54 chapter 2
barometer, which indicates and permanently marks the rise or fall of a nation’s
life. To study a people’s language will be to study them” (40). Words “indicate
or permanently mark” the rise and fall of a nation’s life, just as Patmore’s poetry
benefits the nation’s life because of its marked and striking excellences.
Hopkins’s reading in philolog y reinforced his thinking that the moral life
of a culture could be allegorized in the written word. In 1878, two years before
Hopkins read Trench, he considered the physical material of words in terms of
sprung rhythm. In his essay, “Rhythm and Other Structural Parts,” which he
wrote as a novitiate at St. Bueno’s in Wales, Hopkins wrote, “we may think of
words as heavy bodies . . . every visible palpable body has a centre of gravity
round which it is in balance and a centre of illumination . . . up to which it is
lighted and down from which it is shaded . . . English is of this kind, the accent
of stress strong.”^22 The importance of perceiving words visually, as bodies, di-
rectly corresponds to Hopkins’s metaphysical theories of inscape and instress.
“Instress” is crucially related to the metrical mark for stress—the actual, physi-
cal mark for accent that Hopkins scored above words in his poems—and that
stress measured his spiritual hopes for the nation throughout his career. Exam-
ining how Hopkins made these marks onto and above the word-bodies of his
poetry, I argue that the “stigma” of meter is a crucial figure for the mark on
language that makes this national and spiritual reading visible. Meter, rather
than abstracting, clarifies and brings into focus Hopkins’s linguistic inten-
tions. Material marks and patterns in nature and on poems figure into Hop-
kins’s understanding of the imaginary, idealized realms of England and of
heaven.
Marking Instress
In Hopkins’s early diaries, his observation of patterns in the natural world pre-
cipitated the theory of inscape and instress. These terms were not merely tools
for the definition and manipulation of meter, but inevitably dealt with the
fundamentals of perception, reality, and existence. Put simply, “inscape” is the
unified complex of characteristics that gives each thing its uniqueness and
thereby differentiates it from other things, and “instress” is the force of being
that holds inscape together—the impulse or force of a pattern that carries the
inscape into the mind of the perceiver or beholder. In his 1868 “notebook on
the history of Greek philosophy, etc.” Hopkins began to define the instress of
language, of words. He wrote: “A word then had three terms belonging to it, 3
opoi, {terms} or moments—its prepossession of feeling ; its definition, abstrac-
tion, vocal expression or other utterance; and its application, ‘extension,’ the
concrete things coming under it.”^23 Essentially, as he sees it, a word possesses a
subjective state, is a thing itself, and names something in the objective world.
A few essays later in the same notebook, in an essay on Parmenides, Hopkins
further defined language as the very “stress” or force that carried the mind over