56 chapter 2
Hopkins’s many journals recorded his daily observations about the weather,
his activities, his reading notes, and questions about his various intellectual
pursuits. A sample of this detailed writing reveals his close attention to the
physical patterns in nature:
Was happily able to see composition of the crowd in the area of the
theatre, all the heads looking one way thrown up by their black coats
relieved only by white shirt-fronts etc.: the short strokes of eyes, nose,
mouth, repeated hundreds of times I believe it is which gives the visible
law: looked at in any one instance it flies. I could find a sort of beauty
in this, certainly character—but in fact that is almost synonymous with
finding order, anywhere. The short parallel strokes spoken of are like
those something in effect on the cusp-ends of six-foils in the iron tracery
of the choir gates in our chapel.^28Hopkins transforms the theater crowd into an impression, noticing the
“strokes of eyes, nose, mouth” as if they had been painted onto a blank canvas.
He immediately likens these ordered strokes to the architecture of the choir
gates, bringing a theater crowd into the forged gates of the church. In the year
of his conversion, Hopkins’s remarks subtly trace a path toward his spiritual
beliefs about the nature of things and begin to tie his theory of patterns to his
theory of religion. While considering a move toward Catholicism, Hopkins
subtly allegorizes the discipline of meter (the ordered stroke of the mark) into
the discipline of spiritual devotion, thus connecting himself to the broader
field of the English language and English poetry; he thus remains bound to an
important—and spiritualized—aspect of the English language. He continued
to explore and deepen this fraught connection to the holiness in the English
language and the particular power of metrical instress to convert readers for
the remainder of his career.
Two years later, in 1868, Hopkins’s poetic, linguistic, and metaphysical
consideration of stress comes together. The year Hopkins first defines instress
is when he first employed diacritical marks for metrical stress on a syllable, in
the poem “St Dorothea.”^29 He visually marks the page with acute accents to
help his reader, Robert Bridges, navigate the “new rhythm.” He writes, with
some trepidation, to Bridges: “I hope you will master the peculiar beat I have
introduced in ‘St. Dorothea.’”^30 Hopkins’s revisions of “St. Dorothea” outline
an early struggle over how to represent stress graphically—believing in some-
thing seen and determining the visual proof necessary for a true conversion. In
version A^31 of the poem, there are only “grave” accents, which appear on many
of his early poems (“quenchèd not” l. 16), but in version C, subtitled “lines for
a picture” (as if to emphasize the visual aspect of his rhythm), he uses diacriti-
cal marks in lines 2, 4, 8, 13, 16, 18, 19, 40, and 47. Her “básket” is made of
“white rods,” similar to those he observes two years earlier on Ascension Day: