74 chapter 2
(1838, 1882). This interest was stirred by Benjamin Thorpe’s translation into
English of R. K. Rask’s Grammar of the AngloSaxon Tongue, first published in
1830 but reprinted and more widely circulated in 1865. Rask’s section “Of
Versification” appeared as no mere speculation: “The Anglo-Saxon versifica-
tion, like the Icelandic, and that of other ancient Gothic nations, has a peculiar
construction, the chief characteristic of which does not consist in syllabic
quantity, but in Alliterative Rime or Alliteration.”^75 Anglo-Saxon prosody, al-
though linked to other cultural practices, distinguished itself by its “peculiar-
ity”; indeed, with this statement, we sense the origins of the English prosodic
camp that associate English meter with a national past disassociated from the
classical languages rather than in relation to them. The prosodic concerns that
tie Anglo-Saxon to late nineteenth-century English were bound by a national
border—any variation therein should still be accountable to a common En-
glish origin.^76 Though Hopkins does not refer to Guest directly in his letters,
we know that he first read Barnes in 1870 (“I was almost a great admirer of
Barnes’ Dorset (not Devon) poems.”^77 Around the same time that he read
Barnes’s An Outline of SpeechCraft in 1882, Hopkins began to study Old Eng-
lish and to consider the ways that current English could not only bear, but also
reveal, the marks of its history.
Scholars have discussed Hopkins’s interest in the Anglo-Saxon history of
words and often mention Barnes’s writings.^78 Barnes’s Anglo-Saxon theories
joined “breath” to the page and brought English back to a primal “purity.” In
the same letter in which Hopkins attests that Patmore’s poems “are a great
battle won by England,” he says that he has been meaning to return Patmore’s
volume of Barnes’s poems to him. Barnes represented a new way of thinking
about preserving and representing dialect in English—a kind of representa-
tion of the “common” speech of the common man. The influence of Piers
Ploughman and strong-stress verse has been widely documented in Hopkins
criticism, but the history of the mark in Anglo-Saxon poetry is particularly
useful for our understanding of Hopkins’s fusion of etymological, spiritual,
and national concerns, stressed all at once.^79 From its first appearance in En-
glish translation, the question of marks for meter in Anglo-Saxon verse was
contested; Anglo-Saxon marks for accent were deliberately suppressed in
order to make the verses appear more readable. Hopkins’s fascination with
Anglo-Saxon fused his refusal to give up the mark in later poems to his fasci-
nation with the way a language could portray the instress of an entire people.
To Hopkins, William Barnes wrote “true poetry” and was “the soul of poetry”
because he composed not only in Dorset “dialect” (transcribed into text),^80 but
because he used Anglo-Saxon words: “an unknown tongue, a sort of modern
Anglo-Saxon.”^81 This “unknown tongue” preserved the Anglo-Saxon history
of English words and also expanded the boundaries of English syntax. Hop-
kins wrote to Bridges that Barnes’s use of dialect was “the instress of Westcoun-
try,” and to Patmore “it is his naturalness that strikes me most; he is like an