notes to chapter 2 217
Virgin’s. The bounds of St. Michael’s pass through the old St. Peter’s Rectory in New
Inn Hall Street, where GMH then lodged” (n.1, 136, 348).
- Norman MacKenzie, Poetical Works, ll. 3–5, 58.
- Devlin, Sermons, 129.
- House, JP, 195.
- July 8, 1871: “I noticed two kinds of flash but I am not sure that sometimes
there were not the two together from different points of the same cloud or starting
from the same point different ways—one a straight stroke, broad like a stroke with
chalk and liquid, as if the blade of an oar just stripped open a ribbon scar in smooth
water and it caught the light; the other narrow and wire-like, like the splitting of a rock
and danced down-along in a thousand jags” (House, JP, 212). - Hopkins, AN.
- Abbott, LIII, 14–15.
- Hopkins gladly erased the marks in order to try to assure the poem’s publica-
tion, but The Month rejected it even without marks. - Abbott, LI, 51–52.
- See MacKenzie, The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 319–20. An in-
teresting phenomenological reading of “The Wreck” is offered by William A. Cohen
in Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses, 125–27. - The numbers in the left column record the distance from the left edge of the
page for each line. The distance is equivalent for each line, so that in line 1, the eye has
to wander past 4 spaces (tabs, when we type) before the supposed two beats of the line.
The right column records the number of stresses in the line according to the “Author’s
Note.” I have reproduced this spacing—as all editors perhaps should—because the ab-
sence of words is part of the metrical pattern. The stanza itself leans to the right, like a
stroke for stress when viewed from far away:
(4) Thou mastering me (2)
(3) God! giver of breath and bread; (3)
(2) Wórld’s stránd, swáy of the séa; (4)
(3) Lord of living and dead; (3)
(1) Thou has bóund bónes and véins in me, fástened me flésh, (5)
(1) And áfter it álmost únmade, what with dréad, (5)
(2) Thy doing : and dost thou touch me afresh? (4)
Óver agáin I féel thy fínger and fínd thée. (6)- Arsis means the act a raising or lifting the foot and thesis to the stamping down
of the foot, corresponding in Greek quantitative meter to the short and long part of
the metrical foot. In Latin accentual verse, the meaning was reversed: arsis came to
mean the long part of the foot and thesis the shorter. This misinterpretation held
when English accentual verse translated short and long feet into unaccented and ac-
cented syllables. Hopkins explains this to Patmore in an 1883:
Perhaps you do not know that the Latin writers exchanged and misapplied the
Greek words arsis and thesis. Arsis is properly the rise of the foot in dancing or of
the conductor’s arm in beating time, thesis the fall of the same. Arsis therefore is
the light part of the foot, I call it the ‘slack’; thesis is the heavy or strong, the
stress. For this reason some writers now refuse to say arsis and thesis and use ictus