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The Windhover

I caught this morning morning's minions, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there!, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and the gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
stirred for a bird, -- the acheive of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

I don't like appending notes to poem dissecting them too often as its disrespects the immediacey of its life, and essentially can be like a tearing apart. So I post below this poem by Hopkins something on his unique approach to poetry.

A discussion is ongoing in the voice forum concerning Hopkins, including how to read him with examples and valuable contributions from the participants.

Hopkins provides a challenge to poetry and the definition of poetry, especially in the co-mingling of meaning, sound and rhythmic patterning. Many commentators (including those on this site) have stated that meaning, sound and rhythm become 'as one' when they are embodied in a successful poem. It behoves us then to seek out such poems to appreciate that 'embodiment'. However, education towards what constitutes a successful poem, also has a part to play; and perhaps the learning, the evolution of taste and appreciation is never ending.

This is the context within which I wanted to mention Hopkins.

He was never published in his lifetime. He may not have been even if he had released his poems because his way of writing was completely at odds with contemporary taste. Amazingly this was a poet working in the time just after Tennyson, yet his work is utterly new even now, whereas Tennyson's formal diction may be said to be dated today.

In Hopkins the sound and rhythmic elements could be said to embody the theme, sometimes almost purely in sound and rhythm rather than clear meaning. He cultivates imagery rather for the sound expressivenes that he can wring (or ring) out of it. In this respect, when his themes are examined in depth, despite the difficulty of understanding some of his poetry, the meaning, when revealed, is often simple; therefore it could be said to be a tool for expressing the 'inscape' or hidden aspects of a thing by incorporating them into word-music - which itself is a manner of verisimiltude (to use John Keat's expression) of the earthly objects under the poets eye sculpted in sound, music, through the breath; this is a kind of higher representation of, for example the Hawk of this poem above, the particular natural object under consideration. This is the essence of poetry in my definition.

Does Hopkins do that here where he utilises all his eccentricities of language and imagery and rhythm? I feel he does. But to judge that requires that one develop a taste for sound over sense which requires a giving up of all preconceptions, to let the new flood in; the new being that which the poet discovers in the naterial or natural object, which is of its essence, and which he incorporates in imagery, sound, rhythm, grammar, beat. This is the challenge Hopkins poses to readers. It is a big challenge. And is one which can be said to make him a poets poet.

Some notes from 'Hopkins' the critical heritage below may be relevant for this question. Although I disagree with the writer. The article is from the Athenaeum, a now defunct British Literary journal.

p126 ....

"He (Hopkins) aimed at complex internal harmonies, at a counterpoint of rhythm; for this more complex element he coined an expressive word of his own:

'But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music and design in painting, so design, pattern, or what I am in the habit of calling inscape is what I above all aim at in poetry.'

Inscape is still, in spite of apparent differentiation, musical; but a quality of formalism seems to have entered with the specific designation. With formalism comes rigidity; and in this case the rigidity is bound to overwhelm the sense. For the relative constant in the composition ofpoetry is the law of language which admits only a certain amount of adaption. Musical design must be subordinate to it, and the poet should be aware that even in speaking of musical design he is indulging in a metaphor. Judging by his practice, Hopkins admitted this in his later sonnets of despair where sense is not subordinate to musicality. Perhaps here the urgency of the content made this necessary.........

The communication of thought was seldom the dominant impulse of his creative moment. ...He says of 'The Golden Echo' ' I never did anything more musical'." p126-127

For me music does become sense. A higher sense than prose meaning, yet a type of sense that patterns the theme in a medium above the mere disembodied idea. If Hopkins was the Poet who emphasised this most conspicuously in his work, and if he succeeded, then he is a poet of the future, the one most devoted to form, to inscape, to the higher representation of a natural thing in poetry.

C.Jordan

you are unbelievable, you know that?

by the time this discussion is over, i will be ready to kill you, myself, dig up the remains of Hopkins and dump them between the towery pillars of Oxford!

i promise i won't leave a spot of blood.

The inscape you speak of sounds kin to onomatapoeia.......am I wrong in drawing that relationship?

At any rate, a fascinating read. Thank you for taking the time and effort.

n his journals, Gerard Manley Hopkins used two terms, "inscape" and "instress," which can cause some confusion. By "inscape" he means the unified complex of characteristics that give each thing its uniqueness and that differentiate it from other things, and by "instress" he means either the force of being which holds the inscape together or the impulse from the inscape which carries it whole into the mind of the beholder:

There is one notable dead tree . . . the inscape markedly holding its most simple and beautiful oneness up from the ground through a graceful swerve below (I think) the spring of the branches up to the tops of the timber. I saw the inscape freshly, as if my mind were still growing, though with a companion the eye and the ear are for the most part shut and instress cannot come.

The concept of inscape shares much with Wordsworth's "spots of time," Emerson's "moments," and Joyce's "epiphanies," showing it to be a characteristically Romantic and post-Romantic idea. But Hopkins' inscape is also fundamentally religious: a glimpse of the inscape of a thing shows us why God created it. "Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:/ . . myself it speaks and spells,/ Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came. "

Hopkins occupies an important place in the poetic line that reaches from the major Romantic poets, especially Wordsworth and Keats, through Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites to Hopkins, Pater, Yeats and the symbolists, and finally to Ezra Pound and the Imagists. His insistence that inscape was the essence of poetry ("Poetry is in fact speech employed to carry the inscape of speech for the inscape's sake") and that consequently, what he called "Parnassian" poetry (i.e., competent verse written without inspiration) was to be avoided has much in common with the aestheticism of Walter Pater (one of his tutors at Oxford) and the Art for Art's Sake movement, and sounds very much like the theoretical pronouncements of the Imagists of the early twentieth century.
http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian/hopkins/hopkins1.html

"In his poetry Hopkins expressed what he called inscape and instress. Inscape is the individual design of each thing that distinguishes it from other things in the universe; instress is the act, the intense power, that brings one to recognizing an object's inscape. Through instress, one would recognize the divine in everything, and Hopkins wrote his poems to reflect this realization and to bring inscape to the reader through his unique rhythm, which he called sprung rhythm, and word play."
http://www.webspan.net/~amunno/gerard.html

ONOMATOPOEIA (ahn-uh-mah-tuh-PEE-uh)

Strictly speaking, the formation or use of words which imitate sounds, like whispering, clang and sizzle, but the term is generally expanded to refer to any word whose sound is suggestive of its meaning.

Sidelight: Because sound is an important part of poetry, the use of onomatopoeia is another subtle weapon in the poet's arsenal for the transfer of sense impressions through imagery, as in Keats' "The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves," in "Ode to a Nightingale."

Sidelight: Though impossible to prove, some philologists (linguistic scientists) believe that all language originated through the onomatopoeic formation of words.

(See also Mimesis, Phonetic Symbolism)

Hi ....(Hekter, Helen and Susan)...

I am just catching up on some reading now. Thank you all for the efforts in this thread. I have to read Hopkins' poem a couple more times to get his whole point.

Helen. If you're out there. I've been mulling on this onomatapea ( I can't spell by the way) business for a while now. Here's what I think.

Yes, the poet is trying to imitate sounds, but not merely outer ones; something more. She looks into the imaginative heart of the thing, its secret imagination which can be found through observation but requires imaginative perception too. She looks there and articulates the gesture of that imagination in sound and image. She knows that the imagination lying and behind a thing is its deepest reality; and that this is of a picture nature which can be expresed in sound, in song and story. In sound it can be manifest most directly through patterning of all the plastic and musical elements that may embody that secret picture nature and vital life of the thing. This could be a mood, a yew tree, a crocus, a battle.

The above is what Hopkins meant in my view, but codified it with the inscape/instress terminology because he had academic tendencies, or wanted to justify his outlandish innovations by giving them terminology that would make it easier for his associates to digest.

Here is a perceptive quote on this whole business from a sligtly less Blakean perspective;

...'Keat's Ode to Autumn contains a beautiful description of something which everyone has observed- the cloud of gnats falling and rising by water in a still warm evening:

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies.

What incredible aptness of sound is to be found especially in the last half of thesse three lines! Borne aloft- the 'b' brings the slight effort with which the wind comes out of the calm; the'l' raises the choir of gnats; in the 'f' the wind is still blowing and they are still rising; but the 't' brings a limit, and, with a last sigh of the wind in the ‘s’ of sinking, the darker, heavier second syllable of that word brings the fall. Up again from the ‘l’ of light on to the ‘t’ once more; down to the darker lower ‘d’ of wind; only to rise and fall once more in ‘lives or dies’.

It is not here a question of imiatating the sounds of nature, but of catching the essential gesture of each sound of speech, and feeling how marvellously it chimes with the movement of the thing described.'

definitely the whole sense of image has to be transformed into the sound and the feel of the word.

update on the Gerard Manley Hopkins link.

there was a very long thread preceding this one, on our old Voice Forum.

it went on for quite awhile. this sort of picks up where that one left off.

the old Voice Forum was a lot of fun -- there was no bother with the Sound Recorders -- just a java program & voila -- asynchronous radio.

unfortunately, that program - once free - is no longer available to us.

hence, the creation of Poets' Radio Forum.

directly above your reply is the correct link for Hopkins.

yes, he was a Jesuit priest & felt his writing to be at odds with that.. so.. he burned some of his early work. but you can read the bio.

please add whatever you like to these Metacriticism threads.

i will look into that Eliot inspiration you mentioned --

i may have that in a book i like about Eliot. when i have the chance..

I recall this discussion from last year and wondered what became of it. Connor certainly did some fine investigation into the works of Hopkins --- a poet whose "inventions" still intrigue us. It's good to see that his work is again being shared on MetaCrit.

What draws us to Hopkins is obvious: a shrewd blend of music and vocabulary, both of which are crafted around his subject. Although "The Windhover" is the anthologized piece we use to teach his sprung rhythm, I always include "God's Grandeur" as the supreme evidence of his ability to combine and organize alliteration, rhyme and rhythm without watering down the thematic significance of the lines. That's quite a trick! Others who have attempted it produce what appears to be merely contrived poetry.

From "God's Grandeur" :

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

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.

I wonder if Yeats could have written "The Second Coming" without [what Bloom calls the anxiety of influence].

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world . . .

It is certain that Hopkins "stirred" the poetic mix in his day . . . although, like so many other poets . . . he was never recognized while he lived.

I noticed an earlier reference to TS Eliot and the possibility that he was inspired in some way by Hopkins when composing one of his many Sweeney poems. Critics have always been interested in Eliot's sources, but it is difficult to be sure what exactly Eliot had in mind unless he discloses the information in his exhausting notes . . . and then ---- we are not really sure he is telling the truth ----! God knows that Eliot borrowed [and stole] from Dante to Donne to Shakespeare to the French Imagists to The London Times . . .

But, that is another discussion altogether.

Eliot's last critical work was on George Herbert.

a congenial (to Eliot) religious man - who provided some unison in Eliot's life - or something like that -

but no Gerard M. Hopkins (of whom i could find no mention in connection with Eliot).

this is the Herbert poem Eliot was in tune with:

i would, if i knew what you wanted More on.

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