Selected Sonnets and Other Lyrics by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Sound is clearly an important feature here, but it is far from being pointless and redundant with regard to meaning. The alliteration and assonance creates a strong. basically iambic, rhythm, with stresses on the alliterating words. This gives the line its impetus and energy: the sense that these ‘weeds’ are growing at extraordinary speed. The word ‘wheels’ fits perfectly with this sense of exuberant energy, and indeed precisely describes the movements of certain shoots, like brambles or ivy, that circle around looking for platforms on which to climb. The ‘meaning’ here – the extraordinary energy of spring – is primarily communicated by the sound, not the semantics of the words themselves.

Sound also provides connections: ‘lush’ takes us to ‘Thrush’s eggs,’ so that the exuberant variety of Nature that Hopkins wishes to bring before the reader can be stitched together in a network of sound. The Starlight Night provides a particularly clear example of this organising principle of sound in Hopkins, with its alliterative progression through the alphabet – ‘bright boroughs, circle-citadels…diamond delves.’ Hopkins uses this technique to create a cornucopia of wonder and variation; the reader’s imagination is launched from ‘fire-folk’ to diamond mines to ‘quickgold’ in a manner that would not succeed artistically if all these strange and various elements were not connected in the web of sound and rhythm. Here it might be argued that the aural network of the poem actually provides an underlying structure for meaning to rest upon.

Rhythm is central to Hopkins’ poetry. Indeed, he invented his own form of verse, that he called ‘sprung rhythm,’ and which works by adding extra, unstressed syllables to a line so that the stresses acquire a special emphasis or ‘release,’ as if a spring were suddenly uncoiled. An excellent example of rhythm itself communicating meaning comes in the opening of the sestet of The Windhover : ‘Brute beauty, and valour, and act, oh, air, pride, plume here/ Buckle AND the fire that breaks from thee then.’ In terms of pure semantics, this line has only limited coherence. Even given the ‘superimposed’ images of horseman and kestrel in the octet (‘his riding of the rolling level underneath him steady air…how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing’) the list of nouns (with one adjective), ‘Brute beauty, and valour, and act…,’ hardly creates a clear or vivid image or meaning in the reader’s mind. Certainly, it is possible to relate each of these words to both a knight in armour and the windhover itself, but this is surely at a later stage of reflection on the poem, or even in depth study.