Hopkins's Thinking About The Spoken Delivery Of Verse

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By the by the mark in the verses means a sort of spondee, two long syllables equally accented or nearly so, though nominally one of the two has the stress.

This is my difficulty, what marks to use and when to use them: they are so much needed and yet so objectionable. About punctuation my mind is clear: I can give a rule for everything I write myself and even for other people, though they might not always agree with me perhaps.

Yet this leaves Hopkins's management of aural delivery as dependent upon the visual apparatus of manuscript or print as on the sound values and rhythms it embodies. This contradiction, if that is what it is, runs through Hopkins's thinking about the spoken delivery of verse.

He is keener on control, getting his own reading of his poems across, than many poets would wish to be, yet his theories about verse Shoes Online idealise spoken delivery. He is thus left in the impossible ...
... situation of needing an authoritative text read by a sole, trained expert who perfectly delivers his intention.

This is not the more familiar support for spoken poetry which opens texts to many readings, many speakers. Hopkins's dilemma may relate to his adoption of the contextual situation of plainsong and recitative.

They are delivered by members of a community set apart from the mainstream culture, or in the case of recitative by professionals in performance, and plainsong itself delivers sacred text, which is of ritual and spiritual significance. The need for control and 'perfectibility' that derive from this context runs counter to the modern open approach to the reading of verse.

However much history and terminology music and poetry have been made to share, however close the terminologies run, there is a huge difference in experience of the two art forms. Reading Hopkins's poetry is clearly nothing like listening to plainsong, which has effects of weight, simplicity and timelessness. The overall impression of plainsong can be that the spiritual, like the beautiful, is the slow.

Yet Hopkins's mind is anything but slow, and his poetry is characterised by energy and intensity, packed with thought. Thus when Hopkins writes of the delivery of his own verse he directs to ways of slowing it down, of lingering and pauses, as if aware of the difficulty of the reader in receiving such condensed material and of the tendency of his verse to make the mind race rather than take time to receive its complex inner movements.

This is most evident in his notes to particular poems. The attempt to slow the reader down goes through his writing career. The two sonnets of 1877,'God's Grandeur' and 'The Starlight Night' are, he instructs, 'to be read, both of them, slowly, marking the rhythms and fetching out the syllables' and his last sonnet of 1889.'

Thou art indeed Discount Shoes Just, Lord' carries a similar instruction to Bridges: 'Observe, it must be read adagio molto and with great stress'.

The number and consistency of such instructions is remarkable: of 'Ribblesdale' he wrote 'It is to be read very pausingly, the voice dwelling where the native rhythm overlaps into another line'. 'Two licences are natural to sprung rhythm' he writes in his Author's Preface from MSB, 'The one is rests, as in music.

The other marks are easily understood... what in music are called pauses... to show that the syllable should be dwelt on...' It is the rhythm of his verse that he selects as the feature which demands that it be performed rather than read silently: 'The rhythm of this sonnet [Harry Ploughman], which is altogether for recital, and not for perusal (as by nature verse should be), is very highly studied'.