The Natural Performance and Delivery Belonging to Lyric Poetry
He is drawn back to his dream of an ideal performance
, this time developed from the hint of technological aid in his mention of the phonograph: The natural performance and delivery belonging to lyric poetry, which is speech, has not been enough cultivated, and should be.
When performers were trained to do it (it needs the rarest gifts) and audiences to appreciate it would be, I am persuaded, a lovely art... With the aid of the phonograph each phrase could be fixed and learnt by heart like a song.
Hopkins's letter to
Shoes Online Everard presents us with the prospect of a new specialist art, one dependant upon highly trained reciters fixing for ever the stress, duration and tone of a poem.
This removes poetry from the flexibility and multiplicity of the voices of its readers, and it may be that Hopkins is thinking of protecting himself from the harm done by the misreadings of his friends.
It also connects with the problem of his marking of the stress of his poems and its occasional deviation from natural stress. His personal emphases are the ones he wants to fix.
There are observable dislocations between Hopkins's personal readings as inscribed in his stress markings, and his wider critical vision which produced sprung rhythm.
This offered it as the heightened but natural delivery of spoken language, in which the rhythm of the poem is the inscape or performance of the theme itself.
Yet his stress markings frequently connect with a strong sense of self, a personal emphasis. It is as if the authorial directions come from a separate and more conscious occasion than the poem itself, perhaps a stage of composition when transmission was the dominant interest.
For example, when faced with the line 'Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain' from Thou art indeed Just, Lord, the long-term
Discount Shoes reader of Hopkins may suspect that he wanted to hear, among lesser stresses, a very powerful: ''Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain' following on from the emphatic 'but not / build'.
Such an emphatic sense of 'me' confronts an alternative reading which wants to emphasis 'roots' and 'rain' using the licence of sprung rhythm to juxtapose two strong stresses: 'send my roots rain'.
My own finding is that the reader can hold, perhaps not simultaneously, all the rhythmic possibilities that Hopkins's has freed the language to perform, with Hopkins's own voice as shown in his markings as an optional 'voice-over'. One can hear the man in anguish 'send my roots rain' and yet also hear the deeper note of the roots (ours) needing rain.
The Natural Performance and Delivery Belonging to Lyric Poetry
By: endeavor
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