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