216 notes to chapter 2
from ‘shakes’ to ‘them’ so that the syntax may flow” (The Printed Voice of Victorian
Poetry, 273).
- Cf. Richards, Basic English and Its Uses; So Much Nearer: Essays Towards a World
English. A few canonical “sound” focused studies of Hopkins’s meter include J. Hillis
Miller, “The Univocal Chiming,” 89–116; Susan Stewart, “Letter on Sound,” 29–52;
James I. Wimsatt, Hopkins’s Poetics of Speech Sound: Sprung Rhythm, Lettering,
Inscape. - Earle, The Philolog y of the English Tongue, 585–620.
- Abbott, LII, 218–19.
- Cf. Plotkin, The Tenth Muse; Dowling , Language and Decadence in the Victorian
Fin de Siècle. - Plotkin, The Tenth Muse, 37–38.
- Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language, 384.
- Trench, On the Study of Words (1851) and English Past and Present (1855), 117.
Further references are given parenthetically in the text. - House, JP, 269.
- Ibid., 127; Higgins, The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Volume IV:
Oxford Essays and Notes, 306–7. - For an intricate reading of Hopkins’s “Word” and “The Wreck of the Deutsch-
land,” see Daniel Brown, Hopkins’ Idealism, 278–326. - Both White’s Hopkins: A Literary Biography and Phillips’s Gerard Manley Hop-
kins and the Victorian Visual World note the influence of Ruskin on Hopkins’s philoso-
phy of inscape in the visual world. It is no accident that “blood is red” so closely re-
sembles Ruskin’s meditation on perception in Modern Painters, especially the chapter,
“Of the Pathetic Fallacy”: “be it observed that the word blue does not mean the sensa-
tion caused by a gentian on the human eye; but it means the power of producing that
sensation” (157). - House, JP, 129; Higgins, Oxford Essays and Notes, 312.
- Bloom, Gerard Manley Hopkins: Modern Critical Views, 3, 2.
- House, JP, 139.
- Hopkins had used a grave accent as early as 1864 in his draft of “Floris in Italy.”
That mark occurs in a line that instructs us about how to use meter as a visual guide:
“Beauty it may be is the meet of lines / Or careful-spacèd sequences of sound.” In the
“mete” or measure of lines, sound—an imprecise science—must be sequenced and
spaced onto the page. The grave mark, promoting the normally unpronounced “ed,” as
is typical in poetic practice, spaces the line out to give it ten syllables. - Abbott, LI, 24.
- Norman MacKenzie, Poetical Works, 56.
- House, JP, 136. “Beating the bounds” of the Parish is an Ascension Day tradi-
tion. The priest would walk the grounds to show its boundary, saying a blessing at
certain points. Boys with white birch rods would then rhythmically beat the spot until
the priest moved on to the next boundary. Though parish maps have supplanted this
tradition from some churchyards, Hopkins’s observation of this event gives another
meaning to his use of “white birch” in his poems. “This ancient method of impressing
the parish’s boundaries on the children’s memory on Ascension day is still preserved by
three Oxford parishes: St. Michael’s at the North Gate, All Saints, and Saint Mary the