Hopkins studied philosophy at the Jesuit college Stonyhurst, in Whalley, East Lancashire between 1870 and 1873, returning later to teach there in 1878, and between 1882 and 1884. Monk explains that during research for the
sequence she was drawn to a similarity between the poetry that Hopkins wrote during his time at Stonyhurst, and the witches’ spells; she found the
‘convergence of people, place and religious belief [...] irresistible’
(‘Collaborations’ 179). She suggests that ‘making extensive use of [Hopkins’] poems’ along with ‘the witches’ own spells’ raises several questions about the interchangeability of the texts and their authors, and therefore the extent to which the ‘balance’ of their respective lives is altered by their ‘placement in time, social position and gender’. Thus Monk claims that she is able to interrogate several ‘social, political and historical myths’ through effecting, or permitting ‘these chance collisions of words and worlds’ (‘Collaborations’ 180). The chapter concludes then with a discussion of Hopkins as Monk’s primary
interlocutor, one that reveals ambivalence towards the claims of unruly freedom that the poem and its commentators might otherwise suggest. This section concludes the chapter by showing that the poem’s excavation of seventeenth- century sources and voices of Pendle, is incomplete for Monk without Hopkins’ sacramental poetics of place.
Like Monk, Hopkins’ imagination was pricked by the association of witchcraft with Pendle; his journal records the following walk over the hill during his initial stay at Stonyhurst in 1872.
Sept. 17 – I wandered all over Pendle with Mr. Sutton. There are some black scalped places on it that look made for a witches’ sabbath, especially on the far side looking over the part of the country which the bulk of the hill between hides from us here, where the hillside is very sheer, and you might fancy them
dancing on the black piece and higher and higher at each round then flinging off at last one after the other on her broomstick clear over the flat country below. And there is another odd thing by the same token here, namely that looking out forward over the edge while right and left and beyond is wooded […] there lies before you a bare stretch of land almost without a tree it is so bleak and bare and in size and shape just such as might be covered by the shadow of Pendle at some time of day: as the shadow of a wall or tree scores off and keeps and shelters hoarfrost or dew and the sunlight eats up to the edge of it this seemed chilled and blasted with just such well-marked plotting of and bounding line.113
Much of Hopkins’ journal entries are given over to observations of natural phenomena, the detail and pattern of clouds, water, flora and fauna. The act of imagining the witches also occurs directly out of the poet’s experience of being on the hill, corresponding with his observations of form, pattern and design in the landscape. The ‘black scalped places’ on Pendle are reflected in an
adjacent ‘bare stretch of land’ which the poet imagines as a shadow repeatedly cast by the hill. The shadow marks out the bare stretch of land like a draughts- person or artist ‘plotting’ the ‘bounding line’ of a shape or form. Hopkins’
fascination with design and pattern is evident throughout his poetry and prose, but is as Catherine Phillips suggests, anticipated in his sketches and drawings, particularly in the privileging of ‘line over tonal’ shading and the sharp attention to detail.114 This concern with pattern is, Phillips argues, integral to the poet’s idea of ‘inscape’, although the artistic origin of Hopkins’ term is generally she claims overlooked by critics.115 In a letter of 1879 to Robert Bridges, his literary executor, Hopkins attests directly to the importance of artistic modes for the rendering of inscape in his poetry: ‘design, pattern or what I am in the habit of calling “inscape” is what I above all aim at in poetry. Now it is the virtue of design, pattern, or inscape to be distinctive and it is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer.’ The distinctive quality of inscape, or unique pattern of a thing, is apt to make it appear strange or ‘queer’ and Hopkins admits that his own poetry ‘errs on the side of oddness’.116 Here Pendle Hill is made as ‘odd’ as the history and myth embedded there, through the pattern and design that
113 Hopkins, Notebooks and Papers, ed. by House, pp. 168–9. 114 Phillips, Hopkins and the Victorian Visual World, p. 34. 115 Phillips, Hopkins and the Victorian Visual World, p. 35.
116 Hopkins, letter to Robert Bridges, 15 February 1879, in Hopkins to Bridges, ed. by Abbott, p.
Hopkins perceives in the ‘bleak and bare’ landscape before him. Landscape thus ‘plotted and pieced’ appears again in ‘Pied Beauty’, indicating a correlation between God’s intelligent design and human agricultural enterprise. Yet here too all God’s ‘dappled things’ run surprisingly ‘counter, original, spare, strange’ to the harmonious principles of Hopkins’ Christian cosmology, or divine pattern. Commenting on inscape, Wilhelmus Peters remarks that ‘the suffix scape in ‘landscape’ and ‘seascape’ posits the presence of a unifying principle which enables us to consider part of the countryside or sea as a unit and as an individual, but so that this part is perceived to carry the typical properties of the actually undivided whole.’117 This sense of differentiated unity is key to Hopkins’ sense of the unique patterning of a thing as it expresses the universal divine pattern.118 As I have pointed out, principles of spatial composition, pattern and form are similarly important to Monk and her ‘emotional geography’ of the North.
When read via Hopkins, Monk’s concern with form and linguistic play is increasingly evident. ‘Outriders’ for example which Monk uses as a section heading for poems about the shift workers, Fox and Hopkins himself, might be simply understood to indicate the marginalised voices of the hill, via the word’s similarity with outsider. However, the unusual nature of the term suggests that it is drawn directly from Hopkins’ theory of sprung rhythm, where ‘outrides [are], one, two, or three slack syllables added to a foot and not counting in the nominal scanning. They are so called because they seem to hang below the line or ride forward or backward from it in another dimension than the line itself.’119 While outrides are often difficult to distinguish from other metrical feet such as paeans or dactyls without the assistance of metrical marks in the manuscripts, they must not be so ‘confused’ according to Hopkins. The
difference being that the ‘strong syllable in an outriding foot has always a great stress and after the outrider follows a short pause’.120 Such devices serve to effect a rhythm of common speech, one that disrupts the usual pattern of reading, a linguistic figure that simultaneously dramatises the origins and
117 Wilhelmus Peters, Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Critical Essay Towards the Understanding of
His Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), p. 2.
118 On science and differentiated unity in Hopkins, see, Daniel Brown, Hopkins’ Idealism:
Philosophy, Physics, Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
119 Hopkins, ‘Author’s Preface’, p. 108.
disjunctions of language, and therefore the self. The outriders in Interregnum, are never only subjects of history or symbols of particular regional identities, but linguistic figures through which Monk can explore the possibilities and
constraints of representing the self through the rhythm and pauses that constitute the lyric voice.
The final voice in the ‘Hill Outriders’ section then is Hopkins himself, fondly parodied in the poem ‘JESUIT BOY BLUES’. The lyric ‘I’ is posited in the ‘Selfbent’, ‘Selfworn’ figure which Monk excises from the final sextet of Hopkins’ sonnet ‘Ribblesdale’ and repositions in her own octet.
And what is Earth’s eye, tongue, or heart else, where Else, but in dear and dogged man? Ah, the heir To his own selfbent so bound, so tied to his turn,
To thriftless reave both our rich round world bare And none reck of world after, this bids wear
Earth brows of such care, care and dear concern.121
The manuscript A version of ‘Ribblesdale’ includes a preface in Latin of Romans 8:19–20 that adumbrates the poem, describing the waiting of not merely the individual sinner, but the whole of creation for the final redemption:
Nam expectatio creaturae revelationem filiorum Dei expectat. Vanitati enim creatura subiecta est non volens sed propter eum qui subiecit in spem.122 The sonnet opens with a vision of the ‘sweet’ Lancashire landscape which ‘dost appeal’ to ‘heaven’ for its deliverance from ‘selfbent’ man, though it has ‘no tongue to plead, no heart to feel’ and can only plead through its very being, it only ‘canst but be’.123 It then makes its traditional turn via a shift into pathetic fallacy, as ‘dear and dogged man’ is now the embodiment of ‘Earth’s eye, tongue, or heart’, and the ‘Earth’ also ‘tied to [man’s] turn’, conversely wears
121 Hopkins, ‘Ribblesdale’ in Major Works, ed. by Phillips, p. 156–7 (p. 157).
122 Major Works, ed. by Phillips, p. 369 n; Romans 8: 19–20 (NASB): ‘For the anxious longing of
the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.’