Alliteration and Hopkins's Sprung Rhythm

Abstract

Recognition of alliteration's role in Hopkins's sprung rhythm depends in the first place on understanding that the significance of the verse sound-patterns, the music, is independent of verbal That verse music has an important separate semiotic effect is counter to the general opinion of modern theorists but accords well with the semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce and with Hopkins's repeated statements asserting that verse is wholly or partially repeating some kind of [sound] which is over and above meaning. In a Peircean analysis of the sign, the verse is an icon expressive of the phonetic ideas of the poet, while the verbal meaning constitutes a symbol. The icon and the symbol unite in the interpretant of the reader to form a unified semiotic whole. As is usual in English poetry, Hopkins's repeated of in sprung rhythm are verse feet, but they do not have a consistent foot pattern, such as iambic or trochaic. Lacking this pattern, their identity depends on stress: Stress is the life of But locating the stress and foot boundaries presents a problem to the critic. Hopkins's markings and statements show that the stress referred to is not, as Walter J. Ong influentially has claimed, sense stress; it is rather the sound figure of the foot, with stress the nuclear element, that distinguishes it. Alliteration, occurring on substantially more than 50 percent of sprung-rhythm stresses, brings out the stress and is essential to the effect. Hopkins's writings on verse note the importance of alliteration in English poetry, and they cite medieval alliterative verse. But classical quantitative metrics exerted a more basic influence on sprung rhythm, and ultimately on its use of alliteration; the poet emphasizes the role of strength as well as length in English quantity and his own careful attention to syllabic quantity. He associates the figures of verse with his Scotistic concept of inscape. Through repetition the figures bring out both their haecceitas, or thisness, and the formalities that associate them with Poetics Today 19:4 (Winter 1998). Copyright ? 1998 by The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.183 on Fri, 22 Apr 2016 06:15:00 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 532 Poetics Today 19:4 the other figures. The characteristic patterns originate in a of feeling designed for the contemplation of the mind. The poem for Hopkins, then, begins with the prepossession that becomes embodied as inscape of spoken sound, not spoken words. Writings of poets such as T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Seamus Heaney accord similar significance to common speech patterns independent of spe-