100 PA RT O N E
And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.Longing for quiet, he still can’t keep the sea’s rolling cadence out of his final
line.
Why did water so grip Hopkins? His journals abound with cloud, rain, rain-
bow, pool, brook, river, sea, surf, gorge, glacier, and waterfall in the British
Isles and continental Europe.
July 20 [1873]—Water high at Hodder Roughs; where lit from within look-
ing like pale gold, elsewhere velvety brown like ginger syrop; heavy locks or
brushes like shaggy rope-ends rolling from a corner of the falls and one hud-
dling over another; below the rock the bubble-jostled skirt of foam jumping
back against the fall, which cuts its way clean and will not let it through, and
there spitting up in long white ragged shots and bushes like a mess of thongs
of bramble, and I saw by looking over nearer that those looping watersprigs
that lace and dance and jockey in the air are strung of single drops, the end one,
like a tassel or a heavier bead, the biggest; they look like bubbles in a quill.Just one sentence, shot through with six similes (gold, syrup, rope-ends.. .) and
six metaphors (velvet, brushes, skirt.. .). A rage for figures of speech grasps
what ’s ungraspable: water like syrup, foam as a skirt. And look nearer, how
these images momentarily “catch” something liquid without snagging it, to
see it as stable shape. Falling, rolling, jumping, spitting water becomes bushes,
bramble, “looping watersprigs,” that is, twigs of water—a paradox resolved,
a sort of miracle.
Hiking in the Swiss Alps, Hopkins grumbles that having a companion dilutes
his ecstasy. He got that ecstasy in waterfalls, whose explosive flux also excited
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Muir, plus countless artists and photographers.
At Reichenbach Falls it took “discharges of rice... falling vandykes [trim
beards]” to capture, for the mind ’s eye, races and rills and blown vapor cascad-
ing among the rocks.
The next day “We saw Handeck waterfall... the greatest fall we have seen,”
Hopkins writes. “I watched the great bushes of foam-water, the texture of
branchings and water-spandrils which makes them up. At their outsides nearest
the rock they gave off showers of drops strung together into little quills which
sprang out in fans,” and later “in jostling foam-bags.” Of course there were no
bags, quills, or fans, no bushes, branches, or spandrils—architectural triangles.
Only attentiveness shapes and stays the falls that aren’t really staying at all.
Something it is about waterfalls! Though no Darwinian, Hopkins would have
thrilled at a chimpanzee in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park, swinging