notes to chapter 2 215
“The Wreck of the Deutschland” (53); “The Candle Indoors” (269); “In the Valley of
the Elwy” (including Hopkins’s note about the poem, 358); “The Handsome Heart”
(along with the note that “the author was a Jesuit priest, and Fath e r in line 2 is the
spiritual title,” 369); “The Habit of Perfection” (the first two stanzas; written when an
undergraduate at Oxford, 385).
- Most of Hopkins’s poems prior to The Spirit of Man appeared in small publica-
tions, and though the notice they attracted came mostly from his Catholic audience,
early twentieth-century readers were intrigued by his innovations. George Saintsbury
reported of Hopkins’s poems in 1910 that “it is quite clear they were all experiments,”
and that the lines, “of the anti-foot and pro-stress division” seemed to have syllables
“thrust in out of pure mischief ” (Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody from the
Twelfth Century to the Present Day, 3:391). - Maynard, “The Artist as Hero,” 259–60.
- Clutton-Brock, unsigned review, 19.
- Richards, “Gerard Hopkins,” 195.
- Hopkins also felt distress when faced with the physical form of the metrical
mark. - Norman MacKenzie traces Hopkins’s addition of the accent marks on lines 9
and 14 on Bridges’s transcription from Manuscript A to Manuscript B. Variants in the
manuscripts include “will” in italics from Manuscript A to “wíll.” MacKenzie notes
that this is “probably GMH’s stress.” In Mackenzie’s Poetical Works of Gerard Manley
Hopkins, he keeps the marks on the rest of the poem but chooses to italicize will (Rich-
ards, Practical Criticism). - Richards, Practical Criticism, 83.
- William Empson takes issue with Richards’s removal of the mark in Seven Types
of Ambiguity, 148:
Mr. Richards, from whom I copy this, considers that the ambiguity of will is
removed by the accent which Hopkins placed upon it; it seems to me rather
that it is intensified. Certainly, with the accent on weep and and, will can only
be an auxiliary verb, and with the accent on will its main meaning is “insist
upon.” But the future meaning also can be imposed upon this latter way of read-
ing the line if it is the tense which is being stressed, if it insists on the contrast
between the two sorts of weeping, or, including know with weep, between the
two sorts of knowledge. Now it is useful that the tense should be stressed at this
crucial point, because it is these two contrasts and their unity which make the
point of the poem.Despite Empson’s acceptance of the ambiguity on “will,” he continues that “[i]t seems
difficult to enjoy the accent on are, which the poet has inserted; I take it to mean: ‘Sor-
row’s springs, always the same, independent of our attitude to them, exist,” perma-
nently and as it were absolutely’” (149). In both instances, whether it is the two con-
trasts and their unity or the permanence of spring, Empson resolves Hopkins’s use of
metrical marks into an absolute intention that tends toward a reading that erases the
possibility that the meter could mean something other than an indication of stability.
- In a discussion of “Easter Communion,” Griffiths writes, “two claims are made
on the voice, claims which it can with difficulty meet simultaneously; it must hark
back from ‘shakes’ to ‘brakes’ so that the rhyme may sound out and it must press on