Alice Brewer: 'Gerard Manley Hopkins and Prosody's Catholicism'

IN LOSS AND GAIN (1848), John Henry Newman describes conversion to Roman Catholicism as a kind of disentanglement:

When, then, men for the first time look upon the world of politics or religion, all that they find there meets their mind’s eye as a landscape addresses itself for the first time to a person who has just gained his bodily sight. One thing is as far off as another; there is no perspective. The connection of fact with fact, truth with truth, the bearing of fact upon truth, and truth upon fact, what leads to what, what are points primary and what secondary—all this they have yet to learn [...] Their lines of argument diverge; nothing comes to a point; there is no one centre in which their minds sits, on which their judgment of men and things proceeds.

Renewed sight is a common conceit in conversion narratives; the description in Cardinal Newman’s novel is compelling in its emphasis on vision’s rhythms, on learnt discernment. Probably the most notorious Victorian convert to Catholicism, Newman’s conception of conversion as a matter of order and

pattern finds its fullest rationalist articulation in Grammar of Assent (1870). Though differing with regard to reason’s role in the access to faith, poet and fellow Victorian convert Gerard Manley Hopkins’s prosody shares Newman’s sense of the need for a reformation of attention: he makes a similarly naturalist claim with regard to poetic metre—a position marked, too, by a sense of Catholicism’s unpopularity and obscurity.

Hopkins’s most extended discussion of metre prefaces the so-called ‘B’ manuscript: a collection of his poems retained by Robert Bridges, first published (shorn of diacritical notation) in 1918. He proposes two kinds of metre: Running Rhythm and Sprung Ryhthm. The former broadly corresponds to accentual-syllabic verse, first theorised in English in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Against this, Hopkins establishes Sprung Rhythm. It operates according to bars marked out by vertical dashes within and across the line unit, with its stresses and slacks falling anywhere, “expressed to the eye” (as Hopkins once described it) by diacritical marks over intended stress-points. Such a configuration, he argues, “is [that] of common speech and written prose, when rhythm is perceived in them”.

Critics frequently omit the latter part of this claim. Without the qualification, however, without Hopkins’s diacritical and paratextual efforts, the strident loneliness of his poetry—his life as a Victorian Roman Catholic—is missed. In some ways, Hopkins’s attentional qualification maintains continuity with what might be understood as the Romantic version of poiesis: as a disentanglement of song from the mires of prose, transfigured but unconstructed. As Isabella Alford argues in Forms of Poetic Attention (2020), it was in this movement that poetic attention became properly theorised and prioritised as philosophical concept, as “a departure at once from the world and into the world, at once from the mind, and into the mind” (italics in original). But in Hopkins’s poetry these intersections coagulate: the lyrical fullness of his poems emerge in moments of viscousness as opposed to rupture, with attention more like the work of squinting eyes or a tensed hand, rather than the craned necks and generous ears of, say, Wordsworth and Coleridge.

In this, I think, Hopkins’s prosodic claims and practice begin to register as Catholic ones: as attempts to shore something up against a state of dispossession, to override a Protestant iambic consensus with the consolation of a better—more catholic, more apostolic—knowledge. Alongside his prosodic naturalism, Hopkins argues that Sprung Rhythm cannot be “counterpointed”, cannot be resolved into familiar stress patterns. As in ‘God’s Grandeur,’ “[no] foot feels”: it’s a specific rejection of the verse technology that was coincident with (and not unconnected to) the ratification of English Protestantism. But the attentional qualification marks an awareness of his own minoritised position: his poet—like the convert—is made, not born. It might be read as a mark of estrangement from a culture that he had spent his early life tied to, a culture that had not been Catholic for over three hundred years. His letters to his father during his conversion in 1866 speak to this loneliness: no longer allowed to attend chapel with non-Catholics, but as yet “unrecieved,” he notes the irony of having to not attend Church in order to attend it. Indeed, Evelyn Waugh would later write of this sense of self-incurred loss as a permanent fixture in the life of the convert:

The medieval cathedrals and churches, the rich ceremonies that surround the monarchy [...] the traditional culture of Oxford and Cambridge, the liturgy composed in the heyday of English prose style—all these are the property of the Church of England.

Hopkins himself would remark that “bad taste” is frequently met “in the accessories of Catholicism.” His most accomplished poems, then, might be read as small triumphs over this dispossession, and the sense of being out of step becomes a virtue again, where obstinacy becomes the very means of Christ’s intelligibility. For instance, in ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and the Comfort of the Resurrection’: 

    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 [...]

The assonance and alliteration resemble mud; the words stick and group to one another even as their predicative gradations seem to aspire to distinction. It is difficult for the reading eye to glide, to coordinate the lines according to existing metrical schematics. Hopkins’s bar marks help ratify this: I’m compelled to pressure ‘in’ after the medial caesura, despite the vowel’s smallness, to retrain my eye according to the actually-existing graphic marks and forget my habitual diction. The commanded intractability gives a sense of Christ’s immanence in its strained-for closeness, and the cluster of Eucharistic (“dough, crust”; “starches”) and liturgical (“dust”) references are the same grounds of the sonnet’s conclusion, that “I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am”; that:

    [...] immortal diamond,
    Is immortal diamond.

The pull of the line break over the tautology mimes a trick of the eye or ear: no new sense data confirms or concludes. As in Newman’s description of conversion, what was already there was already there, unattended. And under the pressure of Hopkins’s sonic insistences, the words, like the mud, almost attain to themselves, transubstantiated. Privately circulating his poems, however, Hopkins was frustrated by readerly inexactitude. Notes appending the ‘B’ manuscript frequently demand his poems read according to the musical tempos and time-signatures; in a letter to Bridges, he describes his frustration with written poetry:

My meaning surely ought to appear of itself; but in a language like English, and in an age of it like the present, written words are really matter open and indifferent to the receiving of different and alternative verse-forms, some of which the reader cannot possibly be sure are meant unless they are marked for him.

What was supposed to be inalienable turns out to need the legislature of notation, to need disentanglement. As in Waugh’s and Hopkins’s descriptions of the convert’s disappointment, confidence ends up adjusted, subdued to what it works in. For me, this is the most reflexively Catholic element of Hopkins’s prosodic interventions: a sense of reluctant vocation, a belief that its difficulties bring knowledge—but that under better circumstances, under better eyes, all might have been obvious from the start.

Alice Brewer is an MPhil student in English at the University of Cambridge. She's researching modernist work ethics and the poetry of W.S. Graham.