DANIEL BROWNStones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name (GMH 1-4)Here the optical spectrum has come to parallel the musical scale. Just as the
distinctive being of the creatures is caught in the manner of spectroscopy in
a definitive flash of light, so too the respective natures of the stones, string
and bell issue as specific sounds. 23 The common principle is a physical
dynamism: the regular pattern of agitation in the respective media of the
luminiferous ether (posited by the wave-theory of light), together with the
air through which sound is also propagated in the form of waves. Indeed,
the formal analogy of the wave is neatly presented by Hopkins's punning
image of "stones" that "ring" both visibly through the surface of the water
and audibly through the air. Such semantic richness marks an instance of
the saturated participation in being, in activity, that Hopkins's poetry
insists upon. These lines require that the reader "find... tongue" and
exercise it by moving through the obstacle course of their prosody: a
sequence of alliteration, internal rhymes, and crisp consonants wrapped
around closely packed contrasting vowel sounds often marked by strong
stresses. He emphasizes that he wrote his poetry to be read aloud. In a
fragment written in 1865, he understood speech as a physical activity and
sound as vibration: "Where is the tongue that drives the stony air to
utterance?" ("O what a silence in this wilderness!" [GMH 14-15]). Most
of his mature poetry implicitly poses this question, demanding that the
latent energy of print be actualized by speech.
The analogy that Hopkins draws between sound and light is based upon
an understanding of each as a dynamic formal principle, a particular
pattern of movement in a material medium. Such understandings presup-
pose thermodynamics, the science that emerged in the 1820s from the study
of the steam engine. By the 1860s, this area of scientific research conceived
of not only heat and work but also electricity, magnetism, light, and sound
as translatable modes of an abstract quantitative principle that was
becoming known as energy. The principle of the conservation of energy
maintains that whatever transformations such principles undergo there is
always, as Henri Poincare puts it, "a something which remains constant." 24
Hence energy is described either as potential or as actual. The movement
from the latent to the actual state appears in Hopkins's poem "Tom's
Garland: On the Unemployed" (composed 1887) where the friction of the
working man Tom's boots on paving stones generates a spark: it "rips out
rockfire" (GMH 3). For Hopkins, the source of all such energy is God: "As
kingfishers catch fire" they manifest this energy as a distinctive pitch of
light. Hopkins conceives of God's presence as a huge charge of energy that
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