Gerald Manley Hopkins

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses how much of the imagery in Gerald Manley Hopkins' poetry is written in bad-taste and how much of this bad-taste involves the sexual urge in some way. Through an analysis of some of his poems, it looks at how Hopkins was phonocentric poet and how it is possible to trace moments of bad-taste in specific, recurrent sound-patterns. It examines the bad-taste in Hopkins' consistent allusion to the pleasurable act in terms of his idiolect, his poetics and the running tropes that facilitate bad-taste in his poetry. It concludes with the idea that Hopkins was, indeed, a poet of Baroque bad taste.

From the Paper:

"In the final line of the third stanza, the two modes come together in the word "burn", which matches the brevity of the b with the dragging of the urn. The unification of these sounds is significant. It reveals the word "urn", in "burn" as in a vessel used for preserving the ashes of the dead; this links with "ash", and picks up on "beadbonny", wherein "bonny" becomes "bony". (Perhaps the "bead" in "beadbonny" picks up on the Old English form of the word, meaning prayer"). This layer of meaning is only uncovered if one follows closely the sound patterns in the poem. "

More papers on Gerald Manley Hopkins:

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• Comparison Essay # 68829 : "Modernist Poetry"

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