the stigma of meter 51
why.” Using the unmarked and truncated text from Bridges’s The Spirit of Man,
Richards acknowledged that Hopkins was aware of the “possible alternative
readings of the seventh (sic) line” because of the “accent-mark he originally
placed on ‘will.’” In the 1918 edition of Hopkins’s poems, also edited by
Bridges, accent marks appeared in lines 1, 3, 5, 9, 11, and 14 (Bridges’s 1918
version also includes lines 3 and 4, omitted from both The Spirit of Man and
Practical Criticism, and no other published versions of “Spring and Fall” pub-
lished prior to this moment retained Hopkins’s marks).^11 Richards’s excuse for
the erasure “to avoid a likely temptation to irrelevant discussions”—demon-
strates a critical unwillingness to engage with meter’s material, historical, and
spiritual presence. Indeed, it explicitly deems any such discussion “irrelevant.”
Richards writes, “[w]hen ‘will’ is accentuated it ceases to be an auxiliary verb
and becomes the present tense of the verb ‘to will.’”^12 His criticism of the word
is that even without the accent mark, the hint that it gives toward the mean-
ing of the poem “ought to be retained.”^13 As Richards’s reading of Hopkins
shows, because of and despite its erasure of the mark, meter’s meaning is sel-
dom secure.
This line, if we reinsert the mark, gestures to its own possible reception. The
alliterative “will,” “weep,” and “why,” demote the stress on “know,” so that the
line defers any stable knowledge of why the reader will weep. Hopkins in-
scribes the critical pathos into the poem’s falling rhythm, bolstered by the
words “worlds” and “wanwood” in line 8: “Though worlds of wanwood
leafmeal lie.” In this way, the poem commands us to recognize the “sights” (l.
6: “such sights colder”) that bend our critical will to react, “by and by” (l. 7).
Richards effaces this reading, refusing even to recognize the metrical pun of
the poem’s title—“Spring and Fall,” as Hopkins called his most famous poetic
experiment “sprung rhythm”—and this poem, using that rhythm, springs and
falls in and out of a more traditional alternating pattern. By removing the
mark, Richards, in effect, erases his own willingness to engage with meter on
Hopkins’s specific historical terms, preferring to make meter a constant, and
therefore immaterial, issue.
Richards’s early assessment has haunted critical accounts of Hopkins. Along
Richards’s lines, a critical tendency has arisen to read the sound effects in Hop-
kins’s poetry as either magically clarifying or obfuscating, without considering
the fact that the very concept of sound was changing as Hopkins composed his
poems and theories. Indeed, late twentieth-century critics followed the same
well-trodden paths as nineteenth-century prosodists like Hopkins, idealizing
the possibility of meter as a constant system that could be replicated by more
than one speaker in more than one historical moment. Eric Griffiths’s land-
mark book, The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry (1989), so vividly imagines
scenes of hearing and so carefully shows instances and tropes of voice and si-
lence in Victorian poetry that poetic meter becomes merely voice’s vehicle
without an expressive capacity of its own. Poetic meter, in particular, becomes