Read two poems by Hopkins:
Also, read the following excerpt from a review of Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poetry Read by Richard Austen written by Fr. Noel Barber S.J. for the Irish Quarterly Review.
- "Spring and Fall" p.965
- "Pied Beauty" p.964
Also, read the following excerpt from a review of Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poetry Read by Richard Austen written by Fr. Noel Barber S.J. for the Irish Quarterly Review.
Hopkins believed that his poem "must be spoken; ’till it is spoken it is not performed" because of its rhythms, shape and style. In a letter to his friend Canon Dixon in 1878 he explained the rhythms: Sprung Rhythm, Counterpoint Rhythm, and the further refinements of ‘outriders’ and ‘outriding’ feet’:
"I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm, which I now realised on paper. To speak shortly, it consists in scanning by accents or stresses alone without any account of the number of syllables, so that a foot may be one strong syllable or it may be it may be many light and one strong. Also, I have written some sonnets and a few little things; some in sprung rhythm, with various other experiments – as ‘outriding feet’, that is parts of which do not count in the scanning; others in the ordinary scanning counterpointed." Letter to Dixon, October 5th 1878
"Sprung rhythm" is then regular yet free: stresses are firm, yet unstressed syllables aren’t counted. Thus the short line "Áll félled, félled, are áll felled" (six syllables) and the long line "As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding..." (fifteen syllables) are both five-stress, or iambic, lines. The poems’ shapes (or forms) are likewise original and strange: one "sonnet" has 24 lines, one huge sentence has 66 words and covers seven lines.
Furthermore, more than any other English poet Hopkins made use of alliteration, assonances, internal full- and half-rhyme and what he called ‘vowelling on’ and vowelling off’. His poems were written for the ear. They require an actor’s voice to convey their music, their rhythms and so their sense and feeling.