Hopkins' Affective Rhythm: Grace and Intention in Tension (Poet Gerard Manley Hopkins) (Critical Essay‪)‬

"Why do I employ sprung rhythm at all?" the Victorian poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins asks fellow poet Robert Bridges in 1877. (1) Hopkins' question remains largely unanswered. I do not, however, intend yet another contribution to the eye-glazing debate over sprung rhythm's technical integrity, its viability versus impracticability; doing so would merely perpetuate the presumption, still active in most discussions of sprung rhythm since W. H. Gardner's foundational Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889): A Study of Poetic Idiosyncrasy in Relation to Poetic Tradition, that Hopkins poses his question in purely technical terms. (2) Unquestionably much has been and is yet to be learned from such formal scrutiny; but the assumption that analysis of sprung rhythm should begin and end at this level is entirely questionable. Hopkins answers his own question for Bridges, and his focus is not on pure technique. He champions his prosody's preservation of "the native and natural rhythm of speech" (Letters, p. 46). To presume to have captured in poetry the native character of spoken rhythm is to presume to have captured at least some of the native character of its speaker. (3) Sprung rhythm is more than a metrical novelty: in it Hopkins finds a means for apprehending and recommending to a reader kinds of affective and cognitive experience. In his earliest experiments with sprung rhythm, he connects its performance to an experience of grace. He wants to guide his anticipated reader's rhythmic voicing into an impression of grace. My use of "anticipated" recognizes the tension between Hopkins' intention for his rhythm and his inability to ensure its fulfillment. In Hopkins' theology and prosody, the intentions--meanings, designs, purposes--of poetry and the experienced world are "uttered" by a person through intensive mental engagement and received by him as stresses of affective and cognitive energy. This process requires straining inherent qualities of the speaker and what is spoken into more vigorous states, just as potential energy is converted into kinetic: the activation of sprung rhythm's intentional tension necessitates conversion of a reader's "natural" inclinations in voicing. When Hopkins' few contemporary readers resist this conversion, he is confronted by the possibility that, rather than conveying the nature of grace, his cadences evidence his efforts to shape his reader's nature.