220 notes to chapter 2
who let slip that Hopkins was not only an astute reader of poems but a poet in his own
right—and Hopkins’s employment of his own theories may have been cause for Pat-
more to misunderstand and resist Hopkins’s poems). Thus, amid the praise and nice-
ties the two poets-critics exchanged, we sense a larger tension between Patmore, whose
perceived expertise in matters of versification had only grown with the reissue of his
treatise, and Hopkins, who speaks with an authority as assured as his poetic criticism.
In the 1886 edition, the small “note” from the author states: “This Essay was first
printed, almost as it now stands, in the year 1856. I have seen with pleasure that, since
then, its main principles have been quietly adopted by most writers on the subject in
periodicals and elsewhere.” It was precisely “in periodicals” where Bridges’s debates
about classical meters were playing out concurrently, and where, as Patmore states in
his essay, “a vast mass of nondescript matter has been brought up from the recesses
visited, but no one has succeeded in rendering any sufficient amount of this secret of
the intellectual deep,” concluding “upon few other subjects has so much been written
with so little tangible result” (Coventry Patmore’s “Essay on English Metrical Law,”
3–4). Patmore never adopted any of Hopkins’s suggested revisions, though he assured
Hopkins that he would give his suggestions “my best consideration . . . before I reprint
that Essay, which I propose to do . . . meantime I will only say that much of the sub-
stance of your very valuable notes will come rather as a development than as a correc-
tion of the ideas which I have endeavoured—with too much levity perhaps—to ex-
press” (Abbott, LII, 186).
- Ibid., 152–58, 177.
- Ibid., 166–71. Abbott MS. 185a Durham University Library. This is also the
case for Hopkins’s comments on The Unknown Eros Dec. 6, 1993, Abbott MS. 193a. - Ibid., 178–81, Abbott MS 190a 2–3.
- Patmore, “Prefatory Study on English Metrical Law,” 15.
- Abbott, LII, 179.
- Hopkins continues: “Also what we emphasize we say clearer, more distinctly,
and in fact to this is due the slurring, in English, of unaccented syllables; which is the
beauty of the language, so that only misguided people say Dev-il, six-pence distinctly”
(Abbott, LII, 179). - Ibid., 183.
- Hopkins went over Bridges’s fair copy of his manuscript (MS B) over Christmas
of 1883 as he was preparing to move to Dublin as a Fellow in Classics of the Royal
University in Ireland (Abbott, LI, 263). Hopkins reached Dublin on February 18,
1884 and did not send his manuscript to Patmore until early March. - Though the “Author’s Note” shows a confidence about the poet trusting the
reader’s performance, guided by the always subjective ear, Hopkins’s correspondence
with Bridges proves that Hopkins had not resolved the issue of using marks for accent
in his own poems, and continued, in fact, to trust the eye over the ear. Because Bridges
made fair copies of all of Hopkins’s poems, Bridges could choose whether to leave the
accent marks on or off. In this way, Hopkins could see his poems in a different hand-
writing with the original metrical marks erased and then, “make a few corrections,”
which often meant reluctantly returning his accent marks to his poems. - Devlin, Sermons, 127.
- Rask, Grammar, 114.