The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

The manner was designed to create an outward, poetic form (‘instress’) that mirrored what he saw as the ‘inscape’ of the world. He said in a letter to Patmore that stress is ‘the making of a thing more, or making it markedly, what it already is; it is the bringing out its nature’. His sense of instress and inscape is not unlike the medieval idea of haecceity or ‘thisness’³⁵and the later, modernist obsession with quiddity (‘whatness’). If such exquisite words are leaving you all of a doo-dah, it is worth remembering that for those of us with a high doctrine of poetry, the art is precisely concerned with precision, exactly about the exact, fundamentally found in the fundamental, concretely concrete, radically rooted in the thisness and whatness of everything. Poets, like painters, look hard for the exact nature of things and feelings, what they really, really are. Just as painters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century tried to move their form on, tried to find new ways to represent the ‘concrete flux of interpenetrating intensities’ that T. E. Hulme saw as reality, so Hopkins attempted to create a prosodic scheme that went beyond the calm, regular certainties of iambs and anapaests (‘running rhythm’ as he called traditional metrics) in order to find a system that mirrored the (for him) overwhelming complexity, density and richness of nature. How they mocked Cézanne and Matisse for their pretension and oddity, yet how truthful to us their representations of nature now seem. The idiosyncrasy of Hopkins is likewise apparent, yet who can argue with such a concrete realisation of the skies? ‘Cloud puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows…’ The density and relentless energy of his stresses and word-yokings are his way of relaying to us the density and relentless energy of experience. There is nothing ‘primitivist’, ‘folksy’ or ‘naïve’ in Hopkins’s appropriation of indigenous, pre-Renaissance poetics, his verse strikes our ear as powerfully modern, complex and tense. ‘No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness,’ he wrote to Bridges in 1879. ‘It is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer. This vice I cannot have escaped.’

One more excerpt, this time from ‘The Caged Skylark’, which, as you will see, refers to us more than to the bird:As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cageMan’s mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, dwells.

How different from Blake’s Robin Red breast in its cage…

Five of those twenty-four syllables are slack and squeezed into the lightest of scudding trips (in order: a, -ed, a, -it, his), while the in of both lines takes fractionally more push. The others, with varying degrees of weight that you might like to decide upon, are stressed: I have emboldened the words that seem to me to take the primary stress, but I could well be wrong. Incidentally, ‘bone-house’ to mean ‘body’ is an example of a kenning: it doesn’t take too much to see that the adjectival ‘dare-gale’ could easily cross over into another kenning too.

All of which demonstrates, I hope, the way in which Hopkins backwards-leapfrogged the Romantics, the Augustans (Pope, Dryden et al.), Shakespeare, Milton and even Chaucer, to forge a distinct poetics of stress metre from the ancient verse of the Welsh, Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon traditions. In turn, many British twentieth-century poets looked back the shorter distance to Hopkins, over the shoulders of Eliot, Pound and Yeats. I find it hard to read much of Ted Hughes, for example, without hearing Hopkins’s distinct music. Here are two fragments from ‘The Sluttiest Sheep in England’ for you to recite to yourself.They clatterOver worthless moraines, tossingTheir Ancient Briton draggle-tassel sheepskinsOr pose, in the rain-smoke, like warriors–…This lightning-broken huddle of summitsThis god-of-what-nobody-wants

Or this, from ‘Eagle’:The huddle-shawled lightning-faced warriorStamps his shaggy-trousered danceOn an altar of blood.

Certainly the sensibility is different: Hopkins is all wonderment, worship, dazzle and delight, where Hughes is often (but certainly not always) in a big mood: filled with disgust, doubt and granite contempt. Nonetheless, the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, the generally four-stressed split line and use of alliteration and other ‘echoic’ devices (we’ll come to them in a later chapter) reveal much common ground. Many modern British poets show the influence of ancient forms filtered through Hopkins. We’ve already met this perfect Langlandian line from R. S. Thomas’s ‘The Welsh Hill Country’:

On a bleak background of bald stone.

From the same poem comes this:the leaves’Intricate filigree falls, and who shall renewIts brisk pattern?