Prose (80 page)

When I woke up it must have been ten o'clock. Faint cheerings and shoutings were coming from the house. I peered up cautiously and to my surprise there were actually three men standing on the roof of our house, shouting a song for all they were worth. One of their army songs, I suppose; anyway it sounded like the crazy ending of a comic opera. All I could see was the roof tops, but I could hear an uproar of shouts and yells and singing with an occasional crash or thud. No shots, however.

I made my way around and up the hill to the stables without being seen and slipped in. I hunted around and sure enough there were some old pairs of overalls left by the stable-boys; a lot of old clothes in fact. I threw away my coat and pants and put on a pair—I looked messy enough, anyway, after sleeping in the grass down there.

“Well, they've found father's cellar, all right,” I thought, listening.

A wild, magnificent lawn-party was going on. There seemed to be about fifty people: men, women, and children, all rushing around calling to each other, and engaged in preparing a kind of grand breakfast. They'd put all our tables together in a big horse-shoe under the trees, and covered them with our table-linen (stamped here and there with black footprints). There was a great fire of coals, and four men were cooking over it, coffee and bacon and eggs. Apparently they mistrusted our electric range. Women were running in and out of the house with bread, fruit, glasses, boxes of cigars, everything they could find that might be of use to a banquet. Corks were popping out of bottles, peaceful little explosions right and left, and a few men were already lying around drunk. I went up to the men who were doing the cooking.

“Some place, ain't it, buddy?” one of them said to me. “Been in the house yet?”

I said I hadn't, but I thought I'd take a look, and strolled in the front door. In the hall two women were fighting over the remains of a roasted chicken, both pulling. The marble floor was greasy and muddy; the red roses were ground to a pulp by now. People were coming and going in excited groups, pointing and grabbing and exclaiming, some of them dressed in fantastic costumes put together from the wardrobes of my departed family. It was an hilarious affair. I felt like the host of a house party whose guests had gone mad, which was, nevertheless, a great success.

From father's large bathroom came loud laughter, splashings and slappings. I looked in and discovered two naked men jumping in and out of the shower and bath, throwing powder and bathsalts at each other, spitting shining spouts of water out the window into the sunlight and onto their amused friends below.

In the drawing room there was an old lady sitting on the floor in a ring of dirty petticoats. She was carefully unhooking the cut glass pendants from the chandelier. One by one she held them up to the sunlight and admired the rainbows they made on the wall, then hung them on some part of her clothes or person. She was bedecked and a'dazzle from top to toe.

In mother's French bed, canopied with lime colored satin, someone had put two filthy babies to sleep.…

I went out again to join the breakfast party, toasting each other madly and throwing bottles over trees and chimneys. “What'll you have, kid?” they yelled at me. I saw a bottle of champagne. “Champagne,” I said, pointing.

“Aw, champagne? That stuff's no good. Just like pop.… Have some real stuff, buddy. Have a man's drink. Have some whiskey.”

After a while they began to make preparations for some sort of lot drawing. I couldn't make out quite what it was all about. Everyone wrote his or her name on a slip of paper and dropped it in our large silver coffee urn. Then one of them, a leader, got up, closed his eyes elaborately and drew some of the slips.

“William Brinker!”

A fat, tow-headed man, about forty, got up and essayed a bow, grinning. Everyone cheered, clapped him on the back, offered him a drink. He made his wife and four tow-headed children stand up, too, all smiling and bowing in a row.

“Minna Schlauss!”

Minna was young but enormous. So stormy was her black, wiry hair and general determinedly uncouth appearance that I thought at once of Beethoven. She had two ancient men in charge, her father and his brother they must have been, and her mother was the old lady whom I'd found decorating herself with crystals from the chandelier.

“Jacob Kaffir!”

And then an amazing little man stood up. He was exactly the color of a well used penny and he wore a small moustache and, of all things, a fez. He received his applause shyly, but with delight, and made a timid, sweeping bow.

Somebody remarked, “But he ain't got any children.” …

Somebody else said, “What'll he do with all them rooms?”

It dawned on me what this mysterious drawing of lots meant. They were portioning out our house, and three families, probably more, were to live in it. (For half a second I imagined father and mother and my four brothers and sisters returning, with a sigh, from Canada and being met by William, Minna, and Jacob.…)

“Get somebody else, Jakie,” they were saying, “A couple more single guys like you. That'll even it up all right.”

I caught Jacob's eye and smiled as hard as I could, raising my forefinger like a man saying “One, next the wall,” in a restaurant.

“Him!” Jacob shouted. “He live with me. O. K. to you?”

“You bet,” I said. “Well it may be sort of fun for a while,” I thought.

Apparently Jacob had the same idea. “We'll have fun, huh?” he said, waving an empty bottle at me, and he gave me a wink I could almost hear. “Seems like home already, don't it.”

1933

From “Time's Andromedas”

Now Time's Andromeda on this rock rude …

—Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

One afternoon last fall I was studying very hard, bending over my book with my back to the light of the high double windows. Concentration was so difficult that I had dug myself a sort of little black cave into the subject I was reading, and there I burrowed and scratched, like the Count of Monte Cristo, expecting Heaven knows what sudden revelation. My own thoughts, conflicting with those of the book, were making such a wordy racket that I heard and saw nothing—until the page before my eyes blushed pink. I was startled, then realized that there must be a sunset at my back, and waited a minute trying to guess the color of it from the color of the little reflection. As I waited I heard a multitude of small sounds, and knew simultaneously that I had been hearing them all along,—sounds high in the air, of a faintly rhythmic irregularity, yet resembling the retreat of innumerable small waves, lake-waves, rustling on sand.

Of course it was the birds going South. They were very high up, a fairly large sort of bird, I couldn't tell what, but almost speck-like, paying no attention to even the highest trees or steeples. They spread across a wide swath of sky, each rather alone, and at first their wings seemed all to be beating perfectly together. But by watching one bird, then another, I saw that some flew a little slower than others, some were trying to get ahead and some flew at an individual rubato; each seemed a variation, and yet altogether my eyes were deceived into thinking them perfectly precise and regular. I watched closely the spaces between the birds. It was as if there were an invisible thread joining all the outside birds and within this fragile net-work they possessed the sky; it was down among them, of a paler color, moving with them. The interspaces moved in pulsation too, catching up and continuing the motion of the wings in wakes, carrying it on, as the rest in music does—not a blankness but a space as musical as all the sound.

The birds came in groups, each taking four or five minutes to fly over; then a pause of two or three minutes and the next group appeared. I must have watched them for almost an hour before I realized that the same relationships of birds and spaces I had noticed in the small groups were true of the whole migration at once. The next morning when I got up and went to the window they were still going over, and all that day and part of the next whenever I remembered to listen or look up they were still there.

It came to me that the flying birds were setting up, far over my head, a sort of time-pattern, or rather patterns, all closely related, all minutely varied, and yet all together forming the
migration,
which probably in the date of its flight and its actual flying time was as mathematically regular as the planets. There was the individual rate of each bird, its rate in relation to all the other birds, the speed of the various groups, and then that mysterious swath they made through the sky, leaving it somehow emptied and stilled, slowly assuming its usual coloring and far-away look. Yet all this motion with its effect of precision, of
passing
the time along, as the clock passes it along from minute to minute, was to result in the end in a thing so inevitable, so absolute, as to mean nothing connected with the passage of time at all—a static fact of the world, the birds here or there, always; a fact that may hurry the seasons along for us, but as far as bird migration goes, stands still and infinite.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Notes on Timing in His Poetry

It is perhaps fanciful to apply the expression
timing
to poetry—race horses, runners, are timed; there is such a thing as the timing of a crew of oarsmen, or a single tennis-stroke—it may be a term only suited to physical motions. But as poetry considered in a very simple way is motion too: the releasing, checking, timing, and repeating of the movement of the mind according to ordered systems, it seems fair enough to admit that in some way its discipline involves a method of timing, even comparable to that used for literal actions. For me at least, an idea of
timing
in poetry helps to explain many of those aspects of poetry which are so inadequately expressed by most critics: why poets differ so from each other; why using exactly the same meters and approximate vocabularies two poets produce such different effects; why some poetry seems at rest and other poetry in action. Particularly in referring to Father Hopkins, the most intricate of poets technically and most taxing emotionally, does some such simplified method of approach seem necessary.

The most general meaning of
timing
as applied to any particular physical activity is co-ordination: the correct manipulation of the time, the little duration each phase of the action must take in order that the whole may be perfect. And the time taken for each part of an action is decided both by the time of the whole, and of the parts before and after. (This sounds involved, but can be made quite clear, I think, by picturing for a minute a crew of men rowing a shell, and considering the enormous number of tiny individual motions going to each stroke, to each man, and the whole shell.) The whole series together sets up a
rhythm,
which in turn enables the series to occur over and over again—possibly with variations once it is established.

Just so in poetry: the syllables, the words, in their actual duration and their duration according to sense-value, set up among themselves a rhythm, which continues to flow over them. And if we find all these things harmonious, if they amalgamate in some strange manner, then the
timing
has been right. This does not mean that a monotonous, regularly beating meter means good timing—duration of sense and sound each play a part, I believe, nearly equal, and
sense
is the quality which permits mechanical irregularities while preserving the unique feeling of timeliness in the poem.

I suppose that the most characteristic feature of Hopkins' poetry is that a great part of it is in “sprung rhythm.” Such a departure from the verse traditions of three hundred years must be indicative of a desire or necessity of expressing different sorts of rhythm, involving different sorts of timing from those we find in other poetry. I cannot go into a full explanation of “sprung rhythm” here—both because it is a complicated subject and because I don't know enough about it,—but enough must be said so that the importance of its
timing
and its resultant peculiarities may be illustrated. (For simple explanations of sprung rhythm see Hopkins' own Preface to his poems, and Chapter VI,
The Craftsman,
in his biography by G. F. Lahey, S.J.) The most obvious thing about it is that the stress is considered as always falling on the first syllable of the foot, and the foot may be monosyllabic or followed by one, two or three weak syllables—even a greater number for special effect. The rhythm is thus unified, but mixed, and flexible, something in the manner of the Greek “logaoedic.” In ordinary running rhythm we are accustomed to the variation of reversed feet, dactylls, etc., which if repeated gives us the effect of counterpointing—the original rhythm running underneath the superimposed rhythm. In “sprung rhythm” the rhythm felt corresponds to that of the counterpointing in running rhythm—minus the original underlying rhythm. It must be added, too, that all feet are assumed to be of equal length or strength, and the inequalities common to English are naturally made up by pause or stressing, according to the sense, or indication.

From this much I think it is evident that verse based entirely upon sprung rhythm, or sprung and running rhythms mixed, will have a very different quality about its co-ordination—maintaining the rhythmic beat customary to poetry, with an enormous increase in the variations possible for setting it up. Take, for example, the first lines of Hopkins' well known sonnet “God's Grandeur,” in ordinary running rhythm:

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?”

and compare it with the last lines, in sprung rhythm, of the amazing “Windhover”:

    “No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion