the stigma of meter 59
with a white shire of cloud. I looked up long at it till the tall height
and the beauty of the scaping — regularly curled knots springing if I re-
member from fine stems, like foliation in wood or stone — had strongly
grown on me. It changed beautiful changes, growing more into ribs and
one stretch running into branching like coral. Unless you refresh the
mind from time to time you cannot always remember or believe how
deep the inscape in things is. ( J P, 204)The ribbing and branching and the lines of the string are motifs that appear
again and again in his writing, replicating graphic signs. He writes, a few days
later, that a flash of lightning resembles “a straight stroke, broad like a stroke
with chalk and liquid, as if the blade of an oar just stripped open a ribbon scar
in smooth water and it caught the light.”^36 These lines that Hopkins describes
grow on him and have power; though the “stroke” here refers to an oar in
water, the chalk brings us back to the graphic sign, and the “ribbon scar” to the
potential violence of that graphic sign. In another entry, Hopkins shows ex-
plicitly the power that “looking” or taking interest in the mark can have on a
body—it is not beautiful, but is nonetheless powerful:
Mesmerised a duck with chalk lines drawn from her beak sometimes
level and sometimes forwards on a black table. They explain that the
bird keeping the abiding offscape of the hand grasping her neck fancies
she is still held down and cannot lift her head as long as she looks at the
chalk line, which she associates with the power that holds her. This duck
lifted her head at once when I put it down on the table without chalk.
But this seems inadequate. It is most likely the fascinating instress of the
straight white stroke. ( JP, 207)The fascination of the chalk line creates the effect of stress in the bird—the
instress of a “straight white stroke” has power over the being that perceives
it. Hopkins marked his meter with a blue chalk stroke, so this attention to
the “white stroke” of the white chalk shows his concern with the power
of metrical signs—here a power that holds as long as it is being visually
perceived.
“St. Dorothea” was one of the few poems Hopkins sent to Bridges during
the seven years in which he refrained from writing poetry in order to focus
on his spiritual development as a priest. However, Hopkins’s journals through
the 1870s continue to record his fascination with the markedness of nature.
Indeed, his definitions of inscape and instress seem to move more solidly to-
ward an idea of “markedness” or “muchness” relevant to his investigation of
the graphic mark for accent. In 1871 he wrote: “End of March and begin-
ning of April—This is the time to study inscape in the spraying trees, for the