Colors
According to Hopkins’s theory of inscape, all living things
have a constantly shifting design or pattern that gives each object
a unique identity. Hopkins frequently uses color to describe these
inscapes. “Pied Beauty” praises God for giving every object a distinct
visual pattern, from sunlight as multicolored as a cow to the beauty
of birds’ wings and freshly plowed fields. Indeed, the word pied means
“having splotches of two or more colors.” In “Hurrahing in Harvest,”
the speaker describes “azourous hung hills” (9)
that are “very-violet-sweet” (10). Elsewhere,
the use of color to describe nature becomes more complicated, as
in “Spring.” Rather than just call the birds’ eggs “blue,” the speaker
describes them as resembling pieces of the sky and thus demonstrates
the interlocking order of objects in the natural world. In “The
Windhover,” the speaker yokes adjectives to convey the peculiar,
precise beauty of the bird in flight—and to convey the idea that nature’s
colors are so magnificent that they require new combinations of
words in order to be imagined.
Ecstatic, Transcendent Moments
Many of Hopkins’s poems feature an ecstatic outcry, a
moment at which the speaker expresses his transcendence of the real
world into the spiritual world. The words ah, o,
and oh usually signal the point at which the poem
moves from a description of nature’s beauty to an overt expression
of religious sentiment. “Binsey Poplars” (1879),
a poem about the destruction of a forest, begins with a description
of the downed trees but switches dramatically to a lamentation about
the human role in the devastation; Hopkins signals the switch by
not only beginning a new stanza but also by beginning the line with
“O” (9). Hopkins also uses exclamation points
and appositives to articulate ecstasy: in “Carrion Comfort,” the
speaker concludes with two cries to Christ, one enclosed in parentheses
and punctuated with an exclamation point and the other punctuated
with a period. The words and the punctuation alert the reader to
the instant at which the poem shifts from secular concerns to religious
feeling.
Bold Musicality
To express inscape and instress, Hopkins experimented
with rhythm and sound to create sprung rhythm, a distinct musicality
that resembles the patterns of natural speech in English. The flexible
meter allowed Hopkins to convey the fast, swooping falcon in “The
Windhover” and the slow movement of heavy clouds in “Hurrahing in
Harvest.” To indicate how his lines should be read aloud, Hopkins
often marked words with acute accents, as in “As Kingfishers Catch
Fire” and “Spring and Fall.” Alliteration, or the juxtaposition
of similar sounds, links form with content, as in this line from
“God’s Grandeur”: “And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared
with toil” (6). In the act of repeating “red,”
our mouths make a long, low sound that resembles the languid movements
of humans made tired from factory labor. Elsewhere, the alliterative
lines become another way of worshiping the divine because the sounds
roll and bump together in pleasure. “Spring” begins, “Nothing is
so beautiful as Spring— / When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and
lovely and lush” (1–2).
