The Rise and Fall of Meter

50 chapter 2

essay in The Dial titled simply “Gerard Hopkins.” The piece begins: “[m]odern
verse is perhaps more often too lucid than too obscure,” and makes a case for
“some slight obscurity in its own right,”^9 using Hopkins as an example for the
“practical criticism” that Richards would set forth in 1929. It is not surprising,
then, when one considers the antiphilological and antihistorical approaches
to literature that Richards espoused, that he would praise Hopkins for his
mastery. Despite this respect for Hopkins’s “mastery,” the early history of his
publication is one of truncation and erasure: just as Bridges was reluctant to
reproduce all of Hopkins’s metrical marks, Richards included none of them
in Practical Criticism. Hopkins’s obscurity, according to Richards, repelled
the “light-footed reader” who had been conditioned to expect clarity in met-
ric and narrative not only by English education but also by the inundation
of metrically simplistic Edwardian and Georgian poetry—the conventional
backdrop for the rise of experimental Modernism.
Though Richards was comfortable with the way that Hopkins’s metrical
form helped to create a kind of modern-seeming obscurity, he was uncomfort-
able with the metrical marks indicating Hopkins’s rhythm.^10 In Richards’s
1929 textbook, Practical Criticism, he eliminated the accent mark over the
word “will” in a line from the poem “Spring and Fall.” I’ll quote the poem in
full, including the marks that Richards erased:

Spring and Fall

to a young child

Márgarét, áre you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leáves, like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Áh! ás the heart grows older 5

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you wíll weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name: 10

Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It ís the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for. 15

Richards eliminated all metrical marks on the poem, but he discussed in detail
his decision to erase the mark in line 9: “And yet you wíll weep and know