Veronica Alfano

Rapt and Half-Wrapt:  Projecting Landscape in Hopkins and Hardy

Both G. M. Hopkins and Thomas Hardy have faced critical castigation for their idiosyncratic and often-invented poetic vocabularies.  Examining lyrical depictions of landscape, I investigate the tendency of these poets to flirt with nonsense by coining words.

Hopkins often attempts to absorb natural beauty through synesthetic hyphenations (“very-violet-sweet”).  But confusion over the precise meaning of, say, “flake-doves” in “The Starlight Night” prevents a reader from lingering idolatrously on individual earthly objects; coinages allow Hopkins both to revel in physical detail and to veil his surroundings with dazzling newness.  He is a partially-intelligible human translator for the divine language of landscapes.  God, though absent from the world, is dimly re-projected into it through Hopkins’s rapturous yet elusive neologisms.  Descriptions that border on nonsense in their bewilderingly overwrought assonance and alliteration, furthermore, indicate Hopkins’s attempts to establish links among the root-phonemes of related words and thus to regain the undifferentiated unity of a proto-language.

While Hopkins the believer charges the material world with sublimity, skeptical Hardy’s coinages spring from the recollected inability to recognize epiphanic moments.  On the present is printed the ghostly mark of the then-unperceived past; Hardy attempts to (re-)experience time through space.  The disoriented reader labors to wring meaning from archaic-sounding lexical inventions, even as the poet toils to extract vanished joy from stubbornly opaque landscapes.  Hardy cannot reclaim the absent then, even by projecting it onto the now through anachronistically unfamiliar (or even nonsensical) formations.  Such ambivalent insight into non-insight is epitomized in the neologism “half-wrapt” from “Self-Unconscious”:  this speaker is both engrossed (rapt) and insensible (wrapped).  If Hopkins longs to voice the divine and return to a pre-Babel state, then Hardy is fascinated by the alienated speech of the solitary individual.  Hopkins’s language is a projection of the indefinable Other, while Hardy’s is a projection of the always-divided Self.

Both neologisms and poetry more generally deal in evocative unintelligibility, insisting on radical defamiliarization that is also revelation.  But coinages can also signal frustrating linguistic impotence.  (Here I glance at Hopkins’s tortured “Terrible Sonnets” and at Hardy’s agonized evocations of his dead wife.)  To what extent are impressions and memories of landscapes, especially when projected through the medium of invented language, essentially incommunicable?

Veronica Alfano is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, where her area of research is Victorian poetry and poetics.  She is currently working on a dissertation titled The Lyric in Victorian Memory.  This project will focus on Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Symons, and Housman; it will explore the lyric’s various links to physical and cultural memory (how do the mnemonic systems of poetic form and of narrative interact? how are Victorian poets remembered in the twentieth century?).  A version of the first chapter – on Tennyson’s The Princess – is forthcoming in the journal Critical Matrix.