Sacramental+Poetry+and+Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins's poetry depends extensively on the concept of [|sacrament], and sacrament's etymology opens a key point of access into what Hopkins achieves in the discourse of sacramental poetry. Its Latin root //sacrare// translates roughly as "to consecrate", evoking both the category of the sacred and a declaration of the sacred, and the suffix //mentum// tweaks sacrament to either denote the means or the result of consecration (“sacrament”). So, the term //sacramental// provides a loose contract that poetry under its name (1) has to do with the sacred, (2) is a declaration of the sacred, and (3) concerns either the means or result of such a declaration—that is, something that either consecrates or has been consecrated. Sacramental poetry is a discourse of service, and the sacramental poet's devotion belongs to the category of the sacred—an object of praise with a long literary tradition that smacks of immutability.

However, Hopkins's poetics does not exist in some timeless discourse of the divine. It is informed, for one, by a rich and dynamic inheritance of hymnody. Hopkins had access to what J. R. Watson calls "the great treasury of hymnic devotion", collections comprised of medieval, Latin, and Eastern religious hymns (Watson 140). Although his poems borrow very little from the hymn formally, they rely heavily on the arsenal of [|speech acts] particular to the hymn genre, especially utterances such as prayers and sermons that settle comfortably into the language of the sacred. For instance, the first line of " [|Pied Beauty] " is charged with an expression of prayer, "Glory be to god for dappled things” (Hopkins 1047-8), and " [|The Windhover] " pivots on the apostrophe "O my chevalier!" declared in the highly reverential style of encomium (1047). Hopkins's prosody also derives much of its musicality from the cadence found in hymnic syntactic and formal structures like parallelism and antithesis.

The [|first psalm] in the King James Version Book of Psalms offers arguably the earliest, single most foundational model of the sacramental poet for Hopkins. This psalm points out the essential characteristic that distinguishes religious poetry from the majority of doctrinal hymnody—meditation: "But his delight is in the law of the LORD; and in his law doth he meditate day and night" (//The Holy Bible King James Version,// Pslams. 1.2). Hopkins inherits the machinery of this style of religious meditation, which is an ancient bricolage, a network of contemplative and expressive cogs. It has been used to pin down and express the most elusive, the most pressing experiences in the literary tradition. This process of meditation shows up in Hopkins' critical terms [|//inscape and instress//], which Dick Sullivan broadly defines as "attempts to pin down the power of particularity" (Sullivan). Although this process of "pinning down" in Hopkins's coinages exemplifies the style of meditation outlined in the psalms, it also betrays influences more recent than those predating the Common Era.

Hopkins's system of //inscape// and //instress// closely resembles Wordsworth's "spots of time” (Landow). It is a discourse of revelation and wonder, and Hopkins inherits his exceptionally well-wrought language of wonder largely from the Romantics. The same neo-platonic binary implicit in the romantic [|sublime] crops up in W. A. M. Peters' interpretation of Hopkins's inscape. He figures //inscape// as “the outward reflection of the inner nature of a thing, or a sensible copy or representation of its individual essence” (609). Despite the massive projects of urbanizing and industrialization that characterize the Victorian era, Hopkins opts for an especially Romantic preoccupation with nature as a brimming and infinitely beautiful sanctuary. For this reason, Pauline Fletcher deems him, "in many respects typical of his age" and thus closer to Victorian poetry's Romantic roots despite associations of Hopkins's image-rich poetics with modernity (503).

Even "modern" elements of Hopkins's borrow from medieval and Anglo-Saxon traditions. The balanced alliteration of his //sprung rhythm//emulates Old English poetic meter. Kennings like "windhover" and other compounds such as "[f]resh-firecoal" and "chestnut-falls" hark back to a circumlocution-rich Anglo-Saxon heritage (“Pied Beauty” 1047-8). In Hopkins's poetry these borrowed devices serve to alienate the object of praise, acting like the //instress// that endeavors to convey the //inscape,// the vehicle designed to deliver the particularity of a thing. Even the seemingly Romantic-derived //inscape// draws much of its meaning from medieval philosopher Duns Scotus's "//haecceity// or this-ness" (Sullivan). Hopkins borrows these fragments from the literary tradition to string together a particular brand of sacramental poetics that links hymnic syntactical patterns and a Romantic discourse of wonder to an Anglo-Saxon-inspired alliterative form, thus contributing a new tool of religious meditation to the sacramental poetic kit.

-- AK/ Vic Engl 386/2012W


 * Works Cited **

Fletcher, Pauline. "Landscape and Cityscape.”//The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry.// Ed. Joseph Bristow. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 503. Print.

Hopkins, Gerard Manley. “Pied Beauty.” //The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetics.// //Eds.// Thomas J. Collins, and Vivienne I. Rundle. Ontario: Broadview Press Ltd., 1999. 1047-8. Print.

Hopkins, Gerard Manley. “The Windhover.” //The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetics.// //Eds.// Thomas J. Collins, and Vivienne I. Rundle. Ontario: Broadview Press Ltd., 1999. 1047. Print.

Landow, George P.. “Epiphanies, perfect moments, and centers to time.” //The Victorian Web.// n.p., 26 Jun. 2013. Web. 16 Jan. 2015.

Peters, W.A.M.. “Inscpae and Instress.” //The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.// //E//d. Alex Preminger, et al. NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. 609. Print.

"sacrament, n." //OED Online//. Oxford University Press, December 2014. Web. 17 January 2015.

Sullivan, Dick. “Hopkins and the Spiritual.” //The Victorian Web.// n.p., 3 Apr 2006. Web. 16 Jan. 2015.

//The Holy Bible King James Version. //Nashville: Thomas Nelson Inc., 1977. Print.

<span style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;">Watson, J. R. “Hymn.” //A// //Companion to Victorian Poetry.// Eds. Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Anthony Harrison. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 140. Print.