A further remark: I'm more and more struck by how much of one's perception of meter is subjective and affected by expectation in context. Maybe (probably?) by one's own speech patterns and those one hears. This is true of me at least. It requires brute force for me to read lines 2 and 3 as pentameter. Line 2 to my ear has either six or seven stresses, line 3 seven. And I really, really don't like breaking a word across a line break. It's justifiable in syllabics...I guess.... What is one supposed to do with "-dom"?!?
Hopkins' own approach to metrical composition was subjective: he had a truly wonderful ear combined with a thorough familiarity with traditional meter - and he wrote what worked to his ear. He was an impressionist. That he found it necessary to sometimes mark stress placements to ensure the reader read his poems as he intended is an indicator of his originality - though he was deeply rooted in poetic tradition (which is why a thorough technical understanding of meter is also required to reliably read his poems as intended).
I find that opening enjambment absolutely thrilling. You ask what is one to do with "-dom"? That takes care of itself if you commit to the line ending: it's a press & release. He's using enjambment to heighten the effect of the "ngd" consonant cluster, anticipating the subsequent sonic sustainments on long vowels in the release into the next line ("dauphin...dawn...riding").
The stresses intended in lines 2 & 3 are as follows:
dom of DAYlight's DAUphin), dapple-DAWN-drawn FALcon, in his RIding
of the ROlling) level UNderNEATH him) steady AIR, and STRIding
The lightness and speed of flight, the bird's nimbleness, is superbly conveyed by the runs of light syllables and quick pronunciation (I have marked with closed brackets those syllables that Hopkins himself marks as extrametrical "outriders" - by which we also know that the disyllabic words that *follow* them are intended to count metrically as one syllable, thus requiring quick, compressed enunciation. This kind of compression is pervasive in Hopkins' poems).
*Within* that, the spontaneous compressed support of "UNderNEATH" is just beautiful.
He is one of my very, very favourite artists of any kind.
Many thanks for the explication. No doubt you're correct as to what Hopkins intends, but I would never on my own have heard--for instance--the first syllable of "dapple" as unstressed. That's an instance of the "force" that I said I have to apply to read the line as pentameter. Maybe it requires specific knowledge of the whole "sprung rhythm" scheme, which I admit I've never looked at closely.
I should have mentioned explicitly, in case people didn't use the link to the previous appearance of this poem, that I love the poem, too. Though I think maybe not as much as I did when I first encountered it very long ago.
I wouldn't say I have special knowledge of "sprung rhythm": I simply trust his own notations, and feel my way into the pulse. He's highly *emphatic*.
Paradise Lost can also be misread because of Milton's bold, emphatic contractions (even gliding words together across a punctuation mark sometimes). In addition, he started experimenting with further metrical variations in the second half!
I gave the Baker book to my oldest daughter, the bird lover. But I'm wondering if I can steal it back for a while... I'd really like to read it for myself.
It is really good. I read it very slowly, over a couple of years, off and on --- because the prose is so rich that I didn't want to miss a moment of it, but it's also largely the same thing day after day, in installments, so that your attention can start to wander if you're not careful. The last thing you want to catch yourself thinking is, "Oh, look, more birds."
My very outdoor son had given it to me for Christmas, and I'm glad he did. With Adam Nicolson's The Making of Poetry, it's one of the handful of really beautiful books I've read for the first time in the last few years.
One of my favouite poets. No one could have loved language more, or done more with it. Stretched it so far to such effect. Scott Hightower, in his poem 'Sillion,' on a bust of Severus Alexander, uses the word 'sillion to describe the marble playing with the sitter's curls - "Not fully scrubbed,/ the stone has a blush of blue and rusty/ pimiento where previosly/ there must have been a a slight crust / of sand. A glistening white streaks a little/ at his forehead, above where his hair/ curls; where the plow gashed/ it's sillion/ and left the day's revelation in the field.
Plainly a Hopkins reader, but also a follower after Hopkin's plough.
" Sillion;" he says later in the poem , "the spray or shine/ of a wake behind a ploughing/ ship, only sailing on land." We knew that - somewhere, at some level, we saw it that way - but are beautifully reminded. But Hopkins saw it first, for us.
Very nice! Weirdly enough, not 24 hours ago I wrote this note to self, as a memento:
Late afternoon into early evening. I’ve got a chicken on the grill, spatchcocked, spiced, basically French, going slow. I’m trying to write letters, a few important. Drinking high test beer. A hawk is crying, repeatedly. I keep looking, but can't see him. If experience is any guide, it’s a male Cooper’s hawk, an accipiter, built for flying through trees rather than soaring. He wants to establish a territory, suitable for mating, nesting. It’s happened before, and I hope it happens again. You go, young man. A Cooper’s hawk in flight is a thing of rare beauty, though there is a pang when one has killed a cardinal, the splash of red hanging low. Life.
My favorite poet ever. One of my favorite poems. Thanks so much for re-sharing this, and for the information on Baker; that book is now on my Amazon list. :) Hopkins ability to describe what he sees, and his seeking of its inscape -- there are no words. I always made my students put together a reading at the end of the semester when I taught my Hopkins course, because it is in the reading aloud, I think, that you finally really "get" the work. They often said it amazed them to find how much more they understood and appreciated through it.
Hopkins is discussed as a metrical innovator, an alliterator and (of course) as a religious poet, but I sometimes think the key thing about him as a writer is his extraordinary powers of *noticing stuff*. He is intensely attentive to the specificities of the world, and renders that close, sacred attention in his work. Geoffrey Grigson records an anecdote: "a story is told of one of the Jesuit fathers at Stonyhurst pointing out the young Hopkins to the gardener and telling him that Hopkins was a very fine scholar. The gardener replied that he had seen him hanging around and staring at a piece of glass on one of the paths: he had taken him for a 'natural'..." That's Hopkins: entirely consumed by the particular thing, its beauty and wonder and holiness, he is observing.
Yes. A different kind of mind from Baker's in some ways, but that's what made me think of the two of them together, beyond the obvious convergence point of the hawk. And it's fascinating to me that each of them approached language in the same way, with that absolute intensity of attention to its every move.
I won't repeat my basic experience and opinion of Hopkins, which I noted in this poem's previous appearance. I think this link goes to that page:
https://poemsancientandmodern.substack.com/p/todays-poem-the-windhover
A further remark: I'm more and more struck by how much of one's perception of meter is subjective and affected by expectation in context. Maybe (probably?) by one's own speech patterns and those one hears. This is true of me at least. It requires brute force for me to read lines 2 and 3 as pentameter. Line 2 to my ear has either six or seven stresses, line 3 seven. And I really, really don't like breaking a word across a line break. It's justifiable in syllabics...I guess.... What is one supposed to do with "-dom"?!?
Alternatively, I'm at least partially tone deaf.
Hopkins' own approach to metrical composition was subjective: he had a truly wonderful ear combined with a thorough familiarity with traditional meter - and he wrote what worked to his ear. He was an impressionist. That he found it necessary to sometimes mark stress placements to ensure the reader read his poems as he intended is an indicator of his originality - though he was deeply rooted in poetic tradition (which is why a thorough technical understanding of meter is also required to reliably read his poems as intended).
I find that opening enjambment absolutely thrilling. You ask what is one to do with "-dom"? That takes care of itself if you commit to the line ending: it's a press & release. He's using enjambment to heighten the effect of the "ngd" consonant cluster, anticipating the subsequent sonic sustainments on long vowels in the release into the next line ("dauphin...dawn...riding").
The stresses intended in lines 2 & 3 are as follows:
dom of DAYlight's DAUphin), dapple-DAWN-drawn FALcon, in his RIding
of the ROlling) level UNderNEATH him) steady AIR, and STRIding
The lightness and speed of flight, the bird's nimbleness, is superbly conveyed by the runs of light syllables and quick pronunciation (I have marked with closed brackets those syllables that Hopkins himself marks as extrametrical "outriders" - by which we also know that the disyllabic words that *follow* them are intended to count metrically as one syllable, thus requiring quick, compressed enunciation. This kind of compression is pervasive in Hopkins' poems).
*Within* that, the spontaneous compressed support of "UNderNEATH" is just beautiful.
He is one of my very, very favourite artists of any kind.
Many thanks for the explication. No doubt you're correct as to what Hopkins intends, but I would never on my own have heard--for instance--the first syllable of "dapple" as unstressed. That's an instance of the "force" that I said I have to apply to read the line as pentameter. Maybe it requires specific knowledge of the whole "sprung rhythm" scheme, which I admit I've never looked at closely.
I should have mentioned explicitly, in case people didn't use the link to the previous appearance of this poem, that I love the poem, too. Though I think maybe not as much as I did when I first encountered it very long ago.
I wouldn't say I have special knowledge of "sprung rhythm": I simply trust his own notations, and feel my way into the pulse. He's highly *emphatic*.
Paradise Lost can also be misread because of Milton's bold, emphatic contractions (even gliding words together across a punctuation mark sometimes). In addition, he started experimenting with further metrical variations in the second half!
Wow! I have ordered the Baker. I found the poem really hard to read aloud, because my eye kept skipping over the repeated words. But necessary.
Brilliant pairing, thanks!
I gave the Baker book to my oldest daughter, the bird lover. But I'm wondering if I can steal it back for a while... I'd really like to read it for myself.
It is really good. I read it very slowly, over a couple of years, off and on --- because the prose is so rich that I didn't want to miss a moment of it, but it's also largely the same thing day after day, in installments, so that your attention can start to wander if you're not careful. The last thing you want to catch yourself thinking is, "Oh, look, more birds."
My very outdoor son had given it to me for Christmas, and I'm glad he did. With Adam Nicolson's The Making of Poetry, it's one of the handful of really beautiful books I've read for the first time in the last few years.
One of my favouite poets. No one could have loved language more, or done more with it. Stretched it so far to such effect. Scott Hightower, in his poem 'Sillion,' on a bust of Severus Alexander, uses the word 'sillion to describe the marble playing with the sitter's curls - "Not fully scrubbed,/ the stone has a blush of blue and rusty/ pimiento where previosly/ there must have been a a slight crust / of sand. A glistening white streaks a little/ at his forehead, above where his hair/ curls; where the plow gashed/ it's sillion/ and left the day's revelation in the field.
Plainly a Hopkins reader, but also a follower after Hopkin's plough.
" Sillion;" he says later in the poem , "the spray or shine/ of a wake behind a ploughing/ ship, only sailing on land." We knew that - somewhere, at some level, we saw it that way - but are beautifully reminded. But Hopkins saw it first, for us.
Very nice! Weirdly enough, not 24 hours ago I wrote this note to self, as a memento:
Late afternoon into early evening. I’ve got a chicken on the grill, spatchcocked, spiced, basically French, going slow. I’m trying to write letters, a few important. Drinking high test beer. A hawk is crying, repeatedly. I keep looking, but can't see him. If experience is any guide, it’s a male Cooper’s hawk, an accipiter, built for flying through trees rather than soaring. He wants to establish a territory, suitable for mating, nesting. It’s happened before, and I hope it happens again. You go, young man. A Cooper’s hawk in flight is a thing of rare beauty, though there is a pang when one has killed a cardinal, the splash of red hanging low. Life.
Enjoyable and digestible.
My favorite poet ever. One of my favorite poems. Thanks so much for re-sharing this, and for the information on Baker; that book is now on my Amazon list. :) Hopkins ability to describe what he sees, and his seeking of its inscape -- there are no words. I always made my students put together a reading at the end of the semester when I taught my Hopkins course, because it is in the reading aloud, I think, that you finally really "get" the work. They often said it amazed them to find how much more they understood and appreciated through it.
Thank you. Enjoyed reading about Baker and his writing.
For Hopkins, the hawk's power, like Christ's power, was in buckling.
Hopkins is discussed as a metrical innovator, an alliterator and (of course) as a religious poet, but I sometimes think the key thing about him as a writer is his extraordinary powers of *noticing stuff*. He is intensely attentive to the specificities of the world, and renders that close, sacred attention in his work. Geoffrey Grigson records an anecdote: "a story is told of one of the Jesuit fathers at Stonyhurst pointing out the young Hopkins to the gardener and telling him that Hopkins was a very fine scholar. The gardener replied that he had seen him hanging around and staring at a piece of glass on one of the paths: he had taken him for a 'natural'..." That's Hopkins: entirely consumed by the particular thing, its beauty and wonder and holiness, he is observing.
Yes. A different kind of mind from Baker's in some ways, but that's what made me think of the two of them together, beyond the obvious convergence point of the hawk. And it's fascinating to me that each of them approached language in the same way, with that absolute intensity of attention to its every move.
Seeking the inscape of the thing, whatever it might be.
The Mysticism of Small Things