Timothy, thank you for the additional feedback. I feel like I have now gotten some support for my poetic tastes.

From what I've been reading, I'm getting the message that a famous poet like Hopkins (shudder), having decided what meter he wants, may then so radically depart from that meter as to artificially stress whichever word falls in the operative position, regardless of the natural rhythm of the language or the ordinary usage and meaning of the words themselves.

He may further expect the reader to read his poem according to his intended meter because he's the one who wrote it, by golly. If it is apparent that 100% of readers would not and could not stress the words he wanted stressed without signposts, then he may use accents to stress the wrong syllables. That seems lazy if not outright inept to me.

A poet owns his poem and can write it as badly as he wants to. But how in the world could he ever sell anybody else on it? What am I missing here? When I've read this poem before I haven't seen the accents, and liked it infinitely better without them, even though some of the lines were a little short.

Carol

Good point Carol. The emperor has no clothes. I read Hopkins as I would read any other poet aloud, ignoring his silly diacritical accents. And I often find him glorious. Allbeit only loosely metrical, his verse is so musical, his vocabulary so rich, that there's really nobody that sounds like him. A worse model for a young poet I can't imagine, and fool that I was, I made him my model ages since.

Carol, you raise serious questions about the relation of poetic convention to individual practice--but please don’t imagine that Hopkins is a “typical” technician in the sense that Shakespeare, Keats, or Frost are. Nor would anyone, I think, suggest we can extrapolate, from Hopkins’ practice, observations applicable to the ways that most other poets approach their art.

Hopkins is intelligent, but eccentric. (I use that latter adjective in the neutral and literal sense of “away from or out of the center.”) And his “sprung rhythm” prosody, though related to the old accentual-alliterative tradition, is largely self-devised and unique to his work. He used it--and here and there (e.g. in “God’s Grandeur”) he showed how elements of it might be adapted to accentual-syllabic measure--but no one else has followed, systematically, his principles.

As Frost notes in a letter to his daughter Lesley (Frost, Complete Poems, Prose, and Plays, p. 736), Robert Bridges, in his intro to the 1st edition of Hopkins’ Poems, sympathetically and judiciously assessed the strengths and limitations of Hopkins prosody.

A word should be said in defense of Hopkins’ as a technician. He may well be crazy, but he isn’t lazy and he isn’t ever a “cheater.” He attempts conscientiously--indeed obsessively and neurotically at points--to keep to his rules. And if he initially baffles us, it’s that some of his regulations and procedures are so unlike what we’re used to and so removed from the way that most of us experience English-language poetry and speech.

These remarks remind me that I didn’t entirely answer Caleb’s recent question about sprung rhythm vis-à-vis accentual verse. Sprung rhythm is a specific type of accentual verse. Accentual verse is characterized by its having a certain number of accents per line. But the accents may be (and, because this happens naturally in English speech, are often) separated by one or more unaccented syllables, as in

In a sómer séson whan sóft was the sónne

In contrast, in sprung rhythm, at least some of the time, the accents are cheek by jowl, so as to produce a plosive effect, as in

What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed

Carol, there is a point of view, which I subscribe to, that a poem's manuscript is like a musical score. The poet is telling the reader how it should be read. If the poet doesn't want to give the reader room to improvise, so be it -- we can only hope that the poet's rhythmic instincts are better than the reader's. My own experience with Hopkins's diacritical marks is that they add a wonderful dimension to the poems. In some cases, I would have stressed those syllables anyway, though not always. Putting two accents on "Margaret" at the beginning of the first line (MAR gar ET) adds, to my ear, a fascinating sound, especially when it is contrasted with the unaccented "Margaret" in the last line.

About "sprung rhythm" in general, the line that Timothy just quoted:

What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed
(I think those are Tim's accents, not Hopkins's)

is a good example of why I like the genre so much. Who can deny that the rhythms of that line are marvelous? Yet, that line does not fit any of the usual meters that poets write in. Without sprung rhythm, such a line could never be written (except in free verse, where it would lose its impact).

Of course, there ARE times when I like to add my own stresses. Jerome did a long analysis of "Pied Beauty", explaining why the reader is compelled to read the final line "praise HIM". The only problem was, I always read it "PRAISE him". If Hopkins had put an accent on "him", I would have been robbed of the freedom to say it the way I like.



[This message has been edited by Caleb Murdock (edited July 13, 2001).]

Timothy, I appreciate your explanation and insight, thanks.

In order to read the line with any satisfaction, I am planting a caesura between ghost and guessed, drawing out the two words, so that my ear may still hear tetrameter. Otherwise the lack of resolution irritates me out of all proportion.

What héart/ héard of,/ ghóst ^/ guéssed

Is that the way you are meant to read it, or is it supposed to not be metrical at all but read as free verse?

Carol

Carol, your interpretation is exactly right: Hopkins meant all four of those syllables to count as metrical beats (hence the reinforcing alliteration). He didn't ever, at least far as we know, write vers libre.

Yes, Hopkins certainly meant us to hear four
accents, but there's no way you can put a
caesura between the subject and the verb,
"ghost / guessed"---well, you can put one
there if you like, but it makes no sense.
It's purely arbitrary and violates the
natural rhythm.
And Caleb, are you saying that "Margaret"
in the last line doesn't have two
accents, as in the first line? If so, you
are misreading the line. Maybe that's
why you say you hear some 3-beat lines in
the poem. But there are no 3-beat lines in
the poem, and Margaret has two accents in
both lines.

Robert, in the copies of "Spring and Fall" that I've seen, I've never seen accents on "Margaret" in the last line, but there are always accents present in the first line. I pronounced the first "Margaret" differently from the second (last) one, and I like that contrast. If someone were to show me a manuscript which is true to the original, and if it had accents on the second Margaret, I would pronounce them, though I would be disappointed.

Believe me, I truly don't care if the number of beats changes from line to line.

My understanding is that accents are printed only on syllables the reader would otherwise have failed to stress. Margaret, even without the written stress, reads with 3 syllables in the final line, at least to this metrical ear.

Carol