the stigma of meter 67
subjects, especially his son, in the five marks of the crucifixion that signal both
Christ’s death and the salvation of all of God’s subjects.^55
The final stanza of the poem addresses and emphasizes an imagined com-
munity in thirty-three stressed syllables, more marks than in any other stanza
(ll. 275–80):
Remémber us in the róads, the heaven-háven of the rewárd
Our kíng back, Oh upon Énglish sóuls!
Let him éaster in us, be a dáyspring to the dímness of us,
be a crímson-cresseted east,
More bríghtening her, ráre-dear Brítain, as his réign rólls,
Príde, rose, prínce, hero of us, hígh-príest
Oür héart’s charity’s héarth’s fíre, oür thóught’s chivalry’s thróng’s Lórd.Here, the religious and national are reconnected. If the word is flesh, then this
stanza imagines an English word, the flesh of English citizens whose salvation
must be marked. The “king” is not upon English “soil,” but upon English souls.^56
Reading Hopkins’s marks here, we see that both the metaphysical transforma-
tion of the English language and the religious conversion of England are
bound by the discipline of this new meter. The process that the poem per-
forms, of wavering into faith, is bound to hopes for a national meter—and a
deeper understanding of the English language through the road map of his
meter—that Hopkins tries to bring back to England. By performing the pro-
cess of reckoning with the words as flesh—and that flesh as scored and
scarred—the poem is riddled with its own anxiety about the necessary waver-
ing that “reading” those marks requires.
Mistrusting the Ear
“The Wreck of the Deutschland”’s first three Victorian readers—Fr. Henry
Coleridge, Robert Bridges, and Coventry Patmore—all rejected it. Coleridge,
who was planning to publish it in the Catholic magazine, The Month, first
asked Hopkins to “do away with the accents which mark the scanning.”^57 Hop-
kins protested: “I would gladly have done without them if I had thought my
readers would scan right unaided but I am afraid they will not, and if the lines
are not rightly scanned they are ruined . . . some lines at all events will have to
be marked” (138). Bridges responded to the poem that he would not “for any
money read [the] poem again.”^58 In August 1877, Hopkins wrote to Bridges:
“I cannot think of altering anything. Why should I? I do not write for the
public. You are my public and I hope to convert you.”^59 As the first non-Cath-
olic reader of the poem, Bridges was subject to Hopkins’s poignant “hopes” to
convert him. Likewise, Hopkins’s Welsh pseudonym at the end of the poem,
“Brân Maenefa,” is a bittersweet example of how Hopkins hoped that his