s by
Robert Bridges. (Oxford: University Press.)]

It is from a sonnet written by Hopkins to Mr Bridges that we take the
most concise expression of his artistic intention, for the poet's
explanatory preface is not merely technical, but is written in a
technical language peculiar to himself. Moreover, its scope is small;
the sonnet tells us more in two lines than the preface in four pages.

'O then if in my lagging lines you miss
The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation....'

There is his 'avant toute chose.' Perhaps it seems very like 'de la
musique.' But it tells us more about Hopkins's music than Verlaine's
line told us about his. This music is of a particular kind, not the
'sanglots du violon,' but pre-eminently the music of song, the music
most proper to lyrical verse. If one were to seek in English the lyrical
poem to which Hopkins's definition could be most fittingly applied, one
would find Shelley's 'Skylark.' A technical progression onwards from the
'Skylark' is accordingly the main line of Hopkins's poetical evolution.
There are other, stranger threads interwoven; but this is the chief.
Swinburne, rightly enough if the intention of true song is considered,
appears hardly to have existed for Hopkins, though he was his
contemporary. There is an element of Keats in his epithets, a half-echo
in 'whorled ear' and 'lark-charmed'; there is an aspiration after
Milton's architectonic in the construction of the later sonnets and the
most lucid of the fragments,'Epithalamion.' But the central point of
departure is the 'Skylark.' The 'May Magnificat' is evidence of
Hopkins's achievement in the direct line:--

'Ask of her, the mighty mother:
Her reply puts this other
Question: What is Spring?--
Growth in everything--

Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
Grass and greenworld all together;
Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
Throstle above her nested
Cluster of bugle-blue eggs thin
Forms and warms the life within....

... When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple
Bloom lights the orchard-apple,
And thicket and thorp are merry
With silver-surfed cherry,

And azuring-over graybell makes
Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes,
And magic cuckoo-call
Caps, clears, and clinches all....'

That is the primary element manifested in one of its simplest, most
recognisable, and some may feel most beautiful forms. But a melody so
simple, though it is perhaps the swiftest of which the Eng