Are you enjoying the lazy, crazy, hazy days of summer?
Well wake up!
I have been taking it FAR to easy on you guys lately....
today we are going to think?
About what, you ask?
"Sprung rhythm!"
What is that?
Well pick up your lemonade and read on....
Much of Hopkins's
historical importance has to do with the changes he brought to the form of
poetry, which ran contrary to conventional ideas of metre. Prior to Hopkins,
most Middle English
and Modern English
poetry was based on a rhythmic structure inherited from the Norman side of
English literary heritage. This structure is based on repeating groups of two or
three syllables, with the stressed syllable falling in the same place on each
repetition. Hopkins called this structure "running rhythm", and though he wrote
some of his early verse in running rhythm he became fascinated with the older
rhythmic structure of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, of which Beowulf is the most famous example. Hopkins called
his own rhythmic structure sprung rhythm. Sprung rhythm is structured around
feet with a variable number of syllables, generally between one and four
syllables per foot, with the stress always falling on the first syllable in a
foot. It is similar to the "rolling stresses" of Robinson Jeffers, another poet who rejected
conventional metre. Hopkins saw sprung rhythm as a way to escape the constraints
of running rhythm, which he said inevitably pushed poetry written in it to
become "same and tame." In this way, Hopkins sprung rhythm can be seen as
anticipating much of free
verse. His work has no great affinity with either of the contemporary Pre-Raphaelite and neo-romanticism schools, although he does share
their descriptive love of nature and he is often seen as a precursor to modernist poetry or
as a bridge between the two poetic eras.
Hopkins was born in England (1844-1899)
Much of the richness of his work comes
from Hopkins’s extensive use of alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia and rhyme, both at the end of lines and internally as in the poem below:
‘As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme’ |
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