Carol Rumens 

Poem of the week: The Sea and the Skylark by Gerard Manley Hopkins

These ringing lines register the complex music of nature heard from the Welsh coast, set against the ‘sordid’ human world
  
  

North Wales coast
'Cheer and charm of earth’s past prime' … a man stands on a Welsh coastal path. Photograph: Alamy Photograph: Alamy

Gerard Manley Hopkins was inspired by “the charm and instress of Wales” and also by the Welsh poetic device known as cynghanedd. In 1877, the year of his ordination, he wrote a number of ground-breaking, almost ode-like sonnets, among them this week’s poem The Sea and the Skylark.

Spatial and sensory location are important at the start of the octet. The speaker is standing on or beside the beach at Rhyl, the seaside town in north Wales where the sonnet’s first draft was written. With a sense of double-occasion, he hears the sea on his right and the lark-song rising from the meadowland on his left. The registering of these complex sounds requires two ears – and, from the diction, all the range of polyphonic effects it can dispense.

An arrestingly discordant word-doubling in the first line (“ear and ear” and the homonym of “two noises too old”) is further complicated by the “en” echo across the line-break: “end/Trench … ”. Used as an intransitive verb, “trench” is dramatic, and the dash-enhanced caesura seems to increase the depth of the cut incised. The sea itself makes a divided noise, as “a flood or a fall”, with the heavy, pebbly harshness of “right”, “tide”, “ramps” suggesting the incoming tide, and a gentler consonantal strand depicting the “low lull-off” as the tide retreats. That the process is continuous and endless is beautifully conveyed in the present participle “frequenting”. The sea and the moon are almost personified, but Hopkins challenges poetic convention as he flirts with it, weaving into two lines the aural complexity of a five-part fugue.

Paired spondees help the internal rhymes sound out as the second quatrain begins. The lark’s “score” is his song, visualised as a skein which uncoils in a process that combines the “rash-fresh” and the repetitive in an endless intricate pattern, “re-winded” and “new-skeinèd”. The movement of coiling and curling from a “wild winch whirl” (“whirl” being probably a noun here) is both free and controlled, and, line eight tells us, not a note of this music is excessive or wasted. The description of the lark-song in line seven almost follows the pattern of the cynghanedd groes (cross-cynghanedd): “In crisps of curl off wild winch whirl … ”. Perhaps the lark himself is singing a version of cynghanedd? The repeated Ws which evoked languor in line four (“while moon shall wear and wend”) now contribute to the breathless energy.

Hopkins looks town-wards in the sestet, condemning human intrusion with a mix of frothily light and grittily heavy adjectives (“shallow”, “frail”, “sordid”, “turbid”) and evoking a miniature industrial revolution in the hard, angry, reductive rhymes of “Our make and making break, are breaking … ”. Generally, the rhythms are more regularly metrical than in the octet. The sea and the skylark embody nature’s and God’s moral challenge: they “ring right out” the diminished, man-made present, “right” now coming back adverbially to contain both “fully” and “correctively”. Dust and slime represent spiritual degeneration; no doubt they were also the visible by-products of the construction-work that changed Rhyl from centuries-old fishing village to Victorian “watering place”. Even earlier in the sonnet, in words like “trench” and “roar”, these human efforts at creation are subliminally present. Redundant in its conscious argument, they nonetheless add further elemental sound effects to the tidal and melodic cynghanedd of Hopkins’s praise. Contrasted with “man’s last dust”, “man’s first slime” might be an image of regeneration rather than despair.

The Sea and the Skylark

On ear and ear two noises too old to end
Trench—right, the tide that ramps against the shore;
With a flood or a fall, low lull-off or all roar,
Frequenting there while moon shall wear and wend.

Left hand, off land, I hear the lark ascend,
His rash-fresh re-winded new-skeinèd score
In crisps of curl off wild winch whirl, and pour
And pelt music, till none ’s to spill nor spend.

How these two shame this shallow and frail town!
How ring right out our sordid turbid time,
Being pure! We, life’s pride and cared-for crown,

Have lost that cheer and charm of earth’s past prime:
Our make and making break, are breaking, down
To man’s last dust, drain fast towards man’s first slime.

 

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