the stigma of meter 57
“Children with white rods beating bounds of St. Michael’s Parish.”^32 In version
D, Hopkins moves the diacritical marks to the side of the syllable “I ́ am so ́
light ́ and fair / Men are amazed to watch me pass / With ́ the bas ́ket I
bear. ́”^33 He has added beats and diacritical marks to indicate those beats, carv-
ing up the words “Quinc ́es look ́, when ́not one ́/ Is set in any orchard” and
forcing us to look at the effect these marks have on the rhythm of the poem.
These detached diacritical marks seem to require adding a beat, so one is
tempted to read an accented pause after the syllable intended to carry that
beat. They also more closely resemble the children’s rods—though here they
are beating the words themselves. The “St. Dorothea” manuscript is one of the
only drafts in which Hopkins places accent marks to the side of the syllables—
imitating popular pronouncing dictionaries but also signaling his ambivalence
over whether or not the mark should occupy the space above the letter. The
mark, here, is not of or above the letter, but seems to send our eyes darting
backward toward the stressed syllable we should have pronounced.
But recall that Hopkins’s devotion to marking the instress and inscape is
not limited to the performance or pronunciation of the poem; it is also a com-
mentary on the perception of and connection to the realms of the natural and
spiritual. The poem concerns the conversion of the pagan lawyer, Theophilus,
who jeered at Dorothea on her way to a winter execution: “Bride of Christ,
send me some fruits from your bridegroom’s garden.” The poem names
quinces, dewbells, and mallow-row as the fruits and flowers brought by the
angel commanded by St. Dorothea to prove to Theophilus that she is the bride
of Christ, and yet the poem’s central question and exclamation is, “How to
name it, blessed it!” in line 25. The “stressed” words become “being” of a dif-
ferent sort here: the quince transforms into “the sizing moon” and the dew-
bells into stars; the mallow-row becomes “tufts of evening sky.” Theophilus,
witnessing this transformation, cries, “My eyes hold yet the rinds and bright /
Remainder of a miracle,” concluding that “wordy warrants are flawed through”
since they can only be heard and not witnessed. Theophilus has to see with his
own eyes the transformation of one named thing into another; the answer to
“how to name it,” in the poem, is by seeing the visual proof, in nature, of the
miracle of Christ’s existence. The “remainder” of that miracle hovers over the
stressed words in the poem: we are asked to look at what the messenger brings
with differently trained eyes, eyes that might perceive the multiple meanings
of a thing outside the shaky authority of “wordy warrants” and through the
authority of Christ’s word.
It seems no accident that the only other occasion in which Hopkins used
diacritical marks for accent on his poems before “The Wreck of the Deutsch-
land” was a translation titled, “O Deus, ego amo te,” in which he proclaims: “O
God, I love thee, Í love thée — / Not out of hope of heaven for me / Nor fear-
ing nót to love and be / In the everlasting burning.” Here, the words “I,” “thee,”
and “not” are stressed, showing the intimate proximity to and insecure distance