the stigma of meter 73
semantic, and pathetic labor—Hopkins shows that it is there, ready to be per-
ceived and to flow, as instress, into the mind of the beholder who must “allow”
it to do its work.
The idea of a word “fetched out” by its stress is crucial to Hopkins’s moral
and poetic philosophy as well as to his conception of how a poem relates to
its reader. In Hopkins’s 1880 writings on Duns Scotus, he describes his rela-
tionship between the self and the “object-world” as both intrinsic and
overlapping :
Part of this world of objects, this object world, is also part of the very
self in question, as in man’s case his own body, which each man not only
feels in and acts with but feels and acts on. If the centre of reference spo-
ken of has concentric circles round it, one of these, the inmost say, is its
own, is óf it, the rest are tó it only. Within a certain bounding line all
will be self, outside of it nothing : with it self begins from one side and
ends from the other. . . . A self then will consist of a centre and a sur-
rounding area or circumference, a point of reference and a belonging
field.^74Hence, Hopkins concludes that the self of the universal is not the self of any-
thing else: “In shewing there is no universal true self which is ’fetched’ or
‘pitched’ or ‘selved’ in every other self, I do not deny that there is a universal
really, and not only logically, thus fetched in the universals” (402–03). In both
his use of the word “fetched” with “pitched” and “selved,” as well as his use of
diacritical marks above the prepositions “of ” and “to” the center of reference,
we see that for Hopkins the idea of “stress” is bound to an idea of self that ex-
tends into the object world. The mark, then, is the connection that fetches out
one possible meaning in the poem to the reader and he marks the prepositions
“óf ” and “tó” to indicate how stress might mark that bounding line of self.
Hopkins is only one remove from stating that language is part of that object
world as well, and by “stressing” syllables or words we see/hear the object-his-
tory of that particular sound. Metrical marks on their own could not convey
instress and therefore could not affect spiritual understanding of conversion.
If the English ear was unstable, never guaranteed to hear the same way twice,
the voice was unlikely to perform the poem as intended.
Only two years after Hopkins was thinking about the concurrent failure of
voices to sound the same and searching for marks that would assure a right-
reading, Hopkins encountered the work of Dorset poet and Anglo-Saxon
grammarian William Barnes, whose An Outline of English SpeechCraft (1878)
also considers the power of the mark. There were a number of texts that tied
the perceived “purity” of nineteenth-century English speech specifically back
to its Anglo-Saxon origins and emphasized the importance of “accent” in a
purely English prosody, in addition to Guest’s A History of English Rhythms