Counterpointed

Excerpts from letter:

To Richard Watson Dixon
111 Mount Street, Grosvenor Square, W.                                   Oct. 5 1878.

But I wrote a shorter piece on the Eurydice, also in ‘sprung rhythm’, as I call it, but simpler, shorter, and without marks, and offered the Month that too, but they did not like it either. Also I have written some sonnets and a few other little things; some in sprung rhythm, with various other experiments—as ‘outriding feet’, that is parts of which do not count in the scanning (such as you find in Shakspere’s later plays, but as a licence, whereas mine are rather calculated effects); others in the ordinary scanning counterpointed (this is counterpoint: ‘Hóme to his móther’s hóuse prívate retúrned’ and ‘Bút to vánquish by wísdom héllish wíles’ etc); others, one or two, in common uncounterpointed rhythm. But even the impulse to write is wanting, for I have no thought of publishing.
I should add that Milton is the great standard in the use of counterpoint. In Paradise Lost and Regained, in the last more freely, it being an advance in his art, he employs counterpoint more or less everywhere, markedly now and then; but the choruses of Samson Agonistes are in my judgment counterpointed throughout; that is, each line (or nearly so) has two different coexisting scansions. But when you reach that point the secondary or ‘mounted rhythm’, which is necessarily a sprung rhythm, overpowers the original or conventional one and then this becomes superfluous and may be got rid of; by taking that last step you reach simple sprung rhythm. Milton must have known this but had reasons for not taking it.   ~Hopkins, from A New Sacramental Poetry