the stigma of meter 71
ences that constitute the inscape of the English language. For Hopkins, if read-
ers could appreciate these nuances, then they might be more aware of divine
immanence (and therefore enriched,). Throughout the composition of “The
Wreck of the Deutschland,” Hopkins was considering the relative stability of
graphic signs to indicate or mark where he hoped syllables would receive em-
phasis. In his arguments with Patmore over accent, Hopkins was engaged with
the inadequacies of situating the interpretation of accent solely in oral and
aural performance. Hopkins anticipated what twentieth-century linguists
now know: if we perceive English accent aurally we are still not guaranteed to
hear the same stresses as the person next to us. This element of visual percep-
tion versus aural perception, and how the two are intimately related, is brought
out in Patmore’s and Hopkins’s exchange about the alliteration of vowels.
In Patmore’s English Metrical Law, he writes, “[t]here could scarcely have
been devised a worse illustration of alliteration than Pope’s oft-quoted exam-
ple ‘apt alliteration’s artful aid.’” For Pope and Patmore, alliteration is “essen-
tially consonantal” whereas rhyme is the resonance of vowels. Patmore also
asserts that in Anglo-Saxon “there is properly no such thing as alliteration of
vowels,” even though three vowels that differ enough from one another are
allowed to take the place of alliterating consonants in special cases. Hop-
kins writes: “I should like you to reconsider the alliteration of vowels. To my
ear no alliteration is more marked or more beautiful, and I used to take it
for granted as an obvious fact that every initial vowel lettered to every other
before ever I knew that anything of the sort was practised in Anglo-Saxon
verse.”^71
Hopkins tries to explain to Patmore that Pope blundered by assuming that
the “a” sounds in “apt alliteration’s artful aid” produced the same sound (“[t]he
a in apt is the common English short a. The a in artful is the English broad a,
a very different thing” (184) and so on). An ear, perhaps aided by the reader’s
visual apprehension of the identical letters, may hear them as sufficiently simi-
lar to alliterate, but sufficiently different from each other to be heightened in
beauty. Hopkins contends that “[Pope] was nothing ultra crepidam and here
he seems to have gone ultra crepidam,” the Latin here suggesting that in Hop-
kins’s view, Pope was a fine shoemaker, but he should keep his eye on the shoe
(poetry) and not theorize about his craft. Whether the ear does or does not
hear alliteration is secondary to the fact that the eye must see those lined-up
“a”s even to imagine the line as alliterative. Without the visual apprehension of
the line, the alliterative modulation of any metrical stress might not work. De-
spite Patmore’s later point that the alliteration in Anglo-Saxon verse was so
regular that the dot normally used to mark the caesura became “unessential,”
Hopkins is arguing here that Pope must have heard one kind of alliteration in
the line, Patmore another, and Hopkins still another. Though Hopkins under-
stands this dilemma, Patmore replies along the lines of generations of scholars
—as if confounding the senses is the only way to properly see and hear En glish
poetry: “I must try to teach my ear to adopt your view of alliterative vowels. I