This is an essay I wrote in 1994 about three poems from one of my favorite poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins.   This essay was perceived as original, but to me, as a visual artist, it was perfectly clear the poems had visual as well as oral acuity.  I humbly offer this view on Hopkins' art.  Viktorya
 


About Hopkins

    I drew pictures of three poems—three poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins:  Pied Beauty, God’s Grandeur, and No Worst,  There Is None.   I look at these pictures and feel amazement:  these pictures are patterns of the poems.
 
   The visual shape of the lines in Pied  Beauty flows like flags in a breeze (not unlike the content):  three lines abc, three lines abc, three lines dbd, and one line c become three parallelograms and one rectangle:  visually resembling the division of an English sonnet.  What an interesting crossover—the poem is the four-part shape of an English sonnet but the narrative and resolution format is of an Italian sonnet.

    God’s Grandeur  stuns me.  The shape of the left margin is like gears!  If the octave turns counter clockwise to face the left margin of the sestet, the spaces interlock like the teeth on gears or like the dovetails on drawers.  The remarkable thing to me is that the poem’s content is about industrialization:  the content fits the design of this Italian sonnet.

    No Worst, There Is None is two rectangular blocks with a single bite out of the upper left corner of the sestet:  this dense shape of the Italian sonnet has no breathing space, just as the content gives no relief.

    Before I address each poem individually, it’s necessary to briefly discuss techniques Hopkins uses in these sonnets.  “Sprung rhythm, coined by Hopkins, is the meter:  based on the number of stressed syllables without regard to the number of unstressed syllables. Hopkins used it because ‘it is nearest to the rhythm of prose, that is the native and natural rhythm of speech’ “ (Holman 507).  Alliteration, consonantal and vowel, appear with frequency in the poems.

    Pied Beauty is a prayer of thanks.  I see the poet’s upraised hands, cupped and filled with images, spilling out offerings—pictures of nature’s beauty—with love.  The lyrical melody sings softly with a high pitch bringing feelings of ecstasy and exultation.  This poem awakens my senses—flushes of warmth encourage me to honor the glory of God in dappled things.

    Mottled perfection in Pied Beauty’s musical language rolling off the tongue, flavoring feeling with salivary sweetness; sounds of words bathe the mouth, the tongue and teeth feel small plosive t’s, interior c’s coo and curl the tongue as lips join to form soft s’s.  The mouth savors the sweet beauty of the words:

        For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
        For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim.

    In the first section, the sestet, image reflects the universe:  it takes us from God to the skies to the water to the fire to the animals to the fish to the earth to the man.  Hopkins is very specific with these imagistic pictures.  In the second section, the quatrain, abstract language reflects a general overview of the universe.  This reverses typical Italian sonnet order, which is usually general and then specific.  The turn from specific to general begins with

        And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

and also prepares the switch to abstract language,

        And all things, counter, original, spare and strange;

to end with a return to God, in the curtal:

        Praise him.

    God’s Grandeur is a sermon about industrialization, but begins with—this is God’s world.  Broad gestures warn man about denuding nature; those gestures turn toward resolution kindly softening the message as the Comforter spreads wings bent warmly over the world—there is hope.  This follows the typical form of an Italian sonnet:  a problem is stated, then turns and resolution is offered.

    The tempo in the first four lines is hard-driving; the ga sound:  grandeur, God, gather, greatness, combines with stressed syllables—sprung rhythm—drives the tempo; it slows down with this repetition:

        Generations have trod, have trod, have trod.

Internal rhymes and alliteration continue to slow the pace in the last two lines of the octave:  seared, bleared, smeared, and an off-rhyme trade, alliterating with toil, and the prior word trod, as follows in:   

        And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
        And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell:  the soil/...

    The s’s require a very slow pace or the words simply cannot be spoken.  I plod along slowly to read the poem, the impact is perfect:  to see evidence of man’s industrialization.  There is no sensuality in the words; the last line of the octave reflects the condition of man:

                                        ...the soil
        Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

His sensitivity to the earth is blocked by a clothed foot:  clothed by the industrial revolution.

    The sestet turns from man to nature and softens the pace as the breath and mouth form:  though, Oh, ah! and combine alliteration with Because, bent, broods, breast, bright—all ba sounds that evoke sweetness, not unlike the word baby:

        Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
        Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
        World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

The breath reaches from the heart to feel the sun set in the west and oh, that breath again, a new day, and light springs morning; sensuality return the body through the poem; there is hope, and the point of resolution occurs in the sonnet.

    No Worst, There Is None is a plea for help, a prayer filled with anguish set to a pounding rhythm—there is no resolve.  There is a tonal quality of a voice calling out:  I am the most evil.  This poem shakes me inside, the relentless beat offers no relief—just as the voice in the poem receives none.  I am left with a deep sadness.

    The language expels words to start and stop tersely in the same syllable—setting the tone and rhythm of anguish; punctuation also enforces the tone.  Words express force; techniques provide the vehicle for stress.  Spondee (two hard stresses), explosive consonants, and caesuras pound the psyche as a tempest would a ship in distress.  Blowing out the words need lung-air in short, choppy waves of motion: 

        No worst, there is none.  Pitched past pitch of grief....

The lines writhe back and forth; the first two describe this wretch; the wretch begs for relief in the next two; the voice wants to understand; there is a lull and then fury.  And the sonnet continues this unrelenting force—there is no turn to resolution in this Italian sonnet:

        Then lull, then leave off.  Fury had shrieked ‘No ling—
        ering!  Let me be fell:  force I must be brief.

The precipice into which the speaker looks fills him with terror; the abyss is hell and he’s not sure if he’s going to fall; he may plunge to this death from the

        ...cliffs of fall
        Frightful, sheer, no-man—fathomed.  Hold them cheap
        May who ne’er hung there.

Certainly, there are no elisions to smooth ride; urgency demands interruption, up and down, not unlike a ship, in an angry main, pitch and heave—I see the possibility of a concealed metaphor in the language—a ship in trouble and going down.  The final blow, in this sonnet that give no relief, is the anti-Christian implication that there is no afterlife—no heaven:

        Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

    Each poem differs in tempo.  Each poem celebrates the poet’s love of language—words opening worlds beyond which the poems exist.  No matter how much I research Hopkins, admire and respect what he does, the poems own their own life.

    Hopkins, a Jesuit priest, breaks rules of convention with his work.  His inventions of coining words like sprung rhythm, of creating the curtal sonnet, of birthing words that are non-existent outside his poetry, add up to courage.  It’s exciting to realize this priest broke rules to invent original things; he went against convention to invent new forms and new words.  Could it be that this same spirit of defiance against convention drove Hopkins to despair the  demanded obedience from the Jesuit order and to agonize in No Worst, There Is None.  Christian belief.   Could this same spirit be so cunning and crafty as to form a curtal sonnet, a pied beauty that is indeed a Pied Beauty?

        Whatsoever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

Pied Beauty celebrates Hopkins art; it is stippled black and white, ink on paper, counter to convention, original, strange.

       Praise him.



copyright 1994-2006 Victoria Allen, Viktorya Allen