60 chapter 2
swelling buds carry them to a pitch which the eye could not else gather—
for out of much much more, out of little not much, out of nothing noth-
ing : in these sprays at all events there is a new world of inscape”( JP, 205).
And in 1872:
Stepped into a barn of ours, a great shadowy barn, where the hay had
been stacked on either side, and looking at the great rudely arched tim-
berframes—principals (?) and tie-beams, which make them look like
bold big As with the cross-bar high up—I thought how sadly beauty of
inscape was unknown and buried away from simple people and yet how
near at hand it was if they had eyes to see it and it could be called out
everywhere again. ( JP, 221)Hopkins wishes that everyone “had eyes to see” the patterns of inscape all
around, and especially the patterns of inscape in or on letters (“big bold As”) so
that they could perhaps perceive the patterns in the natural world as well—
patterns that would lead to spiritual and national awareness and salvation. In
1874 he writes of the “single sonnet-like inscape—between which the sun sent
straight bright slenderish panes of silvery sunbeams down the slant toward the
eye”(259). The slant of the sunbeams, like the slant of a metrical ictus, seems to
reach toward the eye, so that what we visually apprehend also gestures or
reaches towards us: “what you look hard at seems to look hard at you.” His
growing awareness that marks in nature that form inscape beckon to be per-
ceived, interpreted, and transformed into instress increases in proportion to
his development of sprung rhythm, in which the accent is meant to “make
much” of the word or syllable, and through which the reader is encouraged to
“let the stress be made to fetch out both the strength of the syllables and the
meaning and feeling of the words.”^37 Hopkins’s ideas about visual marks and
patterns germinated in his journals through the 1870s: the mark as an indica-
tion of elaborated significance; the mark as an allegory of Christ’s “word” and
visible law, as well as Christ as Word or Logos; the power of marks and lines on
a body and on a reader’s eye; the way multidimensional meanings of words
and things becomes defined as “markedness.” When Hopkins wrote to his
friend Digby Mackworth Dolben that he composed “The Wreck of the
Deutschland” in sprung rhythm, he mentioned that during a hiatus from writ-
ing the idea of sprung rhythm had “haunted his ear.” It is clear from his jour-
nals that the markedness of visual as well as aural patterns was on his mind.
Because his writing about visual marks parallels his “haunting” thoughts about
metrical accent, we must also remember to read the composition in 1875 of
“The Wreck of the Deutschland” on a visual level. Rather than trying to hear
sprung rhythm properly, we can read the marks that Hopkins employs beyond
their rhythmic notation and on their own terms, as indications of deeper phil-
osophical and spiritual struggles.