(11) Themes and Poetic Methods in Late Victorian Poetry.

 (G. M. Hopkins, T. Hardy, and A. C. Swinburne).

 

T h e  V i c t o r i a n  P e r i o d  (1830 - 1901)

[See "Background for Topics 6-11..."]

 

G e r a r d  M a n l e y  H o p k i n s  ( 1 8 4 4 – 8 9 )

L i f e :

- studied Oxford

< his professor of poetry M. Arnold

< the aesthetician W. Pater > apprehended sensuous beauty

- became professor of classics in Dublin

< John Henry Newman (1801 – 90) > entered the Rom. Cath. Church as a Jesuit priest (esp. distrusted by Victorian Protestants) => estranged from his family

- corresponded with Robert Bridges (1844 – 1930, a physician, poet, and holder of the post of Poet Laureate) = his lit. executor and ed.

W o r k :

= striking experiments in meter and diction

> hailed as a pioneering figure of ‘modern’ lit. x but: his experiments emerge from the 19^th c. culture

(a) early period:

= in the Keatsian mode

> burnt after his conversion

(b) mature period:

- experiments with a ‘new rhythm’

- observes nature in painstaking detail, pays attention to the exactness of things <=> Pre-Raphaelite painters / poets

- apprehends the beauty of individual objects, celebrates the glory and wonder of God implicit in nature => an ecstatic illumination of the presence of God

(c) late period:

- ‘terrible sonnets’ = poems of despair x awareness of a barely comprehended God comprehending all things

- his distinctive individuality isolates him from God, cannot escape the world of his own imagining

> “No worst, there is none”

> “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day”

> “Patience, hard thing!”

Content:

- preocc.: celebration of the wonders of God’s creation

x but: awareness of pain, of the humankind marring the beauty of nature, and of violence in the animal kingdom

> “The Windhover”

< Duns Scotus (1266 – 1308, a phil., theologian, and logician):

(a) ‘inscape’ = the distinctive design constituting individual identity

(b) ‘instress’ = the act of a human being recognising the inscape of oth. beings and apprehending the specific distinctiveness of an object

(c) the individual identity of any object = the stamp of divine creation on it => the instress of inscape leads a human being to Christ

- aim of poetry = inscape => each poem should have a unique design capturing the initial inspiration

Form:

- violates syntactic order to repres. the shape of mental experience: omits syntactical connections to fuse qualities more intensely, uses ellipsis and repetition

- coins and compounds words to repres. the unique interlocking of the characteristics of an object, uses puns to suggest how God’s creation rhymes in a divine patterning

- ‘sprung rhythm’ = a line with a given number of stresses x but: a highly variable number and placement of unstressed syllables

= natural rhythm of common speech

< OE poetry and nursery rhymes

=> a style designed to capture the mind’s own motion <=> R. Browning

- his rhythm and syntax modern x but: his conc. with the imagination’s shaping of the natural world remain within the Romantic tradition

Also wrote following poems of distinction:

“The Wreck of Deutschland” (1876)

= a rhapsodic lyric-narrative

- a long ode about the wreck of a ship in which 5 nuns were drowned

> the ed. of a Jesuit magazine ‘dared not print it’

“The Windhover”:

- on the wonder of a creature and the sense of the presence of God

- the beast’s predatorial ecstatic swoop and its beauty = ‘brute’ x but: ‘brutality’ = the essence of its animal perfection

“The Loss of the Eurydice”: a parallel to the former

“God’s Grandeur” (1877): a God-centred poem

“Pied Beauty”: on the harmonised oppositions expressing the energy of the visible world x but: held together by a divine force

“Spring and Fall”

 

T h o m a s  H a r d y  ( 1 8 4 0 – 1 9 2 8 )

[see also: H. under ‘12 New Trends and Genres…’]

- after the public furore over Jude the Obscure (1895) ostensibly abandoned fiction for poetry

- in poetry found the expression of his instinctive ambiguity and intellectual evasiveness

= an older generation Victorian poet x but: his poetry chartered a new territory

- agnostic both in prose / poetry x but: in poetry controlled and disciplined the conflicting perceptions [see his “The Darkling Trush”]

- conc.: incidents from personal past and from an immediate history touching on oth. histories

=> love recalled = love lost

Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries (1914):

Content:

= mostly elegiac poems celebrating, and in part expiating, the memory of his 1^st wife, Emma

- tends to reject the ‘satiric’ mode as ‘harsh’

- physically returns to Cornwall to revisit spots where he had courted E. 40 y. earlier > finds that so much has changed

> “Under the Waterfall” (shaped on the page to resemble the cascade it describes), the act of plunging an arm into cold water in a porcelain wash-basin recalls the memory of lovers picnicking beside a waterfall and losing a wineglass in the water: the glass remained intact under the waterfall x but: the pledges once made in it have since been shattered

Form:

- lyric verse x but: proves a metrical inventiveness and a technical mastery of a variety of forms

- plain style x but: plays with localised ‘Wessex’ words to jolt a reader with the unexpected

- an ‘easy’ reading often challenged by a word or idea modifying what has been assumed or taken for granted

> “The Phantom Horsewomen”, obliges the reader to reconsid. the meanings of ‘phantom’ and of ‘he’ and ‘she’ and ‘they’ as the poem’s perspective shifts

Also wrote following poems of distinction:

“The Darkling Thrush”:

- set in an impersonal landscape x but: shot through with a strange anthropomorphism [= personification, applying human or animal qualities to inanimate objects]

- ‘every spirit upon earth’ seems to share a lack of fervour with the speaker x except the thrush singing lustily of ‘Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew / And I was unaware’

- concl.: the ‘I’ left unaware => no longer seeks interpretations, moves away from his fiction’s pressing need to offer explanation

“During Wind and Rain”:

- contrasts the moments of fulfilment x steady obliterations of human memory

- each human achievement wrecked like summer blooms torn by an autumnal storm

- the echoed refrain interrupting each stanza: ‘ah, no; the years O!’ = as if expressing a wider, impersonal regret

- climax: a tombstone in rain > the time allowed one of his many triumphs

“Epitaph on a Pessimist”, “Hap”, “Middle-Age Enthusiasms”, “Neutral Tones”, “The Man He Killed”, and “Weathers”

 

A l g e r n o n  C h a r l e s  S w i n b u r n e  ( 1 8 3 7 – 1 9 0 9 )

[see also: S. under ‘6 Victorian poetry’]

L i f e :

- b. in a distinguished family, studied Oxford x but: shocked by a variety of rebellious gestures, incl. paganism in relig., dedication to the overthrow of establ. governments in politics, and preocc. with practices of Marquis de Sade in love

- demonstrated his scorn of establ. codes also by his personal behaviour: sought the company of Paris and London bohemians, became an alcoholic, etc.

W o r k :

= temporarily associated with the Pre-Raphaelites

- convinced ‘that art of poetry has nothing to do with didactic matter’

- firmly fixed in ‘an attitude of revolt against current notions of decency and dignity and social duty’ also in his work

P l a y s :

Atalanta in Calydon (1865):

= a play filled with classical allusions

- did not admire the Gr. lit. for the traditional quality of classic serenity (<=> M. Arnold) x but: loved Gr. as a land of liberty (<=> P. B. Shelley, whom he most closely resembles)

P o e t r y :

Poems and Ballads (1866):

- poetry of metrical virtuosity: heady rhythmical patterns, words relished as much for their sound as for their sense

> “The Triumph of Time”, one of the finest demonstrations of his qualities

> “The Garden of Proserpine”

- preocc.: death and the re-creations of the underworld garden of Proserpine frozen in timelessness

=> no oth. E poet author of more elegies

Ave Atque Vale:

- the title: from the Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus’s (84 BC – 54 BC) ‘hail and farewell’

= an elegy in the honour of Charles Baudelaire (1821 – 67, [author of The Flowers of Evil (1857)]

- of ‘elusive beauty and enigmatic greatness’

> hoped to be the 4^th in line among the major elegies in E, following J. Milton’s Lycidas (1638, on his college-mate Edward King]), P.B. Shelley’s Adonais [on J. Keats], and M. Arnold’s Thyrsis [on A. H. Clough]

Also wrote following poems of distinction:

“Anactoria”:

= a dramatic monologue poem

- the poet Sappho’s (btw 630 and 612 BC – 570 BC, [a Greek lyric poet b. on the island of Lesbos = homosexual inclinations]) address to a woman with whom she is madly in love

“Hymn to Proserpine”