Rhythm and Grime: Sprung Rhythm as Heaven in Ordinary—Tyler Rogness

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by Tyler Rogness

“The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage / … / Heaven in ordinary, man well drest / … / Church bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood, / The land of spices; something understood.” In these words and more, image after image, George Herbert transforms our understanding of prayer in his poem “Prayer (I).” Perhaps unintentionally, he seems also to have given us new language for the spiritual discipline poetry can be.

Heaven in ordinary—the eternal shining through the loose bonds of the temporal. For some, this will of course bring to mind Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “shining from shook foil” from his sprung sonnet “God’s Grandeur”: the numinous flashing out from the very stuff of our world, sometimes gobsmacking and others melting slowly open to us. Insofar as poetry and prayer demonstrate an attentiveness to God’s movement through and around us, these are very much the same thing: poetry as prayer, the humble or lived prayer as a kind of poetry; two sides of the same coin, different bodies for the same spirit. They are “the soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage” seeking to “sound heav’n and earth” for “something understood” and turning us round toward God everywhere, always new and fresh in the periphery. Prayer and poetry alike, I believe Herbert shows, are not airy and intangible things. On the contrary, their richness is best seen in physicality, in the transformation of the earthy.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, born a bit of an anachronism (and he felt it), thought the same. Or at least seems to have. In Victorian England, a poetic age ruled by the iamb and other highly-calculated metrical feet, Hopkins stooped to the rich foundations of the English language and, in the same way he as a child invited his brothers to eat flowers to really know them—to “instress” them, as he later coined the term—his unique poetic style invited and continues to invite readers to instress the worlds in our words, the heaven in the ordinary we daily tread without a downward glance.

Hopkins’ poems themselves, of course, were revolutionary in both spiritual and poetic terms, though only after his death and the dust of World War I had started to settle. With Hopkins we “selve,” expressing God in our uniqueness along with each other facet of creation. The poet lets us catch fire with kingfishers, feel the weighty trod of our hubris snapping our relationship with the given world—but then to see as well the “warm breast, and…ah! bright wings” of the brooding Holy Ghost bring forth, spring forth “morning, at the brown brink eastward.” We “wretch [and] lay wrestling with” God as that “carrion comfort, Despair,” bares its teeth, gnaws at us. And through all the spiritual wreck and rebuild of our fleshy, physical days, Hopkins helps us also to give “glory…to God for dappled things,” not least of which are these miraculous lives we’ve been given.

In her book The Gospel in Gerard Manley Hopkins, Margaret R. Ellsberg says of our poet that he “practiced transubstantiation in every poem.” And this, I believe, came down to more than just the words he chose. Hopkins’ was a subversive change in poetry and sunk to the bedrock of his charged work. His “sprung rhythm,” this new, springy style of his, was itself an exercise in Herbert’s heaven in ordinary, if unintentionally so.

Sprung rhythm, so called for numerous reasons (its bounciness, its tendency to go from stress to stress with no intervening unstressed syllables), was no invention of Hopkins’, but something he claims to have discovered in early English literature such as nursery rhymes. Ellsberg notes in his verse “the unabashed two-beat foot of common speech…and Anglo-Saxonate kennings” (Old Germanic variable stand-ins for other nouns). Though other scholars have doubted whether Hopkins’ kennings should be lauded as such, Ellsberg is onto something to note the beats Hopkins liked to work in, and the relation to Anglo-Saxon poetry. That dipodic base is a key structural element of alliterative verse, something the learnèd Hopkins would have been familiar with.

While alliteration is a common feature in all world literatures, the Encyclopedia Britannica notes that only the Germanic family of languages, of which English is a part, shows it as a defining structural element. Lee M. Hollander, introducing his own translation of the Poetic Edda (that great monument of Norse mythology), defines the style as one “whose essential principles are stress and concomitant alliteration.” In other words, it’s stress-timed, not syllable-timed as with such forms as iambic pentameter. If the latter requires the selection of words which naturally —and that’s key—follow a consistent pattern of stresses (ba-DUM-ba-DUM-ba-DUM), alliterative verse in general and Hopkins’ sprung rhythm in particular ask writer and reader to focus on the sound of language rather than the look of it: on how it performs rather than how it scans.

I’ve heard it said that iambic pentameter follows the natural beat of human speech. This is true to an extent, though no one metrical structure can claim this universally. Our speech is far too varied for that. Something less rigorous and more playful is required to woo the music from this magical thing we call language.

Alliteration, it should be remembered, is just another kind of rhyme. Though they don’t inherently make an “end rhyme,” consonance and assonance alike are simply the repetition or approximation of particular sounds, tools to help govern the flow of the read word. The Old Germanic tongues which adopted alliteration as a defining literary feature did so not of whim, but of necessity. Because these languages were heavily inflected, our end rhyme could not be regularly practiced without grammatical error. Take for example this rhyme in modern English:

I wanted space, I left the house—
I left as quiet as a mouse.
I sat myself into my car
And there I sat, just there to are.

Though “are” is our perfect rhyme, “be,” of course, would be the proper verb inflection in this little ditty. It is this kind of error we could expect of Old Germanic verse trying to follow our modern expectations for rhyming lines. Couple high inflection with an oral culture, and you have a recipe for stress-timed alliterative verse: It was a pneumonic device for its musicality. Consider Hollander’s translation of the following two stanzas from Voluspá (The Seeress’ Prophecy). I’ve used the more modern backslash to denote metrical breaks where Hollander added more spacing.

Hear me, all ye / hallowed beings,
both high and low / of Heimdall’s children:
thou wilt Valfather, / that I well set forth
the fates of the world / as at first I recall.

I call to mind / the kin of etins
which long ago / did give me life.
Nine worlds I know, / the nine abodes
of the glorious world-tree / the ground beneath.

There’s a similarity here, a resonance with Hopkins’ work for the sound quality achieved with such alliteration, not to mention repetitions such as, “…at first I recall. / I call…” For comparison, here is Hopkins’ first stanza of “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” broken out as if Eddic poetry (I’ve done my scholarly best):

Thou mastering me God! / giver of breath and bread;
world’s strand, / sway of the sea;
Lord of living and dead; / thou hast bound
bones / and veins in me,

fastened me flesh, / and after it almost unmade,
what with dread, thy doing: / and dost thou
touch me afresh? / Over again
I feel thy finger / and find thee.

Taking mid-line breaks as cues for scansion and pause, note the way the words roll off the tongue, push and pull and play with each other. Even the fricative/affricate approximation of “afresh / over” in the penultimate line is a pleasant near-repetition of sound and helps drive the consonance. Note also the ease of reading despite significant variation in the number of unstressed syllables and where the stresses land, both of which I’ll leave you to determine as you read aloud. Alliteration aside, the vowel-play here flows like cool water on the tongue. Language is a dance.

There is a structure to Eddic poetry, of course, and Hopkins does not follow it perfectly. He did not intend to. His was to play with words, to tease out its music with what tools he had at hand and to let language suggest itself to him. A quick perusal of any of his letters or journal entries shows Hopkins loved words, saw them as little miracles by which we could, as Ellsberg says, “[change] plain element into reality sublime,” to see heaven in the ordinary, to begin to understand the God who in the incarnational act showed us how precious the physical world is. When the structures of his day did not suffice for his taste in this endeavor, Gerard Manley Hopkins revived an old tune, one humming in the foundations of his language.

For those who struggle with Hopkins at the outset (and I was one of them), Ellsberg quotes the poet’s personal encouragement to readers in his own introduction to “The Wreck”: “let the stress be made to fetch out both the strength of the syllables and the meaning and feeling of the words.” Just as in regular speech, the count of unstressed syllables doesn’t matter. What matters is which words we stress and how we stress them, how it all flows together to make our point. Should we write poetry in iambic pentameter? Common verse? Should spondees and dactyls guide our word choice? By all means. But we should also be open to those times when the music of the emerging poem demands more freedom, more room to play. On a granular level, stress-timed alliteration might just be that extra bit of wanted freedom; on a grander, we can only hope this small practice of letting go a bit more is another one of many which make us more readily open to, more readily surprised by God as the Great Poem he’s writing continues to spill into the present.

Gerard Manley Hopkins does not tease us with abstractions and fluff. Even his most joyful word-play thrusts our hands into the stuff of this world, this visceral human experience, and it whispers to us, “Can you see our God now? Can you feel him near?” In his rhythm and grime, down to the scaffolding of sprung rhythm he stacked his words on, Hopkins invites us to see again God’s grandeur “flam[ing] out, like shining from shook foil,” the heaven crammed within, bursting out from, what we’ve assumed to call ordinary.

And how can we respond? Our poet took what was in front of him—not least of which was his own selfhood—and made it a means of praise to his Creator. And I think that’s about as much as any of us can do.

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Tyler Rogness is learning to sink into the small moments that fill a life. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Ekstasis Magazine, The Rabbit Room, Sehnsucht, the Clayjar Review, and the Amethyst Review among other publications. More of his explorations in faith, life, and language can be found at awakingdragons.com.

Photo by Joachim Schnürle on Unsplash