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