the stigma of meter 75
embodiment or incarnation or manmuse of the country, of Dorset, of rustic
life and humanity. . . . His rhythms . . . smack of the soil.”^82 Barnes defines ac-
cent as “word-strain, a strain of the voice, higher or lower, on a breath-sound.”
A “high word-strain” is accent, whereas a “high speech-strain” is emphasis. Ac-
cent is differentiated from emphasis when it is not spoken. That is, the word
contains accent, its strain, but as soon as it is spoken that strain might be mis-
interpreted as mere emphasis on the sound of speech and not of the word it-
self. The strain is on the “root or stem-word.” Words are defined as “breath-
sounds”—evidence of a now lost, oral Anglo-Saxon ancestry: “Speech was
shapen of the breath-sounds of speakers, for the ears of hearers, and not from
speech-tokens (letters) in books, for men’s eyes, though it is a great happiness
that the words of man can be long holden and given men to the sight; there-
fore I have shapen my teaching as that of a speech of breath-sounded words
and not lettered ones . . . ”^83
The monosyllable is the original “breath-sound” for Barnes, and each com-
pound word is a combination of breath-sounds. Barnes writes that “Mark is
here taken in its old Saxon meaning, mearc—what bounds, defines, describes,
distinguishes. The Welsh call the adjective the weak name or noun.” Hopkins
lamented to Bridges, in 1882: “It makes one weep to think what English might
have been; for in spite of all that Shakspere [sic] and Milton have done with
the compound I cannot doubt that no beauty in a language can make up for
want of purity. In fact I am learning Anglo Saxon and it is a vastly superior
thing to what we have now . . . [Barnes] calls degrees of comparison pitches of
suchness; we ought to call them so, but alas!”^84
Like Hopkins’s understanding of “fetch” and “self,” Barnes associates “such-
ness” with “mark.” Nouns are renamed “thing-names” and these can be
“marked” as having “much” of something. “Mearc” or Mark, then, is a descrip-
tive word, an adjective. Numerical mark-words are “tale mark-words,” because
they “tell” or count. Suchness is the particular kind of adjective that describes
a thing in relation to another thing. “Pitch-mark words” describe these degrees
of comparison, so that “things are marked as having much of something.” For
Hopkins, words that were “marked” were “made much of,” and language was
“heightened,” but English was also defined and distinguished by Hopkins’s
marks, describing the acceptable boundary of current speech in Hopkins’s
ideal form of poetry. To see how this marking changed his later poetry, one
need only glance at the manuscript version of “Harry Ploughman” or “Spelt
from Sybil’s Leaves.”
Rather than pointing to one stable meaning, as many scholars have at-
tempted to prove, Hopkins’s marks on the page ask the eyes to work more
intensely than the ears to maximize potential meanings. In an oft-quoted let-
ter to Bridges, Hopkins eternally frames “Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves” by its cor-
rect recitation: “On this long sonnet above all, remember what applies to all
my verse, that it is, as living art should be, made for performance and that its