'For the Inscape's Sake': Sounding the Self in the Metres of Gerard Manley Hopkins

ABSTRACT

This article is part of a cluster that draws material from the recent conference Metre Matters: New Approaches to Prosody, 1780–1914. It comprises an introduction by Jason David Hall and six articles presented at the conference, whose aim was to address renewed scholarly interest in versification and form across the long nineteenth century, as well as some of the methodologies underpinning it. The papers included in the cluster look both to the minutiae of Romantic and Victorian metres and to their cultural intertexts. The conference, hosted by the University of Exeter's Centre for Victorian Studies, was held 3–5 July 2008.

The cluster is made up of the following articles: Jason David Hall, 'Metre, History, Context: Introduction to the Metre Matters Cluster'.

Emma Mason and Rhian Williams, 'Reciprocal Scansion in Wordsworth's "There Was a Boy"'.

Ross Wilson, 'Robert Browning's Compounds'.

Margaret A. Loose, 'The Internationalism of Ernest Jones's Dialectical Prosody'.

Nancy Jiwon Cho, 'Gender and Authority in British Women Hymn-Writers' Use of Metre, 1760–1900'.

Ashley Miller, 'Involuntary Metrics and the Physiology of Memory'.

Summer Star, '"For the Inscape's Sake": Sounding the Self in the Metres of Gerard Manley Hopkins'.

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This article explores the nature of (and makes an argument for) the relationship between Gerard Manley Hopkins's interests in the primary otherness in language and his philosophy of selfhood. To consider both the crucial and problematic nature of such a union, I contextualize Hopkins's own interest in primitive language with the 'natural language' theories that influenced and bourgeoned in the nineteenth century, arguing that Hopkins's 'sprung rhythm' was his own contribution to the search for the primitive roots of human speech. Hopkins's metrical expressions of physical movement in his poems with human subjects (specifically in the 'St. Dorothea' poems and 'Harry Ploughman') are a representation of the deep distinctiveness of subjective experience: the experience of 'pitch', which Hopkins theorized in his sermons, or of one's own instress. In this way, metre itself was for the poet a manifestation of an original union between the physical, bodily, and spiritual realms – enacting incarnation. Yet how can we reconcile the poeticizing of the pitch of another with Hopkins's own insistence on the utter and unapproachable difference of that other's own 'self-taste'? Responding to resonances between this problem and modern ethical theory, particularly Merleau-Ponty's notion of how we conceive of otherness through physical observation, I consider Hopkins's metrical expressions of physical embodiment as a possible answer to their own ethical problem. Looking into his often-employed concept of 'sake', defined by Hopkins himself as 'that being which a thing has outside itself', this article finally compares the sounding of this human pitch, of hearing its echo, to Hopkins's religious faith in language as a manifestation of divine being in the world – and in a divine distinctiveness of self destined to transcend mortal limits.