Victorian poetry and sciencecan be actualized at any moment, as we see in the opening of "God's
Grandeur" (written in 1877): "The world is charged with the grandeur of
God. / It will flame out, like shining from shook foil" (GMH 1-2).
The equation of God's power with energy that we find in "God's
Grandeur" is elaborated systematically in the doctrine of "stress," "ins-
tress," and "inscape" that Hopkins develops in his 1868 reading of the pre-
Socratic monist Parmenides. 25 Hopkins, like many of his peers in the
18 60s, recognizes that the new ontology of energy physics effectively
reinstates metaphysical monism, the theory that ultimate reality consists of
one thing (such as Being, spirit, or thought). Indeed, the simultaneous
discovery of the energy principle during the 1840s was probably the
consequence of scientists working independently within the organicist
traditions of Romantic science. Many of these scientists began with the
Romantic presupposition of an overarching unity to nature, which they put
on a scientific footing with the discovery and development of energy
physics. 26 Not only was the energy principle of foundational importance to
neurophysiology (where it fitted into a reductionist ontology that countered
the Romantic hypothesis of vitalism), it also served to resuscitate the grand
Romantic cosmology that Coleridge summed up in his poem "The Eolian
Harp" (1795) as "the one Life within us and abroad." 27 It provided
Hopkins with the means of developing his peculiarly dynamic version of
natural theology during the Darwinian decades of the 1860s, 1870s, and
1880s.
In "Duns Scotus's Oxford" (composed 1879), the world is for Hopkins
an energy plenum: "Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmed, lark-charmed, rook-
racked, river-rounded" (GMH 2). This line demonstrates the way in which
Hopkins's well-known theory and practice of "Sprung Rhythm" registers
the ontological status of what he calls, in his spiritual writings, "stress or
energy." 28 "Sprung Rhythm" makes the stressed syllable the measure of
each metrical foot. On this model, a strong stress can carry with it up to
three other "slack" syllables. 29 This method means that, along with such
other formal features as internal rhyme and alliteration, lines such as this
one from "Duns Scotus's Oxford" reproduce in microcosm the barely
contained dynamism of Hopkins's world.
"That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrec-
tion" (composed 1888) is a caudated sonnet - that is, a sonnet with "a tail"
- that enlarges this dynamic vision to consider the earth's atmosphere:
Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows I flaunt forth, then chevy on
an air-
Built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, i n gay-gangs I they throng; they
glitter in marches.155