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A Linguistic Exploration of Hopkins’s “The

Starlight Night”

By

Ahmed Abdel Azim El Shiekh

An Updated version of a research paper published in

the Faculty of Arts Academic Bulletin, Alexandria

University, Egypt Issue No. 55, 2006- (3-35)

Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Arts, Alexandria

University, Egypt-

Currently: Associate Professor Emeritus

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1. Introduction

The present paper is a linguistic reading of

Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem "The Starlight

Night", and an investigation of the characteristic

features of his poetry as manifested in this poem.

In other words, this paper attempts to link

linguistic analysis with literary studies in one case

where the linkage seems quite handy, if not even

obligatory. The researcher sets out to investigate

some of the major characteristic features of the

poetry of a Victorian, yet quite a modern poet in the

full sense of the word, as reflected in a poem

typically representative of these features. Inscape1,

instress2 and sprung rhythm

3 are key terms here.

The poem to take as our guide on this linguistic tour

is quite appropriately "The Starlight Night", and

our poet is the conservative but later rebellious,

sceptical, though strongly religious man, Gerard

Manley Hopkins. Eventually, we have different, and

sometimes even contradictory, characteristics

mingled together in one man, different elements of

nature fused together in a unifying poetic vision,

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and hopefully, an exploration of one of his poems

making use of linguistics and literature together in

a harmonious unity too.

2. Hopkins: A Snapshot

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844. 1889) was

one of "the major, the finest, poets of Victorian

England" (Joseph J. Feeney, S.J., 2006). Yet he

"was almost unknown until 1918 when his book

Poems was first published, as edited by his friend

Robert Bridges" (Joseph J. Feeney, S.J., 2006). He

is, then, a nineteenth century English poet, yet, in

more than one way, he is a truly modern poet

rather than a Victorian one. The sinking in 1875 of

a German ship carrying five Franciscan nuns, exiles

from Germany, inspired him to write one of his

most impressive poems “The Wreck of the

Deutschland”, which marks the beginning of his

mature work. Thereafter he produced his best

poetry, including “God’s Grandeur,” “The

Windhover”, “The Leaden Echo “The Golden

Echo.”, and, indeed, "The Starlight Night" (ibid).

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Hopkins wrote some poems in a very

traditional style during the 1860s, but he destroyed

them when he decided to devote himself to the

church, believing that he must place aside actions of

personal enjoyment in order to focus. He began

writing again after seven years, when the elders of

the Catholic Church encouraged him to continue.

His work influenced many leading

twentieth century poets. After a second edition of

his collected poems was issued in 1930, Hopkins'

work was recognized as among the most original,

powerful, and influential literary accomplishments

of his century; it had a marked influence on such

leading twentieth century poets as T.S. Eliot, Dylan

Thomas, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and C.

Day Lewis. (Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. CD

Edition, 2000).

With the emergence of Darwinism, the

principle of evolution, and the concept of human

beings as the culmination of evolutionary change on

the one hand, and the growing awareness of the

grave consequences of industrialization and the

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equally growing influence of technology on the

other, the Victorian world was no longer the same.

As Mariaconcetta Costantini remarks, the impact of

scientific discoveries on society is equated with that

of great artistic innovations: "… the new in science

and art is the actualization of the unexpected",

(Costantini, 1997, p. 85). The rise of new world that

is hardly teleological was directly associated with

the question of arbitrary significance. Several

artists were bewildered by a growing sense of

ambiguity and felt an urge to re-establish constant

categories of thought and language. Among these is

Gerard Manley Hopkins, who sought to work out a

system that could cope with scientific rationalism,

yet maintain the old theological order at one and

the same time (Brown, 1997). Both his prose and his

poetry display this attempt to mediate between two

opposing directions and two conflicting ends: the

need to adopt a new epistemological method and

experiment through the potentiality of language;

and the wish to resist the trends of doubt and

scepticism that threatened the well established

status of religious dogma and the very conception of

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man (Costantini, 1997, p. 85). In fact, Hopkins was

less concerned with Christian factionalism than

with countering contemporary threats to faith itself

(Brown, 1997).

3. A Bird's Eye View (Or maybe a Falcon's) of

"The Starlight Night"

Before embarking on this mission, the

researcher has to review Hopkins’ concept of the

duty of a poet, or rather of his own duty as a poet.

Hopkins believes that everything has its own quality

of being, and, at the same time, of having all its

different characteristics unified in one. Not only

does this apply to each thing or entity individually,

but also to the whole world as one unit. As a man

catches the inscape of a natural object, it is the

reflection of that inscape in the man’s feelings that

is labelled by Hopkins as “Instress”. A poet’s duty,

hence, is to aspire to recreate the Inscape of the

natural object and/or experience in his own poem so

as to make it have, on his addressees, the very same

Instress which the natural object and/or the

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experience has had on him. A poem, thus, is a

recreation of the experience that has caused it to

come into existence, and is intended by the poet, to

recreate the same effect upon its readers. When

Hopkins catches the inscape of that starlit night, he

tries to convey to the reader the very same instress

it has had on him through his poem, entitled “The

Starlight Night”. In accordance with Hopkins’ own

terms, it may be better to “catch the inscape of the

“Starlight Night” rather than attempt a literal

understanding of it. This article is an attempt to do

so through the help of a linguistic insight into the

poem.

“Starlight Night” is the product of direct

communication with nature. The theme may be

summed up as follows: Man should always

communicate with God through feeling the beauties

of His creation. As Man enjoys the beauties of a

God-made nature, he should pay for them through

a true worship of God. The very composition of the

poem is indeed, one way of doing so. The style is

analytical; the starlight in the poem is not simply a

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symbol of Christ, but is also identical with Him.

Christ sheds light on our world, enables us to see

the different beauties of nature, and, at the very

same time, unifies them all in His own light and

grandeur. Starlight here is not, thus, an abstract

symbol of Christ, per se, but a spark of His own

light and a representation of it, picked up from the

real world of nature. To use Hopkins’ terms, the

“inscape” of the poem in question lies in its being an

immediate response to nature. The supposed

symbols are not chosen out of speculation or

adopted in accordance with a given literary

conviction, even though they do exist in other poets’

works. The starlight in this poem is real and visual.

As Hopkins is watching various objects of nature

under the light of the stars, he catches the presence

of God in them. It is this aspect of being visual,

concrete and true to nature, that makes the poem

quite original and distinguishes it from traditional

religious poetry which may, at times at least, tend to

be didactic and rather flat.

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The structure of the poem is systematic and

convincing; the starlight night in the poem is the

outcome of a real visual experience, and, therefore,

the first two lines start with excitement and depend

on visual imagery. The conversational tone of the

poem attempts to make the listener relive the

experience with Hopkins, rather than Hopkins

simply relating the experience to him:

Look at the stars! Look, look at the skies!

O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!

Hopkins is not simply stating that he saw

the stars, but is addressing his potential audience as

if the scene were still present here and now, and as

if they could share the very experience with him as

well. The vocative “O” is not used as an affected

piece of rhetoric, but as it would be in everyday

conversation. The exclamation marks define the

intonation as a rising one, as an expression of

excitement. The images flow one after the other in a

way that is meant to be almost parallel to what is

usually labelled as "stream of consciousness", as

with Joyce, for instance. What creates this stream of

consciousness-like feeling is not only the content

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and the semantic indications of the lexical items

used in these two lines, but also the sound effects

too. Each image prepares the addressee for the

following one, both through the content and

outward form of the words.

Down in dim woods the diamond delves! The elves’ eyes!

The lexical item "delves" prepares the ear for

the lexical item "elves" that comes shortly after.

The repeated voiced phoneme /d/ in this line creates

a musical sound unity. But this is only one example.

What has just been suggested with reference to this

line is applicable to the rest of the poem as a whole.

In the following line

The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!

it is not only the repetition of the same sound, but

also the choice of lexemes of similar length that co-

operate in creating the sense of oneness. The choice

of short monosyllabic lexical items suggests the

rapid evocation of emotions in the first seven lines

of the poem. These short lexemes such as "look",

"folk", "fire", "woods", "down", and "dim" are

mainly of Anglo-Saxon origin. They have in

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common the repetitive use of the voiceless

morpheme /f/ and the voiced morpheme /d/, which

creates a unique type of harmonious unity made of

the combination of heterogeneous sounds, echoing,

in general, the oneness of the universe, which is

made up of various aspects, both contradictory and

similar, as well as the oneness of the sight depicted

in the poem in particular, which is made up of two

otherwise contradictory entities, viz. the light of the

stars on the one hand, and the darkness of the night

on the other.

Hopkins’ lexical choice is also suggestive of

certain colours, basically bright ones. The item

"gold" in l. 5, suggests the bright glitter of the

colour yellow which is often used by Hopkins as a

symbol or, more precisely, a representation of the

glory of paradise. A case in point is to be found in

his “Spring and Fall- to a Young Child” (Hopkins,

1966, p.28). The words "starlight", "bright", and

"whitebeam" are also suggestive of white in

particular, and light in general, both of which, in

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turn, are associated with spiritual purity and Godly

beauty.

The eighth and ninth lines are different

from the first seven. The poet’s sensations calm

down a little. He starts expressing himself in a more

rational way, yet, still in the same conversational,

almost dramatic tone. Hopkins' skill in writing

dramatic monologues in the manner of Browning,

which is manifested in his early "Soliloquy of One

of the Spies in the Wilderness", has its traces in

"The Starlight Night" as well (Landow, 2003). He

asks, perhaps in proxy of the addressee, "What?",

and, then immediately answers: “Prayers, patience,

alms, vows.” The longish Latinate lexemes used

here represent the glory of the subject matter of his

speech; they are essentially equated with God.

Even the monosyllabic lexemes used in these two

lines, such as "vows" and "alms" are relatively

longer as they either contain long vowels as /a:/ in

"alms" or a diphthong as in "vows", in contrast

with the short vowels used earlier in words such as

"dim", "look", and "woods" in the first seven lines.

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It may be worth mentioning in this respect, that this

paper uses the term "listener" rather than

"addressee", as well as “say” and “talk” rather

than “write”, as the researcher believes Hopkins’

poetry to have been primarily meant to be read

aloud or recited rather than simply read silently.

Hopkins himself states, "Poetry is in fact speech

employed to carry the inscape of speech for the

inscape's sake"(Glenn Everett, Hopkins on

"Inscape" and "Instress" as found on The

Victorian Web).

After the poet refers to the price to be

paid in return for the various gifts of God, he goes

back to his excited rapid expression of emotions,

calling the reader/addressee to look again at the

living sight.

Look, look: a May-mess like, an orchard boughs!

Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!

Yet it mellows down to some extent here.

The use of "like" in the above two cited lines (10

and 11) shows an attitude that is more rational than

the mingling of two different things into one, as in

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"quickgold", "circle-citadels", and "fire-folk". In

fact, the use of such coined terms and hyphenated

adjectives that are made of compound nouns in this

poem is not merely ornamental or intended to show

off; it conveys Hopkins’ essential feeling of the unity

and oneness of the whole universe. The linking of

words through hyphens, the coinage of new words

out of separate old ones and the use of compound

nouns as adjectives, are all cases of the unity

between different elements of language resulting in

a new harmonious one. The integration of form and

sense on the poetic and linguistic levels echoes the

integration of the physical/natural one on the one

hand, and the spiritual/religious on the other, which

ultimately reveals itself in the oneness and unity of

the universe.

In l. 12, Hopkins recognises all these gifts of

God to be the “barn”. These gifts are NOT symbols

of God and/or Christ. They are, literally, part and

parcel of the glories of God. They are guarding

“Christ, his mother, all his hallows”, as Hopkins

puts it in the last line of the poem. Christ and His

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glory give the whole world its inscape, and the poet

is only attempting to re-produce the instress he feels

on catching the inscape of such glories, in his own

poetry. He does so, not only through the content,

imagery, lexical choices and sound effects of certain

morphemes and/or allomorphs, but also through

the broken rhythm of his poem, which echoes his

own excitement. The breaking of the rather the

jerky rhythm of the poem, is created by the

otherwise unusually frequent use of punctuation

marks and parenthetical phrases.

The “Starlight Night” is, indeed,

representative of one of the most important

characteristic features of Hopkins’ poetry in

general, viz. his reconciliation of form and content

in one harmonious unit, not passively suitable, but

actively corresponding and adding to each other.

Thus each of Hopkins’ poems forms a complete

world in itself. The “Starlight Night” is certainly a

good case in point. It is a well-written poem, or

rather a well-formed world that has its own rules

and logic, its own inscape and instress, and, hence,

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has to be appreciated as such, instead of enforcing

our own logic on it under any pretence, including

that of literary criticism. This article is only an

attempt at reproducing the “instress” the writer has

got on catching the “inscape” of “The Starlight

Night” by Hopkins, to whom we are indebted, not

only for the joy derived from his poetry, but also for

the new terminology his poetic speculations have

given rise to.

4. Hopkins and Linguistic Experimentation

In "Starlight Night", Hopkins' bold

experimentation with language stems from his wish

to explore the mysteries of life. The verbal play on

words, the many coinages and the bold

constructions of his poetry are inextricably linked

to his view of the world as a complex network of

signs, all of which can be interpreted and rendered

in linguistic terms on the phonetic, phonological,

lexical, morphological, syntactic and grammatical

levels. Throughout his life, the poet showed a keen

interest in words. In Hopkins' view, language is

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both an instrument to reproduce nature with

fidelity, and an emblem of metaphysical notions

(the union of the material and the non-material is

symbolized by the Incarnate Word "Christ"). Since

words can establish a relationship between the

world (the signifier) and God (the Sign-Sender), the

poet, equated with the divinity in his role of sign-

user, has the task of exploiting their high potential.

All the lexical and syntactic innovations of Hopkins'

verse are no instances of random experimentation,

but derive from a precise intention to build a system

of analysis and act as a reproduction of reality. In

fact, as Jakobson points out, Hopkins was an

"outstanding searcher in the science of poetic

language" (Jakobson, 1964 p. 27). It may even be

maintained that he anticipates the procedures and

the goals of contemporary linguistics, which draws

from science its methods of investigation of

language (Costantini, 1997).

4.1. Lexical/Semantic Features

4.1.1. Coinage of New Words

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Hopkins is well-known for his tendency to coin

new words. This technique is not simply an outcome

of the poet's desire to express new meanings that

may have no well-established lexical items to

denote. The coinage of new words from familiar

ones acts as a demonstration of the union of

different aspects of nature in one new unified entity.

In the world of external reality, there is "gold",

"silver" as well as "quicksilver". But Hopkins tells

us about "quickgold". The gold we know assumes

the attributes of "quicksilver", yet it "lies" before

our eyes, rather than slips away from our grasp.

4.1.2. Compound Nouns

Another common lexical feature of Hopkins'

poetry is his frequent use of compound nouns,

especially the exocentric type where the compound

is headless and the constituents of the compound

"do not have a head-modifier semantic

relationship" (Katamba, 1993 p.319). This implies

that the meaning of the compound is not the totality

of the meanings of its minor units; it is a new entity

on its own, another demonstration of the new

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entities in the real world which come into existence

as a result of the harmonious unity of otherwise

heterogeneous elements. The wind-beat is not

simply a kind of beat, and neither is fire-folk really

a kind of folk. May-mess is not a mess, and neither

is quickgold a kind of gold that is quick! The

compounds often come in strings, running from one

compound to another, through a stream of nominal,

adjectival or even genitive ones. "March-bloom",

"circle-citadels" (noun + noun), "whitebeam"

(adjective + noun) and "a farmyard scare"

(genitive) are all cases in point. The very nature of

compound nouns where a noun acts as an adjective,

is another instance of the blending of different

elements in language to produce a new linguistic

entity, an incarnation of the harmonious unity of

different aspects of nature in the world of external

reality.

4.1.3. Ambiguity

Intentional lexical ambiguity is also another

semantic feature of Hopkins' poetry, whether

polysemy or homonymy. In "Spring and Fall", for

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example, the very title has two cases of ambiguity.

First is the polysemy in "fall" as the name of a

season, i.e., autumn, and "fall" as in the fall of

Adam and Eve. Second is "spring" as the name of

the geographical season, as well as, metaphorically,

the origin and source of something, as in l. 11 of the

poem "Sorrows springs are the same". Both are

cases of intentional ambiguity arising from

polysemy, whereas compound nouns such quickgold

and fire folks in The "Starlight Night" are

ambiguous in their own right, in the sense that they

do not have a traditionally acknowledged referent.

4.1.4. Expressive versus Descriptive Meaning

Hopkins' poetry is full of expressive rather

than descriptive meaning. In "The Starlight Night",

for example, the first seven lines are devoid of any

direct statement that can be subjected to truth-

value conditions, i.e., can be labelled as descriptive

(Lyons, 1995). In L. 7, then, Hopkins provides a

typical truth value proposition: "… It is all a

purchase, all is a prize". The following two lines,

however, are again devoid of truth-value

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propositions and descriptive meaning. Only the last

three contain two more propositions in "These are

indeed the barn" and "This piece –bright paling

shuts the spouse". It is worth noting, though, that it

is almost practically impossible to subject these four

truth-value propositions in the whole poem to an

investigation that tests their authenticity in the

world of external reality.

The rest of the poem presents nothing that can

be judged as either true or false in any way, but

only utterances giving vent to the poet's feelings, or

performing an action such as persuading the

addressee to do or note something or the other.

4.2.1. Morphological/Syntactic Features

The use of a variety of long sentences and/or

short clauses or even phrases with various

structures ranging from the vocative, the

interrogative and exclamatory to the

straightforwardly declarative is also typical of

Hopkins' poetry. In "The Starlight Night", we have

forty one nouns, including those used in

compounds, thirteen cases of verbs, including three

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of a linking verb (verb to be: "is", "is", and "are"),

nine occurrences of verbs in the imperative with

seven of them the verb "Look" and the other two

"buy" and "bid". There are only two cases of

declarative sentences with verbs that belong to the

category of content words: "Lies" in l. 6 and

"shuts" in l. 13.

Occurrences of other verbal forms are

confined to past and present participles throughout

the poem. There are no past sequences of tenses,

nor perfect aspect structures; only five cases of the

present simple tense with its general time reference

to the past, present and the future in the cases of

"is", "is", "are", "lies" and "shuts". The emphasis

throughout is not on the informative but on the

emotive and vocative. Even in the case of the

present simple tense occurrences, the poem is not a

dissection of facts, but an attempt at communicating

with the truth as Hopkins feels, sees and, maybe,

even lives it. The imperative is used by the

addressor/poet, the interrogative implicitly

introduced by reader/addressee though we only see

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and hear it when it is repeated by the poet "What?"

in l. 9, suggesting the addressee is asking about the

price he/she has to pay for the "purchase" and the

"prize" mentioned in the previous line. We can

almost hear the addressee wondering "What shall I

bid? How shall I buy?", and the answer is "Prayers,

alms, vows", which comes in a nominal phrase with

no verbal elements at all, only three successive

nouns in the plural with no modifiers or qualifiers.

All this, in turn, helps unify the reader/addressee

with the poet/addressor, and eventually with the

poem itself. This poem is not complete without the

role played by the hypothetical reader/addressee.

The different grammatical elements form one

harmonious unity with its own "inscape" that

generates an "instress' on the reader/addressee,

analogous with the instress of the original

experience of the poet.

4.3.1. Phonetic/Phonological Features

Like the majority of Hopkins' poems, "The

Starlight Night" is rich with alliteration and

assonance. One phoneme leads to the other and one

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sound to another, creating a harmonious unity on

the level of sound, just like the ones on the lexical

and grammatical levels. The same consonant

occurs at the beginning of each stressed syllable in

"fire-folk", "bright boroughs" and the /w/ and /b/

come together in "Wind-beat whitebeam". The poet

also resorts to the repetition of similar vowels in the

stressed syllables of successive words in the three

repetitions of the /f/ in "floating forth at a

farmyard" and the /d/ in "Down in dim woods the

diamond delves", where the initial phoneme in the

first two content, and, hence, stressed words, occurs

immediately before the final position in the third

word "woods", and then twice in the fourth

"diamond" in initial as well as final positions. Apart

from alliteration and assonance, there is also the

same phoneme /l/ coming before the /v/ and /z/ in

"delves" and "elves" successively and in "cold' and

"gold", then in "quickgold" before the /d/ and then

assuming the initial position in the following word

"lies". With Hopkins' sprung rhythm and its stress

pattern, the sound effect of stressed lexemes is

highlighted, and an atmosphere of continuity and

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progression runs through the entire poem. All the

verbs are monosyllabic: "Look", "lies", "is", "are"

and "shuts". With the exception of "are" and

"lies", all other verbs in the poem are characterized

by short vowels too, thus speeding. Unity and

harmony are, thus, achieved on all levels of

linguistic features, helping to feed in the poet's

feelings and vision in a way where content and form

are catholically married to each other.

5. A Final Note: End of the Tour

Coming to the end of this exploration, the

researcher hopes we are not simply back at the very

beginning, even though time past and time future

may be still contained within the present. To sum

up, it may be fairly concluded that the blend of

different registerial characteristics in the sonnet,

the conversational informal tone as in "Ah well,",

the religious image dominating the last line of the

poem, as well as the dramatic development and the

hypothetical series of question and answer as in L.

9, are further reinforced by the eye-anagram

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"Look", and the question word "What". The idea

of analytic procedure is equated with the rational

search for laws and explanations, and the relation

between cause and effect. To earn the prize one has

to pay for it in "Prayer, patience, alms, vows".

Confronted with the dilemma of the coexistence of

opposites in nature, the speaker draws from both

religion and science the means to examine and

represent reality. A detailed observation of the

outer world and its adequate representation in

language are the first steps towards knowledge:

hence the sequences of alliterations (such as,

"circle-citadels"; "diamond delves"; "elves'-eyes";

" Wind-beat whitebeam"), the many compounds

(like "fire-folk", "Flake-doves" or "quickgold"),

and the lexemes meant to capture the essence of

colours ("grey lawns", "yellow sallows"). For

Hopkins, however, no principle of unity and

significance is available without religious faith. The

world, which consists of discrete objects and

attributes, is held together only by God: He alone is

the One who can encompass multiplicity and

diversity; Who provides nature with its inscape and

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hence, creates the instress in the poet who, in turn,

produces his poetry as a new copy of that inscape,

hoping to reproduce an equivalent instress in the

addressee. It is now the role of the critic and/or

researcher to attempt another critical inscape to

help produce a similar instress in the reader, which

the researcher hopes this paper may have partially

managed to do. The poet, the reader and the critic,

the experience, the poet's vision and the

reader/addressor's communication with it, the

form, the content and the inscape and instress, all

merge together, all present what is truly true. It is

all an epiphany. To end with Hopkins' very words,

The best ideal is the true

And other truth is none.

All glory be ascribèd to

The holy Three in One.

“Summa”

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Appendix

The Starlight Night

LOOK at the stars! look, look up at the skies!

O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!

The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!

Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves'-eyes!

The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!

Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!

Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare! --

Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.

Buy then! bid then! -- What? -- Prayer, patience, alms, vows.

Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!

Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!

These are indeed the barn; withindoors house

The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse

Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

(Note: The html text of the poems is derived from the one at

Columbia University's Bartleby Library. A few corrections

have been made. R.J.C. Watt, University of Dundee)

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Notes

1 According to Webster's Third New International Dictionary (2002), the

term "Inscape" means an inward significant character or quality belonging

uniquely to objects or events in nature and human experience, especially as

perceived by the blended observation and introspection of the poet and, in

turn, embodied in patterns of such specifically poetic elements as imagery,

rhythm, rhyme, assonance, sound symbolism and allusion: INWARDNESS

("inscape." Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged.

Merriam-Webster, 2002) http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com (13 July,

2006).

As Glenn Everett points out, by "inscape" Hopkins means the unified

complex of characteristics that give each thing its uniqueness and that

differentiate it from other things (Glenn Everett, Hopkins on "Inscape" and

"Instress" as found on The Victorian Web). The concept of inscape shares

much with Wordsworth's "spots of time," Emerson's "moments," and

Joyce's "epiphanies," showing it to be a characteristically Romantic and

post-Romantic idea. But Hopkins' inscape is also fundamentally religious: a

glimpse of the inscape of a thing shows us why God created it. "Each mortal

thing does one thing and the same: myself it speaks and spells,/ Crying

What I'd is me: for that I came." (Ibid)

2 Instress is the act, the intense power that brings one to recognising an

object's inscape. Through instress, one would recognize the divine in

everything, and Hopkins wrote his poems to reflect this realization and to

bring inscape to the reader through his unique rhythm, which he called

sprung rhythm (Glenn Everett, Hopkins on "Inscape" and "Instress" as

found on The Victorian Web).

3 Sprung rhythm is an irregular system of prosody developed by Gerard

Manley Hopkins. It is based on the number of stressed syllables in a line and

permits an indeterminate number of unstressed syllables. In sprung rhythm,

a foot may be composed of from one to four syllables. (In regular English

metres, a foot consists of two or three syllables.) Because stressed syllables

often occur sequentially in this patterning rather than in alternation with

unstressed syllables, the rhythm is said to be "sprung." Hopkins claimed to

be only the theoretician, not the inventor, of sprung rhythm. He saw it as the

rhythm of common English speech and the basis of such early English

poems as Langland's "Piers Plowman" and nursery rhymes. Sprung

rhythm is a bridge between regular metre and free verse. An example of

Hopkins' use of it is in "Spring and Fall- to a Young Child" (Encyclopaedia

Britannica, 2000).

30

Works Cited

A: Primary Sources

Robert Bridges (ed.) (1918), Poems of Gerard Manley

Hopkins, LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD (As found on

TheConcordance-http://www.dundee.ac.uk/english/wics/gmh/framconc.htm)

(12 April, 2005)

B: Secondary Sources

Aarts, Bas (1997), English Syntax and Argumentation,

London, Macmillan Press LTD.

Brown, Daniel (1997), Hopkins' Idealism: Philosophy,

Physics, Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia on Line, 1995.

Costantini, Mariaconcetta (1997), "Hopkins and the

Scientific Dilemma", (RdSV 2, no. 4 [July 1997]: 85-103),

http://www. creighton.edu/~dcallon/maria.htm, (11 February,

2006).

31

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. CD Edition, (2000)

Glenn Everett (1995), "Hopkins on "Inscape" and

"Instress"" as found on The Victorian Web- (12

June. 2006).

Jakobson, Roman, (1964), "Closing Statement: Linguistics

and Poetics", in "Style in Language", ed. by Th. A.

Sebeok, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University

Press.

Joseph J. Feeney, S.J. (2006), "Hopkins the Poet, Hopkins

the Jesuit", The Hopkins Quarterly,

http://hopkinsquarterly.com/Biography.htm, (12

September, 2006)

Katamba, Francis (1993), Morphology, London,, Macmillan

LTD.

Landow, George P. (2003), "Genre in Hopkins's Poetry" as

found on The Victorian Web (3 April 2006).

Lyons, John (1995), Linguistic Semantics, Cambridge,

32

Cambridge University Press.

Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged.

Merriam-Webster, 2002), http://unabridged.merriam-

webster.com (13 July, 2006).