Thank you for posting this along with your beautiful analysis. I taught a course on Hopkins a few times, but when I read him just for myself I find myself bereft of words, merely trying to catch breath in the wonder of the beauty he opens to us.
This is wonderful. And this—“it is like a Petrarchan sonnet whose separate pieces have shrunk in the wash”—is perfect. This poem has always befuddled me – I always enjoyed it and have read it 100 times but you are analysis of the prosody helps explain the draw.
A question: you said that the first line is headless iambic pentameter. I would’ve called it trochaic pentameter, since we say “GLO-ry.” Are we saying the same thing?
Well, you could say that, but then you have to account for the dangling syllable at the end, which (I think inevitably) carries a stress. I hear it as more like this: GLO/ry BE/to GOD/for DAP/pled THINGS.
It is fairly standard-ish for a line of iambic pentameter to begin on a single stressed syllable --- I know poets who do this when, for example, the previous line ends in a feminine ending, so there is a dangling unstressed syllable, which you could count as the first half of the iambic foot, and then the next line begins on the stressed syllable that completes it. Obviously that's not the case in the opening line of a poem, but I've been fascinated by that idea of a metrical economy, from line to line (things like that make me more attentive to and careful about my own use of meter, too). This particular thing is not what Hopkins is doing here, but it's one iteration of the idea of starting on a half-iamb.
That's probably just a self-indulgent digression! But you could probably make an argument either way: whether you hear one syllable fewer at the beginning of the line, or one syllable extra at the end. And I do come down in the former camp simply because that last syllable is a stress.
That makes perfect sense. Thanks for the response. I love this kind of thing and used to spend hours marking up poems to better understand how they work.
I also used to go along with a whole school of thought set up by Vladimir Nabokov. Have you ever read his book Notes on Prosody? He has a different system—very interesting. To his ear, the first line would be called trochaic pentameter because unstressed syllables at the end don’t count, making “things” follow the trochaic pattern.
At any rate, I think it’s great that you are taking the time to write about how the sound reflects the sense. It wasn’t until deep into college that I learned how to listen instead of just read. Thanks for bringing that back.
I remember so well the first time I read this poem. It was in high school, and I had no notion of how to read poetry. Hopkins shocked me. I wanted to read it and understand it, but it was almost too much to bear--the vitality and virulence. But I never forgot some of the lines here, and, from that time, "dapple" entered my juvenile vocabulary. When I re-encountered Hopkins in college, better equipped by then to enter into his linguistic marvels, I felt so much joy!
This is particularly satisfying to read in a quiet and beautiful spot -- overlooking a pond and the ocean on Nantucket Island where I have spent many hours watching a grandson fish and fuss with "gear and tackle and trim." Beautiful. Thank you!
"rose-moles" is one of those compound words where the pitch naturally drops on the 2nd syllable, and it would make expressive sense (and would be characteristic of Hopkins) for "all" to be stressed, so that's where I hear the 2nd beat ("-moles" still carries weight, but only through duration, not pitch; "rose" and "all" have both duration and a rise in pitch). That also makes the beat placements exactly identical to line 2. When I get home I'll check if the notes in my collected Hopkins tell us of any scansion marks he made himself!
Personally, on the penultimate line, I would pump the 4th beat forward (creating an alliteration and matching double stress with "Praise him"):
he FAthers-FORTH whose BEAUty is PAST CHANGE:
It's an orthodox variation, so even by that reading it remains the only fully orthodox line of iambic pentameter!
Re "rose-moles" --- my initial impulse actually was to hear that almost as one long stress, rather than two separate ones, and I do think that that would have been more right (casting more stress upon "all").
What strikes me with this work is that Hopkins is not just describing the aesthetic positivity of pied colour-schemes (the beauty of trout, of the blue-white of summer skies and so on) but the *moral* complexity of the world:. "Fickle" is not a good thing to be (the Old English root of this world is stronger than the modern usage: ficol, from fician [“to deceive, trick”] = deceitful, crafty, false) though being freckled is morally neutral. But otherwise, in the quasi-sestet: better to be fast than slow, to be sweet than sour, to be bright than dim. But strong and weak, good and evil, are also part of the "dappled" cosmos God has created. Praise him indeed.
Yes. What a marvelous observation. There's implied here a deeper and more mysterious sense of the varied nature and potential "deep down things." I think of a phrase from the opening of St. Paul's Epistle to the Colossians, which as an antiphon in my own modern breviary is translated as saying that Christ "holds all creation together in himself" --- all creation, in all its perplexing contradictions. That's exactly what this compressed poem seems to hold together in itself.
The more I read Hopkins, the more I marvel at Hopkins.
Thank you for posting this along with your beautiful analysis. I taught a course on Hopkins a few times, but when I read him just for myself I find myself bereft of words, merely trying to catch breath in the wonder of the beauty he opens to us.
This is wonderful. And this—“it is like a Petrarchan sonnet whose separate pieces have shrunk in the wash”—is perfect. This poem has always befuddled me – I always enjoyed it and have read it 100 times but you are analysis of the prosody helps explain the draw.
A question: you said that the first line is headless iambic pentameter. I would’ve called it trochaic pentameter, since we say “GLO-ry.” Are we saying the same thing?
Well, you could say that, but then you have to account for the dangling syllable at the end, which (I think inevitably) carries a stress. I hear it as more like this: GLO/ry BE/to GOD/for DAP/pled THINGS.
It is fairly standard-ish for a line of iambic pentameter to begin on a single stressed syllable --- I know poets who do this when, for example, the previous line ends in a feminine ending, so there is a dangling unstressed syllable, which you could count as the first half of the iambic foot, and then the next line begins on the stressed syllable that completes it. Obviously that's not the case in the opening line of a poem, but I've been fascinated by that idea of a metrical economy, from line to line (things like that make me more attentive to and careful about my own use of meter, too). This particular thing is not what Hopkins is doing here, but it's one iteration of the idea of starting on a half-iamb.
That's probably just a self-indulgent digression! But you could probably make an argument either way: whether you hear one syllable fewer at the beginning of the line, or one syllable extra at the end. And I do come down in the former camp simply because that last syllable is a stress.
That makes perfect sense. Thanks for the response. I love this kind of thing and used to spend hours marking up poems to better understand how they work.
I also used to go along with a whole school of thought set up by Vladimir Nabokov. Have you ever read his book Notes on Prosody? He has a different system—very interesting. To his ear, the first line would be called trochaic pentameter because unstressed syllables at the end don’t count, making “things” follow the trochaic pattern.
At any rate, I think it’s great that you are taking the time to write about how the sound reflects the sense. It wasn’t until deep into college that I learned how to listen instead of just read. Thanks for bringing that back.
I love Nabokov, but I haven't read his Notes on Prosody. Thanks for the recommendation!
I just intuitively loved this from the first time I read it. I'm warmed by seeing the poet praise God for beings like me.
I remember so well the first time I read this poem. It was in high school, and I had no notion of how to read poetry. Hopkins shocked me. I wanted to read it and understand it, but it was almost too much to bear--the vitality and virulence. But I never forgot some of the lines here, and, from that time, "dapple" entered my juvenile vocabulary. When I re-encountered Hopkins in college, better equipped by then to enter into his linguistic marvels, I felt so much joy!
That’s good!
This is particularly satisfying to read in a quiet and beautiful spot -- overlooking a pond and the ocean on Nantucket Island where I have spent many hours watching a grandson fish and fuss with "gear and tackle and trim." Beautiful. Thank you!
"rose-moles" is one of those compound words where the pitch naturally drops on the 2nd syllable, and it would make expressive sense (and would be characteristic of Hopkins) for "all" to be stressed, so that's where I hear the 2nd beat ("-moles" still carries weight, but only through duration, not pitch; "rose" and "all" have both duration and a rise in pitch). That also makes the beat placements exactly identical to line 2. When I get home I'll check if the notes in my collected Hopkins tell us of any scansion marks he made himself!
Personally, on the penultimate line, I would pump the 4th beat forward (creating an alliteration and matching double stress with "Praise him"):
he FAthers-FORTH whose BEAUty is PAST CHANGE:
It's an orthodox variation, so even by that reading it remains the only fully orthodox line of iambic pentameter!
Re "rose-moles" --- my initial impulse actually was to hear that almost as one long stress, rather than two separate ones, and I do think that that would have been more right (casting more stress upon "all").
A wonderful reading of this amazing poem.
What strikes me with this work is that Hopkins is not just describing the aesthetic positivity of pied colour-schemes (the beauty of trout, of the blue-white of summer skies and so on) but the *moral* complexity of the world:. "Fickle" is not a good thing to be (the Old English root of this world is stronger than the modern usage: ficol, from fician [“to deceive, trick”] = deceitful, crafty, false) though being freckled is morally neutral. But otherwise, in the quasi-sestet: better to be fast than slow, to be sweet than sour, to be bright than dim. But strong and weak, good and evil, are also part of the "dappled" cosmos God has created. Praise him indeed.
Yes. What a marvelous observation. There's implied here a deeper and more mysterious sense of the varied nature and potential "deep down things." I think of a phrase from the opening of St. Paul's Epistle to the Colossians, which as an antiphon in my own modern breviary is translated as saying that Christ "holds all creation together in himself" --- all creation, in all its perplexing contradictions. That's exactly what this compressed poem seems to hold together in itself.
The more I read Hopkins, the more I marvel at Hopkins.
Yes! He holds together all creation with its perplexing contradictions.