68 chapter 2
verses could convert the whole of Britain—Bran (“crow” in Welsh) the Blessed
was reputed to have brought Christianity to Britain.^60 When, in 1879, Hop-
kins shared “The Wreck of the Deutschland” with Canon R. W. Dixon, he
found his most sympathetic reader. Dixon wrote, “I have your Poems and have
read them I cannot say with what delight, astonishment, & admiration. They
are the most extraordinary I ever read & amazingly original.”^61 In December
1880, Hopkins explained his new prosody, sprung rhythm, to Dixon in some
detail (quoted above); Dixon responded supportively, that the remarks on
meter were “very curious original & valuable.” Hopkins agreed to share his
poems with Dixon so as to illustrate the rhythm he described: “all that I have
said is of course shewing you the skeleton or flayed anatomy, you will under-
stand more simply and pleasantly by verses in the flesh” (23). After reading
poems by Hopkins and Bridges, Dixon asks Hopkins if he might be able to
draw out a “system of rules” for it or if it “must be a matter of ear, rather than
of formal rule” (35). Through the “marked and striking excellence” of the Eng-
lish language and by the stigmata of metrical marking, Hopkins recognized
that perhaps a more universally accepted definition of stress in English was
needed in order to accomplish the national salvation he sought—a definition
in which the mark for meter could somehow enter all ears, if eyes could not be
properly taught to perceive the instress of the meter.
It was with this hope that Hopkins reached out to his fellow Catholic poet
and metrist, Coventry Patmore. Patmore visited Stonyhurst College in August
1883, where Hopkins was a classics instructor. The two began corresponding
almost immediately, beginning with Patmore’s publisher sending Hopkins the
four-volume 1879 edition of his Collected Poems. Hopkins returned the favor
by sending Patmore copies of published poems by Bridges and Dixon, with no
indication that he himself wrote poetry. Their correspondence was both cor-
dial and critical, with Hopkins including insightful yet stringent comments on
Patmore’s poems. In November of 1883, Hopkins turned to Patmore’s Essay
on English Metrical Law, which had been included as part of the 1879 edition
of Patmore’s poems, reprinted from the earlier essay “English Metrical Crit-
ics.”^62 This was not Hopkins’s first encounter with Patmore’s law; in a January
1881 letter to Bridges, Hopkins commented at length on the 1878 reprint of
“Metrical Critics,” which was then titled Prefatory Study on English Metrical
Law (and appeared in Patmore’s edition of poems Amelia, Tamerton Church
Tower, etc... .). As if to clarify Patmore’s theory to Bridges and to himself,
Hopkins writes: “Patmore pushes the likeness of musical and metrical time
too far—or, what comes to the same thing, not far enough: if he had gone
quite to the bottom of the matter his views would have been juster.. .”^63 But
for Hopkins, the “bottom of the matter” is the strict definition of accent in
English; it is no accident that his long discourse on Patmore’s avoidance of ac-
cent winds back around to Hopkins’s problems with how to signal the accent
in his own poems. He complains: “Italics do look very bad in verse. But people
will not understand where the right emphasis is” (120). In the manuscript ver-