Metodolog´ıa de dise˜ no

Recorded in lapidary prose that inclines to iambic rhythms, the act of

noticing the budded lime in the journal entry from 1868 transposes the seen into the heard, and turns looking into a new and unfamiliar sort of listening, one that resembles what Hopkins in a different context calls “reading with the ear.” To view the lime tree is not simply to see it, but also to hear it, or at least to see it speaking. In particular, it means hearing or seeing the muted speaking of the tree’s form, which is identified with the swaying and rocking of choral or odic rhythm: “turn, pose, and counterpoint in the twigs and buds.” Plant form is poetic form here, but the comparison is not in the service of an organic poetics, and the terms are not reversible. Poetic form is

not modeled on the tree’s growth. Nature is instead shaped by a

superinduced application of poetic design. Accordingly, the lime tree is given dynamism by borrowing from the resources of literature. Nature is

describable in terms of art, specifically in terms of literary form (“turn, pose, and counterpoint”). In a critical move, this dynamism is transposed from the eye to the ear, and nature’s speaking voice derives from the literary pattern that is projected onto the twigs and buds. In Hopkins’s description, it is as if the future growth of the tree’s now incipient parts will occur through the sequenced stanzaic lapsing of a choral ode. Trellised onto the architecture of a structure rooted in literary pattern, the lime tree is a form that has or is given a voice, where the ambivalence between having voice and being given voice is critical.

Hopkins’s poetry characteristically involves readers in a process similar to what occurs under the limes on April 6, 1868. This involvement, outlined in the embowered scene in which Hopkins is for once interested in the limelight, is the ambivalent crossing between listening and voicing. The ambivalence is due to formal speaking being something that is listened to as well as something that is voiced or given voice in lyric. Formal speaking sounds something typically mute and mutes something typically sounded. It is akin to watching the mute mouthing of utterance. This sort of thing spoke

to Hopkins, and not as an agonistic poetical maneuver whereby he was able to tender his own sound. During his Swiss walking-tour, for example, lines and outlines spoke to him on several occasions: “Alpine cows dun-coloured and very well made. Melodious lines of a cow’s dewlap” (July 9, 1868). Of his climb of the Wylerhorn (“how fond of and warped to the mountain it would be easy to become”), he notices a melodious outline on a larger scale:

Firs very tall, with the swell of the branching on the outer side of the slope so that the peaks seem to point inwards to the mountain peak, like the lines of the Parthenon, and the outline melodious and

moving on many focuses.—I wore my pagharee and turned it with harebells below and gentians in two rows above like double pan- pipes.—In coming down we lost our way.

Mountains whose summits have been reached submit to the poet’s melodizing, even if Hopkins admits to having a “dangerous slide down the long wet grass of a steep slope” (July 11, 1868). It is all sport here. But mountains for Hopkins would later become sublime, a landscape sounded with pangs and shrieks of wilder wringing, an inner place without melody or beauty: “the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/Frightful, sheer, no- man-fathomed. Hold them cheap/May who ne’re hung there” (ln 9-11). The fecund mixing of the semantic fields associated with the terms central to the scene on the Wylerhorn—“melody,” “lines,” “branching,” “steep”—

energizes a poem such as the late, and unfinished, “Ashboughs” (so-titled by Bridges):

Not of all my eyes see, wándering on the world, Is anything a milk to the mind so, só sighs déep Poetry to it, as a tree whose boughs break in the sky.

Say it is áshboughs: whether on a December day and furled Fast or they in clammyish láshtender combs creep

Apart wide and new-nestle at heaven most high.

They touch heaven, tabour on it; how their talons sweep The smouldering enormous winter welkin! May

Mells blue and snowwhite through them, a fringe and fray

Of greenery: it is old earth’s groping towards the steep of Heaven whom she childs us by. The tree that “só sighs déep/Poetry” plays upon the sky, “tabour[s]” on heaven with its tender lashes. Ashboughs, bittersweet, resemble bird claws at their branch tips: “their talons sweep/The smouldering enormous winter welkin.” The poem almost takes flight on invisible wings that would seem, by implication, to be tied up in the ash tree, wings metonymically present by virtue of the “talons” of the boughs. But the vantage remains earthly, and the tree is sighted from a position upon the ground. As such, the sky is seen through a break in the branches, in a charged interstice through which “May/Mells blue and snowwhite.” Mixing, as of color (blue and white), is the first and primary meaning of “mells,” but the more striking and

hammering senses of the word also impinge. Accordingly, the poem’s mood treads between violence and repose, and “mells” suits for how it touches senses harsh and sweet—“mell” as a noun connecting May’s liveliness with the “honey” that brings the poem into precarious relation with things

melodious. “Láshtender” hereby comes to sound like a new translation of “bittersweet.” On this same axis, the trestling of branch is hive-like in Hopkins’s rendering, “láshtender combs creep.” The comb-structure of the tree’s pattern sways at a honeyed pace, where branches move about and “creep” as if dripping from the comb. “Mells” also charges the poem with another kind of sonorousness, that of birdsong or human conversation. Hopkins mells his way through the poem’s lines in another sense, in the hammering and pounding that “mells” denotes. This is a hammering that is spatial in the figure of the tree’s lashing boughs and sonic in the poem’s sound-work: “furled/Fast or they in clammyish láshtender combs creep.”

The lashing of May, arresting in “Ashboughs,” is less out of place in the powerful fragment “Strike, churl” (ca. 1885), a May poem memorable for its unseasonable weather:

Strike, churl; hurl, cheerless wind, then; heltering hail May’s beauty massacre and wispèd wild clouds grow Out on the giant air; tell Summer No,

Bid joy back, have at the harvest, keep Hope pale.

The disjunction of season and scene is darkly inspiring. May mells with violence, bringing out what remains contained within and beneath the surface of “Ashboughs.” In “Strike, churl,” malediction is breathed without reservation, inspired by the “heltering hail” and “cheerless wind” that occasions description. The poem’s conjuring of corruption is Swinburnian

for being quasi-celebratory. Perhaps the leaden echo is merely missing its golden pair in this fragment? It is impossible to say, but the energy of the fragment is its embrace of entropy: “May’s beauty massacre…have at the harvest, keep Hope pale.” The poem’s strange bidding recalls Keats’s picture of the figure of Joy in the “Ode on Melancholy,” whose “hand is ever at his lips bidding adieu.” Joy’s grape bursts in “Strike, churl,” but with an

energetic detachment that resists the stasis of melancholic involvement.