Lectures from Hopkins Literary Festival July 2023

Silence in Hopkins's Poetry

Giuseppe Serpillo,
University of Sassari (Emeritus),
Sardinia.

Silence is like the sea in T.S. Eliot’s “Dry Salvages”: it has many voices, and it can be found both inside and outside us; it can cause suffering and joy; it can be used and misused: it is in your mind and in your heart; it can be chosen or just endured. And it is an important feature of language. I will consider three types of silence in Hopkins’ poetry: The silence of God; the silent presence of God and the silence embedded in the language code.

1. The silence of God

Gianfranco Ravasi, in Il silenzio di Dio, speaks of ”the mysterious and scandalous silence of God”.¹ A mystic knows that kind of silence well and considers with terror the time, on his spiritual journey, when God will stop talking or even listening to him, as if he/it had never existed. It is a time of utter despair, which Juan de la Cruz defines as “la noche obscura de l’alma” ("the soul’s dark night”). Hopkins knows what that means, its consequences on the soul, the sense of hopelessness and even despair that comes with it;[ “ […] and blackest night / giddies the soul with blinding daze” (“Nondum”, 1866). At the time Hopkins was twenty-two, yet this does not make him a mystic; he may have been attracted by that condition, but it does not appear that he ever went through that experience. After the terrible trial of the “noche obscura”, in fact, a mystic reaches a condition of complete detachment from the limits and contradictions of everyday life, he is completely free from doubts about the existence and presence of God in his life and the universe, and that makes him compassionate and sensitive to the limits of human existence. His is not la noche obscura de l'alma of San Juan de la Cruz, not only for its shorter duration, although the poet declares that it is a condition that lasts over time (“But where I say / Hours I mean years, mean life”)³ “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day”, Untitled sonnet, 1885, but above all because this deus absconditus is nevertheless present, albeit distant, and is, implicitly, a friend (“letters sent / to dearest him that lives alas! away”⁴ ). In any case, he addresses the absent one with terms of endearment (“Comforter, where, where is your comforting?” ⁵ )

Walter Ong, a Jesuit himself, who wrote a long essay on our poet, declares that “The sense of abandonment, the desperation that can be read in the 'terrible sonnets', [...] has nothing (or little) to do with the 'dark night of the soul' of the mystics; rather it is a question of discouragement, of emptiness that finds no rational explanation for what appears to be indifference and even divine injustice”. ⁶

If it is not a “noche obscura”, yet it is as disturbing. God's silence is typically associated with the darkness of the night, that sort of darkness, which before the advent of electric light, was so different from that which we are used to to today; so dark that it was impossible to move without running into some obstacle and it was not even possible to see one’s own hands. In the field of religion silence and night are an inextricable pair. Absolute darkness is both physical/objective and psychological/spiritual. The two sonnets, “No worst, there is none” and “I wake and feel the fell of dark”, in particular, signal the silence of God, but also that of the Virgin (“Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?”). A need for guidance is felt: “And lead me child-like by the hand / If still in darkness not in fear” (“Nondum”).

2. Awe and the silent presence of God

This leads us to a different perspective concerning silence in his poetry. If God does not answer, he is there, his presence is felt both in tragic and contemplative circumstances: in “The Wreck of the Deutschland”, for example, the tall nun cries to the Lord "Come quickly". God does not answer, but is there, close to them. The poetic voice comments that they are the chosen ones (“on his own bespoken”), and God chooses to take them before time (“before-time taken”) as “dearest prizèd and priced” (St. 22) God's silence, in the words of Francesco Benozzo, is “un silenzio che grida” ("A clamorous silence")^7. God speaks continuously through the beauty of creation, but his voice is not perceived through the ears, and may not be perceived at all. Paradoxically, God speaks through silence. Silence is necessary, it is the silence of contemplation. Take “Hurrahing in Harvest”, for instance: Summer, and the poet is full of admiration at the glorious landscape before his eyes: in stooks “barbarous beauty”, “silk-sack clouds”,”azurous hills”, and he is almost taken by surprise: “These things, these things were here, and but the beholder / Wanting”. God is always there, so very close that he needn’t speak to attract your attention. In the face of the beauty of creation one must remain silent. The poet's exclamations verbally hide the silent pauses, individual or shared, in which the reader is also invited to participate. (“shared silence”), which – incidentally -- is the essence of prayer, which - as any Catholic priest not too involved in "Propaganda fide" will tell you - is substantially speechless; and the more sincere and effective it is the more it feeds on silence, which is made of admiration, thanksgiving for the gifts of life, gratitude and acceptance. God is perceived rather than known – “[I] greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand” (“The Wreck of the Deutschland”, Str. 5) – sometimes through the beauty of his work; other times, more dramatically, through the power that his name emanates: “Over again I feel Thy finger and find thee” (ibid., St. 1); or again “[I] confess / Thy terror, O Christ, O God” (ibid. Str. 2), “the frown of his face before me” (Str.3). From 'dejection' to exaltation, admiration and joy, with no break in between.

In "God's Grandeur" the noise of millions of steps of generations busy in commerce, in activities that litter and pollute everything, ⁸ “Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; / And all is seared with trade, bleared, smeared with toil” “God’s Grandeur”, ll. 6—7. contrasts with the peace and harmony of a "nature [that] is never spent", that disappears before the silent and awed contemplation of the warmth and lightness of the Holy Spirit sitting quietly and thoughtfully over the bent world. ⁹ “And for all this, nature is never spent […] Because the Holy Ghost over the bent / World broods with warm breast and with ah! Bright wings” (iv ill. 9 – 13-14).] It is clear that Hopkins constantly opposes external noise to internal silence in which man finds his real self and the greatness of God, who is its cause and justification.

3. Silence in the code

“Only in its physical form does poetry become Poetry”¹⁰. As early as 1865, when he was just twenty-one, Hopkins was aware of the great power that words as such, even a single word, could display beyond – or even despite – the subject of a poem. In “Let me be to thee as the circling bird”, a sort of anticipation of “The Windhover”, a line explicitly declares the close connection, in his mind, of poetry and music: “I have found my music in a common word”. This entitles us to read, if not all, certainly a good number of his poems as musical scores.

I would start with the stanza and the relationship established between stanzas in a poem. A good example of the semantic value of silence through a skilled use of stanzas may be found in “The Leaden Echo and The Golden Echo”. It was meant to be a song for his play of St. Winefred. But the two sections of the poem ¹¹, bearing each a title of its own, are so semantically connected as to be considered two long stanzas turning on two opposite views of the same dilemma: how to keep beauty from vanishing away.

The first stanza is full of sounds: some words or even sentences and clauses are repeated several times (any any / beauty, beauty, beauty / messengers, messengers, messengers) (there’s none, there’s none, there’s none); others are kept together by strong alliterations (bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or catch, etc.), until you come to the last line: "Despair, despair, despair". On this last line of the first part silence falls, a silence full of dismay, dejection, but also expectation, a moment of meditation, solitude. The first two lines of the second stanza resurrect hope (“Spare! / There ìs one, yes I have one”), but it is no time for jubilation: the road to take in order to rise from despair will be progressively revealed, but not yet.

In the meantime, explicitly, it is the poet himself who asks for silence ("Hush there"). The final two lines of the stanza, and the poem, repeat the same adverb – “Yonder” – four times. Silence falls again, but it is different from that in the first part: it is almost a whisper. As in many musical compositions of the time (take Brahms’s lieds, for example), the final notes – and words – are followed by a long span of silence so that the audience may absorb the full intellectual and emotional value of the piece. But silence can be produced also within the single lines of a poem through different typographical devices, such as a skilled use of punctuation or/and the enjambement. I will consider the former first, the skilled use of different typographical devices. A sonnet composed on 23 August 1885, “To What Serves Mortal Beauty?” will give my reasons for it. More than any other poem, it can be considered almost a musical score: its rapid changes of rhythm bring about more or less long pauses, each with a different value; in at least three occasions, the pause signals a moment of silence, in which, very rapidly, thoughts form or doubts are revealed. The first line makes a reader stop before the adjective “dangerous”, a dash signals the stop. ¹² You are before a choice: “to what serves mortal beauty?” We don’t know, we must still find out; we are before a choice, a quandary, a dilemma: the pause signals our uneasiness. If you read the line without that pause, that uneasiness is lost, and the dramatic discovery that in any case it is dangerous, is also gone. The splitting of two words for what seems to be just a metrical solution is also worth a more perceptive approach. In my opinion it is not just a matter of number of accents: you can’t split a word and believe that this has no consequence on how the brain receives it. Take “danc-ing”, split at the end of line one ¹³. Mortal beauty sets blood dancing. The short pause you are forced to take at the end of the line, before you start reading the next, casts a different light on blood, which doesn’t just flow, but dances.

Another such splitting of a word is “swarm-èd” (lines 7/8) ¹⁴. Here again the splitting is not just a matter of prosody. He stresses “ed”, which has no meaning as such, it is a function. So, why stress it? Several types of response are possible, but you can’t read that word in the same manner as you would if it were not split in two. In my opinion, he wants us to see, in a blink, the disorderly crowds which characterize a city, still pagan, so that the contrast with the nobler figure of the Christian pope is better appreciated by the listener.

As for the enjambement, everybody knows that the sense of a sentence or a clause is not completed within the line where it began, but runs on into the one which follows. This implies that between the end of the first line and the beginning of the next, a pause is required, however short or very short, which still increases the semantic value of the proposition or clause, This device was very common in the 16th and 17th centuries, and was revived by many poets in the 19th century; for that reason I will not consider this aspect of silence; but there are poems in which the unusual frequency of this device ends up creating a response of anticipation and expectation. This, for example, is what happens in the sonnet “Carrion Comfort”. Here the enjambement appears several times in all the stanzas; in particular “these last strands of man / in me”, first stanza, and “foot trod / Me”, “that year // Of now done darkness”. Notice how that pause, in both cases, emphasizes the poet’s dramatic awareness of his fragility before God’s power.

To all this is added the use, twice, of parentheses, which by breaking the rhythm of the sentence or line, require a more or less long pause. In this specific sonnet, the two parenthetical forms “since (seems) I kissed the rod” and “wrestling with (my God) my God” can be looked upon as moments of reflection and meditation; in the first case the poet stops for a little while to consider his experience of hard, if chosen, suffering; in the second case he suddenly becomes aware of his paradoxical boldness: a creature that dares to fight with its creator! A pause is required to fully express his horror and fear. “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves”, in Hopkins’s words “the longest sonnet ever written”, was – as he stated in a letter to Bridges – “made for performance, and […] its performance is not reading with the eye but loud, leisurely, poetical (not rhetorical) recitation, with long rests, long dwells on the rhyme and other marked syllables, and so on”, concluding that “The sonnet should be almost sung”[ Letter to Bridges 26 November 1886.] In the same letter he speaks of “tempo rubato”, thus using musical terminology. The “tempo rubato” allows a performer to linger on a sound, a note, a syllable or to scroll quickly on a sequence of accents to reach the conclusion of a line or a half line, on which to pause for short or longer spans of silence. A good example is to be found in the first line of the poem ¹⁶: the adjective "stupendous" is skillfully isolated at the end of the line, so that the reader (or the “singer”) is forced to slow down or even stop, stealing – so to say – some “tempo” from the word or words that follow in the second line. This brief interval of silence is functional to convey the sense of admiration of the speaker before the greatness and mystery of a natural phenomenon, which has also acquired moral connotations.

In the second line the quick pace that the sequence of modifiers requires (a slower pace would give the sensation of an uncertain reading) gives an extra emphasis to the noun modified, i.e. "night", which closes the line. The brief interval of silence which follows, before carrying on with the next line calls back to mind the metaphysical, symbolic value that Hopkins often associates to night.

Final Remarks

Faith is the attempt to answer the enigma that surrounds and defines our existence. But no matter how strong faith is, there is always a space for doubt, a question that suddenly and unexpectedly comes over to mind and brings in question those beliefs which seemed cast in stone just a minute before; because faith is not a point of arrival, but a journey, a pilgrimage with all its dangers, stops, second thoughts. Poetry is a form of verbalization of this path and it is even more so in religious poetry.

Moreover, as Nicola Gardini, an important writer, a Latin scholar and Italian intellectual, has written: "Only in oral performance does a poem have its fulfilment: the form asks to be pronounced."¹⁷ Any poem worth reading, shares in the qualities of music. Hopkins was aware of it from his early youth. The poetry-music correlation is therefore present in all of Hopkins' poetry and, as in music, silence has an important semantic value. Silent reading, he knew, cannot do justice to the necessary modulation of sounds, to which, in poetry, an important communicative value is entrusted, which is not only emotional, but semantically significant. Try and read Hopkins, even aloud, without any rhythm, which “gives back to poetry its true soul and self”, forget his pauses, his silences. You will be caught in a shipwreck worse than that of the Deutschland!

Notes

1. Gianfranco Ravasi, Il silenzio di Dio, meditazione 94, Milano, TS edizioni, 2022.
2. “ […] and blackest night / giddies the soul with blinding daze” (“Nondum”, 1866). At the time Hopkins was twenty-two.
3. “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day”, Untitled sonnet, 1885.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Walter Ong, Hopkins, the Self and God, Toronto, 1986 ( Il sacro oltre lo scandalo: Hopkins, il sé e Dio, Milano, Edizioni Medusa, 2009)
7. Francesco Benozzo, Felci in rebellion, 2 part).
8. “Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; / And all is seared with trade, bleared, smeared with toil” “God’s Grandeur”, ll. 6-7.
9. “And for all this, nature is never spent […] Because the Holy Ghost over the bent / World broods with warm breast and with ah! Bright wings” (iv ill. 9 – 13-14).
10. “Solo nella forma la Poesia diventa poesia” (Nicola Gardini, Il poeta legge e ascolta. E dopo scrive”, “Domenicale”, Il Sole 24 ore, 30.04.2023, p. III).
11. “[…] my song for my play of St. Winefred called The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo” Lettera a Dixon del 23 ottobre 1886.
12. Gianfranco Ravasi, Il silenzio di Dio, meditazione 94, Milano, TS edizioni, 2022.
13. “To what serves mortal beauty –; dangerous;”
14. “does set danc- / ing blood”
15. “How then should Gregory, a father, have gleaned else from swarm- / èd Rome?”v
16. Letter to Bridges 26 November 1886.
17. “Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, | vaulty, voluminous … stupendous / Evening strains to be time’svast | womb-of-all, home.of-all, hearse-of- all night”
18. “solo nell’esecuzione orale una poesia ha il suo compimento: la forma chiede di essere pronunciata” Nicola Gardini, “Il poeta legge e ascolta. E dopo scrive”, “Domenicale”, Il Sole 24 ore, 30.04.2023. p. III.

Lectures by Giuseppe Serpillo , Sassari University, Sardinia.