Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

The difference in movement between the two quotations is plain to see; and yet I think the reader feels exactly as much unity in the rhythm of the latter, the same wholeness (even intensified) that he gets from the broken iambics of the more conventional sonnet. The action pulls more ways at once; new muscles are touched and twinged, and the interrelations of stressed and slack syllables knit the poem more closely since they refer us not alone to a general meter but to other particular feet. For example, the foot — u u u which occurs in the first and last lines quoted. The lines have said themselves exactly with that poise I label timing, and there has been more action compacted into the lines by reason of the use of sprung rhythm.

One license allowed by sprung rhythm becomes, through Hopkins’ use of it, almost an elucidation of timing and a proof of its existence and excellence. That is the possibility of hangers or outriders: unaccented syllables added to a foot and not counting in the scansion — placed in such a way that the ear recognizes them as such and admits them, so to speak, under the surface of the real meter. An example of this is found in the second line of the above quoted “Windhover.”

“I caught this morning morning’s minion,

kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn-Falcon, in his riding…”

Here the timing and tuning of sense and syllable is so accurate that it is reminiscent of the caprice of a perfectly trained acrobat: falling through the air gracefully to snatch his partner’s ankles he can yet, within the fall, afford an extra turn and flourish, in safety, without spoiling the form of his flight.

Hopkins’ abundant use of alliteration, repetition, and inside rhymes are all characteristics which place firm seals upon his words, joining them, at the same time indicating the sound relationships in the same way that guide lines, or repeated forms might, in a drawing. Excess of these poetic tricks in ordinary meter produces often the rhythmical vulgarity of much of Swinburne; in Hopkins’ their frequent combination with an intricate sprung rhythm keeps them subtle, in various lights and shades of rhythmical importance. Listen to the ending of “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire.”

“In a flash, at a trumpet crash,

I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and

This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood,

immortal diamond,”

The first aspect of timing I have been talking about might be defined paradoxically as the accuracy with which poetry keeps up with itself. There is perhaps yet another element helping to bring about this result of co-ordination, an element depending very much on the individual poet and working for the perfecting of the poem generally, not alone in respect to timing. Perhaps I should not attempt to bring it in here, only considering the sustained emotional height of most of Hopkins’ poetry, and the depth of the emotional source from which it arises, I believe it is important to try to express, however inadequately, the connection between them. A poem is begun with a certain volume of emotion, intellectualized or not according to the poet, and as it is written out of this emotion, subtracted from it, the volume is reduced — as water drawn off from the bottom of a measure reduces the level of the water at the top. Now, I think, comes a strange and yet natural filling up of the original volume — with the emotion aroused by the lines or stanzas just completed. The whole process is a continual flowing fullness kept moving by its own weight, the combination of original emotion with the created, crystallized emotion, — described by Mr. T. S. Eliot as “that intense and transitory relief which comes at the moment of completion and is the chief reward of creative work.” Because of this constant fullness each part serves as a check, a guide, and in a way a model, for each following part and the whole is weighed together. (This may explain why last lines in poetry are so often best lines; and why, often too, they seem so concocted and over-drawn for the rest of the poem — those were composed separately, without the natural weight of the creation of the rest of the poem behind them.)

One stanza from “The Wreck of the Deutschland” illustrates this perfectly, with its mounting grandeur and partly self-instigated growth of feeling:

“I admire thee, master of the tides,

Of the Yore-flood, of the year’s fall;

The recurb and the recovery of the gulf’s sides,

The girth of it and the wharf of it and the wall;

Stanching, quenching ocean of a motionable mind;

Ground of being, and granite of it: past all

Grasp God, throned behind

Death with a sovereignty that heeds but hides, bodes but abides.”

II

So far I have meant by timing some quality within the poem itself; now I wish to take the same expression and use it in a different way, for a different thing. A man stands in a shooting gallery with a gun at his shoulder aiming at a clay pigeon which moves across the backdrop at the end of the gallery. In order to hit it he must shoot not at it directly but a certain distance in front of it. Between his point of aim and the pigeon he must allow the necessary small fraction of space which the pigeon will cross in exactly the same amount of time as it will take the bullet to travel the length of the shooting gallery. If he does this accurately the clay pigeon falls, and his timing has been correct. In the same way the poet is set on bringing down onto the paper his poem, which occurs to him not as a sudden fixed apparition of a poem, but as a moving, changing idea or series of ideas. The poet must decide at what point in its movement he can best stop it, possibly at what point he can manage to stop it; i.e., it is another matter of timing. Perhaps, however, the image of the man in the shooting gallery is incorrect, since the mind of the poet does not stand still and aim at his shifting idea. The cleavage implied in the comparison is quite true, I think — anyone who has even tried to write a single poem because he felt he had one somewhere in his head will recognize its truth. The poem, unique and perfect, seems to be separate from the conscious mind, deliberately avoiding it, while the conscious mind takes difficult steps toward it. The process resembles somewhat the more familiar one of puzzling over a momentarily forgotten name or word which seems to be taking on an elusive brain-life of its own as we try to grasp it. Granted that the poet is capable of grasping his idea, the shooting image must be more complicated; the target is a moving target and the marksman is also moving. His own movement goes on; the target must be stopped at an unknown critical point, whenever his sense of timing dictates. I have heard that dropping shells from an aeroplane onto a speeding battleship below, in an uncertain sea, demands the most perfect and delicate sense of timing imaginable.

Hopkins, I believe, has chosen to stop his poems, set them to paper, at the point in their development where they are still incomplete, still close to the first kernel of truth or apprehension which gave rise to them. It is a common statement that he derives a great deal from the seventeenth century “Metaphysical” poets — his exceeding rapidity of idea, his intuition, and to a lesser degree, his conceits — and I think he has also a very close bond with the prose of the same period. The manner of timing so as to catch and preserve the movement of an idea, the point being to crystallize it early enough so that it still has movement — it is essentially the baroque manner of approach; and in an article on “The Baroque Style in Prose” by M. W. Croll* I have found some striking sentences which I think express the matter equally well as regards Hopkins. Speaking of the writers of baroque prose he says: “Their purpose was to portray, not a thought, but a mind thinking.… They knew that an idea separated from the act of experiencing it is not the same idea that we experienced. The ardor of its conception in the mind is a necessary part of its truth; and unless it can be conveyed to another mind in something of the form of its occurrence, either it has changed into some other idea or it has ceased to be an idea, to have any evidence whatever except a verbal one.… They … deliberately chose as the moment of expression that in which the idea first clearly objectifies itself in the mind, in which, therefore, each of its parts still preserves its own peculiar emphasis and an independent vigor of its own — in brief, the moment in which truth is still imagined. ”