A conversation from days long past.

ODIOUS (musing): You know, Gerard Manley Hopkins is probably the least aptly named poet ever.

PECULIAR: Hmm. [A pause.] I suppose we don't really know about Longfellow, do we?

This is of course unfair to Mr. Hopkins, who was capable of superior and moving verse. His verse punches above its weight: he loads more emotional mass onto single words than most poets can manage to get in an entire sonnet. Consider, for example, his "As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme" (the stress marks are the poet's own):

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

And to add further power to his verse he developed what he called "sprung rhythm". With sprung rhythm a single syllable can act as a foot, and "two or more stresses can come running". Like children's songs ("One, two/Buckle your shoe", or "Baa, baa, black sheep"), single syllables get the same weight as poetic feet.

John Fraser has an essay on reading Hopkins.

So far as I have been able to figure out, to appreciate Hopkins’ poems one needs to grant him, without further question, certain basic facts about his own verse.

At bottom, this comes down to saying that once one has determined, on the basis of some unambiguous line or set of lines, what basic number of main stresses a line in that poem should contain (five? six? four?), one must then go through the poem line by line and mark that number of stresses, and only that number of stresses, in each line.

I don't believe that this statement is perfectly true, but it is an eeriely powerful way of hearing Hopkins' poetry. And even more than most poets Hopkins must be heard. If you didn't, may I suggest reading the poem quoted above aloud?

To me the heavily accentual nature of this poetry recalls Old English verse, where the unstressed syllables are more or less ignored in measuring the line. And Hopkins can achieve the same clean, strong verse when he is at his peak:

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

(Like I was going to talk about Hopkins without quoting "The Windhover"! You read that aloud, I hope?) But there's a reason sprung rhythm never caught on. For all the power it can convey, it often lacks what Hopkins called "counterpoint". It's hard to depart rhythmically, and thereby convey any of the sensations clever poets can, in a poem without an established rhythm. If Pope could use a lot of what Hopkins had, Hopkins might have learned a bit from Pope's "An Essay on Criticism":

When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,
The line too labours and the verse goes slow;

And too often Hopkins is read as though every line laboured. His sprung rhythms is read as spondee upon spondee, and the verse... drags. It is not for nothing that Aristotle called the iambic meter the meter of movement. Without it, ecstatic moments can be conveyed, but a developed, continuous sense of motion is nearly impossible.

Robert Frost has said that "All that can be done with words is soon told. So also with meters— particularly in our language where there are virtually but two, loose iambic and strict iambic." It's not that poets cannot compose in other rhythms; it's that the readers won't hear it. Blake falls victim to this:

When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!
So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.

I defy anyone to read the third line except as "'weep-weep! 'weep-weep!'". And Hopkins can fall just the same. The verse is exquisitely metered, so to speak; the reader's ear is unprepared for it, and so the verse fails. And when, as Hopkins' often does, the verse depends on an immediate emotional movement, the reader is left dissatisfied. That is, I am left dissatisfied--this is, of course, a confession of the weakness of my own ear for poetry. I should additionally confess than I am hammered on sake, and while discoursing on poetry in such a state has the approval of the classicists, it does make proofreading rather difficult.

UPDATE: Changed slightly for sobriety.