# Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins/Notes

EDITOR'S NOTES
PREFACE TO NOTES
An editor of posthumous work is bounden to give some account of the authority for his text; and it is the purpose of the following notes to satisfy inquiry concerning matters whereof the present editor has the advantage of first-hand or particular knowledge.
The sources are four, and will be distinguished as A, B, D, and H, as here described.Sources
A is my own collection, a MS. book made up of autographs—by which word I denote poems in the author's handwriting—pasted into it as they were received from him, and also of contemporary copies of other poems. These autographs and copies date from '67 to '89, the year of his death. Additions made by copying after that date are not reckoned or used. The first two items of the facsimiles at page 70 are cuttings from A.
B is a MS. book, into which, in '83, I copied from A certain poems of which the author had kept no copy. He was remiss in making fair copies of his work, and his autograph of The Deutschland having been (seemingly) lost, I copied that poem and others from A at his request. After that date he entered more poems in this book as he completed them, and he also made both corrections of copy and emendations of the poems which had been copied into it by me. Thus, if a poem occur in both A and B, then B is the later and, except for overlooked errors of copyist, the better authority. The last entry written by G. M. H. into this book is of the date 1887.
D is a collection of the author's letters to Canon Dixon, the only other friend who ever read his poems, with but few exceptions whether of persons or of poems. These letters are in my keeping; they contain autographs of a few poems with late corrections.
H is the bundle of posthumous papers that came into my hands at the author's death. These were at the time examined, sorted, and indexed; and the more important pieces—of which copies were taken—were inserted into a scrap-book. That ​collection is the source of a series of his most mature sonnets, and of almost all the unfinished poems and fragments. Among these papers were also some early drafts. The facsimile after p. 92 is from H.
The latest autographs and autographic corrections have been preferred. In the very few instances in which this Methodprinciple was overruled, as in Nos. 1 and 27, the justification will be found in the note to the poem. The finished poems from 1 to 51 are ranged chronologically by the years, but in the section 52-74 a fanciful grouping of the fragments was preferred to the inevitable misrepresentations of conjectural dating. G. M. H. dated his poems from their inception, and however much he revised a poem he would date his recast as his first draft. Thus Handsome Heart was written and sent to me in '79; and the recast, which I reject, was not made before '83, while the final corrections may be some years later; and yet his last autograph is dated as the first 'Oxford '79'.
This edition purports to convey all the author's serious mature poems; and he would probably not have wished any Selectionof his earlier poems nor so many of his fragments to have been included. Of the former class three specimens only are admitted—and these, which may be considered of exceptional merit or interest, had already been given to the public—but of the latter almost everything; because these scraps being of mature date, generally contain some special beauty of thought or diction, and are invariably of metrical or rhythmical interest: some of them are in this respect as remarkable as anything in the volume. As for exclusion, no translations of any kind are published here, whether into Greek or Latin from the English—of which there are autographs and copies in A—or the Englishing of Latin hymns—occurring in H—: these last are not in my opinion of special merit; and with them I class a few religious pieces which will be noticed later.
Of the peculiar scheme of prosody invented and developed by the author a full account is out of the question. His Author's prosodyown preface together with his description of the metrical scheme of each poem—which is always, wherever it exists, transcribed in the notes—may be a sufficient guide for practical purposes. Moreover, the intention of the ​rhythm, in places where it might seem doubtful, has been indicated by accents printed over the determining syllables: in the later poems these accents correspond generally with the author's own Marksmarks; in the earlier poems they do not, but are trustworthy translations.
It was at one time the author's practice to use a very elaborate system of marks, all indicating the speech-movement: the autograph (in A) of Harry Ploughman carries seven different marks, each one defined at the foot. When reading through his letters for the purpose of determining dates, I noted a few sentences on this subject which will justify the method that I have followed in the text. In 1883 he wrote: 'You were right to leave out the marks: they were not consistent for one thing, and are always offensive. Still there must be some. Either I must invent a notation applied throughout as in music or else I must only mark where the reader is likely to mistake, and for the present this is what I shall do.' And again in '85: '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 Punctuationis clear: I can give a rule for everything I write myself and even for other people, though they might not agree with me perhaps.' In this last matter the autographs are rigidly respected, the rare intentional aberration being scrupulously noted. And so I have respected his indentation of the verse; but in the sonnets, while my indentation corresponds, as a rule, with some autograph, I have felt free to consider conveniences, following, however, his growing practice to eschew it altogether.
Apart from questions of taste—and if these poems were to be Mannerismarraigned for errors of what may be called taste, they might be convicted of occasional affectation in metaphor, as where the hills are 'as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet', or of some perversion of human feeling, as, for instance, the 'nostrils' relish of incense along the sanctuary side', or 'the Holy Ghost with warm breast and with ah! bright wings', these and a few such examples are mostly efforts to force emotion into theological or sectarian channels, as in 'the comfortless unconfessed' and the unpoetic line 'His mystery must be unstressed stressed', or, again, the exaggerated Marianism of ​some pieces, or the naked encounter of sensualism and asceticism which hurts the 'Golden Echo'.—
Apart, I say, from such faults of taste, which few as they numerically are yet affect my liking and more repel my sympathy than do all the rude shocks of his purely artistic Stylewantonness—apart from these there are definite faults of style which a reader must have courage to face, and must in some measure condone before he can discover the great beauties. For these blemishes in the poet's style are of such quality and magnitude as to deny him even a hearing from those who love a continuous literary decorum and are grown to be intolerant of its absence. And it is well to be clear that there is no pretence to reverse the condemnation of those faults, for which the poet has duly suffered. The extravagances are and will remain what they were. Nor can credit be gained from pointing them out: yet, to put readers at their ease, I will here define them: they may be called Oddity and Obscurity; and since the first may provoke laughter when a writer isOddity serious (and this poet is always serious), while the latter must prevent him from being understood (and this poet has always something to say), it may be assumed that they were not a part of his intention. Something of what he thought on this subject may be seen in the following extracts from his letters. In Feb. 1879, he wrote: 'All therefore that I think of doing is to keep my verses together in one place—at present I have not even correct copies—, that, if anyone should like, they might be published after my death. And that again is unlikely, as well as remote.... No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness. I hope in time to have a more balanced and Miltonic style. But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music and design in painting, so design, pattern, or what I am in the habit of calling inscape is what I above all aim at in poetry. Now it is the virtue of design, pattern, or inscape to be distinctive and it is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer. This vice I cannot have escaped.' And again two months later: 'Moreover the oddness may make them repulsive at first and yet Lang might have liked them on a second reading. Indeed when, on somebody returning me the Eurydice, I opened and read some lines, as one commonly reads whether prose or verse, with the ​eyes, so to say, only, it struck me aghast with a kind of raw nakedness and unmitigated violence I was unprepared for: but take breath and read it with the ears, as I always wish to be read, and my verse becomes all right.'
As regards Oddity then, it is plain that the poet was himself Obscurityfully alive to it, but he was not sufficiently aware of his obscurity, and he could not understand why his friends found his sentences so difficult: he would never have believed that, among all the ellipses and liberties of his grammar, the one chief cause is his habitual omission of the relative pronoun; and yet this is so, and the examination of a simple example or two may serve a general purpose:
This grammatical liberty, though it is a common convenience Omission of relative pronounin conversation and has therefore its proper place in good writing, is apt to confuse the parts of speech, and to reduce a normal sequence of words to mere jargon. Writers who carelessly rely on their elliptical speech-forms to govern the elaborate sentences of their literary composition little know what a conscious effort of interpretation they often impose on their readers. But it was not carelessness in Gerard Hopkins: he had full skill and practice and scholarship in conventional forms, and it is easy to see that he banished these purely constructional syllables from his verse because they took up room which he thought he could not afford them: he needed in his scheme all his space for his poetical words, and he wished those to crowd out every merely grammatical colourless or toneless element; and so when he had got into the habit of doing without these relative pronouns—though he must, I suppose, have supplied them in his thought,—he abuses the licence beyond precedent, as when he writes (no. 17) 'O Hero savest!' for 'O Hero that savest!'.
Another example of this (from the 5th stanza of no. 23) will discover another cause of obscurity; the lineIdentical forms
'Squander the hell-rook ranks sally to molest him'
means 'Scatter the ranks that sally to molest him': but since the words squander and sally occupy similar positions in the two sections of the verse, and are enforced by a similar accentuation, the second verb deprived of its pronoun will follow ​the first and appear as an imperative; and there is nothing to prevent its being so taken but the contradiction that it makes in the meaning; whereas the grammar should expose and enforce the meaning, not have to be determined by the meaning. Moreover, there is no way of enunciating this line which will avoid the confusion; because if, knowing that sally should not have the same intonation as squander, the reader mitigates the accent, and in doing so lessens or obliterates the caesural pause which exposes its accent, then ranks becomes a genitive and sally a substantive.
Here, then, is another source of the poet's obscurity; that in aiming at condensation he neglects the need that there is for care in the placing of words that are grammatically ambiguous. English swarms with words that have one identical form for substantive, adjective, and verb; and such a word should never be so placed as to allow of any doubt as to what part of speech it is used for; because such ambiguity or momentary uncertainty destroys the force of the sentence. Now our author not only neglects this essential propriety but he would seem even to welcome and seek artistic effect in the consequent confusion; and he will sometimes so arrange such words that a reader looking for a verb may find that he has two or three ambiguous monosyllables from which to select, and must be in doubt as to which promises best to give any meaning that he can welcome; and then, after his choice is made, he may be left Homophoneswith some homeless monosyllable still on his hands. Nor is our author apparently sensitive to the irrelevant suggestions that our numerous homophones cause; and he will provoke further ambiguities or obscurities by straining the meaning of these unfortunate words.
Finally, the rhymes where they are peculiar are often repellent, and so far from adding charm to the verse that they Rhymesappear as obstacles. This must not blind one from recognizing that Gerard Hopkins, where he is simple and straightforward in his rhyme is a master of it—there are many instances,—but when he indulges in freaks, his childishness is incredible. His intention in such places is that the verses should be recited as running on without pause, and the rhyme occurring in their midst should be like a phonetic accident, merely satisfying the ​prescribed form. But his phonetic rhymes are often indefensible on his own principle. The rhyme to communion in 'The Bugler' is hideous, and the suspicion that the poet thought it ingenious is appalling: eternal, in 'The Eurydice', does not correspond with burn all, and in 'Felix Randal' and some and handsome is as truly an eye-rhyme as the love and prove which he despised and abjured;—and it is more distressing, because the old-fashioned conventional eye-rhymes are accepted as such without speech-adaptation, and to many ears are a pleasant relief from the fixed jingle of the perfect rhyme; whereas his false ear-rhymes ask to have their slight but indispensable differences obliterated in the reading, and thus they expose their defect, which is of a disagreeable and vulgar or even comic quality. He did not escape full criticism and ample ridicule for such things in his lifetime; and in '83 he wrote: 'Some of my rhymes I regret, but they are past changing, grubs in amber: there are only a few of these; others are unassailable; some others again there are which malignity may munch at but the Muses love.'
Now these are bad faults, and, as I said, a reader, if he is to Euphony and emphasisget any enjoyment from the author's genius, must be somewhat tolerant of them; and they have a real relation to the means whereby the very forcible and original effects of beauty are produced. There is nothing stranger in these poems than the mixture of passages of extreme delicacy and exquisite diction with passages where, in a jungle of rough root-words, emphasis seems to oust euphony; and both these qualities, emphasis and euphony, appear in their extreme forms. It was an idiosyncrasy of this student's mind to push everything to its logical extreme, and take pleasure in a paradoxical result; as may be seen in his prosody where a simple theory seems to be used only as a basis for unexampled liberty. He was flattered when I called him περιττότατος, and saw the humour of it—and one would expect to find in his work the force of emphatic condensation and the magic of melodious expression, both in their extreme forms. Now since those who study style in itself must allow a proper place to the emphatic expression, this experiment, which supplies as novel examples of success as of failure, should be full of interest; and such interest will promote tolerance.
​The fragment, of which a facsimile is given after page 92, is the draft of what appears to be an attempt to explain how an artist has not free-will in his creation. He works out his own nature instinctively as he happens to be made, and is irresponsible for the result. It is lamentable that Gerard Hopkins died when, to judge by his latest work, he was beginning to concentrate the force of all his luxuriant experiments in rhythm and diction, and castigate his art into a more reserved style. Few will read the terrible posthumous sonnets without such high admiration and respect for his poetical power as must lead them to search out the rare masterly beauties that distinguish his work.
NOTES
p. 4, l. 21. rove over. This expression is used here to denote the running on of the sense and sound of the end of a verse into the beginning of the next; but this meaning is not easily to be found in the word.
The two words reeve (pf. rove,—which is also a pf. of rive—) and reave (pf. reft) are both used several times by G. M. H., but they are both spelt reave. In the present context rove and reaving occur in his letters, and the spelling reeve in 'The Deutschland', xii. 8, is probably due to the copyists.
There is no doubt that G. M. H. had a wrong notion of the meaning of the nautical term reeve. No. 39 line 10 (the third passage where reeve, spelt reave, occurs, and a nautical meaning is required—see the note there—) would be satisfied by splice (nautical); and if this notion were influenced by weave, wove, that would describe the interweaving of the verses. In the passage referred to in 'The Deutschland' reeve is probably intended in its dialectal or common speech significance: see Wright's 'English Dialect ​Dictionary', where the first sense of the verb given is to bring together the 'gathers' of a dress: and in this sense reeve is in common use.
p. 7. Early Poems. Two school prize-poems exist; the date of the first, 'The Escorial', is Easter '60, which is before G. M. H. was sixteen years old. It is in Spenserian stanza: Early Poemsthe imperfect copy in another hand has the first 15 stanzas omitting the 9th, and the author has written on it his motto, Βάτραχος δέ ποτ' ἀκρίδας ὥς τις ἐρίσδω, with an accompanying gloss to explain his allusions. Though wholly lacking the Byronic flush it looks as if influenced by the historical descriptions in 'Childe Harold', and might provide a quotation for a tourist's guide to Spain. The history seems competent, and the artistic knowledge precocious.
Here for a sample is the seventh stanza:
This was no classic temple order'd round With massy pillars of the Doric mood Broad-fluted, nor with shafts acanthus-crown'd, Pourtray'd along the frieze with Titan's brood That battled Gods for heaven; brilliant-hued, With golden fillets and rich blazonry, Wherein beneath the cornice, horsemen rode With form divine, a fiery chivalry— Triumph of airy grace and perfect harmony.
The second prize-poem, 'A Vision of Mermaids', is dated Xmas '62. The autograph of this, which is preserved, is headed by a very elaborate circular pen-and-ink drawing, 6 inches in diameter,—a sunset sea-piece with rocks and formal groups of mermaidens, five or six together, singing as they stand (apparently) half-immersed in the shallows as described
'But most in a half-circle watch'd the sun,' &c.
This poem is in 143 lines of heroics. It betrays the influence of Keats, and when I introduced the author to the public in Miles's book, I quoted from it, thinking it useful to show that his difficult later style was not due to inability to excel in established forms. The poem is altogether above the standard of school-prizes. I reprint the extract here:
Soon—as when Summer of his sister Spring Crushes and tears the rare enjewelling, ​And boasting 'I have fairer things than these' Plashes amidst the billowy apple-trees His lusty hands, in gusts of scented wind Swirling out bloom till all the air is blind With rosy foam and pelting blossom and mists Of driving vermeil-rain; and, as he lists, The dainty onyx-coronals deflowers, A glorious wanton;—all the wrecks in showers Crowd down upon a stream, and jostling thick With bubbles bugle-eyed, struggle and stick On tangled shoals that bar the brook—a crowd Of filmy globes and rosy floating cloud:— So those Mermaidens crowded to my rock.
But most in a half-circle watch'd the sun; And a sweet sadness dwelt on every one; I knew not why,—but know that sadness dwells On Mermaids—whether that they ring the knells Of seamen whelm'd in chasms of the mid-main, As poets sing; or that it is a pain To know the dusk depths of the ponderous sea, The miles profound of solid green, and be With loath'd cold fishes, far from man—or what;— I know the sadness but the cause know not. Then they, thus ranged, gan make full plaintively A piteous Siren sweetness on the sea, Withouten instrument, or conch, or bell, Or stretch'd chords tuneable on turtle's shell; Only with utterance of sweet breath they sung An antique chaunt and in an unknown tongue. Now melting upward through the sloping scale Swell'd the sweet strain to a melodious wail; Now ringing clarion-clear to whence it rose Slumber'd at last in one sweet, deep, heart-broken close.
After the relics of his school-poems follow the poems written when an undergraduate at Oxford, of 1862-1868which there are four in this book—Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 52, all dating about 1866. Of this period some ten or twelve autograph poems exist, the most successful being religious verses worked in Geo. Herbert's manner, and these, I think, have been printed: there are two sonnets in Italian form and Shakespearian mood (refused by 'Cornhill Magazine'); the rest are attempts at ​lyrical poems, mostly sentimental aspects of death: one of them 'Winter with the Gulf-stream' was published in 'Once a Week', and reprinted at least in part in some magazine: the autograph copy is dated Aug. 1871, but G. M. H. told me that he wrote it when he was at school; whence I guess that he altered it too much to allow of its early dating. The following is a specimen of his signature at this date.
After these last-mentioned poems there is a gap of silence which may be accounted for in his own words from a letter 1868-1875to R. W. D. Oct. 5, '78: 'What (verses) I had written I burnt before I became a Jesuit (i.e. 1868) and resolved to write no more, as not belonging to my profession, unless it were by the wish of my superiors; so for seven years I wrote nothing but two or three little presentation pieces which occasion called for. But when in the winter of '75 the Deutschland was wrecked in the mouth of the Thames and five Franciscan nuns, exiles from Germany by the Falck Laws, aboard of her were drowned I was affected by the account and happening to say so to my rector he said that he wished some one would write a poem on the subject. On this hint I set to work and, though my hand was out at first, produced one. I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm which now I realised on paper.... I do not say the idea is altogether new ... but no one has professedly used it and made it the principle throughout, that I know of.... However I had to mark the stresses ... and a great many more oddnesses could not but dismay an editor's eye, so that when I offered it to our magazine The Month ... they dared not print it.'
Of the two or three presentation pieces here mentioned one is certainly the Marian verses 'Rosa mystica', published in the 'The Irish Monthly', May '98, and again in Orby ​Shipley's 'Carmina Mariana', 2nd series, p. 183: the autograph exists.
Another is supposed to be the 'Ad Mariam', printed in the 'Stonyhurst Magazine', Feb. '94. This is in five stanzas of eight lines, in direct and competent imitation of Swinburne: no autograph has been found; and, unless Fr. Hopkins's views of poetic form had been provisionally deranged or suspended, the verses can hardly be attributed to him without some impeachment of his sincerity; and that being altogether above suspicion, I would not yield to the rather strong presumption which their technical skill supplies in favour of his authorship. It is true that the 'Rosa mystica' is somewhat in the same light lilting manner; but that was probably common to most of these festal verses, and 'Rosa mystica' is not open to the positive objections of verbal criticism which would reject the 'Ad Mariam'. He never sent me any copy of either of these pieces, as he did of his severer Marian poems (Nos. 18 and 37), nor mentioned them as productions of his serious Muse. I do not find that in either class of these attempts he met with any appreciation at the time; it was after the publication of Miles's book in 1894 that his co-religionists began to recognize his possible merits, and their enthusiasm has not perhaps been always wise. It is natural that they should, as some of them openly state they do, prefer the poems that I am rejecting to those which I print; but this edition was undertaken in response to a demand that, both in England and America, has gradually grown up from the genuinely poetic interest felt in the poems which I have gradually introduced to the public:—that interest has been no doubt welcomed and accompanied by the applause of his particular religious associates, but since their purpose is alien to mine I regret that I am unable to indulge it; nor can I put aside the overruling objection that G. M. H. would not have wished these 'little presentation pieces' to be set among his more serious artistic work. I do not think that they would please any one who is likely to be pleased with this book.
1. St. Dorothea. Written when an exhibitioner at Balliol College. Contemporary autograph in A, and another almost identical in H, both undated. Text from A. This poem was afterwards expanded, shedding its relative pronouns, to 48 lines divided among three speakers, 'an ​Angel, the protonotary Theophilus, (and) a Catechumen': the grace and charm of original lost:—there is an autograph in A and other copies exist. This was the first of the poems that I saw, and G. M. H. wrote it out for me (in 1866?).
4. Wreck of the Deutschland. Text from B, title from A (see description of B on p. 94). In 'The Spirit of Man' the original first stanza is given from A, and varies; otherwise B was not much corrected. Another transcript, now at St. Aloysius' College, Glasgow, was made by Rev. F. Bacon after A but before the correction of B. This was collated for me by the Rev. Father Geoffrey Bliss, S.J., and gave one true reading. Its variants are distinguished by G in the notes to the poem.
The labour spent on this great metrical experiment must have served to establish the poet's prosody and perhaps his diction: therefore the poem stands logically as well as chronologically in the front of his book, like a great dragon folded in the gate to forbid all entrance, and confident in his strength from past success. This editor advises the reader to circumvent him and attack him later in the rear; for he was himself shamefully worsted in a brave frontal assault, the more easily perhaps because both subject and treatment were distasteful to him. A good method of approach is to read stanza 16 aloud to a chance company. To the metrist and rhythmist the poem will be of interest from the first, and throughout.
Stanza iv. l. 7. Father Bliss tells me that the Voel is a mountain not far from St. Beuno's College in N. Wales, where the poem was written: and Dr. Henry Bradley that moel is primarily an adj. meaning bald: it becomes a fem. subst. meaning bare hill, and preceded by the article y becomes voel, in modern Welsh spelt foel. This accounts for its being written without initial capital, the word being used genetically; and the meaning, obscured ​by roped, is that the well is fed by the trickles of water within the flanks of the mountains.—Both A and B read planks for flanks; G gives the correction.
St. xi. 5. Two of the required stresses are on we dream.
St. xii. 8. reeve, see note on Author's Preface, p. 101.
St. xiv. 8. these. G has there; but the words between shock and these are probably parenthetical.
St. xvi. 3. Landsmen may not observe the wrongness: see again No. 17, st. ix, and 39, line 10. I would have corrected this if the euphony had not accidentally forbidden the simplest correction.
St. xvi. 7. foam-fleece followed by full stop in A and B, by a comma in G.
St. xix. 3. hawling thus spelt in all three.
St. xxi. 2. G omits the.
St. xxvi. 5 ad 6. The semicolon is autographic correction in B; the stop at Way is uncertain in A and B, is a comma in G.
St. xxix. 3. night (sic). 8. Two of the required stresses are on Tarpeian.
St. xxxiv. 8. shire. G has shore; but shire is doubtless right; it is the special favoured landscape visited by the shower.
St. iii. 2. Cadair Idris is written as a note to Giants stool.
St. viii. 4. Several variants. Two good copies read darksome danksome; but the early copy in A has darksome darksome, which B returns to.
7. 'God's Grandeur. Standard rhythm counterpointed.' Two autographs, Feb. 23, 1877; and March 1877; in A.— ​Text is from corrections in B. The second version in A has lightning for shining in line 2, explained in a letter of Jan. 4, '83. B returns to original word.
11. 'Walking by the Sea. Standard rhythm, in parts sprung and in others counterpointed, Rhyl, May '77.' A. This version deleted in B, and the revision given in text written in with new title.—G. M. H. was not pleased with this sonnet, and wrote the following explanation of it in a letter '82: 'Rash fresh more (it is dreadful to explain these things in cold blood) means a headlong and exciting new snatch of singing, resumption by the lark of his song, which by turns he gives over and takes up again all day long, and this goes on, the sonnet says, through all time, without ever losing its first freshness, being a thing both new and old. Repair means the same thing, renewal, resumption. The skein and coil are the lark's song, which from his height gives the impression of something falling to the earth and not vertically quite but tricklingly or wavingly, something as a skein of silk ribbed by having been tightly wound on a narrow card or a notched holder or as twine or fishing-tackle unwinding from a reel or winch or as pearls strung on a horsehair: the laps or folds are the notes or short measures and bars of them. The same is called a score in the musical sense of score and this score is "writ upon a liquid sky trembling to welcome it", only not horizontally. The lark in wild glee races the reel round, paying or dealing out and down the turns of the skein or coil right to the earth floor, the ground, where it lies in a heap, as it were, or ​rather is all wound off on to another winch, reel, bobbin or spool in Fancy's eye, by the moment the bird touches earth and so is ready for a fresh unwinding at the next flight. Crisp means almost crisped, namely with notes.'
17. The Loss of the Eurydice. A contemporary copy in A has this note: 'Written in sprung rhythm, the third line has 3 beats, the rest 4. The scanning runs on without break to the end of the stanza, so that each stanza is rather one long line rhymed in passage than four lines with rhymes at the ends.'—B has an autograph of the ​poem as it came to be corrected ('83 or after), without the above note and dated 'Mount St. Mary, Derbyshire, Apr. '78'.—Text follows B.—The injurious rhymes are partly explained in the old note.
St. 9. Shorten sail. The seamanship at fault: but this expression may be glossed by supposing the boatswain to have sounded that call on his whistle.
St. 12. Cheer's death, i.e. despair.
St. 14. It is even seen. In a letter May 30, '78, he explains: 'You mistake the sense of this as I feared it would be mistaken. I believed Hare to be a brave and conscientious man, what I say is that even those who seem unconscientious will act the right part at a great push.... About mortholes I wince a little.'
St. 26. A starlight-wender, i.e. The island was so Marian that the folk supposed the Milky Way was a fingerpost to guide pilgrims to the shrine of the Virgin at Walsingham. And one, that is Duns Scotus the champion of the Immaculate Conception. See Sonnet No. 20.
St. 27. Well wept. Grammar is as in 'Well hit! well run!' &c. The meaning 'You do well to weep'.
St. 28. O Hero savest. Omission of relative pronoun at its worst.= O Hero that savest. The prayer is in a mourner's mouth, who prays that Christ will have saved her hero, and in stanza 29 the grammar triumphs.
21. 'Henry Purcell. (Alexandrine: six stresses to the line. Oxford, April 1879.)' Autograph in A with argument as printed. Copy in B is uncorrected except that it adds the word fresh in last line.
'"Have fair fallen." Have is the sing, imperative (or ​optative if you like) of the past, a thing possible and actual both in logic and grammar, but naturally a rare one. As in the 2nd pers. we say "Have done" or in making appointments "Have had your dinner beforehand", so one can say in the 3rd pers. not only "Fair fall" of what is present or future but also "Have fair fallen" of what is past. The same thought (which plays a great part in my own mind and action) is more clearly expressed in the last stanza but one of the Eurydice, where you remarked it.' Letter to R. B., Feb. 3, '83.
'The sestet of the Purcell sonnet is not so clearly worked out as I could wish. The thought is that as the seabird opening his wings with a whiff of wind in your face means the whirr of the motion, but also unaware gives you a whiff of knowledge about his plumage, the marking of which stamps his species, that he does not mean, so Purcell, seemingly intent only on the thought or feeling he is to express or call out, incidentally lets you remark the individualising marks of his own genius.
'Sake is a word I find it convenient to use ... it is the sake of "for the sake of", forsake, namesake, keepsake. I mean by it the being a thing has outside itself, as a voice by its echo, a face by its reflection, a body by its shadow, a man by his name, fame, or memory, and also that in the thing by virtue of which especially it has this being abroad, and that is something distinctive, marked, specifically or individually speaking, as for a voice and echo clearness; for a reflected image light, brightness; for a shadow-casting body bulk; for a man genius, great achievements, amiability, and so on. In this case it is, as the sonnet says, distinctive quality in genius.... By moonmarks I mean crescent-shaped markings on the quill-feathers, either in the colouring of the feather or made by the overlapping of one on another.' Letter to R. B., May 26, '79.
23. 'The Bugler's First Communion. (Sprung rhythm, overrove, an outride between the 3rd and 4th foot of the 4th line in each stanza.) Oxford, July 27, (?) 1879.' ​A.—My copy of this in B shows three emendations. First draft exists in H. Text is A with the corrections from B. At nine lines from end, Though this, A has Now this, and Now is deliberately preferred in H.—B has some uncorrected miscopyings of A. O for, now, charms of A is already a correction in H. I should like a comma at end of first line of 5th stanza and an interjection-mark at end of that stanza.
Then I say more: the just man justices; Keeps grace and that keeps all his goings graces; In God's eye acts, &c.
35. 'Ribblesdale. Stonyhurst, 1882.' Autograph in A. Text from later autograph in B, which adds 'companion to No. 10' (= 16). There is a third autograph in D, June '83 with different punctuation which gives the comma between to and with in line 3. The dash after man is from A and D, both of which quote 'Nam expectatio creaturae', &c. from Romans viii. 19. In the letter to R. W. D. he writes: 'Louched is a coinage of mine, and is to mean much the same as slouched, slouching, and I mean ​throng for an adjective as we use it in Lancashire'. But louch has ample authority, see the 'English Dialect Dictionary'.
38. 'To what serves Mortal Beauty? (Common rhythm highly stressed: sonnet.) Aug. 23, '85.' Autograph in A.—Another autograph in B with a few variants from which A was chosen, the deletion of alternatives incomplete. Thirdly a copy sent to R. W. D., apparently later than A, but with errors of copy. The text given is guided by this version in D, and needs in line 9 is substituted there for the once in A and B, probably because of once ​in line 6.—Original draft exists in H, on same page with 39 and 40. The following is his signature at this date:
It fancies; it deems; dears the artist after his art; So feigns it finds as, &c.
42. 'Tom's Garland. Sonnet: common rhythm, but with hurried feet: two codas. Dromore, Sept. '87.' With full title, A.—Another autograph in B is identical. In line 9 there is a strong accent on I.—l. 10, the capital initial of country is doubtful.—Rhythmical marks omitted. The author's own explanation of this poem may be read in a letter written to me from 'Dublin, Feb. 10, '88:... I laughed outright and often, but very sardonically, to think you and the Canon could not construe my last sonnet; that he had to write to you for a crib. It is plain I must go no further on this road: if you and he cannot understand me who will? Yet, declaimed, the strange constructions would be dramatic and effective. Must I interpret it? It means then that, as St. Paul and Plato and Hobbes and everybody says, the commonwealth or well-ordered human society is like one man; a body with many members and each its function; some higher, some lower, but all honourable, from the honour which belongs to the whole. The head is the sovereign, who has no superior but God and from heaven receives his or her authority: we must then imagine this head as bare (see St. Paul much on this) and covered, so to say, only with the sun and stars, of which the crown is a symbol, which is an ornament but not a covering; it has an enormous hat or skullcap, the vault of heaven. The foot is the day-labourer, and this is armed with hobnail boots, because it has to wear and be worn by the ground; which again is symbolical; for it is navvies or day-labourers who, on the great scale or in gangs and millions, mainly trench, tunnel, blast, and in other ways disfigure, "mammock" the earth and, on a small scale, singly, and superficially stamp it with their footprints. And the "garlands" of nails they wear are therefore the visible badge of the place they fill, the lowest in the commonwealth. But this place still shares the common honour, and if it wants one advantage, glory or public fame, makes up for it by another, ease of mind, absence of care; and these things are symbolised by the gold and the iron garlands. (O, once explained, how clear it all is!) Therefore the scene of the poem is laid at evening, when they are giving over work and one after another pile their picks, with which they earn their living, and swing off home, knocking sparks out of mother earth not now by labour and of choice but by the mere footing, being strongshod and making no hardship of ​hardness, taking all easy. And so to supper and bed. Here comes a violent but effective hyperbaton or suspension, in which the action of the mind mimics that of the labourer—surveys his lot, low but free from care; then by a sudden strong act throws it over the shoulder or tosses it away as a light matter. The witnessing of which lightheartedness makes me indignant with the fools of Radical Levellers. But presently I remember that this is all very well for those who are in, however low in, the Commonwealth and share in any way the common weal; but that the curse of our times is that many do not share it, that they are outcasts from it and have neither security nor splendour; that they share care with the high and obscurity with the low, but wealth or comfort with neither. And this state of things, I say, is the origin of Loafers, Tramps, Cornerboys, Roughs, Socialists and other pests of society. And I think that it is a very pregnant sonnet, and in point of execution very highly wrought, too much so, I am afraid.... G.M.H.'
43. 'Harry Ploughman. Dromore, Sept. 1887.' Autograph in A.—Autograph in B has several emendations written over without deletion of original. Text is B with these corrections, which are all good.—line 10, features is the verb.—13, 's is his. I have put a colon at plough, in place of author's full stop, for the convenience of reader.—15 = his lilylocks windlaced. 'Saxo cere- comminuit -brum.'—17, Them. These, A.—In the last three lines the grammar intends, 'How his churl's grace governs the movement of his booted (in bluff hide) feet, as they are matched in a race with the wet shining furrow overturned by the share'. G. M. H. thought well of this sonnet and wrote on Sept. 28, 1887: 'I have been touching up some old sonnets you have never seen and have within a few days done the whole of one, I hope, very good one and most of another; the one finished is a direct picture of a ploughman, without afterthought. But when you read it let me know if there is anything like it in Walt Whitman; as perhaps there may be, and I should be sorry for that.' And again on Oct. 11, '87: 'I will enclose the sonnet on Harry Ploughman, in which burden-lines (they might be recited by a chorus) are freely used: there is in this very heavily loaded sprung rhythm a call for their employment. The rhythm of this sonnet, which is ​altogether for recital, and not for perusal (as by nature verse should be), is very highly studied. From much considering it I can no longer gather any impression of it: perhaps it will strike you as intolerably violent and artificial.' And again on Nov. 6, '87: 'I want Harry Ploughman to be a vivid figure before the mind's eye ; if he is not that the sonnet fails. The difficulties are of syntax no doubt. Dividing a compound word by a clause sandwiched into it was a desperate deed, I feel, and I do not feel that it was an unquestionable success.'
47. My own heart. As 45.—l. 6, I have added the comma after comfortless; that word has the same grammatical value as dark in the following line. 'I cast for comfort, (which) I can no more find in my comfortless (world) than a blind man in his dark world....'—l. 10, MS. accents let.—13 and 14, the text here from a good correction separately written (as far as mountains) on the top margin of No. 56. There are therefore two writings of betweenpie, a strange word, in which pie apparently makes a compound verb with between, meaning 'as the sky seen between dark mountains is brightly dappled', the grammar such as ​intervariegates would make. This word might have delighted William Barnes, if the verb 'to pie' existed. It seems not to exist, and to be forbidden by homophonic absurdities.
49. Alfonsus. Text from autograph with title and 'upon the first falling of his feast after his canonisation' in B. An autograph in A, sent Oct. 3 from Dublin asking for immediate criticism, because the sonnet had to go to Majorca. 'I ask your opinion of a sonnet written to order on the occasion of the first feast since his canonisation proper of St. Alphonsus Rodriguez, a laybrother of our Order, who for 40 years acted as hall porter to the College of Palma in Majorca; he was, it is believed, much favoured by God with heavenly light and much persecuted by evil spirits. The sonnet (I say it snorting) aims at being intelligible.' And on Oct. 9, '88, 'I am obliged for your criticisms, "contents of which noted", indeed acted on. I have improved the sestet.... (He defends 'hew') ... at any rate ​whatever is markedly featured in stone or what is like stone is most naturally said to be hewn, and to shape, itself, means in old English to hew and the Hebrew bara to create, even, properly means to hew. But life and living things are not naturally said to be hewn: they grow, and their growth is by trickling increment.... The (first) line now stands "Glory is a flame off exploit, so we say".'
56. Ashboughs (my title). In H in two versions; first as a curtal sonnet (like 13 and 22) on same sheet with the four sonnets 44-47, and preceding them: second, an apparently later version in the same metre on a page by itself; with expanded variation from seventh line, making thirteen lines for eleven. I print the whole of this second MS., and have put brackets to show what I think would make the best version of the poem: for if the bracketed words were omitted the original curtal sonnet form would be preserved and carry the good corrections.—The ​uncomfortable eye in the added portion was perhaps to be worked as a vocative referring to first line (?).
The times are nightfall and the light grows less; The times are winter and a world undone;
64. 'The Woodlark.' Draft on one sheet of small notepaper in H. Fragments in some disorder: the arrangement of ​them in the text satisfies me. The word sheath is printed for sheaf of MS., and sheaf recurs in corrections. Dating of July 5, '76.
72. 'Epithalamion.' Four sides of pencilled rough sketches, and five sides of quarto first draft, on 'Royal University of Ireland' candidates paper, as if G. M. H. had written it while supervising an examination. Fragments in disorder with erasures and corrections; undated. H.—The text, which omits only two disconnected lines, is my arrangement of the fragments, and embodies the latest corrections. It was to have been an Ode on the occasion of his brother's ​marriage, which fixes the date as 1888. It is mentioned in a letter of May 25, whence the title comes.—I have printed dene for dean (in two places). In l. 9 of poem cover = covert, which should be in text, as G. M. H. never spelt phonetically.—l. 11, of may be at, MS. uncertain.—page 90, line 16, shoots is, I think, a noun.
Jesus Christ sacrificed On the cross.... Moulded, he, in maiden's womb, Lived and died and from the tomb Rose in power and is our Judge that comes to deal our doom.