Hopkins and Heidegger by Willems Brian

Hopkins and Heidegger by Willems Brian

Author:Willems, Brian.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2009-07-19T16:00:00+00:00


attuneable,

White reads the next word in the first line of ‘Sibyl’, ‘attuneable’, in much the same way as equal, saying that it perhaps means ‘“bringing into harmony or accord”, and refers to the evening’s bringing to one tone the dapple of daytime earth and sky’ (2002, p. 28). This is not ‘one note’ in a literal sense, but rather that the world is brought into an organization of tonality, which White relates to the spheres of music in classical times when each main planet that was then known had its own tone on a seven-tone scale. Then White makes an interesting connection:

Hopkins suggests that, rather like the ancients’ spheres, the parts of the cosmos, including the earth and its ‘dapple at end’, have lost their characteristic individual tunes and are now all of one note. This would be an obvious sign of cosmic breaking-up and the end of time. (Ibid.)

White connects ‘bringing into harmony or accord’ to ‘an obvious sign of cosmic breaking-up and the end of time’ in much the same way as the previous section looked at the concept of the oracular end of history. Attunement [Gestimmtheit] is one of the key terms in Heidegger’s thought, although it takes on a different definition than White makes for Hopkins here, and perhaps Heidegger’s reading of attunement will help in the reading of ‘Sibyl’ as an act of prophecy.

Before looking at Heidegger’s concept of attunement, one aspect of White’s reading should be addressed, and that is the role of the musicality of ‘Sibyl’. For Hopkins, his poems were meant to be read aloud, and the process of such reading forms an essential part of their meaning. The importance of musicality for Hopkins can also be seen in that he composed music.3 In a letter to Robert Bridges dating from 1884, Hopkins describes his effort at hearing the melody in William Collins’ poem ‘Ode to Evening’, which Hopkins was setting to music: ‘Quickened by the heavenly beauty of that poem I groped in my soul’s very viscera for the tune and thrummed the sweetest and most secret catgut of the mind’ (1935, p. 199). While the oral aspect of his poetry was pervasive throughout his work, nowhere did he feel it was more important than with ‘Sibyl’. Hopkins says the poem:

is made for performance, as living art should be – reading aloud, leisurely, poetical (not rhetorical) recitation, with long rests, long dwells on the rhyme and other marked syllables, and so on. This sonnet should be almost sung. It is most carefully timed in tempo rubato. (Qtd. in Gardner, 1944, p. 105)

As one of Hopkins’ most attentive scholars, W. H. Gardner, upon quoting the above extract from Hopkins’ letters, says, ‘Like the Deutschland and the Echoes, this sonnet is a task for the sensitive virtuoso … and the rubato effect allows of individual interpretations within the broad march of a pulsing but not facile cumulative rhythm’ (ibid.). White makes another reference to the musicality of ‘Sibyl’ in his full-length biography of Hopkins.



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