Even more overwhelming were the dramatic waterfalls and glaciers, which
inspired some of the journal's most striking and innovative images. The
Jungfrau glacier, for example, is represented as the skin of a white tiger
flung into the air and allowed to fall, its gnarled ends "in tongues and
points like the tail and claws" and its edges "knotted or knuckled
like talons." But this sight proved too much even for Hopkins'
indefatigable patience: "The spraying out of one end I tried to catch but
it would have taken hours" (174).
Hopkins' journal
scrutinizes objects with an almost myopic focus on their surface structures
and, at times, inhabits a linguistic world of his own invention. The journal
displays both inventiveness with the resources of language and frustration with
the incapacity of words to represent things. Confronted with the novelty of
sights he has never seen, or never noticed in a certain way, Hopkins
must formulate his own solutions to the nature writer's perennial challenge:
How to represent the experience of discovery.
Remarkable for its tension at the meeting point of seeing and
representation, the journal distinguishes itself by the stylistic idiom
through which Hopkins tries
to "capture" an evanescent perception or the elusive complexity of an
object's appearance. He weaves an ostensibly literal language that strives
toward what he called the haecceitas or "thisness" of things,
concentrating on pattern and structure ("spike flower like plantain,
flowering gradually up the spike"), with a figurative language that makes
objects imaginatively visible in his text ("every fingered or fretted
leaf"). (3) Further, the journal does not merely reflect or record
the things Hopkins sees;
writing it also enables his insights and enacts his perceptions for later
re-reading. The journal therefore functions as an epistemic, or
knowledge-seeking, pursuit, embodying in its pages Hopkins'
very processes of thinking and discovery.
… His journal, like others, unfolds in the rhythms of
periodic encounter, in accumulations of unconnected facts and remarks, and in
imagistic, sometimes fragmented bits of text. But although Hopkins'
journal practice in many ways resembles other writers', his style of
writing, beyond basic notations, bears the quirky uniqueness that leads many
critics to label him idiosyncratic. Few diarists work as hard as Hopkins
to describe ordinary trees or seawater:….
… Hopkins coaxes,
strains at, wrestles with words--almost as poignantly as he wrestles with
"(my God!) my God" in his poem "Carrion Comfort"--to wring
from them the efficacy he needs to represent new sights. (3) Mary Ellen Bellanca, Gerard Manley
Hopkins' journal and the poetics of natural history. Highbeam.org
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