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HOPKINS DIFFERS FROM THE VICTORIAN TRADITION
It is in the work of Hopkins the voice of the new poetry was first heard. Though Hopkins chronologically belonged to the Victorian Age, his poetry marks a complete departure from the Victorian traditions. So there is a different tone and style in his poems; he freed both meter and language from the bonds of convention and paved the way for the emergence of modem poetry. It is worth to note that Hopkins hardly published any of his poetic work during his lifetime. He died in 1889 and it was only in 1918 that his friend and literary executor, Robert Bridges, gave to the world the first edition of Hopkins’s poems. Hopkins’s endeavor was to achieve the unique and essential meaning of the experience he was embodying: “inscape”, the individual and distinctive design, was for him the true reality and as it were, personality of a poem. He recognized the risk of becoming “queer”, but it was a risk he had to take if he was to write real poetry at all.
NEWNESS IN HOPKINS’S POETRY
Hopkins was never content to rest in accepted poetic feeling. He charged older words with new meanings by the contexts in which he set them; he experimented with word combinations; he restored their original meanings to dead metaphors thus providing a shock of surprise. Hopkins’s oddities—his elisions, omission of relative pronouns, twisted word-order, and so on—are part of his strength and individuality. They represent a calculated risk he took in his poetry: when they come off, they achieve an intensity of individualized expression that no other Victorian poet was capable of. Hopkins was neither in the Wordsworthian nor in the Tennysonian tradition. The tradition in which he worked, he really discovered for himself, out of his own reading and out of the needs of his own temperament and situation.
The basic sensibility of Hopkins's poetry is a sensibility of minute and objective observation of nature. Nature is for him the outlet for his loving and sensuous awareness of the physical world around him. His poetry is marked with the details of sunsets, flowers and waves. His sensuous love of nature is seen in his early poem: A vision of Mermaids. There is in this poem a vivid description of sunset, flowers, waters and other natural objects.
Hopkins is fascinated by those aspects of a thing or a group of things, which constitute its individual and ‘especial’ unity of being, its individually-distinctive beauty. Things in nature are all distinctive in pattern. All things have in stress and inscape. If instress makes things alike the fact that all things are full of inscape means that things are alike being unlike. In ‘Pied Beauty,’ the poet expresses a vision of the creation as harmonious multiplicity. Piedness is a relation between things, which are similar without being identical. Each individual thing is pied, or dappled, has its own individual identity. But at the same time they reflect the unified pattern, because they reflect the glory of God.
Another thing noticeable was Hopkins’s “sprung rhythm” which he first used in The Wreck of the Deutschland He called the common rhythm of English verse “Running Rhythm”.
HIS INTEREST IN WORDS
Hopkins’s contemporaries loved “a continuous literary decorum”. Such a decorum, like good form, has its uses. The criticism against Hopkin’s assumes that poetry ought to be immediately comprehensible. But Hopkins felt no obligation to subscribe to that particular notion of good form. He aimed to get out of his words as much as possible unhampered by the rules of grammar, syntax and common usage. But to Robert Bridges and other contemporary poets, these rules were ends in themselves. Robert Bridges complains that in Hopkins one often has to determine the grammar by the meaning, “where as the grammar should expose and enforce the meaning, not have to be determined by the meaning”.
Hopkins’s was always interested in language, and his diary includes a large number of notes on language and the connection and derivation of words. And his interest in langauge was not simply in vocabulary; it was also in dialect and syntax, in fact in anything curious or distinctive about usage.
Hopkins looked for new source both of strength and individuality in English poetic feeling. He charged older words with new meanings by the context in which he set them he experienced with word-combination; he restored their original meaning to dead metaphors thus providing a shock of surprise. One might take any one of at least a dozen poems and show the recharging of language, the vitalizing of rhythm, the counterpointing of colloquial and formal speech, the structuring of imagery into a complex totality of meaning. Hopkins’s oddities, omissions of relative pronouns, twisted word-order, and so on—are part of his strength and individuality. They represent a calculated risk he took in his poetry: when they come off, they achieve an intensity of individualized expression that no other Victorian poet was capable of one of his greatest achievements was in refurbishing the poetic idiom. In a line like:
The Eurydice—it concerned thee, O Lordor in the opening of Hurrahing in Harvest:Summer ends now; now barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise Around; lip above, what wind-walks! what lovely behavior of silk-sack clouds !...
HOPKINS: A DISTINGUISHED POET
Hopkins was a man of rare character as well as intelligence. He writes:
The effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise. So it must be one very original artist to some degree, on me to a marked degree. Perhaps then more reading would only refine my singularity, which is not what you want.
Self-sureness of that kind is genius. Hopkins’s originality was radical and uncompromising. His prosodic account in terms of Logaoedic Rhythm, Counter-point rhythm, Sprung Rhythm, Rocking Feet and Outriders will help no one to read his verse—unless by giving the sense of being helped. Hopkins might have said about each one of his technical idiosyncrasies what he says about rhythm of The Wreck of the Deutschland: the idea was not altogether new, but no one had professedly used it and made it a principle throughout as he had. His strength was that he brought poetry much closer to living speech.
F.R. LEAVES ON HOPKINS
According to F.R. Leavis: “Hopkins belongs with Shakespeare, Donne, Eliot and the later Yeats as opposed to Spenser, Milton and Tennyson. He departs very widely from current idiom, but nevertheless current idiom is, as it were, the presiding spirit in his dialect, and he uses his medium not as a literary but as a spoken one. That is the significance of his repeated demand to be tested by reading aloud: “read it with the ears, as I always wish to be read, and my verse becomes all right”.
INSCAPE AND INSTRESS
Hopkins’s journals are full of his impressions of what he observed and sometimes the relationship between his record and his poem is evident, and helpful in understanding them.
Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves is an obvious examle. He began to search for the rule or the pattern in the thing he observed. He tried to look for what made a thing what it was. For this reason he developed a word for describing the pattern of a thing the way it is made; and that word was “inscape” which he coined on analogy with words like a landscape”. If the picture that makes a whole and single thing out of its inner nature would be its “inscape”.
ALLITERATION; REPETITION; INTERIOR RHYMES
In Hopkins’s poems we find repetitions of grammatical form, whether sentence, clause, phrase or construction; repetition of ideas; repetition of length of syllables, or stress of syllable repetition of vowels or consonants, initial or final. The alliteration so largely present in Hopkins’s poem is also significant.
CONCLUSION
Hopkins was neither in the Wordsworthian nor in the Tennysonian tradition. The tradition in which he worked, he really discovered by himself out of his own reading and out of the needs of his own temperament and situation. His great poems are not more than a handful; but they are some of the most fully realized and perfectly rendered poems in English. Hopkins looked at the world around him keenly and closely. He had the analytical power of a scientist, the shaping eye of an artist, and the power of expression of a poet. His journals are full of his impressions of what he observed and sometimes the relationship between this record and his poem is evident, and helpful in understanding them.
Hopkins, one of Victorian poets made a radical attempt to reconsider the nature of poetic expression. Hopkins gave to both the theory and practice of poetry an intense and dedicated concentration that is reflected in his letters to Robert Bridges and others.
Hopkins’s endeavor was to achieve the unique and essential meaning of the experience he was embodying: “inscape”, the individual and distinctive design, was for him the true reality and as it were, personality of a poem. He recognized the risk of becoming “queer”, but it was a risk he had to take if he was to write real poetry at all.