143
CHAPTER V
LANGUAGE AND IMAGERY IN THE POETRY OF HOPKINS AND ELIOT
The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation...
(To R. B.)
... Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still....
(Burnt Norton)
In this chapter, we turn to the discussion o f language and imagery in the poetry o f
Hopkins and Eliot. Section I o f the chapter concentrates on the use o f language by the two poets
concerned. Section II of the chapter examines two image clusters in the poetry of Hopkins and
Eliot: the natural imagery, and the religious imagery.
In analyzing the use of language, my aim is to point out marked differences in usage,
the purpose o f each poet’s specific word choice and the individual achievement and limitations
o f each. Both Hopkins and Eliot were themselves critics and wrote poetry within norms prescribed
by themselves. Alternatively, they may be seen as formulating critical decrees on the basis o f the
poetry they write. The second section o f the chapter will explore the aesthetic and spiritual
effects o f the images used by each poet. What are the emotional resonances released by their
imagery? What do the images tell us about each poet’s world view , and finally what similarities
and divergences may be found in their poetic images?
I
The use o f the speaking voice in poetic language used in the twentieth century marks a
distinct point o f departure from earlier times. Hopkins’s introduction of colloquialism and the
spoken voice into his poetiy, makes him a precursor of the modern poets. Though Hopkins
belongs to the Victorian age, he is modern because o f his use of language; in other respects he
belongs to the breed o f Victorian poets who were generally conscientious craftsmen, with clear
thought, fine imagery, and melodious music. Eliot the modernist, on the other hand is surprisingly
144
stately and solemn in a period given to speech rhythms. Hopkins’s colloquialism derives from his
very emotional, childlike manner o f communication - the same manner in which he experiences
new emotions. Eliot, in contrast, has certain reservations about expressing himself wholeheartedly.
This is in keeping with an adopted ‘English’ reserve, or, more plausibly, with the Puritan restraint
mentioned in an earlier chapter. Eliot says in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, “There is a
great deal, in the writing o f poetry, which must be conscious and deliberate .” 1 Eliot was a
master o f poetic language, a conscious craftsman who paid great attention to form and idiom,
deliberately aiming at technical effects. Hopkins too displays dazzling technical skill and an
astonishing virtuosity, but the effects are seldom those of deliberation. On the contrary, they are
pressed into service most frequently to communicate effects o f spontaneity. Eliot’s language
gains its resonance through its tone, imagery and his fine ear for cadence and timing, Hopkins’s
through a masterful use o f imagery and sound effects. Both employ language to communicate
depth and intensity. Eliot has said in his critical essay on Matthew Arnold in The Use o f Poetry
and the Use o f Criticism:
What I call the ‘auditory imagination’ is the feeling for syllable and rhythm,
penetrating far below the conscious levels o f thought and feeling, invigorating
every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin
and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end. It works through
meaning, certainly, or not without meaning in the ordinary sense, and fuses the
old and obliterated and the trite, the current, and the new and surprising, the most
ancient and the most civilised mentality.2
Eliot’s own irregular verse, in which he strives to move from personal to universal, to
fuse the intellect and emotion works largely through the use o f what he calls the auditory
imagination in a bid to reach a level o f abstraction. Hopkins aims at different effects: through
strained syntax and alliteration he strives to reach the very root of the personal, staying always
on the level o f the concrete.
145
It may be useful to begin with some comments on what we mean by rhythm. S.H Burton
explains:
All poetry is rhythmical, and a blend of stress and quantity forms the basis of
English verse rhythms. Rhythm is a fundamental phenomenon of life, and it is
poetry’s dependence upon it that helps to make poetry so powerful an influence
in the lives of men... Rhythmic satisfaction is aroused in poetry, as in music, both
by the perception of recurring patterns of rhythm, and by variety within those
patterns.3
When poetry is read aloud words tend to be perceived as grouped, and the ear as well
as the mind’s ear becomes aware of a pattern or design of certain kinds of movements and
fluctuations. Rhythm, then, means the movement of language according to our thinking as we
read poetry. Variations in rhythms of good poetry match changes in thought, imagery and
feeling. Enid Hamer’s explanation of the interplay of base metre and variations in her early work
The Metres of English Poetry is still one of the best introductions to the subject. She remarks:
Verse rhythm, as distinct from prose movement, would seem then to consist of a
number of repeated stress units, arranged in groups which also repeat themselves
. . . but in order to understand verse rhythm completely we must go to its origin
in the mind of the poet. A poet in composing has at the back of his mind, sometimes
quite consciously, an abstract and quite regular rhythmic pattern, which we call
the base of the poem, and which consists of a series of weak and strong beats or
pulsations, independent of words altogether.... Upon this he shapes and measures
his language. He seldom reproduces the base exactly in words, but what he must
do is to order the movement of his phrases so as to communicate the base to the
hearer’s mind also, and to give him the pattern against which to measure the
actual rhythm which he hears. Any departures will be acceptable which do not
blot out the impression of the base, and as we shall see, departures from the base
become one of the chief means of expression at the poet’s disposal.4
146
Poetry is thus both an act and instrument by means of which the poet expresses himself
or herself. Hopkins and Eliot were both innovators of verse-forms, the former through his
energizing o f stanzaic verse and conventional metres through Sprung Rhythm, and the latter
through his remarkable free verse.
Both poets also evolved, as far as poetic styles are concerned, in keeping with their
changing thoughts and vision. The oeuvre o f the poets shows that neither was satisfied with
existing styles. But there is a striking difference. Hopkins goes back to the old, little-used alliterative
tradition in Anglo-Saxon poetry; and even his famous Sprung Rhythm derives from Coleridge’s
Christabel. In that sense he revives certain elements inherent in older English poetry.
The concept of rhyme scheme and stanza pattern is deep rooted in the English poetic
tradition. Influences from Europe and America in the matter of free verse (Baudelaire and Whitman,
for example) touched the English mainstream but only superficially; Eliot imported the effects of
French Symbolist poetry into English. It is important to note here that the verse form chosen
determines, to some extent, tone and approach. Rhymed quatrains will not have the same effects
o f complexity, qualification and meditativeness as longer stanzas. And the rhymed stanza
communicates a greater degree of regularity and pattern than blank verse. This in turn gives a
sense o f a firm hold on whatever it is that is being said. The non sequiturs and logical gaps that
characterise Eliot’s poetry are oblique or difficult partly because the directness of rhymed stanzas
has been abandoned in his major poems. Hopkins’s verse, always rhymed, is among the most
musical ever written in English. Hopkins insisted that his poetry was written to be read aloud. An
indefatigable amateur musical composer, he aimed at musicality in poetry.
Hopkins was very early drawn to technical experimentation in language and rhythms,
though the experiments were never undertaken for their own sake. Having a flair for the
subject, he was appointed to teach rhetoric at Roehampton in 1874 where he taught both
Classical and English metres. Hopkins had begun to show his skill at versification, when already
at school. His early poems written while in school were versatile experiments in conventional
147
modes, with a genuine poetic quality. The Escorial which won him a school prize for poetry,
shows a mastery of the Spenserian stanza:
There is a massy pile above the waste
Amongst Castilian barrens mountain-bound;
A sombre length of grey; four towers placed
At corners flank the stretching compass round;
A pious work with threefold purpose crown’d A cloistered convent first, the proudest home
Of those who strove God’s gospel to confound
With barren rigour and a frigid gloom Hard by a royal palace and a royal tomb.
(PGMH, 3)
His other well-known early poem Heaven-Haven also displays technical skill. Hopkins took
technical difficulties as a challenge and instead of sticking to the usual modes, tried his hand at a
great variety of lines and stanzas.
I HAVE desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.
And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.
(P&P, 5)
148
The mix of iambic and anapaestic metres in this short poem gives it a iilt that conveys both
stillness and movement.
u VJ
I HAVE desiredlto go
vj —
Jwhere fliesjno sharp Jand sicjiled hail
uu u
— |u —
And I have askedlto be
o — — —
Where nolstorms come,
VJ
O
— I —
—i
-
1o
—
Where the green! swell islin the havens dumb,
And outlof the swinglof the sea.
U
— I vj u
—
j o u
—
The closing lin e ‘And out | of the swing | of the sea’ quite marvellously evokes movement
and closure simultaneously through the anapaests of the last two feet. It in fact imitates the
swing of the sea.
The ‘Author’s Preface’ to the collection of Hopkins’s poems edited by WH. Gardner
gives us some idea of the rhythms that he uses:
The poems in this book are written some in Running Rhythm, the common rhythm
in English use, some in Sprung Rhythm, and some in a mixture of the two. And
those in the common rhythm are some counterpointed, some not.
Common English rhythm, called Running Rhythm above, is measured by
feet of either two or three syllables and ( putting aside the imperfect feet at the
beginning and end of lines and also some unusual measures, in which feet seem to
be paired together and double or compromise feet arise) never more nor less.
149
Every foot has one principle stress or accent, and this or the syllable it
falls on may be called the Stress of the foot and the other part, the one or two
unaccented syllables, the Slack. Feet (and the rhythms made out of them) in
which the Stress comes first are called Falling Feet and Falling Rhythms, feet and
rhythm in which the Slack comes first are called Rising Feet and Rhythms, and if
the Stress is between two Slacks there will be Rocking Feet and Rhythms. These
distinctions are real and true to nature; but for purposes of scanning it is a great
convenience to follow the example of music and take the stress always first, as
the accent or the chief accent always comes first in a musical bar. If this is done
there will be in common English verse only two possible feet - the so-called
accentual Trochee and Dactyl, and correspondingly only two possible uniform
rhythms, the so-called Trochaic and Dactylic. But they may be mixed and then
what the Greeks called a Logaoedic Rhythm arises. These are the facts and
according to these the scanning of ordinary regularly-written English verse is
very simple indeed and to bring in other principles is here unnecessary.5
Such comments indicate the deep interest Hopkins took in matters of prosody and his
understanding that English verse, unlike Latin verse, was a matter of stress rather than quantity.
Hopkins’s early poetry adhered to conventional metres, Though he had a fine ear and
highly cultivated metrical skill, we do not discern any experiments in metre at this stage. It was
when Hopkins was inspired to write a poem on the wreck of the Deutschland after a long lapse
of poetic activity, that he wrote to R. W. Dixon in a letter dated October 1878:
. . . On this hint I set to work and, though my hand was out at first, produced one,
I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm which I now realised on
paper. To speak shortly, it consists in scanning by accents or stresses alone, without
any account of the number of syllables, so that a foot may be one strong syllable
or it may be many light and one strong. I do not say the idea is altogether new;
150
there are hints of it in music, in nursery rhymes and popular jingles, in the poets
themselves, and, since then, I have seen it talked about as a thing possible in
critics. Here are instances - ‘Ding, Dong, bell; Pussy’s in the well; Who put her in
? Little Johnny Thin. Who pulled her out ? Little Johnny Stout.’ For if each line
has three stresses or three feet it follows that some of the feet are of one syllable
only. So too ‘One, two, Buckle my shoe’ passim . . . But no one has professedly
used it and made it the principle throughout, that I know of. Nevertheless to me
it appears, I own, to be a better and more natural principle than the ordinary'
system, much more flexible, and capable of greater effects.6
Hopkins goes on to say that he had also written a shorter piece on the Eurydice in
‘sprung rhythm’, some sonnets and other poems, some in sprung rhythm, with various other
such experiments - as ‘outriding feet’ ( that is parts of which you do not count in the scanning).
Hopkins’s first experiment in sprung rhythm was The Wreck which was far ahead of its time and
it was only later that it received recognition as a masterpiece. The first stanza introduces the new
rhythm masterfully:
----o O —
THOU mastering me
— -u O - u
—
God ! giver of life and breath
—
— — uo—
World’s strand sway of the sea
—
O — VJ o
—
Lord of living and dead;
u o —
—
l_> — o o — u — —
Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh
O
— U U — O O —
—
o
—
And after it almost unmade what with dread
o — o
u
—
—
—
— O —
Thy doing; and dost thou touch me afresh?
— u o—o — O — O U —
—
Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.
This poses difficulties only one when attempts conventional scansion through feet; the stresses,
however, are clear and weighted, absorbing in themselves other unstressed syllables which a foot
151
normally requires. Thus in the opening line, the first foot and last foot consist of a single stressed
syllable:
Conventional prosody requires a foot to have at least two syllables, but Hopkins (as indicated
earlier) maintained that “a foot may be one strong syllable, or it may be many light and one
strong.” The line quoted above shows feet of both kinds; and if one scans by stress alone, is a
trimetre line of three feet. We need to ask what the effect of this Sprung Rhythm is. To quote
Hopkins, “ . . Sprung Rhythm is the most natural of things. For (1) it is the rhythm of common
speech and of written prose, when rhythm is perceived in them. (2) It is the rhythm of all but the
most monotonously regular music, so that in words of choruses and refrains and in songs written
closely to music it arises ”
Reading the stanza aloud one picks up an extraordinary combination of speech and
musicality. What would be called anapaestic rhythm in conventional prosody reappears every
now and then in the midst of those strong feet of single stressed syllables to give the verse a
swinging lilt simultaneous with arresting (or arrested) moments of address (eg. ‘God’ ‘Thou’
‘Lord’). The stanza clearly demonstrates the accentual nature of English versification (upon
which the prosody of Latin quantitative verse has been imposed). Hopkins reverts to a rhythm
governed by stresses. This, combined with his use of alliteration, gives to his poetry an effect in
which intense feeling and melodious harmony combine in roughly equal proportions. It expresses
Hopkins’s spiritual state of depth and flow very well indeed.
Hopkins frequently combined rhythms. One of the terrible sonnets, ‘No worst, there is
none. Pitched past pitch o f grief', is written in standard rhythm, though so highly modulated
that one can only sense the standard iambic base below the heavily stressed lines in sprung
rhythm.
152
--- <JU—
—
u
—
U —
No worst there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
— UU
—
— DO — O U
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
— o —
o u o
— u —* o —
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
o—
—
—
O — o Uu- o —
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
—
—
— o
u u — --- o —
o —
Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing -
U
— u
—
——
O
—
— —
Then lull, then leave off.Fury had shrieked ‘No ling -
UU
— u u —
— u — o —
ering ! Let me be fell: force I must be brief.’
U(->—
—
o — u
—
o —
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of falls
—
O
—
—■
---- - U
—
O
—
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
_
o —
— —
—
o —
o —
May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small
— o —
o o — o — —■
-—1
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here ! creep,
—
— o u— o — > uu — o
—
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
— — O — O — ------ O —
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
u — o —
Somewhere, sometimes at the end of a line (eg. past pitch of grief), the iambic rhythm is heard
and sensed to govern the sonnet, but the variations are very great. The poem is a rhythmic
triumph in its freedom and control.
The sonnet was Hopkins’s favourite poetic form. His sonnets are in the Petrarchan form
(an octave of two quatrains, each rhyming a b b a , with the sestet either in two tercets of c c d
or cdc dcd). Hopkins avoids making them obvious by allowing the sense to run on from line to
line, often through a whole quatrain or tercet. The sonnet God's Grandeur is a perfect example
here. The octave can be neatly divided into two quatrains and Hopkins utilises the whole of the
first quatrain to describe God’s powerful presence in the natural world, whereas in the whole of
the second quatrain, he is preoccupied with man’s careless overuse of Nature and his distance
153
from God. The whole o f the sestet reinforces only one point - that God’s power can revitalise
nature and also grant new spiritual life to man. Hopkins’s partiality for the sonnet form may be
related to his spiritual life. His choice o f the Petrarchan sonnet indicates his love o f (and need
for) structure; his readiness to submit to its external pattern is analogous with his choice to
become a religious and take the vow o f obedience. I am not suggesting a direct one-to one
correspondence (for how then would one explain Petrarchan sonnets written by, say, Wordsworth),
but only offering a tentative connection. The liberties that he takes with metre within the demanding
rhyme scheme o f the Petrarchan sonnet are indicative o f the emotional intensity at play within an
elaborate structure. Sonnets such as Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves or That Nature is a Heraclitean
Fire and o f the comfort o f the Resurrection, extraordinary metrical accomplishments, are also
highly revelatory o f a sensibility that feels ( whether joy or dejection ) and submits to order at one
and the same time. This double capacity is specially highlighted by his individualistic use o f the
Petrarchan sonnet form.
Eliot presents an entirely different case with his use o f free verse. G. S. Fraser defines
free verse as that “which has no fixed stanza length or rhyme scheme, which allows for ‘hanging’
or unrhymed lines, and the interspersion irregularly o f shorter lines among longer ones, is in a
sense ‘free’. Some critics would use the term for any poem they admire which does not seem to
be written in regular iambics.” 8 Eliot’s
distinctly modem voice introduces something new.
Some o f his early poems are in rhymed vers litre, but his later poems were influenced by the very
free and flexible blank verse o f Jacobean drama. Burton notes:
Free verse, which owes much to Walt Whitman, does not make use o f patterns o f
alliteration, but is similar to sprang rhythm in its use o f accent. In free verse, the
poet abandons the steady beat o f a regular rhythmic pattern with its constancy
and its variations, substituting for this, lines grouped in emotional rather than
rhythmic units. But here, no less than in traditional measures, stress and quantity
are o f enormous importance in the transmission o f feeling and thought9
154
While it is interesting to note the reference to sprung rhythm, it must be stated straightaway
that the effect o f Eliot’s versification is very far removed from Hopkins’s. We find Eliot working
up steadily towards a particular emotion or an image in free verse, whether it is Simeon’s anxiety
to see salvation in Song fo r Simeon or whether it is the description of the dark night o f the soul
in part III o f Ash-Wednesday . Eliot, like Pound, wrote experimental verse to express modern
man’s boredom and aimlessness and he seems to think that only free verse can be an effective
medium. The twentieth century has been a period of much innovation in English verse forms and
some o f the innovations have been the various methods of free verse. A. David Moody remarks
that Eliot’s “inventiveness was mainly a matter o f reworking existing poetic forms and discovering
new possibilities in them. Existing forms and influences were his primary resource - and not at
all a source o f anxiety.” 10 Eliot brought in normal speech rhythms into his free verse forms very
successfully . Once again, the use o f speech rhythms reminds one that Hopkins too introduced
speech rhythms, but to entirely different effect. The difference may be traced to Hopkins’s readiness
to use rhyme (and alliteration) with a sense of mastery even while he modified rhythmic patterns.
Eliot, in his major poems, drops the demands o f a rhyme-scheme, and in doing so projects a
twentieth century modernist breakaway from tradition, from what Eliot called ‘dead form’.
Moody says that three main stages may be marked during the course o f Eliot’s poetic
career o f which
The first begins with his discovery o f Laforgue in 1908 or 1909, and continues
into the ur-Waste Land, that is, the poem as drafted in 1921, This is the phase of
dramatic lyricism. The second begins with his finding a new style and form as he
completed The Waste Land at the end of 1921 or in early 1922, and it includes
his ‘dream poetry’ ofthe 1920s, ‘The Hollow Men’, Ash-Wednesday and ‘Marina’.
This is the phase of pure lyricism, in retrospect it can be seen to have been a
transitional style and form; but Eliot himself thought for a time that with ‘Marina’
he had reached the end o f his development as a poet, and turned towards writing
155
for the theatre. But then, somehow, out of Murder in the Cathedral came Burnt
Norton, and thence his third and most important phase, that of bis Four Quartets.
This is the phase of metaphysical lyricism, in which thought has taken over from
the dramatic.11
The phases indicated above are suggestive of a poetic metamorphosis over the years, in
both matter and manner. It was after reading Laforgue that Eliot came to see the akinness of his
temperament with the French poet’s and thus discovered his own form. Eliot remarks :
As for ‘free verse’, I expressed my view twenty-five years ago by saying that no
verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job. No one has better cause to
know than I, that a great deal o f bad prose has been written under the name of
free verse; though whether its authors wrote bad prose or bad verse in one style
or another, seems to me a matter of indifference. But only a bad poet would
welcome free verse as a liberation from form. It was a revolt against dead form,
and a preparation for new form or for the renewal of the old; it was an insistence
upon the inner unity which is unique to every poem, against the outer unity which
is typical. The poem comes before the form, in the sense that a form grows out of
the attempt of somebody to say something; just as a system of prosody is only a
formulation of the identities in the rhythms of a succession of poets influenced by
each other.12
Form is thus not separable from poetry, it is that outer pattern which requires us to
follow a certain order and development of thought and emotion. The form is the structure of the
poem and contributes to the symmetry, climax, continuity, proportion, etc. The rhymed stanza
obviously communicates a greater degree of regularity and pattern than blank verse. By the
time he came to write religious poetry Eliot had learnt to use free verse with great stateliness and
formality. At the same time its mannered stiffness is deliberately cultivated so as (perhaps) to
156
communicate the difficulty o f talking about religious experience. The opening unit o f Ash-
Wednesday is a good illustration:
U
U
—
—
II 0O —I
—1 U
u
- I U
—
I Cj —
I
Why should! the "aged
aged eaj^le
eagle stretc!
stretcli its wings? |
—
u
— o
O
Why should I mourn
U —
U
— U
0 0 — 0 —
The vanished power o f the usual reign?
It is fairly obvious from this passage that Eliot is far less adventurous from a prosodic point o f
view than Hopkins. The iambic beat pulsates throughout despite the variations, and the closing
line o f the stanzaic unit firmly establishes the dominant iambic pentametre pattern. The line
lengths vary immensely but do not shut out the rhythm o f iambic pentametre. The effect finally is
one o f staying within the tradition. Iambic pentametre is the staple o f English poetry, and Eliot
makes no startling departures in terms o f stress. The formality given by the repeated phrases,
now lengthened out, now truncated, only serve to reinforce the traditional and ceremonious.
Nothing could be further from the spontaneous outbursts that come pouring out from Hopkins.
The rhythm here is very deliberate and measured; the emotion has indeed been recollected in
tranquillity and w orked upon by thought; there is very little overflow.
The Ariel Poems all have the same general effect, though Marina is more stiff and mannered
than these opening lines o f Ash-Wednesday, and Journey o f the Magi somewhat less.
It may be noted that the words ‘stiff and ‘mannered’ are not used necessarily in a pejorative
sense (though the second stanza o f Marina becomes mannerism); rather, that is the effect Eliot
157
wants to create. It derives from a spirituality in which the excitement of love and the anguish of
pain have to be carefully monitored and controlled. Hopkins is child-like in his responses; Eliot,
by contrast, never seems to have been young ( note he refers to himself as an ‘aged eagle’ at the
age of only forty-two, for the poem was written in 1930 and Eliot was born in 1888). Exuberance
is not a mode Eliot will permit himself. One cannot imagine him saying as Hopkins does; in The
Starlight N ig h t:
—
— <JO
“
—
— oo —
Look up at the stars ! Look, look up at the skies !
The metrical irregularity o f the ecstatic line where it impossible to determine whether it is iambic,
trochaic, anapaestic or dactylic, is wholly different from Eliot’s ‘joyful’ moment in Ash- Wednesday :
LJ —
O —IU - I U “ | U ----The broad jacked figure drest in blue/and green
and the metrical difference arises from a spiritual difference. Hopkins’s relationship with his God
is one of wonder and surprise.
(JO - u u - u —
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
O o — <J—
U
—
—
o --- u - O O
I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am and
O — —
— — cj —
—o O — U
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal
— U
diamond,
— U — O — OO
Is immortal diamond.
The piled up monosyllabic stresses build up the intensity till it reaches the climax. Eliot’s climactic
moment expresses itself with the measured gravity o f a dance:
U -j
U U— |
And all khall be well I
— t *o O — 1 o U — I
All manner o f thinglshall be well I
o
o
■—
I
O
j (JO j —
o
When the tongues lof flamelare inj-folded
O
0 — 1 O
O —
1 (J —
And the firaand the rosa are one
158
This is a mixture o f iambic and anapaestic feet very common in English poetry; and its predictable,
undoubtedly beautiful movement is a sign o f a relationship in which distance and formality are
important ingredients.
Even in the lyrics in the Four Quartets, where Eliot will allow the emotion to unbend a
little, and flow with more tenderness, the formality never entirely drops away; it returns to its
measured rhythm. For example, section IV of Burnt Norton:
— o u — o — OU —
Time and the bell have buried the day,
a
—
— — o u —- a —
The black cloud carries the sun away.
— o — o O — •O — — U — u U
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
—
—
—
Cj O
— O
Q
—
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
—
O
—
Clutch and cling?
But the liquidity is soon stopped and the next six lines return us gradually to
‘the still point of the turning world’
The lyrical section IV o f The Dry Salvages is very beautiful and very serious, but its slow
movement suggests the spiritual attitudes o f reverence and prayer:
—
u
\
u
— uu u —
u uu
Lady, whose shrine is on the pror lontory
— o
O — U — ,
Pray for all those! who are n ships...!
An effect utterly different from Hopkins’s cry:
— U U
— —
U U — U U
Comforter, where where is your comforting
— O — U O —
—U U
<_! —
Mary, mother o f us, where is your relief ?
One hesitates to mark the feet in Hopkins’s verse; Eliot’s relatively greater regularity emboldens
one to do so.
159
It has been suggested in the foregoing pages that the spiritual differentiation in these two
Catholic poets reflects itself in the rhythms o f their poetry. Eliot’s greater reliance on traditional
metrical mixtures suggests a containing, an ordering out o f spiritual experience within the familiar
and known. Hopkins’s extraordinary accumulation of stress and floating, light, unstressed syllables
are governed almost exclusively by the ups and downs of his spiritual life. Elisabeth Schneider
remarks:
In general Eliot’s style in verse down to the time of his conversion had remained
deliberately anti-poetical; afterwards, except for certain passages in the Four
Quartets, it rarely descends from the “high” poetical, still, however, retaining
some o f the living sinew of speaking inflections. It is in this new style that Ash
Wednesday and the Ariel poems come to explore the inner reality o f a changed
and changing self.13
We now turn a discussion o f the diction of Hopkins and Eliot. Burton, discussing poetic
language, says:
Poetry is much more compressed and intense than prose, and so demands a highly
imaginative use of language if the feelings aroused in the reader are to be those
which excited the poet as he wrote. Great poetry cannot be made with words
loosely and unthoughtfully applied to the scenes, incidents or emotions that they
are supposed to be communicating; rather, it arouses in the reader an overwhelming
sense that the words chosen are the right ones for the work in hand, and that no
others could possibly be used in that context without altering for the worse both
the total impression made by the poem, and the meaning o f the line in which
substitution has occured .14
Every age has its own poetic diction out of words that are fashionable at that time. The most
obvious example is the eighteenth century the poetic diction of which became notorious in the
160
eyes o f Romantic poets and critics. But the fact is that Wordsworth established a new fashion in
poetic diction, though the phrase is seldom applied to his work as it was to the eighteenth
century. Both Hopkins and Eliot use poetic diction of a distinctive kind, but Hopkins, whose
work remained unpublished in his lifetime, seems to depart somewhat from the poetic diction of
Victorian England, whereas Eliot appears to be virtually using (or creating) the voice o f his time.
Eliot’s voice seems representative, though in a matter of twenty years, English poetry was taking
yet another turn, and by the fifties the Movement poets were trying deliberately not_ to sound
like Eliot.15 The fact is, that Eliot’s influence in matters o f diction has been strong, whereas
Hopkins’s has been negligible. A poet, while selecting words, is concerned with their meaning,
their sound, and their associations.Thus, it is to be remembered that the poet and his diction can
only be judged rightly against the background of their purpose. Minor poets may adopt fashionable
words without the an acute sense of meaning, while great poets adopt words with precision and
care. Both Hopkins and Eliot exhibit their expertise, precision and accuracy in the choice of
words they use in their poetry. The words used by Hopkins are ripe with feeling, (eg. ‘a lush-kept
plush-capped sloe’, ‘mouthed to flesh-burst’), while the words of Eliot are restrained. In Hopkins’s
poetry, the reader is offered an abundance to taste and savour, whereas in Eliot’s poetry, the
words are deliberate, almost irreducible. The informality o f Hopkins’s choice of words is in
striking contrast with the formality of Eliot. Hopkins’s language has a kind o f sinewed energy
and urgency, whereas in Eliot’s poetry we find that the pace is slow as in the Four Quartets.
Hopkins, in his attempt to preserve the ‘thisness’ o f things, even goes on to coin words as if
straining beyond the existent vocabulary.
Hopkins’s genius for creating beautiful and original effects may be attributed to his
personal intensities o f feeling. Hopkins’s style seems extravagent and Baroque when compared
with Eliot’s. J. M. Cohen explains baroque:
The term Baroque does not yield to exact definition. Its probable derivation is
from the Portuguese word haroco, the term for a misshapen pearl. If a Renaissance
161
work o f art can be thought o f as regular and symmetrical, with each feature
balanced and its parts exactly proportioned to one another and to the whole, its
Baroque counterpart will be irregular and asymmetrical, and its parts will not be
so readily isolated. Thus a typical Renaissance picture will be composed in receding
planes; and a Baroque picture - a Rembrandt portrait, for example - will draw the
eye directly to its central point, subordinating the rest o f the canvas to a single
dramatic effect.16
Hopkins achieves often baroque effects, and this is largely owing to his piling up of
words. The closing line of The Wreck is a good illustration of the irregularity and ‘misshapenness’
Cohen speaks o f in discussing baroque painting:
Our heart’s charity’s hearth’s fire, our thought’s chivalry’s throng’s
Lord
(P & P, 24)
Any discussion o f Hopkins’s diction needs to take into account his tendency to amass
words (often coinciding with cumulative stresses, as in the line quotes above). The strung-out
use o f the possesive case in that closing line o f The Wreck is an extreme example; setting up
syntactical irregularity that builds up to the desired effect of excess and power (of dominion over
the single inmost strain, as well as over the extended many). The drama o f the baroque style is
caught in that line. A. C. Sewter says, “The ebullient vitality characteristic o f the Baroque, its
realism, richness and variety of texture, and its deliberate intention to stir the spectator’s emotions,
involve a constant risk o f theatrical extravagence and vitality.”17
Hopkins’s Baroque style is much suited to his poetic temperament, his unrestrained
emotionalism, his images which are full o f exuberance, splendour and brilliance. Hopkins’s
predecessor in this respect is the seventeenth century poet, Richard Crawshaw. It is worth noting
the effect o f the Counter-Reformation, specifically Ignatian spirituality, on these two Catholic
162
poets separated by two hundred years. St. Ignatius had the ‘gift of tears’ and he records it
without embarrasment. Crashaw’s poem St. Mary Magdalene or The Weeper offers, without any
sense of excess or absurdity a picture of Mary Magdalene’s tear-filled eyes:
Two walking baths, two weeping motions,
Portable and compendious oceans.
Hopkins manages such emotionalism far better. Stanza 18 of The Wreck asks and exclaims with
much greater tact:
Why tears ! is it? tears; such a melting, a madrigal start.
J.M.Cohen says that the Baroque poets chose the sonnet to express themselves because
of its strict and compressed form. He adds “The Baroque sonnet... will state a mood in the
opening and go on to intensify without necessarily resolving it. Alternatively, it may present an
image in the first line and elaborate it without any considerable increase of emotional tension in
the next thirteen.”18 Hopkins’s Baroque poems ar a curious mixture of these characteristics. In
The Windhover we see that the poem opens with the image of the Falcon in flight and is
elaborated and goes to the point of fervent and increased emotional tension in the sestet. The
poems Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves and That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and o f the comfort o f the
Resurrection present a mood in the beginning and end without resolving the mood.
Elisabeth Schneider dwells on three Baroque sonnets of Hopkins in a chapter in her
book, The Dragon in the Gate in which she discusses The Windhover, Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves
and That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and o f the Comfort o f the Resurrection . She says “THE
BAROQUE STYLE of Hopkins springs in some measure out of elation, elation arising from a
sensuous response to beauty in nature, from a heightened spiritual awareness or insight.”19
Hopkins’s Baroque style is unique and is not without its ‘thisness’ so that it becomes a kind of
Hopkinsian Baroque. These poems are full of rich imagery and sensuous details. The Windhover
and That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and o f the comfort o f the Resurrection are poems in
163
which the elation springs from a sensuous response to the beauty of nature which is presented in
the octave and the heightened spiritual awareness in the sestet. Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves gets its
extravagance from the poet’s heightened spiritual insight. One discerns an exaggerated emotional
response in all of Hopkins’s poetry, but more so in thepoems just discussed. Cohen says that
Baroque poetry expresses private thought, and the three sonnets discussed by Schneider are the
ones that do precisely that. Hopkins also repeats words to create an impression of deep feeling,
as if repetition alone can communicate intensity. In The Starlight Night, for example, we find the
line
The grey lawns cold where gold , where quickgold lies !
and again
Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.
Hurrahing in Harvest uses repeated words with the same intention of evoking emotional depth:
These things , these things were here but the beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.
In ‘No Worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch o f grief ’, we have the line already cited while
discussing rhythm:
Comforter, where, where is your relief?
In the sonnet Peace we find:
When , when , Peace , will you, Peace ?
164
Stanza 10 of The Wreck has the lines:
Or rather , rather then stealing as Spring
Through him, melt him but master him still:
Whether at once , as once at a crash Paul
Or Austin, a lingering out sweet skill,
Make mercy in all of us , out of us all
Mastery, but be adored , but be adored King.
These are only some examples of a habit with words, a habit in evidence whether the mood is
ecstatic or grieving. Besides the intensity already referred to, words receive emphasis through
repetition, suggest a conviction which brooks nothing different as in the line from The Wreck
quoted above:
But be adored, but be adored King.
Repetition in this case works to exclude other possibilities though the mood is subjunctive.
In other cases the word has a different connotion when repeated as (from the same
stanza) in :
Whether at once , as once at a crash Paul
In the first instance it means suddenly, and in the second instance, at a time in the past.
The device of repetition is so marked that it strikes home at first reading. It is as if the poet
wishes to hammer those words into the reader’s mind when he asks: ‘Behind, where, where was
a, where was a place?’ in stanza 3 of The Wreck, the frantic questioning and bewilderment are
emphasised by the repeated use of the word ‘where’. In God's Grandeur , Hopkins repeats the
phrase ‘have trod’, thrice in a single line - ‘Generations have trod, have trod , have trod ;’ where
it serves most aptly to produce the desired effect of the mechanical as well as monotonous and
continual abuse of nature by men. We can literally feel the ages of burdensome treading of
165
mankind over the earth. Repetition of a single word may be used to drive home an idea or
thought. In the poem Peace, mentioned above, Hopkins repeats the word ‘peace’ nine times in
a poem of eleven lines, just as he repeatedly uses the word ‘patience’ six times in his sonnet
‘Patience , hard thing! the hard thing hut to pray
Hopkins’s poetry is full of poetic devices like alliteration, onomatopoeia and compound
words for varied poetic effects. He has also been accused of ‘obscurity’ and ‘oddness’ in his
verse; the omission of pronouns and tangled syntax.20 In the matter of syntax Hopkins’s approach
may be linked with Browning’s, and seen as departure from the ‘straight’ lines in which other
Victorian poets wrote. Hopkins’s purpose in ‘playing’ thus with syntax seems related to his own
surprised wonder, or alternatively, surprised pain. The Windhover's opening lines do indeed have
a linear subject - verb - object movement, but the qualifying phrases that expand the object
(minion) make the syntax appear tangled:
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...
The nouns in apposition to minion, and the multiple adjectives qualifying those nouns (eg. dappledawn-drawn Falcon) lengthen the visual scene. At the same time, using ‘underneath him steady’
as if it were an adjective like ‘rolling’ and ‘level’, condenses the effect. A simultaneous effect of
expansion and condensation is thus achieved through the syntax. Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves
offers a fair degree of syntactical difficulty. Here are the opening lines:
EARNEST, earthless, equal, attuneable, vaulty, voluminous , ...
stupendous
Evening strains to be time’s vast, womb-of-all, home-of-all,
hearse-of-all night.
166
The noun which is the subject of the opening lines is ‘evening’ but it is preceded by seven
adjectives, followed by the verb ‘strains’ which takes an indirect object ‘night’ which is preceded
by three adjectival phrases and two adjectives.
Alliteration is a favourite Hopkins device; he learned from Anglo-Saxon poetry how it
can be used both to bind lines together and to make them more musical. In The Wreck almost
every stanza has alliteration for different moods. For example, for God’s power, ‘God ! giver
of breath and bread’ , ‘World’s strand, sway of the sea’ ; for expressing the soothing effect of the
touch of God as in ‘Over again I feel thy finger and find thee’(stanza 1), for implying the result
of a terrible fall from rocky heights as in ‘ Hard down with a horror of height’ (stanza 2) and of
Christ’s central place in the poet’s life ‘Of the gospel proffer, a pressure, a principle’ (stanza 4).
The line ‘O Deutschland, double a desperate name!’ is unmatched for not only its alliterative
effect, but also for the fine fusion of sound and meaning. In The Windhover, the alliterative
sounds are skillfully used to highlight the majesty and sweep of the falcon’s flight.
Hopkins was influenced by certain chimes suggested by the Welsh poetry he had read,
called cynghanedd (pronounced ‘kung - hanneth ‘). Cynghanedd is a Welsh bardic tradition of
great antiquity consisting of a highly sophisticated series of techniques for making intricate and
beautiful patterns of speech-sound - i.e. for ‘inscaping’ speech-sound by means of alliteration
and vowelling, which is another of Hopkins favourite device for onomatopoeic effects. The
patterns of vowel sounds, wherein a line is divided roughly into three parts; two syllables of
parts 1 and 2 rhyme, while alliteration links parts 2 and 3 as in To R. B. : ‘fire . . . sire . . . soul’
( line 9), as in The Wreck: ‘listener. . . lingerer. . . love’ (line 3 in stanza 33) and ‘He .
three
. . . thunder-throne’ (line 5 in stanza 34).
Examples of internal rhymes, called ‘vowelling-on’, also abound in Hopkins’s poetry
and this makes for the enhancement of the sounds of the lines, as in ‘And hurls for him, O half
curls earth for him off under his feet’(line 14, Hurrahing in Harvest), ‘Storm flakes were scroll-
167
leaved flowers, lily showers’ (line 8, stanza 21, The Wrec/c), ‘Strike you the sight of it’ (line 3,
stanza 28, The Wreck), ‘And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil’ (line 6, God's
Grandeur), ‘Down in dim woods the diamond delves ! the elves’ -eyes !’ (line 4, The Starlight
N ight), ‘Forms and warms the life within’ (line 2, stanza 6, The May Magnificat), ‘Stones ring;
like each tucked string tells’ (line 3, ‘A s kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame ’).
Hopkins makes frequent use of onomatopoeia in his effort to get at the ‘inscape’ of
things. Marjorie Bolton lists the effects of some speech sounds in The Anatomy of Poetry. She
notes that “In general, long vowels tend to sound more peaceful or more solemn than short ones,
which tend to give an impression of quick movement, agitation or triviality.” 21 When Hopkins
in stanza 10 of The Wreck ‘as once at a crash Paul’, where the sound of the word ‘crash’ conveys
the sudden and violent event of the conversion of Paul. The use of the word ‘drum’ in ‘goes
Death on drum’ in stanza 11 of The Wreck, makes the reader hear the drumming arrival of death.
The violent noisiness of the stormy sea in the same poem is expressed in stanza 19 by the use of
the words ‘swirling’, ‘hawling’ and ‘brawling’. In the poem, The Caged Skylark, when the song
is described as ‘sweetest, sweetest spells’, it successfully creates the soothing and pleasurable
effect of a delightful song of a bird, whereas the use of the words ‘wring’ and ‘bursts’ in another
line of the same poem - (‘Or wring their barriers in bursts of fear and rage’ ) immediately makes
almost audible, the desperate effort and quick movements of the bird to free itself from the cage.
Hopkins himself had quite a lot to say about diction. In a letter to A. W. M. Bailie dated
September 10, 1864, Hopkins explains at length his own theory of poetic language which came
to his mind as he was preparing for a paper of poetical criticism on Tennyson where he says:
. . . I think then the language of verse may be divided into three kinds, the first
and highest is poetry proper, the language of inspiration, the word inspiration
need cause no difficulty. I mean by it a mood of great, abnormal in fact, mental
acuteness, either energetic or receptive, according as the thoughts which arise in
it seem generated by a stress and action of the brain, or to strike into it unasked.
168
This mood arises from various causes, physical generally, as good health or state
of the air or, prosaic as it is, length o f time after a meal, but I need not go into this;
all that it is needful to mark is, that the poetry o f inspiration can only be written in
this mood of mind, even if it only last a minute, by poets themselves. Everybody
o f course has like moods, but not being poets what they then produce is not
poetry. The second I call Parnassian. It can only be spoken by poets, but is not in
the highest sense poetry. It does not require the mood of mind in which the
poetry o f inspiration is written. It is spoken on and from the level o f a poet’s
mind, not, as in the other case, when the inspiration, which is the gift of genius,
raises him above him self. . . Great men, poets I mean, have each their own
dialect as it were o f Parnassian, formed generally as they go on writing, and at
last, - this is the point to be marked, - they can see things in this Parnassian way
and describe them in this Parnassian tongue, without further effort o f inspiration.
In a poet’s particular kind of Parnassian lies most of his style, o f his manner, o f his
mannerism if you like. . . But in Parnassian pieces you feel that o f you were the
poet you could have gone on as he has done, you see yourself doing it, only with
the difference that if you actually try you find you cannot write his Parnassian
. . . There is a higher sort o f Parnassian which I call Castalian, or it may be
thought the lowest kind o f inspiration. Beautiful poems may be written wholly in
it. Its pecularity is that though you can hardly conceive yourself having written in
it, if in the poet’s place, yet it is too characteristic o f the poet, too so-and so-allover-ish, to be quite inspiration . . . The third kind is merely the language o f verse
as distinct from that of prose, Delphic, the tongue of the Sacred Plain , I may call
it, used in common by poet and poetaster. Poetry when spoken is spoken in it, but
to speak it is not necessarily to speak poetry. I may add here there is also Olympian.
This is the language of strange masculine genius which suddenly, as it were,
forces its way into the domain o f poetry, without naturally having a right there 23
169
Hopkins in this passage is making fine distinctions, and one cannot be quite sure what he means
by ‘Olympian’. But The Wreck written in, to use his own terminology, Parnassian, surely rises to
Castalian (again to use his own term) in stanza 28 where the vision of Christ is spoken of
But how shall I ... make me room there:
Reach me a ... Fancy, come faster Strike you the sight of it? look at it loom there,
Thing that she ... there then ! the Master,
Ipse, the only one, Christ, King, Head:
He was to cure the extremity where he had cast her;
Do, deal, lord it with living and dead;
Let him ride, her pride, in his triumph, despatch and have done
with his doom there.
(P&P, 21)
One cannot conceive of this stanza being written by anyone other than Hopkins, however skilled
and gifted; it bears the poet’s most distinctive marks but is not imitable nor easily parodied as
other passages might be.
Hopkins’s use of adjectives may be traced to his artist’s eye for detail, to his
sense of keen and detailed observation of everything around him, and also to his genius for
making compounds. Hopkins’s coinages of are mostly the adjectives ‘Dappled-with-damson
west’ (stanza 5, The Wreck), ‘dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon’ (The Windhover), ‘dappled things’
(PiedBeauty), ‘dapple-eared lily’ (Dims Scolus's Oxford), shows Hopkins’s penchant for the
adjective ‘dappled’ , a word that connotes light and shade (therefore multiple richness) and is
musical too. In other places his use of adjectives such as ‘white-fiery snow’ (stanza 13, The
Wreck), ‘black-about air’ (stanza 24, The Wreck).”iav-blue heavens’ (stanza 26, The Wreck),
170
‘crimson cresseted east’ (stanza 35, The Wreck) , ‘skies of couple-colour and brinded cow
{Pied Beauty), ‘ azurous hung hills’ ( Hurrahing in Harvest) create a richly coloured world.
Hopkins conveys movement of things with his masterly use of adjectives, mostly compound
words, as in ‘whirlwind- swivelled snow’ (stanza 13, The Wreck), wind-beat whitebeam’ and
‘flake-doves’ {The Starlight Night), ‘dare-sale skylark’ {The Caged Skylark). Hopkins, as we
have said earlier has an artistic sensibility and a wonderful eye for detail. One recalls that he
sketched leaves in his diary with great precision. He is particular about conveying his emotions
or the content of his poetry in every aspect and his adjectives are part of his standards of
perfection. ‘Cobbled foam-fleece’ (stanza 16,The Wreck), ‘scroll-leaved flowers’ ( stanza 21,
The Wreck), ‘landscape plotted and pieced’ {Pied Beauty) are adjectives which are used to
describe shape and form. Adjectives like ‘lush-kept plush-capped sloe’ (stanza 8, The Wreck),
‘silk-sack clouds’ {Hurrahing in Harvest), ‘ crisp combs’ ( ‘Patience hard thingI the hard thing
but to p ra y '), convey the texture of the things described. But most important is Hopkins’s use
of adjectives to convey emotions , ideas and feelings. ‘Lashed rod’ (stanza 2, The Wreck) is
expressive of the terror of God, ‘carrier-witted 1’ (stanza 3, The Wreck) suggests that the poet’s
soul is like a carrier pigeon and who flies straight to its destination, while ‘widow-making
unchilding unfathering deeps’ (stanza 13, The Wreck) is unmatched in its expression of the
devastating effects of the stormy sea . Nobody but Hopkins could have described peace as
‘piecemeal’ and ‘reaving’, so that these two adjectives seem to contain the summary of the
sonnet Peace, in which the poet laments the transitoriness of peace and the difficulty of finding
it. The use of adjectives in the ‘terrible sonnets’ is in keeping with the depressed and agonised
mood of the poet — ‘carrion comfort’, ‘last strands’, ‘wring-world right foot’ , ‘darksome
devouring eves’. ‘ bruised bones’ . in (Carrion Comfort), the mind’s mountains seen as ‘frightful,
sheer, no-man-fathomed’, and ‘dark heavens’ as ‘baffling’ in ‘To Seem the Stranger lies my lot,
my life and ‘black hours’, ‘cries countless’, ‘dead letters’, ‘dull dough’, ‘sweating selves’ in 7
Wake and Feel the Fell o f Dark ’.
171
Eliot’s poetic diction is as distinct as that of Hopkins and utterly different. Exclamation
marks are conspicuous by their absence in his religious poetry, and his words do not come
pouring out. On the contrary, this is a highly premeditated art.
From the rhythmic point of view, one very striking difference is the slow pace of Eliot’s
religious poems. Hopkins uses anapaests far more freely, and the verse quickens as he does so.
Eliot’s use of anapaestic feet is more sparing. He reverts quickly to iambic feet, and the verse
slows down. Below is an example from Ash-Wednesday (Section IV) where, despite the variations,
the constant return to iambic establishes a steady tone:
yj —
o
—
i o
-
u
o
o
— o
Who walked between the viqdet and the violet
O
Who walked ^between
O O — i d - O —
The vai ious ranks p f varied green
—
o
— l
—
l o —
o
— (J
Goinglin white] and blue,lin Maiy’s colour,
— i_!> a ~ | o
—i
Talking af trivial things 1
U o ld o
G U I - 1 O
1 OU- G
— G
In ignorance and in knowledgelof eterr al dolour
U ‘—
G - i U - j u l
O
Who moved among the otners as hey walked,
u
O KJ
— I <o o l u
Who then made strong^the fountains and bade fres the
s\
springs.
It is true that metrical variations in the Four Quartets are very many and very striking,
more so than in the lines scanned above, but they all work towards a contemplative stance; they
do not, as in Hopkins, sweep the reader along on a tide of emotion. The lyrical fourth sections of
both East Coker and Little Gidding have a quickened tempo, but it seems deliberate, not
spontaneous, as if the poet, like a musical composer, has decided to introduce a passage in
allegro and takes care to see that the lines have been shortened to tetrametres with just four beats
to the first three lines of each stanza, and five feet to the concluding two lines of each stanza : For
example, from Section IV of East Coker :
172
U - I 0 — 1 <J — ( O —
The wounded surgeon plieslthe steel
U —
U U / U-j
O —
That ques tions the (distempered part;
u — I u — I O — I <J —
Beneathjthe bleeding hands we feel
<J — I O'. VJ Uj u - I <J —
The sharp compassion of ihe hewer’s art
o - | J u|
o -/o —
[
Resolving the (enigma of the fevjer chart.
The occassional pyrrhic feet of unstressed syllables ( o u ) as well as the shortened line lengths
give a quick tempo, but the regular iambic rhythm sustains a formal mood. And after that, in the
fifth section, the poet returns to free line-lengths and a slower pace.
The point to be made is that Eliot’s shade of spirituality directly colours his aesthetic
choices. The metre itself appears to arise from the state of feeling as much as it does in the case
of Hopkins; the difference is that the state of feeling is more restrained, slow, full o f doubts and
backward glances, perhaps cerebral. Hopkins’s emotional states, by contrast, overflow boundaries,
spill out without check, soar or droop, each state being itself; there are no backward glances.
The metre in each case reflects the state which generates the poem.
Eliot also uses onomatopoeia skillfully: ‘The sea howl / And the sea yelp, are different
voices / Often together heard: the whine in the rigging, / The menace and caress o f wave that
breaks on water, / The distant rote in the granite teeth, / And the wailing warning from the
approaching headland / Are all sea voices, and the heaving groaner / Rounded homewards. . . .’
It is evident that the poet wishes to express the voices of the sea, which he does with the careful
choice o f words. The words ‘howl’ and ‘yelp’ bring out the difference between the sea’s noise in
its two different moods as when at ebb and high tide. The ‘r ’ sounds o f ‘rote’ and ‘granite’ echo
grinding sounds; and ‘wailing’ and ‘approaching’ - participles functioning as adjectives beautifully communicate the effect of continuous sound over distance.
Eliot makes occasional use of internal rhymes as in these lines from the fifth section of
Ash-Wednesday: ‘Those who are torn on the horn’, ‘who will not go away and cannot pray * and
173
‘Pray for those who chose and oppose’. Repeated words occur also in Eliot as in Hopkins.
Examples are these lines from the fifth section of the poem: ‘If the unheard, unspoken / Word is
unspoken, unheard’, which asserts the mysteriousness of God and T he desert in the garder the
garden in the desert’ which creates not only a rhythmic effect but also creates an effect of
curious mixture and mingling , an implication that the two are one and the same.
As illustrated earlier, Hopkins too uses repetition of words, but the difference in Eliot is
striking. Whereas in Hopkins the charge is emotional (‘Comforter, where where is your
comforting?’), in Eliot the charge is intellectual :
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.
(CPP, 96)
Such a passage demands an unpacking of meaning after careful search. The repetition is not
simple repetition but intellectual play on Christ as Logos or the Word. The dense allusion tc the
opening verses of St. John’s gospel (I: 1-5) cited below is the reason for the repetition.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was
God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and
without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life
was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness
comprehended it not.24
174
The mystery o f the Incarnation is offered through references to the infant pre-linguistic Jesus
(the Word without a word). The refusal o f that mystery by an unhearing world (‘the unstilled
worlds still whirled / About the centre o f the silent Word’) is brought in. Finally, the continuing
presence o f that mystery as the Spirit blows where it lists is glanced at in the lines ‘the Word
within / The world and for the world. ’ This alludes also to the doctrine o f the Atonement according
to which we are at - one - with God through Jesus Christ; his coming is thus ‘for, the world’.
The theological implications of Christ as the Word are not entered into here as the purpose
o f this thesis is to link the poet’s spiritual understanding with his poetry. What is clear is that in
Eliot’s case the poetry proceeds from an intellectual understanding o f the theological issue, and
that the poetic device o f repetition is used to explore that intellectual internalisation. Hopkins
had completely internalised theological stands, for example, those based in Duns Scotus, but the
poetry in his case proceeds from an emotional (rather than intellectual) hold on the issue. He
proclaims inscape (based on Duns Scotus’s haecceitas. or thisness, or quiddity), but he rejoices
in it. In the sonnet ‘A s kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame ’, he uses repetition to
project the theological implications o f quiddity:
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves - goes itself; mvself it speaks and spells,
Crying What / do is me: fo r that I came.
I say more : the just man justices
Keeps grace; that keeps all his goings graces:
Acts in God’s eve what in God’s eve he is Christ - 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.
(P & P , 51)
175
Both poets use the same poetic device to explore theological resonances, but the effects
are wholly different. The distinctness may be attributed to their distinct spiritual stands; the one
stands apart in brooding reverence as he contemplates the mystery; the other flings himself
forward as he embraces the mystery.
Eliot’s repetitions are self-conscious to the point o f being mannered. The first three lines
of the first stanza, the first line of the second stanza, the eighth line o f the third stanza o f the first
section o f Ash-Wednesday begin with the phrase ‘Because I do not hope’. The phrases ‘Because
I do not think’, ‘Because I know’, ‘Because I cannot hope’, ‘Because these wings’ used in
further lines is used to work up to an emotional climax. This is an example o f prolonged repetition
which creates an impression o f thought circling back on itself. The repetition o f the phrase
‘Lord, 1 am not worthy’ taken from the Mass, at the end of the third section of the same poem
evokes the serious mood o f penitence. Section IV of the poem is a prayer for redemption and the
repetition o f the word ‘redeem’ four times at crucial points helps to reinforce the theme of the
poem. In Burnt Norton the word ‘time’ occurs seven times in the first five lines. The lines in the
same section, ‘. . . between season and season, time and / time, between / hour and hour, word
and word, power and power’ shows the poet’s precision in carefully tracing the movement
through time as in the pursuit of grace.
Donald Davie distinguishes between diction and language and points out that the former
is ‘less splendid’ than the latter. He remarks
I f ‘diction’ is a selection from the language of men, then Hopkins may be said to
use a poetic diction in the ridiculous sense that ‘hogshead’, or any other word
one may call to mind was never used by him in any of his poems, and that he
therefore used a selection o f the language which excluded ‘hogshead’ or whatever
word it is. But the point is that in reading the poems of Hopkins one has no sense
of English words thrusting to be let into the poem and held out by the poet. One
feels that Hopkins could have found a place for every' word in the language if
only he could have written enough poems.25
176
The enrichment o f the language by Hopkins is indeed a remarkable achievement. C.L. Wrenn
recognises Hopkins’s influence on the English language:
With a wide knowledge of the older poetry and o f something o f the technicalities
o f its language, he taxed the resources of English to their utmost, indeed sometimes
seeming to be fain to invent a new kind o f English, with new words, revivals and
new-made compounds to express his so intense and so individual consciousness
o f natural beauty as the expression of spiritual fa c t. . . and it is probable that his
influence and example have had considerable effect, however temporarily, on the
language o f English poetry. 26
While Hopkins ‘enlarged’ the language, Eliot did in his own phrase ‘purify the language
o f the tribe’. One is not quite sure what he meant by this phrase - perhaps the deepening and
elevation o f the language used by the common people. This is what every major poet does; and
this indeed is the function of the poet as envisaged by Eliot.
The fact is that Eliot’s diction is far less idiosyncratic than Hopkins’s. His choice o f
words does not startle us into attention in the way that ‘lush-capped plush sloe’ does, for example.
That there is a propriety and beauty to the diction no one will deny, but characteristic lines, like
the following from East Coker (Section I) bear out Eliot’s notion that there should be no startling
difference between the language of prose and the language o f poetry:
In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes. And ashes to the earth
177
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
(CPP, 177)
When we ask ourselves why Eliot sounds so different from Wordsworth despite sharing
his view on the language of poetry, we must conclude that Eliot’s rhythms and use of allusions
remove his poems from the world of ‘daily converse’ inhabited by Wordsworth’s poems. '
Eliot’s stand is that the language of poetry should be close to the language of prose, a
remarkably Wordsworthian stand, and yet no poet could be less like Wordsworth than Eliot.
Eliot has this to say on the subject:
Emotion and feeling, then are best expressed in the common language of the
people —that is, in the language common to all classes: the structure, the rhythm,
the sound, the idiom of a language, express the personality of the people which
speaks i t . . .We may say that the duty of the poet, as poet, is only indirectly to his
people: his direct duty is to his language, first to preserve, and second to extend
and improve. In expressing what other people feel he is also changing the feeling
by making it more conscious; he is making people more aware of what they feel
already, and therefore teaching them something about themselves. But he is not
merely a more conscious person than the others; he is also individually different
from other people, and from other poets too, and can make his readers share
consciously in new feelings which they had not experienced before. That is the
difference between the writer who is merely eccentric or mad and the genuine
poet.28
Eliot’s use of alliteration is neither as profuse nor as intricate as in the poetry of Hopkins.
There are stray examples like ‘Sleeping in snatches’ {Journey o f the Magi), ‘The stubborn season
has made stand’, ‘My life is light’, ‘Kept faith and fast’ {A Song fo r Simeon), ‘This form, this
178
face’{Marina), ‘1 left them twisting, turning below’ (Ash-Wednesday), ‘We die with the
dying’{Little Gidding). Alliteration here serves its usual poetic purpose - it arrests the attention,
heightens the musicality and binds the lines in which it occurs.
Eliot’s diction is close to prose and this is because he believed that all good poetry
should have the qualities o f good prose and this is illustrated in his poetry. Acknowledging that
Hopkins is very different, he remarks :
In most kinds of poetry, the necessity for its reminding us of contemporary speech
is reduced by the latitude allowed for personal idiosyncrasy: a poem by Gerard
Hopkins, for instance, may sound pretty remote from the way in which you and I
express ourselves —or rather, from the way in which our fathers and grandfathers
expressed themselves: but Hopkins does give the impression that his poetry has
the necessary fidelity to his way o f thinking and talking to himself.29
It is Hopkins’s personal tone which pervades all his poetry, but the intimacy with which Hopkins
writes is extended almost every time to the reader in the form o f an invitation to join with him in
his experience. The tone is not only that o f the poet talking to himself, but also that of a poet
reaching out to his readers, sometimes in the form o f conversational narrative as in the The
Wreck, explicit invitation to partake o f the experience as by the use o f the word ‘look’, ‘look,
look up’, ‘O look at’ , further attempts at involving the readers with the use o f exclamations and
requests to ‘Buy then ! bid then !’ as in The Starlight Night. Eliot’s tone is deliberately impersonal
and utterly different, in keeping with his conviction that poetry is not a letting loose o f emotion
but an escape from emotion, as he notes in his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’: “Poetry
is not a turning loose o f emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression o f personality,
in
but an escape from personality.’
The worlds created by the language of the two poets are utterly distinct. Hopkins’s
poetry urges us and takes us into his world. The reader is at once compelled to identify with
179
whatever is described, and the poet’s experience becomes our own . Reading Eliot’s poetry is
quite a different experience altogether. The reader awakens, but at a more cerebral level. On
being aroused intellectually, the reader is given the choice of selecting a way from so many open
to him, to enter into the poet’s world. The reader may enter or stand at the entrance and peer into
Eliot’s world, but Hopkins just takes the reader by the hand and pulls him into his world with
compelling power. For Hopkins, language is a tool by means o f which he lays open the ‘thisness’
of the objects that are composite parts o f his poems. Each thing is peculiar and has its own
individuality, so much so that the words used also seem to have an ‘inscape’ o f their own. Eliot’s
use o f diction is not driven in this way.
We turn now to syntax. Syntax is one of the ways in which language becomes an instrument
of articulation. Poets, however, take the licence o f abnegating the prose syntax which is part of
formal grammar. This is more true of poets o f the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who
believe that when syntactical forms are retained in poetry, those forms carry no weight, as opposed
to the assumption o f the poets o f the seventeenth and eigtheenth centuries, that syntax in poetry
should often, if not always, carry a weight of poetical meaning. Poets can use the forms of
grammar for their own purposes, which are not those of grammarians. Accoring to Donald
Davie poets may make music out o f syntax, but they may not always be successful, for sometimes
synatx is perverted with no music in exchange. Davie say s:
In fact, I distinguish five kinds o f poetic syntax, as follows: (I) subjective, (ii)
dramatic, (iii) objective, (iv) syntax like music, (v) syntax like mathematics . . .
Most people, if they think about the syntax o f poetry at all, regard it as something
neutral, in itself neither favourable nor unfavourable to poetry, a mere skeleton
on which are hung the truly poetic elements, such as imagery or rhythm . . . but a
skeleton obviously has a great deal to do with the beauty or ugliness o f the body
it supports .31
180
Davie places Eliot’s poetry in the fourth and fifth sections o f the categories o f syntax. He
explains by giving an example o f the first fifteen lines of Ash-Wednesday and explains that lines
10 and 13 have a similar end-rhyme :
Line 10 - The infirm glory of the positive hour
Line 13 - The one veritable transitory power
And lines 8 and 10 are gramatically similar :
Line 8 - The vanished power of the usual reign 9
Line 10 - The infirm glory o f the positive hour
There is, he says, a connection between rhyme and metre and grammar or syntax. Thus, he
explains that the use o f syntax as rhyme is ‘syntax like music’. Davie is uncertain about limiting
Eliot’s syntax to only this category and says that Eliot’s poetry also contains the syntax of his
fifth category that is ‘syntax like mathematics’. Davie confesses that though it is very easy to
distinguish synatx like music from syntax like mathematics in theory, it is very difficult to co so
in practice. He elucidates by saying that the syntax o f a poem is like ‘mathematics’ when it has ‘a
more mimetic function, clinging closely to the experience behind it’.Davie again refers to AshWednesday and says that it is “not a sheer act o f faith - that, when identical syntactical
arrangements recur in ‘Ash-Wednesday’, they do so not just to knit the poem together but
because the curve o f experience presented in the poem has at that point come round upon i;self.
Hence the syntax o f ‘Ash-Wednesday’ can, after all, be shepherded into the mimetic fold.” 32
Section I has a series of successive clauses o f reason leading in the first stanzaic unit to a statement
o f ‘no longer striving’.
Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
181
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive towards such things
(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power o f the usual reign?
(CPP, 89)
The second stanzaic unit does not come to a close but is extended into the next unit, the numerous
‘Becauses’ leading to
I rejoice that things are as they are. . . .
The cumulative adverbial modifying clauses very fully create the dialogue of the mind with itself,
so that by the time we come to the fifth stanzaic unit:
And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself 1 too much discuss
To much explain. . . .
We know exactly what his spiritual state is. He has crossed over but the difficulty o f the crossing
haunts him still, and syntax has been beautifully used to convey this.
Another example of unusual syntax occurs at the close o f Section III of the same poem,
where we have the lines Lord, I am not worthy
Lord I am not worthy
but speak the word only
182
This is taken directly from the Act of Humility in the Mass, but a syntactical ambivalence is
introduced by the omission of the line that follows ‘But speak the word only, And thy servant
shall be healed’. Here ‘speak’ is clearly an imperative, whereas the omission o f ‘And thy servant
shall be healed’ in Eliot’s poem leaves it open as indicative. It then means ‘I am not worthy, I
only speak’, thereby bringing in a rich ambivalence, since the reader will clearly expect the
meaning of the phrases as they occur in the Mass ( and originally in the Gospels - in the account
of the healing of the centurion’s servant as in Matthew VIII: 5-13).
Eliot does something similar at the close of Section IV :
But the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down
Redeem the time, redeem the dream
The token of the word unheard, unspoken
Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew
And after this our exile
(CPP, 95)
Here the last line is taken from the Salve Regina . where it occurs as
And after this our exile, show unto us Christ.
In the Latin hymn we are offered the prospect of a showing of Christ through the intercession of
the Virgin.
Illos tuos misericordes occulos ad nos converte
Et Jesum benedictum fructum ventris tui
Nos post hoc exilium ostende Turn those merciful eyes towards us
And, after this our exile, show to us
Jesus the blessed fruit of your womb.
183
Eliot leaves the line as
And after this our exile
which can mean that, despite the vision of the one who walks between the violet and the violet,
and the fountain springing down, and all the redemptive imagery of Section IV, the soul is still an
exiled wanderer. The line has an elliptical is: ‘ And after this is(or comes) our exile’. Eliot’s
deliberate use of syntactical uncertainty is related to the spiritual state he delineates - a state
where there is no triumphant sense of arrival.
The second category according to Davie is ‘dramatic syntax’, in which the poet imagines
the ‘form of thought’ in some mind other than his own. I see the Ariel poems falling in this
category since all of them are spoken through dramatis personae (eg. The Magi, Simeon, Marina).
The first category of poetic syntax according to Davie is ‘subjective syntax’ the function of
which he says is to ‘follow the form of thought in the poet’s mind’. The syntax in some parts of
the Four Quartets of Eliot and nearly all the poems of Hopkins can be included in this category.
Such difficulty as is presented by Hopkins’s poetry arises from his unusual syntax (violation
of accepted sentence order). Frequent omission of relative pronouns makes one part of speech
like another, a noun like an adjective or verb. His use of neologisms (the use of new words), and
sometimes of extremely antiquated words, (for eg. voel in stanza 4 or burl in stanza 16 in The
Wreck) account for the difficulty of the poetry. His theory o f ‘inscape’ leads Hopkins to use the
demonstrative pronoun this as in this line from G od’s Grandeur - ‘And for all this nature is
never spent’, and these. as in the line ‘These things, these things were here and but the beholder
/ Wanting;’ {Hurrahing in Harvest). Hopkins’s straining at syntax to the point of tortuousness
may be illustrated by stanza 6 of The Wreck :
Not out of this bliss
Springs the stress felt
Nor first from heaven (and few know this)
184
Swings the stroke dealy Stroke and a stress that stars and storms deliver,
That guilt is hushed by, hearts are flushed by and melt But it rides time like riding a river
(And here the faithful waver, the faithless fable and miss).
(P& P, 14)
One cannot be quite sure what the antecedent of ‘it’ might be when one comes to the line
But it rides time like riding a river
Is the it ‘his bliss’ or ‘the stress’ or ‘the stroke’ ? The reader, however faithful, may indeed
waver, fable and miss!
(iCarrion Comfort) has numerous points of syntactical interest: ‘rude’ used as a verb;
inversion of word order (‘Not, I’ll not carrion comfort, Despair, nor feast on thee’); omission of
particles (‘Nay in all that toil, that coil since (seems) I kissed the rod’); omission of relative
pronouns (‘that year of now done darkness’ instead of darkness which is now done’); and use of
qualifiers; (‘I kissed the rod, / Hand rather, my heart lo ! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh,
cheer’).
These are only two illustrations of a habit, though Hopkins would, on occasion, write in
‘straight’ grammatical lines as in his last sonnet To R.B. We need to ask how Hopins’s syntax
reflects his spirituality. The inversions, omissions and qualifications all contribute to a thrusting
forward effect, an urgency, whether of grief, or joy. It is as if the speaker cannot refrain from
what he must say, it comes from the innermost depths, and say it he must. And for this pressing
need, the ordinary word order seems inadequate. If the syntax of Eliot’s religious poetry suggests
ambivalence and reflectiveness, the syntax of Hopkins’s poetry suggests certainties and intense
emotion.
185
II
This section engages in a discussion o f image-clusters. These are divided into two groups,
viz. the natural imagery and the religious imagery. Within natural imagery, the imagery of the
elements is dealt with in some detail. It is generally conceeded that imagery is the very life-blood
o f poetry; it is the means whereby the poet unpacks his meaning, releases emotional associations,
creates his world. The connotative aspect of language largely through images, while the denotative
works through grammar.
Given the theological concept o f God’s immanence in Nature, it follows that natural
imagery will predominate in Christian religious poetry. God is not only absolutely transcendent
(needing neither nature nor human beings), he is also immanent or present in the natural world
which comes into being because o f his love. Hopkins, as we know was extremely influenced by
the Scotist theory of God’s immanence as is evident in his poetry. “With St. Thomas, Duns
Scotus holds that we can infer the existence o f God only a posteriori or from his works - the
proof is latent in every' rational, created spirit, and requires only to be made actual. The doctrine
o f divine omnipotence and o f God’s creation o f the world out o f nothing cannot, however be
proved, God is pure form or actuality, in whom everything is explicit and nothing merely potential,
otherwise he would not be an absolutely perfect spiritual principle. God’s knowledge is a living
intuituion of everything real and possible. From the fact o f the world we infer the existence o f a
first cause to which, of necessity, we must ascribe conscious knowledge and purpose .”33 Nature
is a manifestation o f God’s love; thus it is subordinate to God but directly linked to God because
it is created by him. His in-dwelling presence in his created work may then be an acceptable
theological position, quite distinct from a pantheistic worship o f Nature. Scotus believed that
. . . the first nature after God does not exist of itself but is dependent upon Him;
neither is anything (viz. matter) presupposed in order to give it existence.
Consequently, it is created. For if a first efficient cause exists, everything else
receives its total being from it. Otherwise, these other beings would not be
dependent upon it, nor could it really be the first efficient cause .” 34
186
Within the body of natural imagery, the imagery of the elements in the poetry of both
Hopkins and Eliot, the images of water and fire are dominant. Water and fire are elements in
Nature which have been heavily invested with Christian significance. Water is the symbol of a
new birth, the Christian is baptized with water (as Christ himself was as in Matthew III: 13-17)
and Jesus Christ has promised that whosoever drinks of the water he gives shall never thirst (as
in the account of the Samaritan woman at the well in John IV: 13-14). With these associations
water becomes the symbol of life. Fire is linked with both punishment (the flames of Hell) and
purification (the descent of the Holy Spirit as tongues of flame). Hopkins condenses the two
associations with his line in stanza 3 of The Wreck, ‘To flash from the flame to the flame then,
tower from the grace to the grace’. Air, the third element, when seen as the wind is associated
with the movement of the Holy Spirit. It is said in the gospel of John III: 8, “The wind bloweth
where it listeth, and thou therefore hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh,
and wither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.” The fourth element, earth, by
contrast, pulls downward and being the clay of which human beings are made, is marked by a
heaviness and grossness which the other three elements can cleanse, purify and move. One needs
to keep the conventional Christian significance of the elements in mind as one examines their
occurrence in the work of these two Christian poets.
We take first water. The early Hopkins poem Heaven-Haven has the poet longing to go
‘where springs not fail’, a direct reference to the water offered by Christ. Hopkins situates this
living water in a pure and serene landscape, with a few lilies, a field free of hail and near a calm
green sea. A Haven is a safe harbour, and Hopkins sets up an opposition between two kinds of
water: the swinging sea (the tumultous world), and unfailing springs (life- giving heaven). It is
to be noted that the two worlds are not mutually exclusive. Heaven is the haven; the green swell
of the sea is quiet here, but it is here nevertheless. Heaven is the transformation of the wild sea
into a quiet haven - a possibility offered by the convent, for the subtitle of the poem is ‘A Nun
takes the Veil’. The religious life is in the world but not of it.
187
With The Wreck we are in the midst o f a raging, devouring sea. This is an actual shipwreck
and a very real sea (whereas H eaven-Haven was patently symbolic). The waters here are called
‘widow-making, unfathering deeps’(stanza 13). At the same time the opening stanzas have said
that God is master o f the tides and the ‘sea’s sway’, and it is in these raging seas that the miracle
occurs. The tall nun has a vision o f Christ (stanza 24):
. . . She to the black-about air, to the breaker, the thickly
Falling flakes to the throng that catches and quails
Was calling ‘O Christ, Christ, come quickly’:
The cross to her she calls Christ to her, christens her wild-worst
Best.
(P & P, 20)
The stormy sea and the ‘tall nun’ calling out to Christ to come quickly are reminiscent o f the
biblical accounts o f Christ calming the seas in Matthew XIV : 25 and Mark VI : 48. The death­
dealing water (wild-worst) brings life-giving Christ. The next three stanzas are given over to an
exploration o f what that cry meant - was it a longing to die, or a desire for the crown o f heaven
(stanza 26); was it something else ( ‘Other, I gather, in measure her mind’s / burden, in wind’s
burly and beat o f endragoned seas’, stanza 27). All these lead up to the climactic stanza 28 where
there is an explicit (but beautifully hesitantly reverent) statement that those seas bore Christ
walking the water.”
But how shall I ... make me room there :
Reach me a ... Fancy, come faster Strike you the sight o f it ? look at it loom there,
Thing that she ... there then ! the Master,
188
Ipse, the only one, Christ, King, Head :
He was to cure the extremity where he had cast her;
Do, deal, lord it with living and dead;
Let him ride, her pride, in his triumph, despatch and have done
with his doom there.
(P& P, 21)
Water is thus, in all cases, the bearer of life, In The Sea and the Skylark, the sea is seen as a pure
source shaming the grime of the town.
Turning to Eliot, Section IV of Ash-Wednesday uses the usual image of water as life after
the desert and bones imagery of Section II, and the ascent in Section III. Section IV offers a
garden of fountains and springs, and as the ‘Who’ that walks passes, sheathed in light,
The fountain sprang up and the bird sang down.
The prayer at the close to the ‘Blessed sister, holy mother’ calls her ‘spirit of the fountain’, ‘spirit
of the river’ and ‘spirit of the sea’. At the same time, though the seeker has crossed the difficult
passage (indicated by the certainty of ‘ Although I do not hope to turn again’ in Section VI) he
is nostalgic for the beautiful sensuous world he has left behind. He sees it in terms of a world by
the sea, and longs to rejoice again in the ‘lost sea voices’ and ‘lost sea smell’. The sea ar.d the
shore here become the epitome of a world lost through renunciation - that which has to be
renounced if there is to be spiritual advancement. The imagery very accurately defines the degree
of renunciation demanded, for what must be renounced here are not gross joys, but the beautiful
and indistinct yearnings of the human heart:
And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
189
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea-smell
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth.
(CPP, 98)
The bent golden-rod and crying plover over the sea signify a fine-spun beauty that moves towards
the infinite but must remain ever finite. Even these do not take the seeker to the final spiritual
goal, marked as they are by restless movement. What is required is stillness and prayer:
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in his will.
(CPP 98)
Of the Ariel poems, Marina is full of sea imagery. The sea in this poem carries the seeker (the
rotting boat) to some other state. The epigragh from Seneca’s Hercules Furens:
Quis hie locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga ?
‘What place is this, what land, what quarter of the globe?’
signifies arrival in some new ‘land’, and the poem’s opening lines bear out this sense o f discovery:
What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands
What water lapping the bow
And scent o f pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog
What images return. . . .
(CPP, 109)
The title is taken from Pericles’s discovery o f his daughter Marina in Shakespeare’s Pericles
(Act V, scene 1), and we may reasonably infer that the speaker in Eliot’s poem discovers ‘new’
190
life through his conversion. The sea is used here as life-giving, life-bringing water that which
bears the boat with its weak rigging and rotten canvas to a place where there is wonder and
surprise, as the woodthrush calls through the fog.
In The Dry Salvages, the most sea-haunted of the Four Quartets, Eliot reverts to his use
of the sea as an image of life when Eliot says, ‘the sea is all about us’, where the sea stands for
history and human existence itself. When he says ‘we cannot think of a time that is oceanless’
(section II), where the sea becomes a metaphor of time and eternity, and human beings are called
voyagers in section III:
‘Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;
You are not those who saw the harbour
Receding, or those who will disembark.
Here between the hither and farther shore
O voyagers, O seamen,
You who come to port, and you whose bodies
Will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea
Or whatever event, this is your real destination.’
(CPP, 188)
They degrade the water (drifting wreckage of section II) but they are called upon to fare forward.
The lyrical prayer for those in peril on the sea, and while it is ostensibly a prayer for fishermen, it
turns into one for all afloat on life’s seas:
Lady, whose shrine stands on the promontory,
Pray for all those who are in ships, those
Whose business has to do with fish, and
191
Those concerned with every lawful traffic
And those who conduct them.
Repeat a prayer also on behalf of
Women who have seen their sons or husbands
Setting forth, and not returning :
Figlia del tuo figlio,
Queen of Heaven.
Also pray for those who were in ships, and
Ended their voyage on the sand, in the sea’s lips
Or in the dark throat which will not reject them
Or wherever cannot reach them the sound of the sea bell’s
Perpetual angelus.
(CPP, 189)
The reference to the sea-bell’s perpetual angelus is a reminder of the need for prayer. The Virgin
is requested to pray for the utterly lost and beyond the reach of such a call to pray. There are such
recesses too, but the Virgin’s prayer can sound there. The use of the sea here for life, is, no doubt
conventional. Hymns are full of them (eg. ‘Guide us heavenly father guide us / O’er the world’s
tempestuous sea’), but the use here of details specific to fishermen, and the expansion of that to
a much wider scene taking in much more, makes Eliot’s sea image extremely concrete.35 The
line ‘Lady, whose shrine stands on the promontory’ evokes very fully through the image of the
promomtory a spiritual openness, nakedness and vulnerability, and concurrently of refuge and
love (Lady, whose shrine).
Eliot also uses the image of the river, most conspicuously in the opening lines of The Dry
Salvages. About this passage Derek Traversi writes :
192
The opening ‘movement’ of the new quartet is, whatever we may think of what
follows, one of Eliot’s most sustained and evocative pieces of writing . . . The
subject is now man’s journey in time, which is simultaneously that of the individual
engaged in recovering the instinctive, half-conscious memories of the human past
... More precisely, the river is the Mississippi of Eliot’s earliest childhood memories
in St. Louis; but, in the process of being reecalled by the poet it becomes something
more, is associated with the efforts of the successive generations of men who
have at various times fought, used, and been overcome by it. The river runs into
the sea, and the part it plays in the poem implies at once a journey back into
personal origins and, beyond this, a symbol of the history of the human race
which each individual accumulation of expereience in time in some measure
recreates. The sense of the whole, uniquely eloquent passage emerges in the line
which connects the two sections into which it is divided: ‘The river is within us,
the sea is all about us’. The river is life as movement in time, continual restlessness,
the sea is the greater reality which surrounds us, the ‘eternity’ which we only
penetrate at the moment - and at the cost - of dying.36
This strong identification with the river as a life-force leads the poet to describe the river as ‘a
strong brown god-sullen, untamed and intractable’. The river like the sea, is a natural symbol of
life, but while the sea signifies life’s variegatedness and depth, the river quite naturally, signifies
through its flow, life as process. The most celebrated example of this is perhaps the close of
Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum (‘But the majestic river floated on . . . .’)
Arnold has
also used the river as subterranean force in The Buried Life (‘Even in his own despite his being’s
law, / Bade through the deep recesses of our breast / The unregarded river of our life / Pursue
with indiscernable flow its way; / And that we should not see / The buried stream, and seem to be
-> o
/ Eddying at large in blind uncertainty, / Though driving on with it eternally.’);
and Cleveland
(in the seventeenth century) asks for his life to flow as broad and clear as the Thames. These are
only some examples that come to mind where the river is more than just a setting. Where Eliot’s
193
river image gains in force is in identifying it as a sullen and untamed force within us. In the line
‘The river is within us, the sea is all about us’, the poet distinguishes between life-force, and the
scene over which that force is driven. It is interesting to contrast this image of the river
‘unhonoured, unpropitaited’ (The Dry Salvages, Section I) with Hopkins’s reference to the river
as controlled. Stanza 6 of The Wreck has the line ‘It rides time like riding a river’. Mention has
been made earlier while discussing language and syntax of that problematic ‘it’. What is of
interest at this point is Hopkins’s image of the ‘riding a river’. It appears that time and life, like
rivers, may be channelized, ‘ridden’, their course changed, their water dammed and stored.
The river as an untamed, sullen god (Eliot), or the river as something one can ride
(Hopkins) - the difference at the spiritual core is clear. If we were taking only this image into
consideration, we would say Hopkins has more faith. Without entering that debate, the energy as
well as the imagery of Hopkins’s poetry speaks of more certainties in his life. Eliot’s religious
poetry focuses more on waverings and doubts. Surrender to control (even divine control) comes
far less easily to him than to Hopkins.
We turn now to the use of the fire imagery. Stanza 2 of The Wreck, has the phrase ‘laced
with the fire of stress’, implying the spiritual stress in that crucial moment of conversion, but the
corollary is that he flashes from ‘the flame to the flame’ the very next stanza, and is now in the
embrace of redeeming fire. The fire of divine blessing, is explicitly mentioned in The Windhover
as ‘the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion / Times told lovelier, more dangerous / O my
chevalier!’. The revelation of Christ can only be imaged through fire, perhaps fire, when looked
at is all beautiful; when experienced, is all consuming; when put out is seen to be all-cleansing.
When Hopkins contemplates the Resurrection he thinks of fire. In ‘ That Nature is a Heraclitean
Fire and o f the comfort o f the Resurrection’ he says ‘. . . nature’s bonfire burns on’ that is, all
things change. But when the ‘world’s wildfire leaves nothing but ash’ we are to understand that
another all-consuming fire has come down, for the very next line proclaims ‘in a flash, in a
trumpet crash’, that the self is taken up and becomes Christ, immortal diamond.
194
Eliot also uses the imagery of fire, most spectacularly in Litf/e Gidding, and also in
East Coker. The opening lines of East Coker use fire to underline cyclical process:
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth . . . .
(CPP, 177)
Later, in Section IV of the poem we have a reference to pugatorial fires:
. . . If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid pugatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.
(CPP, 181)
The oxymoron in these lines (freeze in frigid fires) suggests that Eliot uses fire here to suggest
spiritual process, as indicated by the word purgatorial. We have moved from the material fires of
Section I to another kind of fire altogether. Eliot suggests here that redemption does not come
easily, the pains involved in the process are the briars but they burst into flamimg roses, glorious
reward. Little Gidding is full of fire imagery. The opening lines about the winter sun flaming on
the ice, the combination of frost and fire, lead up to the pentecostal fire that stirs the dumb spirit.
The Holy Spirit stirs the dumb spirit - that is the benumbed seeker whose spiritual state is wintry
and frozen. Pentecost is the feast which commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the
Apostles (Acts II: 1-4.). The form the Holy Spirit takes is that of tongues of fire; in other
contexts, the element most associated with the Holy Spirit is air ( ‘the wind bloweth where it
listeth’ ). The Holy Spirit is also imaged of course as a dove. Eliot brings fire, air, and dove all
together in the lyrical Section V of Little Gidding when he says:
The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror. . . .
195
This is foreshadowed in the reference (mentioned above) to the pentecostal fire o f Section 1.
Section II opens with stanzaic verses about the elements, the death o f air, earth, water
and fire. Here fire is simply one o f the elements, part o f the Heraclitean flux. It is interesting to
note that while the Heraclitean theory o f change posits the elements changing one into the other
ceaselessly, fire is still privileged above the other elements. It is noted by Thilly and Wood in_A
History o f Philosophy, that the fundamental thought in the teaching o f Heraclitus is “that the
universe is in a state of ceaseless change . . . To signalize the notion o f incessant activity, Heraclitus
chooses as his first principle the most mobile substance he knows, something that never seems to
come to rest, the ever-living fire - sometimes called by him vapour or breath - which is regarded
by him as the vital principle in the organism and the essence o f the soul. According to some
interpreters, the fire-principle is merely a concrete physical symbol for ceaseless activity, or
process, not itself a substance, but the very denial o f all substance. It is, however, very unlikely
that Heraclitus reasoned the thing out to so fine a point; it sufficed for him to have a principle
that changes incessantly, undergoing continual qualitative transformation; and fire satisfies this
demand. The fire of Heraclitus is not the abiding substratum o f his predecessors; it is that which
is constantly being transformed into other things.
Fire changes into water and then into earth, and the earth changes back again into
water and fire, ‘for the way upward and the way downward are one’. ‘All things
are exchanged for fire, and fire for all things; as wares are exchanged for gold and
gold for wares.’ Things seem to be permanent because we do not perceive the
incessant movements in them, and because what they lose in one way they gain in
another. Even the sun is new everyday, kindled at its rising, and quenched at its
setting.39
Section II o f Little Gidding in its three opening stanzas projects this continual transformation,
but the close o f the poem veiy clearly shows how ‘all things are ultimately resolvable into fire’ but with a difference. This fire is not simple ‘one basic, rational, intelligent principle’ - this fire is
196
the Holy Spirit enkindling the human heart. We are led in Little Gidding by slow degrees to the
final fire. Beginning with the pentecostal flame flaming on the winter ice in Section I, we are
taken through the cyclical strife in the early stanzas of Section II, and towards the close of that
section, we are in a ‘refining fire’:
. . . From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer..
(CPP, 195)
This is a purgatorial fire: a painful cleansing, tempering, refining as preparation for the culmination.
Section IV (the lyrical section in each o f the quartets) has two stanzas in which the Holy Spirit,
as both dove and flame, descends, bringing, through love, a torrment which is indistinguishable
from ecstasy. ‘Fire’ (God’s love) will redeem the soul from the ‘fire’ consuming the average
sensual seeker. Eliot here is saying much the same thing as Hopkins when he speaks of the need
to ‘flash from the flame to the flame then’ (stanza 3, The Wreck). Section IV of Little Gidding
is given below:
The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
O f which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice o f pyre or pyre To be redeemed from fire by fire.
197
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
(CPP, 196)
The central image of fire as the force which descends, cleanses and redeems is fully worked out
in those stanzas. It may be seen as a musical phrasing, an answer to the stanzas about the
Heraclitean flux at the opening of Section II. The second stanza there closed with the line:
This is the death of water and fire
But here we are redeemed from this fire which dies by the fire of the Holy Spirit. All things are,
to quote again Thilly and Wood’s note on Heraclitus, transformed by and back again into the fire
- not Heraclitus’s fire - principle, but God’s all-consuming fire of love.
The quartet rises through Section V to an affirmation of faith somewhat rare in Eliot.
The poem ends thus:
Ail shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
(CPP, 198)
198
The ‘shalls’ signify a new certainty that the final fire is a crowned knotted rose: utterly beautiful,
almost unimaginable. It is only thus indirectly, through the image of fire, that God’s love may be
hinted at.
From the spiritual point of view it may be said that Eliot approaches Hopkins more
closely through his use o f the fire image than at any other point. For both poets the imagery of
Christian faith speaks powerfully. Christianity proclaims divine love more openly than any other
faith, and the image for that in the Christian tradition has been fire. When it comes to speaking of
that central ‘source’, both poets fall back on the traditional elemental image o f fire.
We have dealt thus far with the elements under natural imagery. Hopkins’s poetry is
crowded with natural imagery, much more so than Eliot’s.The themes ofHopkins’s poetry revolve
around the experiencing of God in Nature—the Scotist principle (discussed earlier). His own
theories o f ‘inscape’ and ‘instress’, and the Ignatian influence o f the Last Week o f the Exercises
also led Hopkins to look at Nature as a revelation o f God’s love. Thus, he is at once a Nature
poet and a religious poet. By contrast Eliot’s themes are based on modern life, its ills, and such
natural imagery as occurs is linked to the past, to memories. The most frequently used images
are those o f the garden, signifying the possibility of hope fulfilled; and the desert is persistently
used to connote the barrenness o f spiritual life and material life. Unlike Hopkins, Eliot does not
see Nature as an avenue to God. Paul Murray explains the difference between the two responses:
Within the Western tradition there are two distinct forms under which Christian
poets have beeen accustomed to conceive Divine Reality. The first o f these, the
doctrine or the poetry of immanence, invited the believer to look outwards towards
the material universe that surrounds him, and through all his senses to perceive in
the power and beauty of Nature the immanent presence of God. The doctrine of
immanence is nowadays, of course, associated in particular with the work of
Gerard Manley Hopkins. But it is the second form of Christian doctrine and
199
experience -- namely that of Transcendence - which can be said to characterise
the poetical and mystical vision of the Four Quartets . This doctrine insists on an
almost total separation of the human and the divine, of the temporal and the
eternal worlds. God, or the Supreme Being, is thought of as being separated
from our world of multiplicity by an immeasurable distance. And thus the path of
the man who is in search of spiritual perfection, or in search of God, must of
necessity be a path of interior darkness and of determined self-denial, a journey
‘inward and upward’.40
This explains partly why Hopkins’s poems are so full of emotional closeness / distance,
and Eliot’s so preoccupied with the difficulties of the inner life. The doctrine of immanence
offers a parental background (whether of love or withdrawal); the doctrine of transcendence
places the adult seeker on a path where assurance is not the background, but rather the goal. To
sense God’s immanence in the world is to be accompanied; to sense his transcendence is to be
more alone. Such inner states in turn structure the response to Nature, and natural images reflect
that response.
The stark contrast in the views of the two poets is underlined by their choice of seasons.
While Hopkins generally celebrates the seasons of freshness and renewal, Eliot generally seems
more at home with winter, when growth in Nature is slow. Spring for Hopkins as in The May
Magnificat is ‘Growth in every' thing - / Flesh and fleece, fur and feather, / Grass and greenwood
all together;’ when ‘bird and blossom swell / In sod or sheath or shell’. Hopkins in his poem
Spring not only describes the abundance of the spring but calls on you to rejoice in it.
NOTHING is so beautiful as Spring When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look like little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
200
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. - Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.
(P & P, 28)
Eye and ear are both called upon to respond accutely, from the bluish eggs of thrushes to their
piercing song; the blue skies, white lambs, lovely weeds (!), Hopkins is so much in love with the
natural world he cannot help wondering whence it all comes, what is it quite. Poems like Binsley
Poplars, and the celebrated The Windhover, and That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and o f the
comfort o f the Resurrection, all testify to the naturalist’s love of accuracy and the poet’s love of
beauty. The last-named unforgettably evokes the passage of cumulus clouds in a strong wind.
The world in all these poems, is big with ‘juice’ and ‘joy’.
Eliot’s references to spring are far more contained and muted. In the second stanza of
Section I of Ash-Wednesday, he uses the image of Spring in the phrase ‘where trees flower’
which qualifies it so as to suggest the inherent lack of conviction as faith does its disappearing
trick.
Because I do not hope to know again
The infirm glory of the positive hour
201
Because 1 do not thimk
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing
again
(CPP, 89)
The final impression is that ‘nothing again’ refers to ‘the disturbance of the spring’. The most
sustained image of ‘spring’ is not spring at all but ‘mid-winter Spring’ in December, the heart of
the winter 41 This appears in Little Gidding. It is interesting to see that, quite apart from locating
spring in winter, Eliot seldom focuses on images from Nature in, and for, themselves. Large and
generalized , they appear only to signify non-material inner states of mind. In Hopkins the inner
and outer are inseparable. It is precisely the material - the glassy pear tree for instance - that
mirrors the spiritual.
In both poets winter images separation from God, but as already noted, occurs more
frequently in Eliot than the other seasons (Journey o f the Magi, Song fo r Simeon are examples)
Light is another natural image that connotes multiple associations. Hopkins’s poems are
full of bright, dazzling lights, sometimes pale and fading lights, and sometimes absence of light,
but all are bathed in light or steeped in darkness. Eliot’s poems offer muted lights, in keeping
with his deliberate attempt to be understated in all aspects of his poetry; they offer little by way
of fluctuation. Hopkins’s poem The Starlight Night is of course, a poem about light. This light
brightens a world which contains Christ, his mother and all the saints.42 Elsewhere, light is
equated with Christ. Stanza 21 of The Wreck refers to him as the ‘Orion of light’.This is one of
the most unforgettable images in all of Hopkins’s poetry:
Thou art above, thou Orion of light.
202
Coming when it does, after the description of the sinking ship, the calling of the tall nun, the
buffeting of wind and water, it offers an image of total beauty and power as overarching and
wide as the sky over the sea. Orion is the constellation of the hunter, one of the most spectacular
in the night sky. Christ is here, ‘Orion of light’ - the one who hunts the human soul but
simultaneously the one who is light. Thus, the hunting and wreck are really redemption and
safety. Christ is also ‘A beacon, an eternal beacon’ when the poet is stranded on the ‘foundering
deck’ in That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and o f the comfort o f the Resurrection . Spelt from
Sybil's Leaves has the poet’s most sustained use of all possible shades of light to create a sense
of doom.
Eliot’s use of light images is neither as bold nor as direct nor as varied as Hopkins’s. A
Songfo r Simeon based as it is on the nunc dimitiis (‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart
in peace, according to thy word’, Luke II: 29) with its reference to “The dayspring from on high
” visiting those that sit in darkness, moves towards a staircase of light (‘Light upon light,
mounting the saint’s stair’).43 Ash-Wednesday’s Section IV has a redemptive Beatrician figure,
clothed in light:
White light folded, sheathed about her, folded.
Glittering light in Section I of Burnt Norton offers a positive moment when the drained pool
seems to be filled with water and light:
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown-edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light.
(CPP, 172)
On the whole, however, Eliot’s poems are haunted by half-lights and darkness (Section III of
East Coker is a threnody to darkness). Waiting in darkness seems natural for those ‘Who are torn
203
on the horn between season ans season, time and / time between / Hour and hour, word and
word, power and power
Section V, Ash-Wednesdcty). Light and darkness, of course, for
religious poets, constitute deeply invested, very highly charged symbolism. We have here taken
account only of light as an image in Nature. We have noted that light and dark play dramatically
over Hopkins’s world, and intermittently over Eliot’s world.
We turn now to religious imagery. The figure of the Virgin is prominent in the work of
both poets. This is natural in the work of Catholic poets. The figure of the Virgin Mary is
conspicuous by its absence in the religious poems of non-Catholic English poets.44 For Hopkins,
moving from Anglicanism into the embrace of Roman Catholicism, the Virgin does not become
a central figure of devotion as one might expect. He writes poems to celebrate her on formal
occasions at Stonyhurst and refers to her in The Wreck, The Starlight Night, and in the two
poems written in her honour, The May Magnificat and The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air
we Breathe. The May Magnificat is surprisingly wooden; and The Blessed Virgin Compared to
the Air we Breathe not much less so. In the latter poem Hopkins says revealingly
If I have understood
She holds high motherhood....
(P & P, 56)
suggesting a not-quite-internalised devotion.
In The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air we Breathe, Hopkins says that Christ our
Saviour took flesh from her flesh and that He is both God’s and Mary’s son. Mary is ‘Mary
Immaculate’, and though a ‘mere woman’, she has more powers than any Goddess could have,
because God’s glory flows ‘through her and from her’. The poet ends the poem with an odd
prayer to Mary, to be his atmosphere, (Be thou then, O thou dear / Mother, my atmosphere).
The May M agnificat, which is a ‘Marian’poem, composed as part of a Jesuit exercise, begins
with the question of why the month of May is associated with the Virgin, though the two feasts
204
o f Mary are Candlemas ( 2 February ) and the Feast o f the Annunciation ( 25 March) occur in
months other than May. The poet celebrates the month of May as ‘Mary’s month’ and ‘Lady
month’ which is the season o f Spring - ‘Nature’s motherhood’ and the poem ends with the poet
imagining the ‘mirth’ that Mary must have felt at ‘Christ’s birth’, of ‘God who was her salvation’,
at her own motherhood. The word ‘Magnificat’ is derived from the Latin magnificare , to magnify
or esteem. Mary’s Magnificat is her hymn praising God as in Luke I: 46-56. Blue is Mary’s
colour in the poems o f Hopkins.45 The season o f spring is ‘growth in everything’ and thus the
poet justifies the association o f the month o f May with the Virgin. In several places in The Wreck,
Hopkins looks upon the Virgin in no aspect other than her being the mother o f Christ:
‘Warm-laid grave o f a womb-life grey / Manger, maiden’s knee’ (stanza 7)
‘Jesu, maid’s son . . . Feast o f the one woman without stain’ (stanza 30)
‘Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame’ (stanza 34)
Hopkins expresses in his poems such a close relationship with Christ and the Father, that spiritual
consolation comes directly from these images. For instance, in The Windhover, Christ is addressed
both with familiarity and distance: ‘O my chevalier!’. When he visualises the starlit night enclosing
a group, the figure of Christ is central:
. . . This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse
Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.
(P & P, 28)
While there can be no doubt that devotions must have taken Hopkins close to the Virgin, her
image in the poetry does not recur frequently, and when it does, lacks the spontaneity and freshness
o f his references to Christ. Hopkins, as a whole (life/work) seems to have been virtually free of
any female influence. So this is not really surprising.
205
Surprisingly, it is Eliot coming from a Puritan background, who quite naturally uses the
image o f the Virgin to signify emotional closeness and love. The image o f Christ nowhere appears
directly; because He is a transcendent God. The poet therefore needs an intercessor which the
Virgin has traditionally been. Those intimate conversations that Hopkins has with the Father and
Son are nowhere present in Eliot’s poems. The Holy Spirit appears in the form o f fire or dove as
mentioned earlier, but the religious figure dearest to Eliot is the Virgin, or a related veiled sister
who honours the Virgin.
Mention was made in an earlier chapter of the uncomfortableness o f Eliot in his interaction
with women. Eliot’s anxiety in his relationships with real women disappears when he contemplates
a quasi-divine figure who leads him onto the path o f the higher love and reconciliation.The
Virgin is not always explicitly the Virgin in Eliot’s poems, she is quite often a Virgin-like figure.
In A Song fo r Simeon, the presentation o f the infant in the temple, Simeon’s prediction that a
‘sword shall her pierce’ is the only indirect reference to Mary and this o f course, is taken from
the gospel o f Luke (Chapter V).
In Ash-Wednesday, Part I closes with lines from the Hail Mary. We need to note the ease
with which those lines fall from the speaker without any sense of strain:
. . . Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Pray for us sinners now and at the hour o f our death
Pray for us now and at the hour o f our death.
(CPP, 90)
Part II offers both the Virgin and a related Lady. The scattered bones chirp:
Because o f the goodness o f this Lady
And because of her loveliness, and because
She honours the Virgin in meditation....
206
Setting up a link between the soul, the lady as mediator with the Virgin, herself the loving
intercessor.
The lyric in Part II (Lady of Silences) clearly recalls the Litany to the Virgin of Loreto,
most especially the lines:
Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
(CPP, 91)
which derive from the ‘Rosa mystica, domus aurea’ of the litany The lyric closes with a direct
reference to the Virgin:
Grace to the Mother
For the Garden
Where all love ends.
(CPP, 92)
This is comparable with Hopkins’s ‘piece-bright paling’ shutting in the ‘spouse Christ, Christ
and his mother and all his hallows’. In Eliot’s garden the Mother is the only figure - the Lady has
merged into the Virgin. Part IV brings the Lady back, but the resonances of the Virgin are
indubitable. She is seen
Going in white and blue, Mary’s colour;
Again, the larkspur is blue, Mary’s colour. The final prayer for intercession at the close of Part
VI with which the poem ends is again addressed to the Virgin. The lines ‘Teach us to care and
not to care’ repeated from Part I remind us that they were followed by the ‘Ora pro nobis’ of the
Hail Mary. Here they are followed by a different address, but it is still to the Virgin:
207
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother,
And spirit of the river, spirit o f the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated
And let my cry come unto Thee.
(CPP, 99)
Separation must be banished by closeness to the Mother. Through this channel he can approach
the divine. That this spirit o f the river is the Virgin and not any pagan Nature spirit is made by the
line with which the prayer began:
Blessed, sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden.
This is a clear reference to the Virgin Mary, who has, in Part II, been the Spirit o f the garden.
When she is called spirit of the sea, a few lines down, she is Stella Maris, the star o f the sea.
In the Four Quartets, The Dry Salvages has a lyrical section IV comprising a prayer to
the Virgin, ‘Lady whose shrine stands on the promontory’. This was discussed earlier in this
chapter. One needs to note here the direct reference to the Virgin in the second stanza of Section
IV:
Figlia del tuo figlio,
Queen o f Heaven.
This is of course one of the traditional ways o f describing the Virgin.
Eliot, as is evident, from the foregoing paragraphs falls back on traditional religious
images precisely because of the weight o f associations they carry. This is in keeping with his
habit o f introducing lines from the literatures o f the past; allusion is with him a device to release
multiple associations and provide effects o f contrast and / or continuity. In the same way, the
208
traditional religious image offers a psychological and emotional resting point in the quest o f a
distinctly modern and fragmented sensibility.
Apart from the Virgin, we may note that God the Father and God the Son are familiar
presences in the poetry o f Hopkins, and almost entirely absent in the religious poetry of Eliot.
Hopkins images God as the masterful and overpowering lord o f the tides in the opening stanzas
o f The Wreck. He appears also as a stern and chastising father. When he is absent, Hopkins refers
to him as ‘dearest him that lives alas ! away’ ( 7 wake and feel the fe ll o f dark, not day ’) He is
also a Judge in a Court o f Law ( ‘Thou art indeed just, Lord, i f I contend'). The images all point
to a vividly sensed and deeply respected Father figure.
In Eliot’s poems, this image is entirely absent, a most interesting lacuna. The reference to
God as transcendent made earlier 46 and outside the world explains Eliot’s refusal (or failure) to
imagine him.
With Christ, Hopkins is entirely at home. All joy comes from this image and goes back to
it; he is proclaimed over and over again, now by a kestrel, now by a starlight night, now by a
kingfisher, now by a bell. Each thing, in being itself, proclaims Christ ( ‘A s kingfishers catch fire,
dragonflies draw flame ’ ). The image o f Christ as Christ (as distinct from the windhover as
Christ, for example) is also tenderly and joyously drawn. In The Wreck, he is the child Jesus
(stanza 7), heart’s light (stanza 30), Walker on Waves (stanza 28), released shower (stanza 34),
a day spring, crimson-cresseted east, pride, rose, hero, high-priest, fire, and the Lord o f all thought
(stanza 35)1 It is as if Hopkins cannot say enough. Where is Christ in the poetry o f Eliot? The
only (possible) reference is in Section IV o f East Coker, (the least lyrical o f all the lyrical fourth
sections in the Four Quartets).
The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
209
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.
Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam’s curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.
The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.
The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid puragtorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.
The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food :
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.
(CPP, 181-82)
210
What, we ask, is this? Christ is a surgeon, himself wounded, but a healer who examines the fever
chart at the foot of the patient’s bed in this hospital which is the world. We are a million miles
away from Hopkins’s ecstatic ‘O my chevalier!’.
The Holy Spirit fares somewhat better in Eliot’s hands. He is there as fire and dove in
Little Gidding, as indeed he is in Hopkins’s God's Grandeur which closes with the image of the
Holy Ghost as a brooding dove bent over the world ( an image also used by Milton in the
opening invocation to Paradise Lost).
The use of religious imagery by Hopkins and Eliot suggests that Hopkins uses images in
a more startling and surprising way than Eliot. His references to Christ as ‘a released shower’
and the virgin as ‘my atmosphere’ among many others indicate a soul that thrusts itself forward
and longs to be nestled in a close embrace, to discover in the entire world (the rain, the air) the
embrace he longs for.
Eliot while remaining almost entirely with traditional parameters in his imagery, surprises
us with his devotion to the Virgin. This comes as a surprise because nothing in his background
(certainly nothing in the Church into which he was born) and not very much in the Church of his
adoption leads us to expect it. As suggested earlier, the a-sexuality of the figure of the Virgin
Mary combined with its utter beauty and purity, make that image a specially attractive one for
Eliot.
Both Hopkins and Eliot are seekers longing for God in their poetry. For Hopkins God
exists, most gloriously in, but also beyond, the physical, material world. God exists in storms, in
nature’s bonfire, in stars, in ten thousand places. It is the celebration o f God and His experience
which the poet feels and shares. Eliot’s search is more mystical and he finds God ‘here and now’.
Eliot is preoccupied with particular moments and spots against the screen of eternal time and
history. Hokpins’s images are specifically themselves and never other. Eliot’s images are seldom
independent objects; they always nearly point away to a larger experience or pattern Hopkins
211
wants the worldly as well as spiritual journey to be a collective one, whereas Eliot pursues his
goal alone, Hopkins is more or less consistent in his poetic style, whereas we discern a distinct
change in Eliot’s poetic idiom as well as imagery in his post-1927 religious phase. It is surprising
that Eliot who gave so much importance to thought and feeling is remembered for his technical
achievement, whereas Hopkins who paid so much attention to form appeals instantly to the
heart. While Hopkins’s life is dedicated to the Creator always through the senses by means of
which he ‘gleans’ the Saviour through his poetry and enjoys a bountiful harvest, Eliot’s poetry
is his exploration of life, and the end of the exploration is for him the starting point.
212
CHAPTER V
LANGUAGE AND IMAGERY IN THE POETRY OF HOPKINS AND ELIOT
NOTES
I
T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Selected Essays. 2nd ed. (London:
Faber and Faber Limited, 1934) 21.
^
T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber and Faber,
1933)118-19.
^
S. H. Burton. The Criticism of Poetry (London: Longman, 1950) 37-8.
^
Enid Hamer, The Metres of English Poetry (London: Methuen, 1930) 4-6.
^
G. M. Hopkins, “Author’s Preface,” Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose ed.
W. H. Gardner (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1953) 7-8.
£
G. M. Hopkins, “Selected Letters,” Gerard Manley Hopkins : Poems and Prose, ed.
Gardner, 187-8.
n
G. M. Hopkins, “Author’s Preface,” Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose, ed.
Gardner, 11.
^
G. S. Fraser, Metre.Rhyme and Free Verse (London: Methuen, 1970) 71.
^
Burton 66.
A. David Moody, Tracing T, S. Eliot’s Spirit : Essays on his Poetry and Thought
(Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1996) 144,
II
Moody 145.
12
T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1957) 37.
213
*^ Elisabeth Schneider, T.S.Eliot: The Pattern in the Carpet (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
U of California P, 1975) 113.
*^
Burton 71.
15 Larkin says “As A guiding principle I believe that every poem must have its own sole
freshly created universe, and therefore have no belief in “tradition” or a “common myth-kitty” or
casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets which I find unpleasantly like the talk of
literary understrappers letting you see they know the right people.” Philip Larkin, Required
Writing : Miscellaneous pieces 1955-1982 (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1983) 20. Larkin
has also directly expressed his views on Eliot and the ‘modernist revolution’ in English poetry in
an interview with Ian Hamilton: “ 1would say that I have been most influenced by the poetry that
I have enjoyed - and this poetry has not been Eliot or Pound or anybody who is normally
regarded as ‘modern’ - which is a sort of technique word, isn’t it? The poetry I’ve enjoyed has
been the kind of poetry you’d associate with me, Hardy pre-eminently, Wilfred Owen, Auden,
Christina Rossetti, William Barnes; on the whole, people to whom technique seems to matter
less than content, people who accept the forms they have inherited but use them to express their
own content . . . What I do feel a bit rebellious about is that poetry seems to have got into the
hands of a critical industry which is concerned with culture in the abstract, and this I do lay at the
door of Eliot and Pound. ‘Four Conversations’, London Magazine 4.6 (1964) : 71.
^
J. M.Cohen. The Baroque Lyric (London: Hutchinson U Library, 1963) 11.
17
A. C. Sewter, Baroque and Rococo Art (London: Thames and Hudson Limited,
1972) 140.
^
Cohen 11.
1^ Elisabeth Schneider, The Dragon in the G ate: Studies in the Poetry of G.M. Hopkins
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1968) 144. (Capitals as in original)
214
20
Gardner notes that in a reply to Bridges’s criticism in 1879, Hopkins admitted of
‘oddness’ in his poetry - that it is a vice he could not have escaped qtd. in introduction, W,H.
Gardner, ed., Gerard Manley Hopkins : Poems and Prose, ed. Gardner, xxii. In yet another reply
to Bridges dated May 13, 1878, qtd. in “Selected Letters,” in Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems
and Prose, ed. Gardner, 178. Hopkins accepts criticism about his poem Enrydice saying “Granted
that it needs study and is obscure .
. . ” In another reply to Bridges dated Aug. 21, 1877,
Hopkins defends himself against Bridges’s charge o f ‘presumptious jugglery’ and ‘obscurity’ in
The Wreck qtd. in Gerald Roberts ed., Gerard Manley Hopkins : The Critical Heritage, (London
and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987) 51.
21
Marjorie Bolton , The Anatomy of Poetry (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
(1953) 58.
22
21
The King James Study Bible (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1988) 1604.
Hopkins, “Selected Letters,” Gerard Manley Hopkins : Poems and Prose . ed.
Gardner, 154-5-6-7-8.
24
25
The Bible, 1604.
Donald Davie, Purity of Diction in English Verse and Articulate Energy (London:
Penguin Books Ltd., 1992 ) 6.
C.L.Wrenn, The English Language (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1983)
179-80.
27
Poems of Wordsworth like Tintern Abbey, The Prelude, and The Excursion are
excluded from the poems referred to.
28
Eliot. On Poetry. 19-20.
2^
Eliot. On Poetry. 33.
215
T.S.Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Selected Essays 2nd ed. (London:
Faber and Faber Limited, 1934) 21.
31
Davie 254.
32
Davie 280.
'i'y
Frank Thillv and Ledger Wood. A History of Philosophy 3rdedn.fNew York: Henry
Holt and Company, 1959) 244.
34 Allan Wolter, trans. Duns Scotus: Philosophical Writings : A Selection (Indianapolis:
The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1962) 70-71.
1s
The reference to fishermen carries associations of the first Apostles,
3^
Derek Traversi, T. S. E liot: The Longer Poems (London: The Bodley Head, 1976)
153.
•-> - y
J ' Matthew Arnold, Poetical Works eds. C.B. Tinker and H.F. Lowry (London: Oxford
UP, 1966) 87.
38
Arnold, Poetical Works. 246.
mq
Frank Thilly and Ledger Wood, A History of Philosophy. 32-33.
^
Paul Murray, T. S. Eliot and Mysticism : The Secret History of Four Quartets
(Houndmills and Basingstoke: The Macmillan P Ltd., 1991) 259.
^'
In The Wasteland, April is “ the cruellest month”.
^2
The hymn ‘Jerusalem the Golden’, translated by John Mason Neale from the Latin
(Urbs sion aurea by Bernard of Cluny), offers a vision of Christ and the saints enclosed in a
radiancy of glory. Hopkins, however, gives us light at night. In J M Neale’s hymn (no. 412 in
The English Hymnal), the second stanza refers to unfailing daylight (borrowing from the Book
of Revelations):
216
Thy stand those halls of Sion
Conjubilant with song,
And bright with many an angel
The Prince is ever in them
The daylight is serene,
The pastures of the blessed
Are decked in glorious sheen .
(italics added)
^
A hymn by H. Alfred in the nineteenth century (no. 486 in The English Hymnal),
uses the same image:
Ten thousand times ten thousand
In sparkling raiment bright,
The armies of the ransomed saints
Throng up the steeps o f lig h t.
Tis finished ! all is finished,
Their fight with death and sin;
Fling open wide the golden gates
And let the victors in.
( italics added)
^
Fromm notes that “ . . . there was a matriarchal phase in religion preceding the
patriarchal one . . . In the matriarchal phase, the highest being is the mother. She is the goddess,
is also the authority of family and society. In order to understand the essence of matriarchal
religion, we have only to remember what has been said about the essence of motherly love.
Mother’s love is unconditional, it is all-protective, all-enveloping . . . The next phase . . . is the
217
patriarchal phase. In this phase the mother is dethroned from her supreme position, and the
father becomes the Supreme Being. The nature of fatherly love is that he makes demands,
establishes principles and laws, and that his love for the son depends on the obedience of the
latter to these demands . . . In the Catholic religion, Mother is symbolised by the Church, and by
the Virgin. Even in Protestantism, the figure of Mother has not been entirely eradicated, although
she remains hidden.” Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1975) 5859.
^
According to the medieval system of liturgical colours, in which there is evidence of
correlation between significant colours and the seasonal feasts of the Church’s year, the colour
blue was associated with Ephiphany and Ascension. A general rule formally defined later in 1570
under Pius V listed white and red as associated with the Blessed Virgin Mary.In the Roman
Catholic Church the post-Vatican II Ordo Missae (1969) white was the colour of Mary. J. G. Davies,
ed. A Dictionary of Liturgy and Worship (London: SCM P Ltd., 1972) 178-180.
^
As in the quote from Paul Murray (note no. 37).