Double-Ridged Rib

THE FIRED I' THE FLINT

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.

In each case the verse lives by its music and suggestiveness, but with one important difference: the suggestiveness here condenses on a stated theme, 'a nun takes the veil', and the heaven-purity-cold idea equates with the haven-nun-ery-quiet images in a relationship that is essentially allegorical rather than symbolic. The Hopkins poem is fretted rather than fecund. In the Blake poem the rose might be a girl but it remains a rose. Yet it is also a rose window, blookshot with the light of other possible meanings. The rose and the sickness are not illustrative in the way the lilies and the haven are. In 'Heaven-Haven' it is the way things are exquisitely wrought, the way a crystal is sharp and sided and knowable rather than the way a rose is deep and unknowable that counts. Hopkin's art here is the discovery of verbal equivalents, in mingling the purity of images with the idea of a vow of chastity. The words are crafted together more than they are coaxed out of one another, and they are crafted in the service of an idea that precedes the poem, is independent of it and to which the poem is perhaps ultimately subservient. So much for the dark embryo. We are now in the real of flint-spark rather than marshlight. 'Heaven-Haven' is consonantal fire struck by idea off language. The current of its idea does not fly the bound it chafes but confines itself with in delightful ornamental channels.

To take another comparison witha a poet whose nervous apprehension of phenomena and ability to translate this nervous energy into phrases reminds us also of Hopkins: take this line by Keats, describing autumn as the season of fulfilment:

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun

and compare it with a Hopkins line that also realizes a sense of burgeoning and parturition, imagining Jesus in Mary's womb:

Warm-laid grave of a womb-life grey.

Both lines rely on the amplitude of vowels for their dream of benign, blood-warm growth, but where Keats's vowels seem like nubs, buds off a single uh or oo, yeasty growths that are ready at any moment to relapse back into the original mother sound, Hopkins's are defined, held apart, and in relation to one another rather than in relation to the original nub: if they are also faceted. Hopkin's consonants alliterate to maintain a design whereas Keats's release a flow. I am reminded of something T. S. Eliot wrote compaing Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. In Jonson, Eliot remarked in The Sacred Wood:

unconscious does not respond to unconscious; no swarms of inarticulate feelings are aroused. The immediate appeal of Jonson is to the mind; his emotional tone is not in the single verseo but in the desing of the whole.

We must say much the same of Keats and Hopkins lines.

Keats has the life of a swarm, fluent and merged; Hopkins has de design of the honeycomb, definite and loaded. In Keats, the rhythem is narcotic, in Hopkins it is a stimulant to the mind.

Keats woos us to receive, Hopkins alerts us to perceive.

I think that what is true of this single Hopkins line is generally true of the kind of poetry he writes. For in spite of the astounding richness of his music and the mimetic power of his vocabulary, his use of language is disciplined by a philological and rhetorical passion. There is a conscious push of the deliberating intelligence, (there it isn't) a siring strain rather than a birth-push in his poetic act. Like Jonson, he is poeta doctus; like Jonson's, his verse is 'rammed with life', butting ahead instead of hanging back into its own centre. As opposed to the symbolist petic, it is concerned with statement instead of states of feeling. Indeed, at this point it is interesting to recall Ben Jonson's strictures on the Shakespearian fluency, rejecting linguistic mothering in favour of rhetorical mastery. Jonson, you remember, was not impressed by the way Shakespeare's current flies each bound it chafes:

I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted a line. My answer hath been, 'Would he had blotted a thousand.'...He was, indeed, honest and of an open and free nature wherein he flowed with tath facility that sometime it was necessary he should be stopped... His wit was in his own power: would the rule of it had been so too.

pg 84-85

Seamus Heaney