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devotion between Christ and the poet, between the word and its stress. The
poem has been “shaped or produced by such touches” as the poet’s hand
applies.^52
As if to justify his practice, Hopkins turns to the necessity of measure in the
last part of the poem. The “five-livèd and leavèd” daughters will “bathe in his
fall-gold mercies,” but Hopkins is in Wales, far away from the judgment and
acceptance he envies in the characters of his poem. Hopkins asks: “What bý
your méasure is the héaven of desíre, / The tréasure never éyesight gót, nor was
éver guessed whát for the héaring ?” The heaven of desire can be measured,
though it cannot be seen or heard, much the way that the true word of God
can never be spoken. Hopkins dramatizes this impossibility in his stammering
in stanza 28: “But how shall I . . . Make me room there; / Reach me a . . . Fancy,
come faster — / Strike you the sight of it?” In order to be named, the material
needs to be seen. In order for the material, the body or the word, to be seen
and saved, it needs to be struck. The bell of being in each person can only ring
when it is struck by the external application of Christ—his “finger” or the
blow of nature. (In stanza 31, Hopkins wavers between his happiness that the
nuns have found salvation in Christ and pity for the “comfortless unconfessed
of them” who also perished. The nun was already marked for salvation:
“maiden could obey so, be a bell to, ring óf it, and / Stártle the poor sheep
back!”) Some critics see Hopkins’s project in this poem as a gesture of differ-
entiation. J. Hillis Miller, in The Linguistic Moment, summarizes Geoffrey
Hartman’s interpretation of Hopkins’s basic poetic strateg y (in Unmediated
Vision) as “a differentiation of language that attempts to say the Word by di-
viding the word”;^53 Miller counters that “the tragic limitation of poetic lan-
guage lies in the fact that the Word itself cannot be said . . . a word by the very
fact that it is just that pattern of vowels and consonants which it is, cannot be
the Word . . . Words have therefore a tendency to proliferate endlessly their
transformations by changes of vowel and consonant, as if they were in search
for the magic word that would be the Word.”^54
Rather, the line in which Hopkins names the variations on Christ’s name is
not admitting failure to unify letters into the divine Word as in the Gospel of
John, but affirms and acknowledges that each word, even Word, contains its
own multiples. The accent mark “makes much” of these dimensions, showing
that even when the names are spelled out for us to read, there are many levels
of definition and variegated meaning beneath the particular form (or flesh) of
each word. “The Master, / Ípse, the ónly one, Chríst, Kíng, Héad” (st. 28, l.
221)—the five stresses fall on the “three-numberèd form” (st. 9, l. 66) of God,
marking his inscape in the world. “Wording it how but by him that present
and past, / Heaven and earth are word of, worded by?—” (st. 29, ll. 229–30).
Words themselves are beacons, marks of God; accents that emphasize and
make much of words both do violence to His word by the ugly striking or scor-
ing that pollutes them, but also allegorize the violence that God visits upon his