The Revelations of Gerard Manley Hopkins

This poem is a variant on the Italian sonnet form with only four rhyming groups spread across the fourteen lines. Yet the dense internal rhythms, rhymes, and alliterations subsume the musical nature of the form, bending it to an even more musical purpose. Much of this happens through the line breaks. Consider the opening, “I caught this morning morning’s minion, king- / dom of daylight’s dauphin.” Here we are set up with a huge expectation of repetition right from the beginning with “morning morning’s minion.” Next we see the word “king” hung on a line, next to the word “minion,” which makes its own kind of initial meaning since the words are opposites. Then it is revealed to be only half of the word “kingdom” — of “daylight’s dauphin” no less, continuing the alliteration, the theme of master/servant, and the theme of morning. So many elements are tightly woven together in only the first eleven lines!

Hopkins uses line breaks like this one as a kind of revelation. He also often employs the colon to similar effect as well as, though to a lesser degree than Dickinson, the hyphen. The point is that the poem itself becomes a revelation, as the meaning of previous lines alters by the time we have read the next line. One of the most exquisite moments of revelation in the poem comes with “the hurl and gliding / Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding / Stirred for a bird,” which, having become so delightfully disoriented by previous lines, we might read as, “the hurl and gliding rebuffed” and then “the big wind: my heart.” The revelation of the speaker’s own heart comes after an immense build-up, and changes meaning before our very eyes. The ending lines speak for themselves, as the crescendo of list-making reaches a dizzying pitch, beyond the realm of conventional meaning, in a kind of bird-Christ rapture.

Strangely enough, for all his metrical genius, Hopkins is a kind of forebearer to free verse, in that he focuses on the same kinds of poetic elements that excited our poetic grandparents like Stevens and Williams. Yet unlike our great-grandparent, Whitman, Hopkins arrived in this territory not by slackening and expanding his lines to make a kind of breathless natural speech, but by compressing them intensely, pushing the boundary in the opposite direction. In doing so, he extracts essential, non-literal aspects of poetry that remain a vital influence.