the stigma of meter 69
sions of his letters, Hopkins underscores for emphasis (a kind of reverse metri-
cal bar below the poem), which was changed to italics in all modern editions.
But accent and emphasis must be marked somehow, whether for the eye or for
the ear, and it is precisely this issue that Hopkins raises with Patmore two years
later, in 1883.^64
The correspondence between the two in 1883 shows the trajectory of Hop-
kins’s prosodic thinking, beginning with his doubts about Patmore’s portrayal
of accent in English. Like Bridges, Hopkins is excited about reform in verse
practice, and hopes that Patmore’s theories will usher in a kind of “stricter
verse prosody.” As he explains his ideas to Patmore about how accent works in
English, he moves toward a definition of what those accentuated syllables and
words might indicate and how a writer like Patmore could explain these con-
cepts clearly. But Patmore does not adopt this view despite Hopkins’s clear
expertise, and the poems Hopkins writes after 1883 reflect his attempts to
demonstrate figuratively and prosodically the way that stress may be grounds
for spiritual communication and national community building, as well as a
growing despair that this communication is impossible.
Hopkins had every reason to hope that Patmore would be open to feedback
on the metrical law; after all, he had paid careful attention to Hopkins’s com-
ments on The Angel in the House only a few months earlier.^65 On the manu-
script of Patmore’s letter from Hopkins (in which Hopkins gives numbered
feedback), there are large “X” marks over comments with which Patmore dis-
agrees, and the word “Done” scrawled across those suggestions he does honor.^66
On Patmore’s copy of the letters in which Hopkins criticizes The Essay on En
glish Metrical Law, there are no such marks. Hopkins is pedagogical as he
moves through the essay, telling Patmore plainly that “the stress, the ictus of
our verse is founded on and in the beginning the very same as the stress which
is our accent” and “it is a radically bad principle to call English feet iambs and
trochees. . . . Names ought to be invented for rhythmic feet.”^67 After “The
Wreck of the Deutschland,” Hopkins was still concerned with the way meter
might join the nation in a kind of spiritual understanding, though these con-
cerns shifted from a broad hope for spiritual salvation for the entire metrical
community of the nation to a smaller, more individual communication be-
tween the poem and the reader.
Patmore writes that the two indispensable conditions of meter are first that
“the sequence of vocal utterance, represented by written verse, shall be divided
into equal or proportionate spaces”^68 or “a simple series of isochronous inter-
vals” (10). Second, “the fact of that division shall be made manifest by an
‘ictus’ or ‘beat’ actual or mental, which, like a post in a chain railing, shall mark
the end of one space and the commencement of another” (15); this beat, he
says elsewhere, shall be “marked by accent” (10); however, Patmore’s mark for
accent was not material—his metrical grid was abstract—and it was some-
times supplemented by an “imaginary beat.” This abstraction was unsatisfac-
tory to Hopkins; how would the reader know that accent is stress? He asserts