in his life between priestly and poetic vocations. While that tension was real, and Hopkins was quite conscious of it, I think for us the useful conflict to be found in his enforced quasi-blindness is instead the contradiction he felt between the beauty of God’s creation and the fallen character of the mortal world. It is important that we recognize this not as a struggle between sacred and profane, but as a clash between two elements of a fundamentally sacramental worldview. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” but this same world is doomed to share the fate of “Goldengrove unleaving,” fading away both gradually through the course of natural history and apocalyptically at Judgement Day.⁷ As we will see, this dichotomy, apocalypticism and all, is at the heart of “Heraclitean Fire.”

We begin, as in many Hopkins poems, with a somewhat baroque description of a natural phenomenon. The tone is overjoyed, with a subtle emphasis on the “over.” The clouds themselves “flaunt forth” in “gay-gangs,” flaunting, glittering, and chevying without any human participation. The term “heaven-roysterers” bears explanation. “Royster” is an archaic spelling of the verb “roister,” itself now archaic, which refers to especially boisterous (or even riotous) celebration. “Roysterers” thus also carries with it an air of menace. This undercurrent continues when we hear that the clouds “glitter in marches,” suggesting perhaps an armored column. Already, Hopkins is suggesting that the glory of nature carries with it the potential to overwhelm.

The first four lines culminate in a description of the play of light and dark as “shivelight and shadowtackle,” evoking the “dapple” which fascinated Hopkins throughout his life.⁸ The use of “pair” here suggests to me the basic Heraclitean structure of opposites. In Heraclitus, contrary pairs of qualities are shown time again again to be deeply interconnected and interdependent. This is doubled on the prosodic level via the quasi-repetition “lace, lance,” almost-identical words which are antonymic in context: combination versus collision. This unity of opposites forms the fundamental motor of Heraclitean flux.⁹

Once the motif of flux is squarely in view, the faint traces of menace I suggested in the martial imagery of the opening sentence begin to surface. The fifth line is jarring in its tonal dissonance between cheerful affect and violent action: “Delightfully the bright wind boisterous | ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare.” The wind is laughing while it kicks your shit in. The description of the clash of elements which follows is dense with inner rhymes, assonances, and alliterations. Take the seventh line: “Squandering ooze to squeezed | dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches”. The image here is of earth as it is made soft by rain, churned, dried, cracked, and so on. These natural transformations and deformations are matched on the poetic level by both the phonetic transformation from “ooze” to “squeeze” or “crust to dust” and the semantic connection between “dough,” “crust,” and “starches.” The words, too, seem to morph into one another.

This sequence of words, linked by both meaning and sound, forms one of the “phonosemantic clusters” that Hopkins used with increasing frequency over the course of his life.¹⁰ They first appear in his philological speculations, such as the diary entry in 1863 where he links “flick, fillip, flip, fleck, flake,” hypothesizing that these words share a common etymology. Unlike his German contemporary August Schleicher, who in 1861 had published the first attempt at the reconstruction of a hypothesized ancestor-language, Hopkins does not seem interested in identifying a candidate root-word for his clusters. The historical dimension of language provides instead a means by which the affinities between our words, running between and around the accepted channels of meaning, can be brought to light and emphasized. The use of a philological figure at this point in “Heraclitean Fire” is no coincidence. By having the language transform along with the natural image which it describes, Hopkins is stressing that our language too is natural, and thus subject to Heraclitean flux. The importance of etymology, as the history of this flux, follows from such a naturalized understanding of language.

As the poem continues, the destruction entailed by this flux overwhelms the flimsy arrogant barrier set up between the natural and the human. At first, “earth” in general is the target, but we are soon told that the churning of the earth wipes out all signs of human life, the “manmarks” we leave upon it. We then see that natural destruction includes mankind along with its marks, both the physical marks of “treadmire” and “his mark on mind.”¹¹ The tone is grim: “...all is in an enormous dark / Drowned.” The final sentence before the volta raises the speaker’s agitation to a fever pitch, as this destruction comes, finally, for the “Manshape, that shone / Sheer off, disseveral, a star...” This final sentence is not only Hopkins continuing to mourn the general fate of mankind, but also a specific reference to the death of Jesus, the “Morning Star” of Revelation 22:16.¹²

To see the importance of alluding to the Passion here, we need to understand that for Hopkins, the temporal Incarnation (that is, the life and death of Jesus) is the worldly manifestation of the eternal Incarnation, the "intrinsic procession of the trinity" which necessarily implies the Creation. Just as God places an infinite limit on himself by taking on human finitude in the form of Christ, by creating any natural world his infinite potential is transmuted into a finite actual.¹³ By here connecting the whole flux of natural finitude to the death of Christ, Hopkins presents the Passion as his archetype for natural passing-away in general, just as the Incarnation is his archetype for natural creation in general.

At this point in the poem, right before the volta, we have been submerged as far as seems possible in the dark side of creation, the ceaseless death and ultimate futility of natural finitude. “Vastness blurs, and time beats level.” Suddenly, the speaker’s despair is punctured by an exclamation: “Enough!” The Resurrection arrives like a crack through a glacier.

It is tempting to see the apocalyptic scene which then begins in the same light as that which concludes another of his late poems, “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves,” where the natural world of flux and dapple is brought to an end by the immanent eschaton. There, the world-seen-as-flux is replaced by the world-revealed-as-stasis. Here, however, the good news of the Resurrection is no rebuke of natural destruction. The target is rather his response to this destruction; what is banished is “grief's gasping, | joyless days, dejection.” The gospel gives hope, but not because it shows natural destruction to be illusory or false, nor because it prevents this destruction from taking place. Instead, the Good News of Christ’s incarnation and resurrection allows Hopkins to affirm the natural flux, declaring “Flesh fade, and mortal trash / Fall to the residuary worm” without fear or grief.

For Hopkins it is theologically vital that Christ’s death was a real and complete one. God sacrificed himself so fully that he was brought to the extremes of human pain and degradation. If the Passion is the archetype for natural destruction, then to halt the Heraclitean fire would be a kind of Docetism. In a letter to Dixon, he emphasizes that Christ’s death was a failure: “his plans were baffled, his hopes dashed, and his work was done by being broken off undone.” This failure, however, simultaneously fulfilled what Hopkins saw as the purpose of the Incarnation: “to give God glory and that by sacrifice, sacrifice offered in the barren wilderness outside of God.” Here, too, Hopkins saw the Incarnation as representing all creation. In his notes on the Spiritual Exercises, Hopkins says that the world, man included, was created to praise God, which “is done by the great sacrifice. To contribute then to that sacrifice is the end for which man was made.” Sacrifice requires loss, and resurrection presupposes death. To borrow Benjamin’s phrase, “nature is Messianic by reason of its eternal and total passing away.” The Resurrection does not quench the Heraclitean fire of nature, but rather affirms it in the strongest possible sense as the spiritual goal of creation.

The reading of the volta I’m opposing in which the poem’s end is a rebuke of mortality, is similarly tempting to apply to the poem’s famous final three lines. On this reading, the poet, now freed from the bonds of nature, is one with Christ, and his mortal flesh is revealed to be immortal diamond. Avoiding this temptation first requires close attention to the pattern of tenses as the sentence begins: “I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am.” The single word which separates the phrase from tautology is “was.” The only aspect of Christ which can be rightfully placed in the past tense is the Incarnation, since all else about him is eternal. So, we might partially gloss this sentence as “I am all at once immortal, since he became man.” Thus read, this is more or less a restatement of John 3:16. The echo is no accident.

However, Hopkins is also making a more radical point. As we’ve seen, Hopkins held there to be two Incarnations, the temporal and the eternal. The eternal Incarnation, which permeates all creation, is what Hopkins felt when he examined and admired the natural world. “He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: / Praise him.” However, it is only through the temporal Incarnation that we can know the eternal one. Christ has brought the Good News. With this in mind, we can give an alternative gloss for the above sentence: As created matter, I am Christ made flesh, and I know this because Christ was made man as Jesus of Nazareth. On this reading, Hopkins is not using the Incarnation as comfort against his own mortality, but rather to affirm that mortality. It is precisely in his being mortal that man is Christlike.

The remarkable final two lines of “Heraclitean Fire” can be read as following from this conclusion, while bringing to the fore once again the linguistic dimension of Hopkins’ poetics. The words which open the penultimate line form another phonosemantic cluster. Each word connects to the next in the sequence quite explicitly: Jack and joke alliterate; joke and poor assonate; poor, potsherd, and patch alliterate; patch and matchwood rhyme. Semantic links further bind the cluster. “Patch” was a traditional nickname for a fool or clown, linking it to “joke.” “Poor potsherd” seems to me a reference to the shattered pot in the Book of Job, which would place “Job” as an implicit mediator between Jack, joke, and potsherd both semantically and phonetically. However, following this densely bound cluster is the audibly disconnected “immortal diamond.” This phrase is polysyllabic, begins with a vowel, and shares only a weak assonance with the rest of the line, between “immortal” and “poor.” Moreover, “immortal” and “diamond” strongly suggest a dactyl where the rest of the line suggests a series of trochees. While we might think that the rupture between the opening cluster and “immortal diamond” marks Hopkins asserting a connection between the two, the final two lines already have the structure of such an assertion: “This X is Y.” However, “immortal diamond” is repeated on both sides of the “is.” If all Hopkins was aiming at here was to show that “This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood” was in fact “immortal diamond,” the repetition would be pointless. Instead, I take it that we are supposed to hear the first use of “immortal diamond” as a member of the initial cluster, alongside “Jack,” “joke,” etc. But how does it fit? And what does it mean that this whole group—”Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond”—is, all together, “immortal diamond”?

There is, in fact, a semantic connection between “matchwood” and “diamond.” As Hopkins would have known, coal and diamonds are both allotropes of carbon, and it was then believed that diamonds in fact formed via the metamorphosis of coal, in particular through the application of intense heat.¹⁴ The cluster thus evokes modesty (the common man Jack, with patched clothes, using simple matchwood), suffering and mockery (both joke and patch suggest mockery, while the sufferings of Job have often been read as a typology for the Passion), transfiguration (the metamorphosis of matchwood into diamond), and immortality. The Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection are all present in nuce, as is the archetypal Christian life of humility and promised reward.

All this is then declared identical to “immortal diamond,” as if the Resurrection or the Kingdom of God were to be isolated as the truth of the Incarnation or the Christian life. Yet Hopkins has now placed “immortal diamond” in a family resemblance alongside the other terms of the phonosemantic cluster, and this web of linguistic relations does not simply fall away once we cross from one side of his “is” to the other. The permanence and finality of “immortal diamond,” the apocalyptic glory of the Second Coming, is thus not a rejection of the mortality of Incarnation, but rather the ultimate telos of that mortality. The Resurrection can only be a comfort because Christ was mortal and truly died. Rather than dissolve the natural world in favor of static truth, the world is affirmed in its mortality as participating in the Great Sacrifice of Christ—and this affirmation is accomplished poetically, at the climactic moment, through one of the phonosemantic clusters that, for Hopkins, marked the natural-historical life of language.

The poems of Hopkins explode with connections between words that are not captured by their denotative “meaning.” Etymology, phonetics, and allusion all place words in new constellations which suggest new possibilities for their use. These features are all distinctive to what Hopkins would call “living language,” language treated not as a formally complete system of signs but as a feature of the natural world, something that grows, changes, and eventually dies, just as its speakers do. The thicket of affinities that emerges in Hopkins’ poetic language forces us to see language as both living and mortal, while at the same time pushing us to understand that these features reveal language to be a vehicle of Christ.

This, I think, is what it means to “heighten” our “common language.” Despite his interest in etymology, Hopkins had no interest in writing archaic poetry. His goal was to blow up the language we have, to expose the expressive potential waiting in the cracks between words and to show that this potential is the product of the natural life of language. For Hopkins, this naturally ends in theological demonstration, but his method and its implications are worthwhile for anyone whose life is tied up with the use and failure of language, which is to say anyone at all. The tension that powers his work, between the historical life of language and its seeming capacity for transhistorical expression, is not too far from the distinction between langue and parole, the opposition between necessity and contingency, or the weight of history and the revolutionary break. His poems shock us out of our rote paths of thought. Suddenly, the same old words overflow with possibility. Our common language, you might say, gets heightened.

1. “Author’s Preface” in Major Works, 108. This is the 2002 OUP edition, which I’ll cite from here on as MW.

2. Robert Bridges and Canon R. W. Dixon were the two main addressees of his letters on poetry; I’ll just call them by their last name.

3. MW 240.

4. You will no doubt notice that this poem, being 24 lines and written in hexameters (with plenty of “outrides,” his name for feet that did not count in the meter), bears little resemblance to the traditional English sonnet. Hopkins did, however, call it one, so I’m following his lead here.

5. I don’t actually know how Substack’s editor handles dynamic formatting yet, and it’s possible that the line breaks will get messed up somehow. Here’s the poem just in case.

6. Or maybe I should say the first sentence. While the line breaks are certainly important, Hopkins rejected the thought of the line as the basic subunit of the poem. In his poems, “all the stanza is one long strain, though written in lines asunder.”

7. From “God’s Grandeur” and “Spring and Fall,” respectively.

8. The most widely read example of this affection is “Pied Beauty,” which famously begins with “glory be to God for dappled things.” As we saw in the earlier selections from his journal, his interest in the play of light and shadow went far beyond one poem.

9. Yeah, yeah, I know that there’s lots of disagreement over how Heraclitus should be interpreted, and I’m no expert. Here, I’m just trying to ventriloquize what I take to be the standard reading that Hopkins would have received when at Oxford.

10. I’m taking the term “phonosemantic cluster,” now relatively common in the Hopkins literature, from Cary Plotkin’s monograph The Tenth Muse: Victorian Philology and the Genesis of the Poetic Language of Gerard Manley Hopkins. I don’t want to spend too much time documenting the philological influence here, but if you’re interested and don’t want to commit to a book with “Victorian philology” in the title, you may want to check out Michael Sprinker’s “Gerard Manley Hopkins on the Origin of Language” or James Milroy’s The Language of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

11. The natural flux extends to the mind; again, language is implicated in the natural just as much as the physical world is.

12. I don’t know if this is a widely accepted interpretation, but it seems clear to me. I first ran across this thought in a paper by J. F. Cotter called “Apocalyptic Imagery in Hopkins' 'That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection'".

13. Hopkins sets this view out in a set of notes he titled ““Creation and Redemption; The Great Sacrifice.” These are sadly not to my knowledge available online, but can be found at page 288 in the Oxford edition of his Major Works.

14. Some diligent scholars have shown that Hopkins was a diligent reader of Nature, which published results to this effect in issues which he was known to have read.