Hopkins and 'Meaning Motion'

                 “If you can paint one leaf you can paint the world.” ~John Ruskin
“It was the Lord’s design he made apparent—
These bands, and blocks of azure, umber, gilt,
Set in their flexing contours, solid flow
That has composed itself in its own frame:
Red garnet neighbouring mica, silver white;
A slice of agate like an inland sea…”
~ Clive Wilmer,“Minerals from the Collection of John Ruskin” (Selected Poems, 1995)

Why Hopkins Matters.  How Hopkins Matters.

…what useful intimations might emerge if we were to consider locating the signifying “essence” of the poetry as much in what it does as in what it says?  If in referring to authors’ “poetics” we mean to denote not their distinctive ideas or their stylistic fingerprints but, rather, their characteristic practices or creativity (poesis: “making”),what might we conclude in the case of Hopkins?

As my paper’s title indicates, I am proposing here that the distinctiveness of the Hopkins aesthetic strategy and practice is its extraordinary dynamism. This poetry’s core business, the meaning of Father Gerard Hopkins’ rather surprisingly being in business at all as a poet, might be called . . . busy-ness. Action, movement, and change.

…It is much more customary, of course, to associate or identify Hopkins primarily with his “signature” principles of inscape and instress. Stylistics and religious thematics aside, the poetry has been most throughly explored and valued as perceptual and conceptual expressions of the divine principles of abidingness that materially shape and spiritually sustain the created world. The often complex significance of those recurrent motifs of discreet individuating form (Scotist haecceitas) and latent vital pressure are commonly understood to constitute the meaning discerned by Hopkins in the visible world… for Hopkins, “meaning” is a verb, not a condition of being. It is something that happens.

Something that explodes. Ethos is praxis. Nothing in this world of things “means” unless and until it is seen to move, to go into action, to differ, differentiate itself, almost in the Derridean sense of active différance, beyond merely being different. Hopkins consistently subordinates even inscape and instress to this vision of a created universe that displays and fulfils in actions (not in form or being) the meaning and intention (in-tension) of its Creator.

…Their life is in their own action. It means to mean what it says and does, and it means it by performing it. If there are “themes” in Hopkins, it is in the musical rather than rhetorical sense of the term: a pattern or figure of notes, often irregular, yet always a mimetic movement occurring in time, and existing only in performance. As we shall see, it is no coincidence that Hopkins does turn several times to musical analogies in naming the expressive “meaning” of distinctive behaviours, both artistic and natural, that declare, rehearse, celebrate, and interrogate the dynamism of the ever-changing, everfleeting universe of things. Stress is the life of it, and verbs are the sweep and the hurl of it…

                                                                             I

Let us begin with the phrase quoted in my title – “meaning motion,” from the notoriously dense and difficult poem “Henry Purcell.” This sonnet does virtually articulate, and perform, the Hopkinsean poetics. Ostensibly a tribute to the distinctive musical genius of our poet’s favourite composer, it ends by equating the effect of hearing the music’s thrusting, thronging rehearsal to the effect of seeing the sudden wuthering open of a great bird’s wings. This startling display of colossal plumage “fans fresh our wits with wonder.” It is explicitly “meaning motion.” Action declares or produces meaning, knowledge, recognition, or at least excites our awareness of it. Likewise for the quintessence of Purcell’s music – the poet insists that its “forg’d feature” is exhibited and experienced not in theme or melody or familiar sweetness but in performance, in self-expressive action.

In this sense the Purcell poem is not primarily “about” the inscape or instress of the music or of the mind of the composer. Inscape is a created thing’s distinctive form or pattern or law of being – its “forgèd feature.” Instress is the vital indwelling pressure – the “archespecial spirit” – sustaining that self, sake, make, or form. There is in both inscape and instress, then, something latent, static, kinetic. The Purcell poem clearly suggests that each of these conditions of natural being – forged inscape and vital instress – assumes or displays its “meaning” only if and when it goes into action, fulfilling itself in motion, change, performance, and is seen to do so.

But the Purcell sonnet does more than this, and does more than justify in God’s eyes and for God’s purposes the exercise of merely natural artistic genius on merely natural subjects. By distinguishing an artist’s expression of “abrupt self” from “all . . . sweet notes not his,” Hopkins also accounts for his own special kind of poetry. We have here, scarcely veiled, the underlying principle both of his own poetry’s idiosyncrasies (his “quaint moonmarks”), and also of his warrant for writing at all.

~ Michael D. Moore, “Meaning Motion”: Reclaiming the Dynamic Poetics of Hopkins

Wilfrid Laurier University. Excerpt: pp.1-3
Henry Purcell

HAVE, fair fallen, O fair, fair have fallen, so dear          

To me, so arch-especial a spirit as heaves in Henry Purcell,      

An age is now since passed, since parted; with the reversal       

Of the outward sentence low lays him, listed to a heresy, here.  

Not mood in him nor meaning, proud fire or sacred fear,

Or love or pity or all that sweet notes not his might nursle:         

It is the forgèd feature finds me; it is the rehearsal          

Of own, of abrupt self there so thrusts on, so throngs the ear.    

Let him Oh! with his air of angels then lift me, lay me! only I’ll   

Have an eye to the sakes of him, quaint moonmarks, to his pelted plumage under

Wings: so some great stormfowl, whenever he has walked his while      

The thunder-purple seabeach plumèd purple-of-thunder,          

If a wuthering of his palmy snow-pinions scatter a colossal smile           

Off him, but meaning motion fans fresh our wits with wonder.