REVIEWS Hopkinssong Wordspawn ALFRED BORRELLO, A Concordance of the Poetry in English of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1969. Pp. ix + 780. ROBERT J. D I L L I G A N A N D T O D D K. B E N D E R , A Concordance to the English Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970. Pp. xx + 321.

By Paul L. Mariani HAS BEEN GRACED with not one, but two concordances, published within a year of one another. Both are industrious, both in many ways helpful, both in part exasperating. Alfred Borrello, who edited his concordance in conjunction with two bus~ness-school student programmers in Mercer County (New Jersey) Community College's Advanced Computer Field Projects Course, has given us a valuable work unfortunately spavined from the start. Borrello as well as DiUigan and Bender 1 explain that their word-lists are geared to The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Fourth Edition (1967), edited by the late W. H. Gardner and Norman H. MacKenzie. This is reasonable since the Fourth will continue to be the standard edition of the poems until Professor MacKenzie's Oxford English Texts edition appears. But some diabolus in machina together with, perhaps, some editorial nodding, have conspired to astigmatize every page of Borrello's concordance: there is frequently no correspondence between line cited and poem, including, often, wrong line :and stanza. Since the numbers seem, .by my random count, to be off (when they are off) by a constant of one, the eyes might be able to adjust to this shift if one knows Hopkins' poetry well, and especially if one is working with the shorter lyrics. But the real exasperation occurswhen,say, we have a long narrative or fragment, and poem number and line number are off, even by one. On the first page of Borrello's concordance, for example, the early lines, "When wholesome spirits rustle about" and "Were limn'd about with radiance rare" are shifted from "I1 Mystico" (77) to "A Windy Day in Summer" (78). On the next page there are four errors, this time the numbers shuttling the other way. Here are two: "Furred snows, charged tuft above tuft, tower" is transferred from

HOPKINS

I Todd K. Bender is also author of Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Classical and Critical R e c e p t i o n o f His Work (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1966).

Backg ro und

Paul L. Mariani is an associate professor o f English at the University o f Massachusetts at Amh erst. He is the author o f A Commentary on the Complete Poems of

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Reviews "Penmaen Pool" (30) to "The Silver Jubilee" (29); "Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour" is shifted from "Hurrahing in Harvest" (38) to "Pied Beauty" (37). Such a listing is meant only to suggest what is, in a work which demands accuracy, a serious flaw, from which Dilligan and Bender have escaped. A less serious error is the occasional misspelling, as in "Sapricious: Proconsul, is Sapricius near?" or festconed for festooned, or an occasional compounding, as in Crimsoncressetedeast for Cn'mson-cresseted east. Moreover, Borrello has not included Hopkins' English translations, numbers 160 to 170, which often show him using coinages which appear nowhere else and a sophisticated, dense language and syntax in that silent and gestatory period in the late 1860s. One place where I did find Borrello's book better as a tool than Dilligan and Bender's is in his entry of each hyphenated compound under all of its word components. The importance of doing this with a poet as word-conscious as Hopkins is evident from Borrello's first entry: the a in water-in-a-wallow, a-wanting, with-a-fountain 's, dingle-a-dangled (you can hear the tintinnabulation in that one), all-a-leaf(with its suggestion of "all alive"), and rock-a-heart (with its mimetic sense, in context, of the metronomic regularity of heart and watch). And Borrello is better if one is looking for all variants of a particular word in order to discern its range, its resonance, in Hopkins. Take about, for example. Dilligan and Borrello concur (be careful of Borrello's erratic numbering: 102.1.74 should read 102.01.70; 152.-.23 should read 152.01.17, as Dilligan has it) in twenty-two of the twenty-three listings. But Borretlo's list adds blackabout air, which appears in "The Wreck of the Deutschland." The examining mind notices that this is, besides a fine alliteration and a startling inscaping o f the claustrophobia felt by the storm-wrecked victims in the North Sea, the only time Hopkins ever used about in a compound. If we collected enough such instances of verbal welding, we would notice startling linguistic patterns recurring in response to deeply-felt psychic pressures. Idiosyncrasy tends to become individuation; play wrestles and merges with need in the poetry. The possibilities inherent in a good Hopkins concordance begin to increase geometrically as the reader's imagination catches fire. Take, for example, Dilligan and Bender's Word Frequency Table, together with Borrello's two appendices (an alphabetized word list with frequency of recurrence, and words listed by frequency Of recurrence). Two polarities immediately reveal themselves: the nature of those words most frequently used, and the extraordinarily high frequency of words used once and once only. Dilligan lists all (241); but Borrello lists I (505), followed by all (245, including its uses in compounds, but excluding the English translations), and then my (239) and me (171), the last two admittedly omitted from Ditligan's list. (Dilligan omits 1, but does not list it in his omission table.) All and L me, my: the point and the circumference, the lyric aggrandizement of the poet's world is suggested in these polarities. 286

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Renews Then as-the sign of simile-(Dilligan 174, Borrello 167), one (Borrello 101, Dilligan omits); O, as cipher or exclamation, extremely important in a poet of spiritual correspondences whose tone is often in the higher registers (Borrello 101, Dilligan omits); like as simile and verb of desire (Borrello 99, Dilligan omits). Personally, I do not think that any word, not even the or and, can be omitted in a poet as elliptical as the mature Hopkins, who weighs every particle before he adds it. Nor can even a preposition like of be omitted when a poet of compound possessive epithets charges it with such foregrounding, as in "Your feast of; that most in you earnest eye." At least Borrello includes it in compounds, as in feel-of-primrose hands, or the compound womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night. Nor can a pronoun like her be deleted after we are aware of its force, its percussive insistence in a line like "Her Perseus linger and leave her tb her extremes?" We may quarrel with his elliptical density and verbal insistence (William Carlos Williams called Hopkins' effects "constipated," Oliver St. John Gogarty called them the introduction of the hiccough into English poetry), but there is precious little filler in any of Hopkins' mature work. There are other words which one would expect to recur frequently: love (80), most frequently as a noun, surprising in a verb-centered poet; will (83), most frequently as a verb, not only signifying future time, but determination as well; heart (76); God or God's (over 60); heaven (53); Christ (40), Christ's (10) as well as Christ-done and Christ-ed; Father (23); Mother (34); man (32); Romantic favorites like beauty and death (37 each); a diction of eye-centered verticality: air, day, eye, sight, light, night, high, sky, clouds, fire, white, breath, wings. Or there is the poet of self (24) and his singular compounds: self-caress'd, self-embraced, self-feeling,

self-instressed, self-made, self-outwitted, self-sacrifice, self-sentenced, selfwill, self-wise, selfbent, selfdisposal, selfish, selfless (in the late line "selfless self of self'), selfquained, selfsame, selfstrung, selfwrung, selfyeast (a word omitted, which we find in the manuscripts is selfstuff), selved, and selves. Such image-patterns are manifold and telling. And the concordances are rich in word-count and word-loam. At the other end of the spectrum are the discrete entries: the astonishingly large number of words used only once in Hopkins. There are over four thousand such entries, and patterns again reveal themselves. There is, for example, Hopkins' proclivity, both early and late, for compounds, both hyphenated and fused. Keats, or at least the Spenserian Romantics and Victorians-what Hopkins called the medieval school of poets with all their keepings-seem most evident in the early compounds:

acanthus-crown'd, acorn-cup, altar-tapers, altar-vessels, all-belated, allaccepting, beryl-covered, blood-vivid, blossom-hitting, broad-fluted, charnelhouse-grate, counter-roundels, columnar-severe, cloud-festooned (Borrello's computer came up here with its own compound:festeoned), fruit-cloistering, glassy-clear, half-meshing, heart-forsook, horizon-round, millbrook-slips, satin-purfled, strawberry-breasted. The list could be made Computers and the Humanities/Voi. 5/No. 5/May 1971

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Reviews much longer, and it helps to show just how heavily Hopkins' early diction was shaped by his reading in the Spenserian school. That influence is there later, too, but shaped by a greater vigor and "manliness" in style and rhythm, which the mature Hopkins found in Shakespeare, Milton, and more especially Dryden, with the latter's "stress...on the naked thew and sinew of the English language." The computer lists help to verify this sea-change of Keatsian compounds, crossed with this emphasis on the bare style. We find in the later Hopkins such forceful and energetic compounds as Amansstrength, baldbright,

beadbonny, beakleaved, bellbright, blackbacked, blue-bleak, bone-house, bugle-eyed, blear-all, bush-browed, champwhite, kindcold, deathgush, heavengravel, care-killed, chancequarried, churlsgrace, manwolf, mansex, passion-plungkd, no-man-fathomed, piece-bright, rook-racked, shadowtackle, shining-shot, shivelights, treadmire, trambeams, unChrist, unfathering, wildfire, wolfsnow, wringworld, and yestertempests. Over against these flinty compounds are the softer, very-violet-sweet compounds which show the Keatsian influence surfacing again and again, for one of Hopkins' favorite poetic stratagems is to play off verbal opposites against one another, moving from pizzicato to feathery touch. Here are some examples: airy-grey, azuring-over, beauty-in-the-ghost,

bell-swarmkd, lark-charmkd, brown-as-dawning-skinned, bushybowered, candycoloured, cloud-puffball, dapple-dawn-drawn, dainty-delicate, dropof-blood-and-foam-dapple, fallowbootfellow, foamfalling, lovely-felicitous, maidengear, not-by-morning-matched, quicksilvery, purple-of-thunder, river-rounded, ruder-rounded, wind-wandering, wind-lilylocks-laced, and wimpled-water-dimpled. (Compounds like yearmother and monthbrother owe more to Swinburne.) One could turn to the concordances for many things-to check how often Hopkins mentions a particular natural phenomenon, together with its compounds: sun (37), moon (12), stars (48),sea (36),ocean (3), earth (45), land (25); birds (12) and their kinds: larks, skylarks, woodlarks,

swans, swallows, rooks, doves, rockdoves, wooddoves, pigeons, robins, finches, seagulls, hawks, eagles. Since titles are not included in the word list, there is no entry for the windhover, nor any way of knowing by computerized concordance alone the long catalog of epithets used to describe the bird. But the computer, by breaking down the syntactical glue and rhythmic current, lets us see the words, the thingness of the words, in a wonderfully fresh way. It is as if we were to see for the first time the rich wordspawn out of which Hopkins created his poems. Reading these word-lists is like reading one of William Carlos Williams' cubist poems, where the words are presented as discrete entries, one to a line, and beneath each other. More than that of any other modern poet, Hopkins' astounding wordhoard flames from the page. When these words are found in their distinctive patterns of sprung rhythm or percussive chant, they change. Something of their abruptness and distinctness is absorbed because 288

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Reviews they are wedded so well to their given context. Hopkins' vocabulary goes hand-in-hand with his rhythms, and we are made aware that somehow music has quarried the words themselves. We have two concordances, both with their assets, both with their shortcomings. Borrello's is by far the easier on the eye and his listing of all word-parts of Hopkins' compounds is a great help. Dilligan and Bender's, while hard on the eye because of its computer type, includes eleven additional poems and, what is crucial in a concordance, is a precise tool. But serious scholars would do well to consult both. They are extremely useful tools-more so than I had thought before I began this review-for checking hypotheses about Hopkins' word patterns: image clusters, coinages, lexical complexities. And, what is more, both books may very well suggest any number of new hypotheses about this maker and his makings.

A Modern Drama Concordance

J. RUSSELL REAVER, An O'Neill Concordance. 3 vols. Detroit: Gale Research, 1969.

By Ernest G. Griffin MANY OTHER O'NEILL SCHOLARS must feel with me a profound regret that we did not have this concordance to hand before we published our books and articles on the playwright. It would have saved us many hours of reading and rereading to find certain words and phrases; and probably we would have enriched our critical ideas in reaction to the references which had not occurred to us. In O'Neill scholarship, previous to this concordance there is nothing of the same kind or scope with which it can be compared. To browse through it is a stimulating experience. It is a massive work, yet such is the nature of a concordance that its regretted limitations exist because it is not longer. One is bound to regret the omissions, especially the omission, in Ernest Griffin is an associate professor o f English at Y o r k University in Toronto. He has written on Eugene O'Neill and is engaged in a s t u d y o f suffering in modern America n literature.

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Reviews this particular concordance, of early works by the dramatist and several important plays. It is not fair to take Rearer to task for this since he explains that there was a lack of time, labor, and funds. However, one might argue with him about the critical implications involved in deciding what to omit. When he speaks of "representative" early plays being included, he leaves himself open to the challenge of his criteria for representativeness. When he states that he omitted "the very early apprenticeship work in his so-called 'Lost Plays,' work that O'Neill himself had forgotten and that was published, when the copyright expired, without his consent," the scholar most likely to use the concordance may well feel deprived of essential material because of faulty argument. In fact, it might be argued that such a concordance is most helpful in just those areas where it deals with lesser-known works not readily available and not so thoroughly explored. My own hope is that Reaver may find the time, labor, and funds for a fourth volume. If such help is forthcoming, I would suggest that the author's written w~rk outside the genre itself be considered. It was very gratifying to see the stage directions included; many of these directions are more useful as insights to O'Neill's attitudes than as practical advice to the producer. Would there be some way of introducing his valuable critical comments? One danger of a concordance is that its very size tends to suggest greater comprehensiveness and infallibility than are possible. The scholar is bound to be disappointed on occasion. Why, for example, was "Bacchus" included but not "Dionysus"? "Dionysus" appears several times in the dialogue of Lazarus Laughed. This omission is unfortunate, since the Dionysian element in O'Neill will, no doubt, be a constant subject of study. However, on the positive side, the possibilities of critical assistance are many and exciting, r~o.r example, I have been impressed by O'Neill's "ehoric" use of certain words. In Mary's speeches in Long Day's Journey into Night, "home" beats repetitiously and compulsively through all she says. Obviously, the concordance can help immensely in this kind of study. Also, I have been frequently struck by the pull of O'Neill towards an Irish rather than American center; the seventy entries under "Irish" as compared with the nineteen under "American" would seem to confirm this-or, at least, invite investigation. As one turns the pages, the thematically inclined critic wishes to begin work on those sixteen columns of "love," eight of "God," and six of "fool"-though nearly as intriguing are the questions raised by three columns of "bitter" and only one mention of "Freud." In general, it is encouraging to see this kind of concordance appear for modern authors. With the information organized by Reaver, together with that supplied by the Gelbs in their definitive biography, there is no excuse in O'Neill study for the ill-informed comment which sometimes devalues the criticism of contemporaries. 290

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