Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

I have already mentioned a few of the characteristics of Hopkins’ use of sprung rhythm which give to his lines their special significance, and now I shall take up further characteristics from the point of view of what they contribute to the movement in his poetry, to the depiction of “a mind thinking.” The scansion is again very important; in sprung rhythm, since the stress always falls on the first syllable of a foot and any weak syllables at the beginning of a line are considered part of the last foot of the line before, it is natural that the scansion is continuous, not line by line. This is what Hopkins calls “rove over” lines, and he says “the scanning runs on without break from the beginning, say, of a stanza to the end and all the stanza is one long strain, though written in lines asunder.” In this manner the boundaries of the poem are set free, and the whole thing is loosened up; the motion is kept going without the more or less strong checks customary at the end of lines. Combined with the possibility of outriders that I have already spoken of the poem can be given a fluid, detailed surface, made hesitant, lightened, slurred, weighed or feathered as Hopkins chooses.

Along with the general device of the rove over line Hopkins is very fond of the odd and often irritating rhyme: “am and … diamond, England … mingle and,” etc. These usually “come right” on being read aloud, and contribute in spite of, or because of, their awkwardness, to the general effect of intense, unpremeditated unrevised emotion. He occasionally uses quasi-apocope for the same excited effects:

From No. 41:

“Huddle in a main, a chief

Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing—

Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shieked “No ling-

ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief.”

From number 44:

“England, whose honour O all my heart woos, wife

To my creating thought, would neither hear

Me, were I pleading, plead nor do I: I wear-

y of idle a being but by where wars are rife.”

These may be serious faults making for the destruction of the more important rhythmic framework of the poem, but at the same time they do break down the margins of poetry, blur the edges with a kind of vibration and keep the atmosphere fresh and astir. The lines cannot sag for an instant; by these difficult devices his poetry comes up from the pages like sudden storms. A single short stanza can be as full of, aflame with, motion as one of Van Gogh’s cedar trees.

At times the obscurity of his thought, the bulk of his poetic idea seems too heavy to be lifted and dispersed into flying members by his words; the words and the sense quarrel with each other and the stanzas seem to push against the reader, like coiled springs against the hand. It seems impossible to get the material into motion in its chaotic state. But as Mr. Croll says further on “baroque art always displays itself best when it works on heavy masses and resistant materials; and out of the struggle between a fixed pattern and an energetic forward movement arrives at those strong and expressive disproportions in which it delights.” In all his form and detail, and above all in the moment he has selected for the transference of thought to paper, Hopkins is a baroque poet.

1934

Roger sat looking out the parlor window of his father’s house, at a rather dismal view of a small lawn, two small trees, and a fire hydrant, all trapped together in a heavy spring rain. There was never much to look at out the windows of the house because it was set, not as most houses are on a street where people are going by, a side street at least, but rather at an extra remove from all traffic — within the boundaries of a college campus. His father was the professor of Zoology at Merton College, the only professor of the subject there, and Roger himself held the official position of Class Baby to the present senior class. He was rather old for a class baby, being eight which would have made him four when chosen for the office — and most of the Class Babies were chosen while still infants in arms. But Roger had not been a very handsome baby, in fact he was still a rather unappealing child, and had it not been for the fact that four years ago there had been a sharp decrease in the birth rate among the professors’ families, leaving him as the only available child, it is unlikely he would ever have been singled out at all.

Roger’s uncomfortable position at the college was equalled, perhaps surpassed, by that of his father, Professor Rappaport. The college trustees had been trying, as he well knew, for some years to do away with the chair of Zoology completely and it was only the requirements of a bothersome legacy (which paid Professor Rappaport his meagre salary) that kept him there at all. Zoology, everyone agreed, was a dead science, and Merton aimed to be a college for practical vocational training. Zoology was no longer living, it was only a matter of interest to a few doddering professors or reactionaries (like Professor Rappaport) who could not face the facts of modern life and must win their only happiness by poking around in a passive and dusty past. Argue as he might, that no one could lay claims to a thorough education without a knowledge of Zoology, that no one could properly understand English without a knowledge of Zoological derivations, that Zoology was a wealth of myth and fable — scarcely anyone would listen to him. The ground had been cut from under his feet bit by bit, both by the cruelty of his fellowmen and by the persistence of the objects of his study in vanishing — in dying off one after the other like so many Civil War veterans, and leaving him, so to speak, not an iota of a field. The lab. work had had to be done, for the last three years, on two crayfish only, and this year they had not survived the rashness of the five freshmen, taking Zoology as a “snap” course. He had had to let his lab. assistant go — there were no longer even any Infusoria. The laboratory was now being turned into a bowling alley. The brutal authorities were even threatening the Professor with confiscating the museum room; the Personnel Department would soon need more filing space — and really, they said, those six stuffed creatures of yours are shedding their hair frightfully. Only the buffalo has stood up at all well.

Roger Rappaport was rather old for his age, as children who are left to themselves are apt to be, and so he was thinking somewhat along these lines as he looked out through the pouring rain. He was waiting for his father to come home from the Monday afternoon Faculty Meeting, for although unpopular, Professor Rappaport was very proud of the collegiate tradition and made a great point of never omitting a detail of his professorial life, no matter what it cost him. Poor papa, thought Roger, he has such a bad time. Why it seems only yesterday that there was a fair number of animals around at the various institutions and papa’s work was alive and exciting. And now everyone thinks there’s nothing left of it except a lot of old pictures with names underneath.

He pushed his forehead bitterly against the window until the cold glass gave him a sharp pain between the eyes. Out on the lawn, just below the window, stood a life-size cast-iron deer, with its right hoof forward to tap the grass, and its nose raised proudly into the rain. In front of it was a little wooden block, like those on business men’s desks, which said DEER. Roger could remember when the deer had come to take his stand on their lawn. It had been three years ago: some people excavating around Salem had struck with a pick into the head of this creature, just a foot or so below the surface of the ground. When they had dug out one antler they became tremendously excited, thinking, of course, that they had come across an ossified animal in fine condition, and they sent a long and frantic telegram to Professor Rappaport. He had started off early the next morning, too excited to eat any breakfast, carrying several little black leather instrument bags. It had been a heart-breaking affair when the deer, by undeniable proof, had turned out to be not stone, but iron. The Professor, however, had made the best of a bad bargain, and decided to purchase the deer, anyway, for the honor of his college, and it followed him home on the next freight train.