in verse #53 : And out of the swing of the sea

Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of the few poets since the alliterative revival to experiment with alliteration as a governing principle of his poetic line. When he wrote “Heaven-Haven,” he was at Oxford reading classics, not yet a Jesuit, just beginning his experiments with ‘sprung rhythm,’ and still uneasy with “his sexual response to other boys”[i] that had manifested itself at Highgate School. Note the almost savage mockery of the nun for choosing to be “where no storms come:”

Heaven-Haven
A nun takes the veil

I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.

And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.[ii] 

The mockery is strongest in the image of the sea that makes up the last two lines: a haven, or harbor, is by definition part of the sea; but in this harbor, there is no sound from the green swell. The green swell, the tidal motion, is in fact “out of the swing of the sea.” This almost a dead sea. But of primary interest to me, as regards this blog, is not the imagery so much as the difference between the metric of the two stanzas. There is one iambic-pentameter line in the whole poem, the third: “To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail” — nine words, ten syllables, graced with two instances of alliteration, and rhyming with the other iambic line in the first stanza, “Where springs not fail,” with which it also alliterates. I can’t make the counterpart line in the second stanza, “Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,” scan as iambic at all — even if in carries a stress, to make it pentametric. Add to that the trochaic title and the last two anapestic feet and you have a carefully controlled contrast between a dead haven and a swinging sea.

Now you might argue that, since this is an early poem, Hopkins may just not have known what he was doing. But remember, he was reading classics at Oxford — Greek and Latin poetry, which is where all those feet first trod. Ruth Padel, in her introduction quoted above, says that he described what he was doing as a “radical new rhythmic system, which he felt was closer to the rhythm of natural speech, and coined a phrase for it — sprung rhythm.”[iii]   “In sprung rhythm,” she goes on to say, “based partly on Welsh metrics but also on Hopkins’s knowledge of Greek lyric, each line has a set number of stressed syllables, but the number of unstressed syllables varies.” Long-time readers of this blog will recall that this accurately describes Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse, with four stressed syllables. Newbies can read about it here and here.  And about my obsession with Welsh forms, starting here.

I have gone to such lengths to analyze Hopkins’s poem because it illuminates the kinship between two American masters, Melville and Whitman, both born in 1819. Hopkins would have been in the next younger generation, born in 1844, a month after Joseph Smith was assassinated. He was searching for something “closer to the rhythm of natural speech,” and wrote “Heaven-Haven” in July 1864, hard on his twentieth birthday, thirteen years after Moby-Dick and nine years after the first edition of Leaves of grass. Padel says “his affinities were with the American trailblazer Walt Whitman rather than the English Victorians.”[iv]  Those affinities were ambivalent, however; in a letter to his friend Robert Bridges, discussing morals, he says offhandedly: “All the world, so to speak, approves of charity and of the corporal works of mercy, though all the world does not practice what it approves of. Even Walt Whitman nurses the sick.” [v] That was written on Jan. 29 1879, after the sixth edition of Leaves of grass (1876) appeared, incorporating the Civil-War poems Drum-Taps and Sequel to Drum-Taps — the so-called Centennial Edition. Hopkins does not admit to having actually read Whitman until a letter to Bridges dated Oct. 18 1882. Bridges had apparently written, suggesting the influence of Whitman on Hopkins’s “The leaden echo and the golden echo.” Hopkins acknowledges having read 3 poems of Whitman, but on the matter of influence on his poem says:

The question then is only about the fact. But first I may as well say what I should not otherwise have said, that I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like my own than any other man’s living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession. And this also makes me the more desirous to read him and the more determined that I will not.[vi]

It would appear that Hopkins was springing away from more than iambic pentameter. He then goes on to analyze in agonizing detail a line from Whitman which he misremembers — after stating “The pieces of his I read were mostly in an irregular rhythmic prose: that is what they are thought to be meant for, and what they seemed to me to be.”[vii]  But what I want to look at is that misremembered poem in comparison with another great American writer, Herman Melville. You may recall that, in Collage of myself, Matt Miller says “But Whitman’s prose was fundamental to his line, and it remained critical throughout his compositional process”^[viii] —because of his method of collage, which essentially supports Hopkins in his analysis. And, since this is a Hopkins moment, I want to compare Melville’s famous swing-of-the-sea prose with Whitman’s long line. This is from Chapter CXIII of Moby-Dick, “The forge”:

 

With matted beard, and swathed in a bristling shark-skin apron,
about mid-day, Perth was standing between his forge and anvil,
the latter placed upon an iron-wood log,
with one hand holding a pike-head in the coals,
and with the other at his forge’s lungs,
when Captain Ahab came along,
carrying in his hand a small rusty-looking leathern bag.
While yet a little distance from the forge, moody Ahab paused;
till at last, Perth, withdrawing his iron from the fire, began hammering it upon the anvil—
the red mass sending off the sparks in thick hovering flights,
some of which flew close to Ahab.

“Are these thy Mother Carey’s chickens, Perth?
they are always flying in thy wake; birds of good omen, too, but not to all;—
look here, they burn; but thou—thou liv’st among them without a scorch.”

“Because I am scorched all over, Captain Ahab,” answered Perth,
resting for a moment on his hammer; “I am past scorching-,
not easily can’st thou scorch a scar.”

“Well, well; no more.  Thy shrunk voice sounds too calmly, sanely woeful to me.
In no Paradise myself, I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad.
Thou should’st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad?
How can’st thou endure without being mad?
Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can’st not go mad?—
What wert thou making there?”

“Welding an old pike-head, sir; there were seams and dents in it.”

“And can’st thou make it all smooth again, blacksmith, after such hard usage as it had?”

“I think so, sir.”

“And I suppose thou can’st smoothe almost any seams and dents;
never mind how hard the metal, blacksmith?”

“Aye, sir, I think I can; all seams and dents but one.”

“Look ye here then,” cried Ahab, passionately advancing,
and leaning with both hands on Perth’s shoulders; “look ye here—here—
can ye smoothe out a seam like this, blacksmith,”
sweeping one hand across his ribbed brow;
“if thou could’st, blacksmith, glad enough would I lay my head upon thy anvil,
and feel thy heaviest hammer between my eyes.
Answer!  Can’st thou smoothe this seam?”

“Oh! that is the one, sir!  Said I not all seams and dents but one?”

“Aye, blacksmith, it is the one; aye, man, it is unsmoothable;
for though thou only see’st it here in my flesh,
it has worked down into the bone of my skull—that is all wrinkles!
But, away with child’s play; no more gaffs and pikes to-day.  Look ye here!”
jingling the leathern bag, as if it were full of gold coins.
“I, too, want a harpoon made;
one that a thousand yoke of fiends could not part, Perth;
something that will stick in a whale like his own fin-bone.  There’s the stuff,”
flinging the pouch upon the anvil.  “Look ye, blacksmith,
these are the gathered nail-stubbs of the steel shoes of racing horses.”

“Horse-shoe stubbs, sir?  Why, Captain Ahab, thou hast here, then,
the best and stubbornest stuff we blacksmiths ever work.”

“I know it, old man; these stubbs will weld together
like glue from the melted bones of murderers.
Quick! forge me the harpoon.  And forge me first, twelve rods for its shank;
then wind, and twist, and hammer these twelve together
like the yarns and strands of a tow-line.  Quick!  I’ll blow the fire.”^[ix]

 

How do you hear these lines? Are they merely re-formatted prose? Do you hear some of the swing of the sea? I hear in these lines another writer whose prose was fundamental to his line — although we value him primarily as a novelist, not as a poet. I chose a section with dialogue, because it seems fundamentally to match Whitman’s frequent rhetorical stance of the inquirer. I think Melville’s prose compares well with the line that Hopkins got hung up on. He remembered it as “or a handkerchief designedly dropped” and tied himself in knots trying to scan it. It is misremembered from the fourth and fifth lines of section 6 of Song of myself; the section is often re-printed as a poem called “A child said, What is the grass?” Here it is, the complete section:

 

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we  may see and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people and from women, and from offspring taken soon
—–out of their mothers’ laps,
And here you are the mothers’ laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues!
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
What do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprouts show there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

All goes onward and outward, and nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.^[x]

 

How do you hear those two contrasting voices?  Are they really contrasting?  Complementary?  Unassociated?

But hold on, I hear you say — We’d have to read them aloud to really know.

Your turn.

 

___________________

 

[i] Selected poems and prose / Gerard Manley Hopkins ; introduced by Ruth Padel ; illustrated by Elizabeth Magill. — London : Folio Society, 2012. The quote is from Padel’s introduction, p. xiii.

[ii] Ibid., p. 5.

[iii] Ibid., p. xii.

[iv] Ibid., p. xi.

[v] The letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges / edited with notes & an introduction by Claude Colleer Abbott. 2^nd rev. impression — London : Oxford University Press, 1955, p. 62.

[vi] Ibid., p. 154.

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] Collage of myself : Walt Whitman and the making of Leaves of Grass / Matt Miller. — Lincoln and London : University of Nebraska Press, c2010, p. 2.

[ix] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moby-Dick/Chapter_113 — this is only the first half of the chapter.

[x] Leaves of grass / Walt Whitman. — Comprehensive reader’s edition / edited by Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley. — New York : Norton, 1968; p. 33-35.