Chapter 3: The Institution of Meter
into things, and things over into the mind. “Stress” is crucially related to the
copula “to be.”^24 He writes that without it “there would be no bridge, no stem
of stress between us and things to bear us out and carry the mind over: with-
out stress we might not and could not say / Blood is red.. .”^25 He continues:
“Being and thought are the same. The truth in thought is Being, stress, and
each word is one way of acknowledging Being and each sentence by its copula
is (or its equivalent) the utterance and assertion of it.” When “stress” is “ut-
tered,” a word becomes “being.”^26 By emphasizing the word stress as a particular
assertion of being, Hopkins implies that language, uttered in a certain way and
perceived in a certain way, becomes an assertion of being. But how might we
understand metrical stress as a measure of being? And how might those beings
then make up a nation?
Hopkins first began to define the instress of words in his notes on Greek
philosophy in 1868; he also began working toward connecting the “thisness”
or “markedness” of words with that of people, natural things, and metrical
stress. Reading Greek philosophy through an idea of an essential “thisness” of
language (also an influence from Anglo-Saxonist movements), Hopkins me-
diated between the classical and nativist views of language, which he used
equally to form his theories of language. Furthermore, all of this patterned
energ y needed to be reconciled with the universal truths of the church.
Through a consideration of the Scottish Franciscan philosopher Duns Scotus
(1265–1308), who also attended Oxford, “Hopkins coined the word ‘in-
scape’ for every natural pattern he apprehended.” Harold Bloom defines “In-
stress” as “the effect of each pattern upon [Hopkins’s] own imagination.”^27
The “stress” of the “scaped” patterns on and in things in the external world
meant that meaning was elaborated, doubled, when it entered Hopkins’s
philosophical and spiritual domain. The application and graphic marking of
prosodic stress evolved, for Hopkins, into an indication of that elaborated
significance in nature and in “things.” The mark, itself, also evolved into its
own elaborated significance as not only the marker of verbal or philological
proliferations of meaning, but as a part of larger patterns of graphic stresses
with inscape, and eventually with transformative powers themselves. Tracing
the mark through Hopkins’s letters as he develops his theory of instress, we
see the way that the philosophical idea of “instress” often follows Hopkins’s
apprehension of a visual mark in nature or, inversely, how considering instress
makes him more aware of visual patterns that resemble ordering marks. Pas-
sages in his journals and papers that consider marks, strokes, and graphic
signs show how their growing significance, over and above “letters,” parallels
his decision to use these signs as superimposed indications of his new metrical
stresses.
Hopkins was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1866. It was the
year before he graduated with First Class in “Greats” from Balliol College at
Oxford. He had met Bridges (an Anglican) at Oxford three years earlier.