11 Themes and Poetic Methods in Late Victorian Poetry
(G. M. Hopkins, T. Hardy, and A. C. Swinburne)
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 – 89)
Life:
- 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.
Work:
- = striking experiments in meter and diction
- > hailed as a pioneering figure of ‘modern’ lit. x but: his experiments emerge from the 19th 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 Loss of the Eurydice”:
- = a parallel to the former
“God’s Grandeur” (1877):
- = a God-centred poem
“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
“Pied Beauty”:
- on the harmonised oppositions expressing the energy of the visible world x but: held together by a divine
force
“Spring and Fall”
Thomas Hardy (1840 – 1928)
[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):
(a) content:
- = mostly elegiac poems celebrating, and in part expiating, the memory of his 1st 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
(b) 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”
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837 – 1909)
[see also: S. under ‘6 Victorian poetry’]
Life:
- 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.
Work:
- = 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
 Plays:
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)
 Poetry:
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 4th 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”