Gash gold-vermilion BOOKS
ANTHONY BURGESS
My first copy of Gerard Manley Hopkins's poems was the second edition of 1930— a slim blue volume about the same size as the newly published selection (chosen and edited by Graham Storey, lOs 6d) with which Hopkins joins Dryden, Keats, Spenser and other poets in the 'New Oxford English Series.'
The new, fourth, edition of the Complete Poems (edited by W. H. Gardner and N. H. Mackenzie; OUP, 30s), published at the same time, is twice as big, but not, unfortunately, with newly discovered 'terrible' sonnets or odes of the scope of the two shipwreck poems. There are just more fragments than before, and more fugitive verse, and the tale is completed—until the fifth edition—with poems in Latin, Greek and Welsh. Some of the verse written between 1862 and 1868 is to be prized—particularly 'The Summer Malison' ('No rains shall fresh the flats of sea,/Nor close the clayfield's sharded sores,/ And every heart think loathingly/Its dearest changed to bores'—that last line is frightening), and one fragment seems to show that Hopkins might once have taken a Mere- dithian way: 'She schools the flighty pupils of her eyes,/ With levelled lashes stilling their dis- quiet;/She puts in leash her paired lips lest surprise/Bare the condition of a realm at riot.' But the real oeuvre is unchanged—except that the sonnet beginning 'The shepherd's brow, fronting forked lightning' is now, rightly, re- moved from the appendix to the main body. And some of the emendations of Hopkins's friend and first editor, Robert Bridges, have been boldly thrown out and the readings of
the original manuscripts restored. )- • Bridges could be incredibly wanting in ear. In that final sonnet addressed to himself, he made one line read: 'Within her wears, bears, cares and moulds the same,' thus killing a sequence based on mingled end-rime and head- rime. Hopkins-lovers always penned in the original 'combs' for 'moulds,' and now they have 'combs' in print. In 'The Soldier' Bridges had 'He of all can handle a rope best' where Hopkins wrote 'reeve a rope best'—an exact technical word as well as a necessary head- rime. Re-reading 'The Brothers,' I am shocked to find 'Eh, how all rung! /Young dog, he did give tongue!' changed, by the present editors, to 'There! The hall rung! /Dog, he did give tongue!'—justified by another manuscript read- ing but inferior to the version I've known by heart for thirty-five years.
At least, I think it's inferior. But once I had an edition of a Chopin nocturne with a mis- printed note that made an uncharacteristic dissonance. I got to accept and like this and was disappointed when told eventually that Chopin never wrote it. I think, though, that Hopkins, when revising his work, was over- influenced by a man who was very small beer as a poet; his verse had that small audience for too long, even posthumously. And I think that Bridges erred in holding back publication till 1918 (Hopkins died in 1889): he was too timid, though not too timid to steal—though even there timidly—some of his friend's rhythms. There were poets killed before 1918 who might at least have been granted the
pleasure and inspiration of a poetry they were well qualified to understand.
Discussing such inspiration, W. H. Gardner says: . . it is likely that James Joyce, E. E. Cummings, and Dylan Thomas were decisively affected by a reading of Hopkins.' Thomas less than you'd think (no sprung rhythm, anyway), Cummings minimally, Joyce not at all. There is, admittedly, a passage in Finnegan Wake that seems deliberately to evoke Hopkins (the description of the sleeping Isobel towards the end), but Joyce's mature style was formed before Hopkins was published. And yet the two men pursued the same end out of the same temperament, and it is an irony that it was only chronology that prevented their meeting. Hopkins was a professor at University Col- lege, Dublin, where Joyce was eventually a student, but Joyce was only seven when Hopkins died. Hopkins became a Jesuit, and Joyce was Jesuit-trained. Both made aesthetic philosophies out of the schoolmen—Joyce from Aquinas, Hopkins from Duns Scotus. Joyce saw 'epiphanies' flashing out of the current of everyday life; Hopkins observed nature and felt the 'instress' of 'inscapes.'
Both were obsessed with language and knowledgeable about music (Hopkins's song 'Falling Rain' uses quarter-tones long before the experimental Central Europeans). Make a context question out of mixed fragments, and you will sometimes find it hard to tell one author from the other. 'Forwardlike, but how- ever, and like favourable heaven heard these' might do for a Stephen Dedalus interior mono- logue; actually it comes from 'The Bugler's First Communion'; 'Muddy swinesnouts, hands, root and root, gripe and wrest them' is from Ulysses but would do for a Hopkins poem about martyrs. The eschewal of hyphens helps the resemblance: 'fallowbootfellow' will do for both. But the kinship goes deeper than com- pressed syntax, a love of compound words, and a devotion to Anglo-Saxonisms. Musicians both, they were both concerned with bringing literature closer to music.
I don't, of course, mean that they pursued conventional 'melodiousness,' like unmusical Swinburne who, hearing 'Three Blind Mice' for the first time in his maturity, said that it evoked 'the cruel beauty of the Borgias.' It was rather that they envied music its power of expression through rhythmic patterns, and also the complexity of meaning granted by that multilinear technique which is the glory of the music of the West. All that sprung rhythm does is to give the prosodic foot the same rights as a beat in music. A musical bar can have four crotchets or eight quavers or sixteen semi- quavers, but there are still only four beats. A line in a Hopkins sonnet always has its statu- tory five beats (or six, if it is an Alexandrian sonnet), and there can be any number of syllables from five to twenty—sometimes more, if we get senza misura 'outriders.' Who fired France for Mary without spot' has nine syllables; 'Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmed, lake- charmed, rook-racked, river-rounded' has six- teen: both lines come from the same sonnet. Music always had the freedom of prose with the intensity of verse; since Hopkins, English poetry has been able to enjoy liberty without laxity, on the analogy of music. This is why Hopkins is sometimes called 'the liberator.'
But there's more to it than just rhythm. There have to be the sforzandi of music— heavy head-rimes, like 'part, pen, pack' (which means 'separate the sheep from the goats; pen the sheep and send the goats packing') and there have to be internal rhymes, like 'each tucked string tells, each hung bell's/Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name,' so that we seem to be listening to the effeets of repetition-with-a-difference that are the essence of melodic phrases. But, most important of all, every line must have the solidity of content of a sequence of chords, or else the sense of multiple significance we find in a passage of counterpoint. There's no space for•the purely functional, since in music nothing is purely functional.
Hence that compression in Hopkins that sometimes causes difficulty: 'the uttermost mark/Our passion-plunged giant risen' or 'rare gold, bold steel, bare/In both; care but share care . . .' or 'that treads through, prickproof, thick/Thousands of thorns, thoughts.' In striv- ing to catch a single meaning, we catch more than one; sometimes—as with 'thorns, thoughts' —two words seem to merge into each other, becoming a new word, and what one might call an auditory iridescence gives a powerful contrapuntal effect.
Joyce lived later and was able to go fur- ther. Words like 'cropse' (which means 'a body interred and, through its fertilisation of the earth, able to produce vegetation which may stand as-a figure of the possibility of human resurrection') are the logical conclusion of the Hopkinsian method: contrapuntal simultaneity is achieved without the tricks of speed or syn- tactical ambiguity. But Joyce's aim was comic, while Hopkins brought what he glumly knew would be called 'oddity' to the inscaping of ecstasy or spiritual agony. 'I am gall, I am heartburn' to express the bitterness of the taste of damnation, which is the taste of oneself, is a dangerous phrase, and my old professor, H. B. Charlton (who spoke of Hopkins as though he were a young upstart), could always get an easy seminar laugh by talking about metaphorical stomach trouble. There are plenty of more sophisticated sniggers available nowa- days for those who find Hopkins's response to male beauty—physical or spiritual—classically queer: 'When limber liquid youth, that to all I teach/Yields tender as a pushed peach' or the close catalogue of the strength and beauty of Harry Ploughman. And sometimes the colloquial ('black, ever so black on it') or the stuttering ('Behind where, where was a, where was a place?') carries connotations of affected- ness guaranteed, with the right camp reciter, to bring the house down. Hopkins took fright- ful risks, but they are all justified by the sudden blaze of success, when the odd strikes as the right and inevitable.
'Success' is an inadequate word for a poet who never aimed at the rhetorical or technical tour de force for its own sake. He is, as we have to be reminded, not one of those little priests whom Joyce remarked at ucp—writers of devotional verse; he is a religious poet of the highest rank—perhaps greater than Donne, certainly greater than Herbert and Crashaw. The devotional writer deals in conventional images of piety; the religious poet shocks, even outrages, by wresting the truths of his faith from their safe dull sanctuaries and placing them in the physical world. Herbert does it: —You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."/So I did sit and eat.'
Hopkins does it more often. The natural world is notated with such freshness that we tend to think that he is merely a superb nature poet, a Wordsworth with genius. And then we're suddenly hit by the Instress' of revela- tion: theological properties are as real as the kestrel or the fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls. Read- ing him, even the agnostic may regret that the `Marvellous Milk' is no longer Walsingham way' and join in calling 'Our King back, Oh, upon English souls!'—`Pride, rose, prince, hero of us, high-priest,/Our hearts' charity's hearth's fire, our thoughts' chivalry's throng's Lord.' This is big magic, which no good Jesuit ought to be able to use.
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