52 chapter 2
a predicament of speech. Griffiths’s work has been instrumental in continuing
the tendency to read meter purely as an instruction to a voice, one that makes
“claims” on it that are sometimes contradictory.^14 When complicated meter
renders accurate voicing impossible—perhaps even silent—Griffiths posits
that Hopkins is allegorizing Christ’s silence. But Griffiths and Richards are all
subject to a naturalized idea of “hearing” that derives from the nineteenth-
century dream of universal pronunciation, (a dream to which Richards de-
voted much of his late career).^15 If were we all able to hear alike, then we would
be able to retroactively “hear,” or more accurately perform, and therefore imag-
ine, the precise sounds that Hopkins intended. Philologist John Earle provides
a convenient example: in his 1873 chapter “Of Prosody,” which I quoted in the
epigraph, Earle called voice “the necessary vehicle of the meaning”; sound
alone was the “illustrative agency” and meter was mere modulation of empha-
sis.^16 But the material form of metrical marking was proof, in itself, that all ears
do not hear alike, nor do all voices emphasize in the right way, despite conven-
tion. If these scholars perceived metrical marks materially, it was only as an
instruction for an imagined, idealized voice that would, even with the marks,
be able to speak and hear the same way. Despite good intentions toward his-
toricism, critical focus on the oral recitation and aural reception of Hopkins’s
poems in this way has shifted our focus away from the material form of Hop-
kins’s metrical marks.
The British Empire of Letters
During the last decades of the nineteenth century, a number of English poets
and prosodists were concerned with the greatness of the English language and
the role poetry played in preserving that greatness. For Hopkins, Robert
Bridges, and Coventry Patmore, the forms of English meter were not only im-
plicated in measuring English poetry, but in measuring England’s character as
well. In 1886, three years before his death, Hopkins wrote to Patmore, praising
his poems as the kind that might be best suited to save England from the spiri-
tual dismay that was now spreading into the empire. “Your poems,” Hopkins
wrote, “are a good deed done for the Catholic Church and another for En-
gland, for the British Empire.” He then asked, “What marked and striking ex-
cellence has England to shew or make her civilization attractive? . . . I hold that
fine works of art . . . are really a great power in the world, an element of strength
even to an empire.”^17 Hopkins’s use of the phrase, “marked and striking,” carries
more import than mere indication. By 1886, when he wrote this phrase, meter
was a crucial site for resolving his spiritual dilemmas, as well as dilemmas about
what he perceived, as an “exiled” Catholic, to be England’s wavering Christian-
ity. Hopkins’s idea of the marked and striking power of English poetry evolved
over his lifetime into a philosophy influenced by his work in the classics, his
intense reading in philolog y, and his spiritual struggles. And his concern with