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do not see the way to do it at present” (186). But this is precisely the problem:
Patmore wants to hear the alliterative vowels without seeing them first—with-
out the visual aid of the letters lined up. Patmore wants all ears to hear alike
and this reply shows how, like Bridges, he is a product of Victorian education
—demonstrating the common conception that we might “teach our ear” to
hear correctly. Though teaching the ear to see and the eyes to hear might seem
the only way to understand accent in English, Hopkins backs away from this
abstract and absolute notion, and in his next letter comforts Patmore: “As for
vowel alliteration, it is clearly not for you to accommodate your ear to mine.
Besides, if you do not agree with me now, it is likely there is some fundamental
difference and we do not hear alike” (187, italics mine). Patmore, looking for a
metrical law, would like for all ears to hear “alike” so that a metrical rule might
follow; Hopkins, recognizing that neither visual nor aural markedness is en-
tirely stable, believes that variation invariably heightens beauty but is also fas-
cinated and frightened by the fact that there might not be one law to which all
eyes and ears adhere concordantly. This admission, that two English proso-
dists simply do not hear alike, refers back to a letter that Hopkins wrote to
Patmore over a month earlier, in which he states: “I shall be more careful about
making metrical objections. I used to object to things which satisfied Bridges
and we came to the conclusion that our own pronunciation, by which every-
one instinctively judges, might be at the bottom of the matter” (165). Whereas
many prosodists and pedagogues, especially toward the end of the nineteenth
century, relied on concepts of an “English Ear” that could instinctively hear
English meter, Hopkins asserts that instinct is what makes listeners hear differ-
ent prosodic effects. What is “marked” for the eye graphically might guide
readers toward a deeper understanding of the poem, but what is “marked” for
the voice and for the ear is an indeterminate science, one that Hopkins em-
phatically refuses to falsely determine.
Hopkins grants this same freedom to the ear in the “Author’s Note” preced-
ing “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” which he reluctantly sent to Patmore
soon after this correspondence occurred,^72 along with the rest of his poetic
manuscript (put into fair copy by Bridges) in March of 1884.^73 On April 1,
1885 he again wrote to Bridges, insisting, “[t]his is my difficulty, what marks
to use and when to use them: they are so much needed and yet so objection-
able” (215). His “Author’s Note” is in dialogue with his commentary on Pat-
more’s English Metrical Law: “Which syllables . . . are strong and which light
is better told by the ear than by any instruction that could be in short space
given,” but a later line from the note reveals the complexity of meanings avail-
able to the reader who understands Hopkins’s multifaceted “stress.” Rather
than empowering the reader’s ear, stress is distinct from the poem in the final
line: “And so throughout let the stress be made to fetch out both the strength
of the syllables and the meaning and feeling of the words.” Though the stress
needs someone to activate it—to make it fetch out and perform its metrical,