Selecci´ on inicial

Speaking form sounds an echoic voice that is heard insofar as it seeks to elide its identity as echo. Like shining from shook foil, authentic voice is the brilliant rustle of artifice. Yet this rustle is not failure, dearth, or

impoverishment; neither is it a scene in which privation as such becomes a source of appeal: ascesis is not the new dispensation. Lyric is formal speech, and lyric “voice,” in Hopkins, is formal shining: “it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing.” Form itself is a ventriloquist, expert at hurling voice, and lyric subtlizes and also figures its own vocal events, “finds tongue to fling out broad its name…myself it speaks and spells,/Crying What I do is me: for that I came.” In the case of the lime tree passage, which can be read as a koan for lyric agency as perverse form, formal reading is figured as a particular kind of

seeing, a looking for and a seeking out of voice that is sounded on and against the arrangement of particular parts: twigs, buds, lines, syllables, and stanzas. Hopkins’s branches are literal and figurative, always swaying in forests real and rhetorical.

The challenge of promoting formal voice is difficult and yet simple. “Form speaking,” noting Hopkins’s emphasis on “form,” suggests that the locus of voice is outer structure rather than inner substance (“turn, pose, and counterpoint” refers to the tree’s external shape). Hopkins does not write “voice,” and so perhaps to reinsert it would be in error. The “voice of form” is then a catachresis, a metalepsis whereby form, as an effect of voice, is turned around so that voice follows as an effect of form. In this reversal form precedes voice, spatially and temporally, rather than vice versa.

Whether what is produced in this process is still “voice” in any conventional sense is a question close to all lyric, and is one exaggerated in later Victorian poetry. Lyric condenses and displaces the metalepsis of voice and form, and the dynamism of this reversal enables and structures poetic utterance. In the observation “the form speaking,” form is subject and object. The stress on the word “form” in Hopkins’s journal cues the fact that what is spoken is form itself, however foreign or ultimately unspeakable that form remains. In the example of the lime tree, what form utters is its own rhythmic swaying.

What form has to say is form, and when it speaks it tells its own shape and acts of shaping.

Poems with a marked interest in the shaping of their own utterance have an uncanny way of uttering shape. Such poems show utterance to be the mouthing of form: “shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb:/It is the shut, the curfew sent/From there where all surrenders come/Which only makes you eloquent.” Lips are literally brought to a close in the first line here with plosive sounds in “shape,” “lips,” and “dumb.” The partial choking back of sound and release of air at the lips is necessary to articulate the line “shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb,” which ends with an alveolar-labial sequence (“dumb”). Countering its own close-lipped message of dumbness, however, the subsequent lines draw out sound through an emphatic clustering of open vowels: “From there where all surrenders come/Which only makes you eloquent.” To object to this situation as an instance of the prison-house of language seems to miss the mark. Lyric poems characteristically fixate on their own forms and their own fraught events of formation. Why this fixation might be found embarrassing or objectionable (a prison to be sprung from) is a rich topic, and the resistance to hearing form speak is a closely connected issue, one that Victorian and Romantic poems explore by elaborating their own highly wrought forms. What Hopkins calls “form

speaking” allows for the possibility that a poem may shape little or nothing beyond its own form. For this reason, formal artifice can be read as a symptom of insufficiency at various levels—poetic, moral, intellectual, and spiritual. Looking ahead to an exemplary twentieth-century complication, however, Wallace Stevens—no formalist partisan—suggests that formally superficial verse, the kind of decadent poetry that is written by poets with “little or nothing to say,” is, or will be, the poetry that matters (“Two or Three Ideas,” 1952).

Hopkins’s exchanges with Bridges often turn on moments of non- comprehension in his poetry, and Bridges’s requests for elucidation are valuable for drawing Hopkins out, but Hopkins also gave difficulty an essential role in his poetry. Difficulty was not a sign of shallowness or a symptom showing that Hopkins had little or nothing to say; resistance was meant strategically, as in what Hopkins in 1888 called the “violent but effective hyperbaton and suspension” within “Tom’s Garland” (L 273). Further discussion between the two came over the “difficult syntax” of “Harry Ploughman.” Hopkins tells Bridges that he has become decided on prefixing “short prose arguments” to some of his poems, presumably his challenging later lyrics, although he does not say which poems:

One thing I am now resolved on, is to prefix short prose arguments to some of my pieces. These will expose me to carping, but I do not

mind. Epic and drama and ballad and many, most, things, should be at once intelligible; but everything need not and cannot be. Plainly if it is possible to express a subtle and recondite thought on a subtle and recondite subject in a subtle and recondite way and with great felicity and perfection, in the end, something must be sacrificed, with so trying a task, in the process, and this may be the being at once, nay, perhaps even the being without explanation at all, intelligible. (L 265-6)

Intelligibility was not a primary criterion in the lyric, but the prose argument could supply something of what was meant, exemplified by the note to “Henry Purcell” (“the poet wishes well to the divine genius of Purcell and praises him…”). The rationale for needing any such “argument” in lyric is more interesting than the actual arguments themselves. Hopkins’s poetry seeks a different criterion of excellence than intelligibility. The “sacrifice” made in “subtle and recondite” writing is likely to be intelligibility—with or without explanation. Being intelligible in lyric is therefore almost

inappropriate, and the mark of difference from epic and drama is that lyric is not “at once intelligible.” Sonic repletion and acoustic force matter above being intelligible.