Inscape and instress

Last updated
For the literary magazine Instress, see Misericordia University.For other uses of "Inscape", see Inscape (disambiguation).

Inscape and instress are complementary and enigmatic concepts about individuality and uniqueness derived by the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins from the ideas of the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus. [1] Inscape has been rendered variously as: external design, aesthetic conception, intrinsic beauty, the intrinsic form of a thing, a form perceived in nature, the individual self, the expression of the inner core of individuality, the peculiar inner nature of things and persons, expressed in form and gesture, and an essence or identity embodied in a thing. [2] These twin concepts are what his most famous poems are about.

Contents

[Hopkins] felt that everything in the universe was characterized by what he called inscape, the distinctive design that constitutes individual identity. This identity is not static but dynamic. Each being in the universe 'selves,' that is, enacts its identity. And the human being, the most highly selved, the most individually distinctive being in the universe, recognizes the inscape of other beings in an act that Hopkins calls instress, the apprehension of an object in an intense thrust of energy toward it that enables one to realize specific distinctiveness. Ultimately, the instress of inscape leads one to Christ, for the individual identity of any object is the stamp of divine creation on it. [3]

This is related to a logocentric theology and the Imago Dei. A logocentric theology of creation is based on correlation of the Genesis account and John 1. Since all creation is by the Word (divine fiat) human identity in God's image is grounded in God's speech and no two creation words are ever spoken alike. [lower-alpha 1] This idea is reflected by J. R. R. Tolkien who compares the Creator to a perfect prism and creation to the refraction of perfect light. Tolkien writes,

'Dear Sir,' I said – 'Although now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not de-throned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned:
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind. [4]

The idea is strongly embraced by the Trappist monk and author Thomas Merton who admired both Scotus and Hopkins. In New Seeds of Contemplation Merton equates the unique "thingness" of a thing, its inscape, to sanctity. Merton writes,

"No two created beings are exactly alike. And their individuality is no imperfection. On the contrary, the perfection of each created thing is not merely its conformity to an abstract type but in its own individual identity with itself." [5]

The result is that holiness itself is grounded in God's creation, his call, and not in a Platonic ideal. To the extent that any "thing" (including humans) honors God's unique idea of them they are holy. Holiness thus connects to "vocation" (from the Latin vocare for "voice") in two ways. First, God creates through the word; and second, when being responds rightly to God's speech by expressing his unique word the result is Holiness.

An example

As kingfishers catch fire Poem by G.M. Hopkins

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

In this poem inscape is exemplified by the kingfisher doing its unique kingfishery thing, each stone and each bell is heard making its own unique sound: unique because each stone and each bell is different. The judge does his judgey thing, and inscape is seen to come into being through performance of each individual's perfect birthright. Eyes are lovely because each is unique and leads us to God by ten thousand different routes. [6]

The central paradox

Hopkins's poems which delineate inscape and instress typically celebrate how an immutable Deity continually creates and recreates a living world of infinite variety and change. [7] For Hopkins, this world of ostensible mutability paradoxically points to the unchanging God who “fathers [it] forth.” [8] The religious aspects of inscape are not simply nailed onto his Oxford tutor's ideas of individuation from which they were derived: they are nailed through the hands of Christ onto the cross. [9] This tutor, Walter Pater, was highly influential, but agnostic in his beliefs. Similar to Pater's Conclusion to The Renaissance, [10] Hopkins's vision of the physical world in his poem “Pied Beauty” [8] is one of “perpetual motion.” For Hopkins, the responsibility of establishing and maintaining order within the physical world does not lie with the individual observer as Pater maintained, but rather with the eternal Creator himself. [9]

In a highly relevant way, this paradox echoes that of modern-day naturalists who celebrate how the immutable building blocks of DNA continually combine and recombine to produce a living world of infinite variety and change. Modern readings of Hopkins's poems stress this correspondence without necessarily resolving the inherent contradiction of reading religious poetry from an agnostic standpoint. [11]

The central enigma

Hopkins regarded The Windhover as his poem that best expressed his conception of inscape. [9]

To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

This falcon is not a delightful lamb-like animal, but a ruthless and proud killing machine whose inscape it is to destroy other inscapes of lesser animals. How can this relate to the Prince of Peace to whom the poem is dedicated? Poets from different generations have wrestled with this problem with various conclusions. [12] For Hopkins, living in a rising tide of disbelief, [13] no simple answer could be given, perhaps because any valid answer needed to be lived rather than declared, and as he lived his life through to the period of the last 'terrible sonnets' he became more human and more prone to despair and less inclined to write about inscape. [14]

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ While it is true that "logos" also means "word" in the conventional sense of "speech", in John it refers not to the "divine fiat" ("Let there be Light" etc.), but to Christ as the second person of the Trinity. As the first quotation from the Norton Anthology states: "Ultimately, the inscape of instress leads one to Christ". [3]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gerard Manley Hopkins</span> English poet and Catholic priest (1844–1889)

Gerard Manley Hopkins was an English poet and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous fame places him among leading English poets. His prosody – notably his concept of sprung rhythm – established him as an innovator, as did his praise of God through vivid use of imagery and nature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leaf by Niggle</span> Short story by J. R. R. Tolkien

"Leaf by Niggle" is a short story written by J. R. R. Tolkien in 1938–39 and first published in the Dublin Review in January 1945. It was reprinted in Tolkien's book Tree and Leaf, and in several later collections. Contrary to Tolkien's claim that he despised allegory in any form, the story is an allegory of Tolkien's own creative process, and, to an extent, of his own life, following the structure of Dante's Purgatorio. It also expresses his philosophy of divine creation and human sub-creation. The story came to him in a dream.

Sprung rhythm is a poetic rhythm designed to imitate the rhythm of natural speech. It is constructed from feet in which the first syllable is stressed and may be followed by a variable number of unstressed syllables. The British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins said he discovered this previously unnamed poetic rhythm in the natural patterns of English in folk songs, spoken poetry, Shakespeare, Milton, et al. He used diacritical marks on syllables to indicate which should be stressed in cases "where the reader might be in doubt which syllable should have the stress" and which syllables should be pronounced but not stressed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Bridges</span> British poet (1844-1930)

Robert Seymour Bridges was a British poet who was Poet Laureate from 1913 to 1930. A doctor by training, he achieved literary fame only late in life. His poems reflect a deep Christian faith, and he is the author of many well-known hymns. It was through Bridges's efforts that the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins achieved posthumous fame.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bluebell wood</span> Woodland with a carpet of bluebells

A bluebell wood is a woodland that in springtime has a carpet of flowering bluebells underneath a newly forming leaf canopy. The thicker the summer canopy, the more the competitive ground-cover is suppressed, encouraging a dense carpet of bluebells, whose leaves mature and die down by early summer. Other common woodland plants which accompany bluebells include the yellow rattle and the wood anemone.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas Traherne</span> English poet, clergyman, theologian, and religious writer

Thomas Traherne was an English poet, Anglican cleric, theologian, and religious writer. The intense, scholarly spirituality in his writings has led to his being commemorated by some parts of the Anglican Communion on 10 October or on 27 September.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Trees (poem)</span> Poem by Joyce Kilmer

"Trees" is a lyric poem by American poet Joyce Kilmer. Written in February 1913, it was first published in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse that August and included in Kilmer's 1914 collection Trees and Other Poems. The poem, in twelve lines of rhyming couplets of iambic tetrameter verse, describes what Kilmer perceives as the inability of art created by humankind to replicate the beauty achieved by nature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Haecceity</span> Term from medieval scholastic philosophy

Haecceity is a term from medieval scholastic philosophy, first coined by followers of Duns Scotus to denote a concept that he seems to have originated: the irreducible determination of a thing that makes it this particular thing. Haecceity is a person's or object's thisness, the individualising difference between the concept "a man" and the concept "Socrates". In modern philosophy of physics, it is sometimes referred to as primitive thisness.

The curtal sonnet is a form invented by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and used in three of his poems.

Inscape and instress are complementary and enigmatic concepts about individuality and uniqueness derived by the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Paul Mariani is an American poet and is University Professor Emeritus at Boston College.

"Adoro te devote" is a prayer written by Thomas Aquinas. Unlike hymns which were composed and set to music for the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, instituted in 1264 by Pope Urban IV for the entire Latin Church of the Catholic Church, it was not written for a liturgical function and appears in no liturgical texts of the period; some scholars believe that it was written by the friar for private use at Mass. The text has since been incorporated into public worship as a hymn.

"Pied Beauty" is a curtal sonnet by the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889). It was written in 1877, but not published until 1918, when it was included as part of the collection Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

"The Windhover" is a sonnet by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889). It was written on 30 May 1877, but not published until 1914, when it was included as part of the collection Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins dedicated the poem "To Christ our Lord".

In romantic literature, a work has organic form if the structure has originated from the materials and subjects used by the author. Using the organic metaphor, the structure is seen to grow as a plant. It stands in contrast to a mechanical form, a work which has been produced in accordance with artificial rules. The lack of rules in Shakespeare's works led some critics to claim that they lacked form; Samuel Taylor Coleridge leapt to his defence with the concept of organic form.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Binsey Poplars</span> Poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, written 1879

"Binsey Poplars" is a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889), written in 1879. The poem was inspired by the felling of a row of poplar trees near the village of Binsey, northwest of Oxford, England, and overlooking Port Meadow on the bank of the River Thames. The replacements for these trees, running from Binsey north to Godstow, lasted until 2004, when replanting began again.

<i>Inscape</i> (Copland) 1967 musical composition for orchestra by Aaron Copland

Inscape is a 1967 musical composition for orchestra by Aaron Copland, approximately twelve to thirteen minutes in length, and commissioned by and dedicated to the New York Philharmonic for its 125th anniversary. Composed using the twelve-tone technique, the piece has been considered less accessible than much of Copland's earlier music. It is named for Gerard Manley Hopkins's term "inscape", invented:

to suggest 'a quasi-mystical illumination, a sudden perception of that deeper pattern, order, and unity which gives meaning to external forms.' This description, it seems to me, applies more truly to the creation of music than to any of the other arts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Catholic literary revival</span> Literary movement

The Catholic literary revival is a term that has been applied to a movement towards explicitly Catholic allegiance and themes among leading literary figures in France and England, roughly in the century from 1860 to 1960. This often involved conversion to Catholicism or a conversion-like return to the Catholic Church. The phenomenon is sometimes extended to the United States.

<i>The Circus of the Sun</i>

"TheCircus of the Sun" is a poem by American poet Robert Lax (1915–2000). First published in 1959 by Journeyman Press it consists of a cycle of 31 short poems that tell the story of a traveling circus. The poem is included in the collections: 33 Poems (1987), Love Had a Compass (1997), and Circus Days and Nights (2000).

The Chimeras is a sequence of sonnets by the French writer Gérard de Nerval, made up of eight individual poems and a total of twelve sonnets. The poems are: "El Desdichado", "Myrtho", "Horus", "Anteros", "Delphica", "Artemis", "Christ at Gethsemane" (I–V) and "Golden Verses". They were published in the book Les Filles du feu in January 1854.

References

  1. ↑ Chevigny, Bell Gale. Instress and Devotion in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins Victorian Studies Vol. 9, No. 2 (Dec., 1965), pp. 141–153.
  2. ↑ SOBOLEV, DENNIS (2011). The Split World of Gerard Manley Hopkins: an essay in semiotic phenomenology. Catholic University of America Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctt2851cg. ISBN   978-0-8132-1855-7. JSTOR   j.ctt2851cg.
  3. 1 2 Stephen Greenblatt et al., Ed. "Gerard Manley Hopkins." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 8th ed. Vol. 2. New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. p. 2159
  4. ↑ J. R. R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories , in Essays Presented to Charles Williams, CS Lewis Ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978)
  5. ↑ Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation New Directions Publishing, 1972. 29.
  6. ↑ "Hopkins's Poetry: "As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Dragonflies Draw Flame" | SparkNotes". www.sparknotes.com. Retrieved 13 December 2020.
  7. ↑ Bump, Jerome. 1990. Poet of Nature. In Critical Essays on Gerard Manley Hopkins. Edited by Alison G. Sulloway. Boston: G. K. Hall, pp. 61–91. Quoted in https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/9/2/49/htm
  8. 1 2 "Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins". Poetry Foundation. 20 December 2020. Retrieved 20 December 2020.
  9. 1 2 3 Urban, David V. (February 2018). "Ignatian Inscape and Instress in Gerard Manley Hopkins's "Pied Beauty," "God's Grandeur," "The Starlight Night," and "The Windhover": Hopkins's Movement toward Ignatius by Way of Walter Pater". Religions. 9 (2): 49. doi: 10.3390/rel9020049 .
  10. ↑ Pater, Walter (20 May 2015). The Renaissance. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. ISBN   978-1-5123-0297-4.
  11. ↑ "Literary theory: Gerard Manley Hopkins' inscape and instress from Crossref-it.info". crossref-it.info. Retrieved 20 December 2020.
  12. ↑ For example, William Blake in his dialogue with his Tyger asks "Did He who made the Lamb make thee?" https://blakequarterly.org/index.php/blake/article/view/borkowska482/borkowska482html
  13. ↑ "Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold". Poetry Foundation. 20 December 2020. Retrieved 21 December 2020.
  14. ↑ Bayley, John (25 April 1991). "Pork Chops". London Review of Books. Vol. 13, no. 8. ISSN   0260-9592 . Retrieved 22 December 2020.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.