Abstract

The paper aims to explore prosodic experimentation and musical sensibility designed for limning the dynamism observed in the Victorian world by the poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins in his poetry, especially, in “The Windhover”, “God’s Grandeur”, “Pied Beauty”, “Inversnaid” and “Spring”. Through a close reading of the prosody, rhythm, rhyme, metrics, alliteration, assonance and onomatopoeia in Hopkins’ poems from the theoretical paradigms of the prosody, and sprung rhythm, propounded by Hopkins himself, and some other theorists, the study is an attempt to prove how Gerard Manley Hopkins exploits the rhythmic novelty to give each poem a distinctive design to capture his apprehension of dynamism, the intense thrust of energy in nature. The finding is that it was the Victorian culture and milieu evoked by the Second Industrial Revolution, technological advance, and Hopkins’ conviction that God manifested in the material world that influenced him to use innovative rhythmic patterns in his poetry so that we could perceive how the universe is characterized by a distinctive design that constitutes individual identity. It is expected that researchers intending to observe the prosodic techniques in poetry in general and Hopkins in particular can take the paper as a reference.

Keywords

Dynamism, Majesty, Music, Rhyme, Sprung Rhythm,

Metrics

Metrics Loading ...

References

  1. Abbott, C.C. (1935a). The correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard. Oxford University Press.
  2. Abrams, M. H. & Greenblatt, S. (1999). The Norton anthology of English literature (7th Ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.
  3. Attridge, D. (1990). Rhythm in English poetry, New Literary History, 21(4), 1015–1037 https://doi.org/10.2307/469197
  4. Baldwin, E. Inversnaid by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Poem analysis. https://poemanalysis.com/gerard-manley-hopkins/inversnaid/
  5. Crystal, D. (2003). A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics. John Wiley & Sons.
  6. Curzan, A. & Adams, M. (2009). How english works. Pearson Longman.
  7. Harrison, T.P. (1957). The Birds of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Studies in Philology, 54(3), 448-63. https://www.jstor.org/stable/i392338.
  8. Hopkins, G. M. (1918). The windhover, pied beauty, spring, Inversnaid, God’s grandeur. In M. H. Abrams & S. Greenblatt (Eds.), Norton anthology of English literature, of Gerard Manley Hopkins (7th Ed). W. W. Norton & Company.
  9. Hopkins, G. M. (1918). Inversnaid. In R. Bridges (Ed.), Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Wordsworth Poetry Library.
  10. Hurley, M.D. (2005). Darkening the subject of Hopkins’ prosody. Victorian Poetry, 43(4), 485-495. https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2006.0004
  11. Jacobson, R. (1964). Closing statement: linguistics and poetics. Style in language. Cambrigde.
  12. Kaczyński, D. (2018). Jesus Christ as one of the persons of the holy trinity in G. M. Hopkins’s the windhover. The Explicator, 76 (2), 1-4. https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2018.144561
  13. Kermode, J. (2018). Alliteration and assonance in poetry. Explore writing. Routledge, 43-45.
  14. Kuhn, J. (1978). The completeness of Pied beauty. Studies in English Literature, 18 (4), 677-692. https://doi.org/10.2307/450198
  15. MacKenzie, N. H. (1990). The poetical works of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Oxford University Press, 51.
  16. Mariani, P.L. (1970). A commentary on the complete poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Cornell University Press. Miller, C.H. (1994). G. M. Hopkins’ spring as a May-day poem. The Hopkins Quarterly, 21(1/2), 23-27.
  17. Reid, J. C. (Ed.). (2020). Gerard Manley Hopkins’ biography. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gerard-Manley-Hopkins
  18. Ross, H. (1999). Beauty- how Hopkins pied it. Language Sciences, 21(3), 237-250. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0388-0001(98)00026-6
  19. Sacks, O. (2007). Musicophilia, tales of music and the brain. Alfred A. Knopf.
  20. Sobolov, D. (2004). Gerard Manley Hopkins and the language of mysticism. Christianity and Literature, 54 (4), 455- 480. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F014833310405300402
  21. Spurgin, L. (2015). Featured poem: Inversnaid by Gerard Manley Hopkins. The Reader. https://www.thereader.org.uk/featured-poem-inversnaid-by-gerard-manley-hopkins/
  22. Stephenson, E. A. (1981). Hopkins’ sprung rhythm and the rhythm of Beowulf. Victorian Poetry, 19 (2), 97-116. Tartakovsky, R. (2015). Free verse, rhythm: an introduction. Style, 49(1), 1-7. https://doi.org/10.5325/style.49.1.0001
  23. Urban, D.V. (2018). Ignatius inscape and instress in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s pied beauty, God’s grandeur, the starlight night, and the windhover: Hopkins’s movement toward ignatius by way of Walter Pater. Religions, 9 (2), 49. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel9020049
  24. White, G.M. (1966). Hopkins’ God’s grandeur: A poetic statement of Christian doctrine. Victorian Poetry, 4 (4), 284- 287.