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from the Lord between which the poet wavers. In “O Deus,” Hopkins writes
that Jesus, “for my sake sufferedst nails and lance.” The strokes of diacritical
marks emphasize Christ’s suffering even more corporeally, the word-as-God
bearing the stigmata of Christ’s suffering. In 1882, Hopkins notes John 1:14,
“and the Word was made Flesh.” “God’s utterance of himself in himself is God
the Word, outside himself is this world. This world then is word, expression,
news of God. Therefore its end, its purpose, its purport, its meaning, is God
and its life or work to name and praise him.”^34 The flesh and thingness of words
is one main theme of “The Wreck of the Deutschland”; the diacritical marks
on ”I” and “thee,” referring to Hopkins and Christ, then, might fasten the two
together—binding them but also symbolizing the marks on Christ’s body that
he withstood when fastened to the cross before ascending into heaven. “St
Dorothea” and “O Deus, ego amo te” demonstrate how, even in his earliest
use of a diacritical mark for accent, Hopkins indicates not only his intended
rhythm but his hopes that stress can indicate a kind of “being” in the word.
As he begins increasingly to incorporate marks for meter on his poems in
the years following 1868, excerpts from Hopkins’s journal show that he was
also considering words, beings, and stress in complex ways. In his journal writ-
ings, both the word itself and the mark above the word might become a kind
of “being,” possessing the possibility of inscape. From a December 23, 1869
entry, Hopkins notes:
As we went down a field near Caesar’s Camp I noticed it before me
squalentem [from the Latin “squaleo”: to be stiff, to be rigid, to be
rough] coat below coat, sketched in intersecting edges beating ‘idiom’,
all down the slope: — I have no other word yet for that which takes the
eye or mind in a bold hand or effective sketching or in marked figures
or again in graphic writing, which not being beauty nor true inscape
yet gives interest and makes ugliness even better than meaninglessness.^35Hopkins makes evident here the importance of graphic representation, of
marking, and of a “bold hand” making visible something close to beauty or
inscape but that, in effect, only draws our attention to other possible meanings
of the marks. A famous journal passage written in late March, 1871 describes
how the power of this interest goes both ways: “What you look hard at seems
to look hard at you, hence the true and the false instress of nature.” Perhaps the
desire for recognition—to be seen as well as to see—is a distracting potential
power of instress—a false instress. What “looks hard at you” has power and
might bend you to its will. He continues:
... one large flake loop-shaped, not a streamer but belonging to the
string, moving too slowly to be seen, seemed to cap and fill the zenith