CHRISTOPHER R. WILSON

                        NINETEENTH-CENTURY MUSCIAL AGOGICS AS AN ELEMENT IN  

                        GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS'S PROSODY

MY PRIMARY PURPOSE in this essay is not to extend discussion of Hopkins's specific literary models.  Nor do I attempt to locate Hopkins's poetic style in any literary tradition.  Rather, I am interested in exploring his references to and use of nineteenth-century musical agogics--that is, to the widespread use of rubato, rhythmic flexibility, pauses, and accents that is characteristic of Romantic music.  Hopkins was familiar with some of the music of the German Romantics from Weber to Wagner, and from his own playing and concert-going he would also have been accustomed to late Romantic performance practice.  Indeed, Hopkins was an enthusiastic amateur musician.  Like Hart Crane, he played the piano--though not very well.  He composed songs on his and other's poetry.  Hopkins even wrote to Robert Bridges that in his later years he found greater solace in music than in poetry:  "Every impulse and spring of art seems to have died in me, except for music, and that I pursue under almost an impossibility of getting on."  

I believe that Hopkins's mode of thing and talking about poetry, his "mindset," was that of a musician.  He perceived syllables or words as musical notes, metrical "feet" as bars, lines or sentences as phrases, paragraphs or stanzas as movements or sections of movements.  As in music, so in Hopkins's poetry:  the agogics or tempo rubato are imprecise.  They are not, however, incidental, acting as some sort of rhetorical ornament.  They are very much part of his style and poetic mode, just as they are essential to the performance of Romantic music.  From the perspective of nineteenth-century literature, Hopkins's poetry is indeed idiosyncratic and hard to place.  But, like Whitman, his musical mode of thinking and writing, his "musicality," resulted, as Robert Hollander points out, in "a new type of metrical contract being drawn, in which the commitment is made not to convention, but to the poetic self."  As such, his poetry should be viewed as one of the "specialized consequences of Romanticism"--a consequence emanating in this case from the influence of Romantic musical expression.