the stigma of meter 77
If we read Hopkins’s metrical practice as a wavering between seeing the mark’s
meaning immediately (Christ’s presence) and trusting that it will come back
when we do not see the mark infused with this meaning, then this late poem,
written and revised in the mid-1880s, is at once a more personal and more
public negotiation of a broader wavering between the light (the revelation of
Christ’s presence) and dark (darkness configured as an absence of Christ or the
despair over Christ’s return)—over which he equivocates in many of his
poems, both thematically and formally—than has yet been recognized. The
mark in “Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves,” then, is the culmination of his early desire
to connect with a reader and have that reader connect to Christ, therefore
conditioning and reeducating a community of English readers to see and hear
as he saw and heard the world; but it is also a later, more mature consideration
of the failure to connect—the yearning for a connection that may never hap-
pen with a reader, a nation, or with Christ, and the realization that the metri-
cal system he professes to have mastered will never become a universal metrical
system, visible or audible to all. Indeed, at this point, Hopkins was well aware
that his system would be available only to a precious few. The mark, then, is
also a response to Hopkins’s failure and frustration, a wavering, a hope, but
also, at times an acknowledgment that despite all of our intentions to see or
hear in common, we are ultimately isolated in the inherently subjective pro-
cess of fetching out the meaning and feeling of words.
While Bridges wanted to move toward even greater transparency in En-
glish—reforming spelling so that there could be no doubt about pronuncia-
tion and thus no variation in metrical reading—Hopkins was committed to
preserving and exploiting the dense variety available in the written record of
English, and at the same time, urging readers to read above and beyond the
language even though they might waver and fail. It is through this lens that
we must look again at Hopkins’s metrical marks and his equivocation about
stress as a spiritual and national concern. This wavering marks the bodies of
his poems and their surrounding fields, and colored his reception—and the
reception of a great deal of experimental metrical writing—in the twentieth
c entur y.
In the poems and theories I have discussed, meter is an unstable, politi-
cal, and external mediator that Hopkins, Bridges, and Patmore attempted,
variously, to stabilize into systems with spiritual and national meaning. Hop-
kins’s isolation as a Catholic perhaps only increased the fervor with which
he coded his writings with marks and signs, instructions for the reader who
would someday come across his verses. His project shifted significantly over
time, as did his own definition of meter and how it could or should be mas-
tered. Encountering his poems is an exercise in instability and failure: all of the
poems waver between the inside and outside, the unseen and seen, the absence
and presence, the dark and the light, understanding and not understanding.
When in “Carrion Comfort,” he asks, “Which one? Is it each one?” so, I argue,
should we.