Poetry and Education: Dawn Potter on Hopkins’s “The Soldier”

It’s so easy to overlook punctuation. Our eyes are trained to glide past it, automatically registering the marks as pauses or sentence endings but not otherwise lingering over them. Baron Wormser and David Cappella note in Teaching the Art of Poetry, “Punctuation makes necessary distinctions so that things don’t blur and tangle and confuse,” and this is why its absence often distresses us. “Punctuation seems ironclad. There had better be a period at the end of each sentence. It’s the law—and poets flout it.”

Well, some poets flout it. In an interview for The Paris Review, Philip Larkin grumbled:

A well-known publisher asked me how one punctuated poetry, and looked flabbergasted when I said, The same as prose. By which I mean that I write, or wrote, as everyone did till the mad lads started, using words and syntax in the normal way to describe recognizable experiences as memorably as possible. That doesn’t seem to me a tradition. The other stuff, the mad stuff, is more an aberration.

It’s true that some poems seem to taunt us with willful misuse. In “th wundrfulness uv th mountees our secret police,” bill bissett not only ignores punctuation and capitalization but misspells words, creating a narrative that is also a sort of manipulative graffiti:

they opn our mail  petulantly
they burn down barns they cant
bug  they listn to our politikul
ledrs phone conversashuns    what
cud b less inspiring to ovrheer

Sonia Sanchez takes a different tack in her “Song No. 3.” Though she, too, ignores capitalization, she does make use of traditional punctuation. Nonetheless, she doesn’t end every sentence with a period, only the last line of the stanza. Her choice affects how we imagine the speaker’s voice and supports our absorption of the poem’s blunt, childish, yet very clear pain.

cain’t nobody tell me any different
i’m ugly and you know it too
you just smiling to make me feel better
but i see how you stare when nobody’s watching you.

Even as many poets experiment with deleting punctuation, others put traditional marks to new uses. For instance, rather than linking images with grammar, Melissa Stein’s “So deeply that it is not heard at all, but” links them with punctuation:

sister: the violin is blue. it plays stars, there was a field—sister: that swelling in your belly will be a milkweed, a duty, a friend—
sister: goldenrod blossom: stippled ancillary: nonplussed bird—

Russell Edson, on the other hand, gives us long grammatically complex sentences filled with traditional punctuation that, instead of clarifying the situation, contribute to the poem’s ambiguity, as in this dense line from “Out of Whack”:

Too late, too late, because I am wearing the king’s crown: and, in that we are married, and, in that the wearer of the king’s crown is automatically the king, you are now my queen, who broke her crown like a typically silly woman, who doesn’t quite realize the value of things, screamed the queen.

But even when a poet follows less raucous patterns of punctuation, she chooses each comma, each period, each dash, precisely and deliberately. Punctuation marks, as Wormser and Cappella have said, add clarity; but they also are important elements of sound, affecting a line’s cadence and tonality. The silence implied by a dash is longer than the silence implied by a comma. A question mark indicates a lift in tonal pitch, whereas a period indicates a drop. Even a hyphen or its absence has a subtle influence: the pacing of fire truck is different from fire-truck is different from firetruck.

Punctuation marks can be stylistic tics, as the dash was for Dickinson. They can even be stylistic anathemas. Richard Hugo, for instance, hated semicolons. In his essay “Nuts and Bolts,” he declared, “No semicolons. Semicolons indicate relationships that only idiots need defined by punctuation. Besides, they are ugly.” Derek Walcott, among many other poets, would disagree passionately with that pronouncement. He uses semicolons throughout his book-length poem The Prodigal, often inserting them at line endings to indicate a pause of recognition or comprehension:

Then through the thinned trees I saw a wraith
of smoke, which I believed came from the house,
but every smoker carries his own wreath;
then I saw that this moving wreath was yours.

In short, punctuation is both a flexible tool for experimentation and a formal structural element with rules and predictable patterns. Gerard Manley Hopkins was well aware of this duality, and he took advantage of both tradition and strangeness in the way in which he handled punctuation in his poems.

The Soldier

Gerard Manley Hopkins

 Yes. Why do we all, seeing of a soldier, bless him? bless
Our redcoats, our tars? Both these being, the greater part,
But frail clay, nay but foul clay. Here it is: the heart,
Since, proud, it calls the calling manly, gives a guess
That, hopes that, makes believe, the men must be no less;
It fancies, feigns, deems, dears the artist after his art;
And fain will find as sterling all as all is smart,
And scarlet wear the spirit of war there express.
Mark Christ our King. He knows war served this soldiering through;
He of all can reeve a rope best. There he bides in bliss
Now, and seeing somewhere some man do all that man can do,
For love he leans forth, needs his neck must fall on, kiss,
And cry “O Christ-done deed! So God-made-flesh does too:
Were I come o’er again” cries Christ “it should be this.”

“The Soldier” opens with this line:

Yes. Why do we all, seeing of a soldier, bless him? bless

The effect of that first small word followed by a period is remarkable: a door slammed, a hand clapped over a mouth. If the poet had chosen a comma, a dash, or even a colon, I would have felt some sense of continued movement in the line. But “Yes.” is a screeching halt.

Why did Hopkins use a period here? When I reread the poem, I don’t see anything that parallels this usage. Perhaps “Here it is:” in line 3 is most similar, but in the second case the colon alerts us to a forthcoming example or explanation. In contrast, “Yes.” ends all discussion. Flatly, it announces a fact.

According to The Careful Writer, “the period is the red light that brings the reader to a halt—in fact, it is known [in British English] as a full stop.” Taking this power into account, The Elements of Style makes allowances for treating certain brief phrases as full sentences: “Do not use periods for commas. . . . [But] it is permissible to make an emphatic word or expression serve the purpose of a sentence and punctuate it accordingly.”

Although these style books address prose rather than poetry, Robert Frost understood that such fundamental principles of grammar were transferable to poems. In a notebook, he wrote, “Poets have lamented the lack in poetry of any such notation as music has for suggesting sound. But it is there and has always been there. The sentence is the notation. The sentence is before all else just that: a notation for suggesting significant tones of voice.”

Punctuation, as Hopkins knew, is crucial to that notation. “The Soldier” is rife with “significant tones of voice.” It hesitates, doubles back, prevaricates . . . but not with “Yes.” The first word of the poem overflows with what I can only call courage. Yes. I will bring myself to speak. Yes. You need to listen to me figure out what I need to say. Yes.

In the middle of line 3, Hopkins opens a new sentence that snakes its way through lines 4 and 5 until stalling out at a semicolon:

                             Here it is: the heart,
Since, proud, it calls the calling manly, gives a guess
That, hopes that, makesbelieve, the men must be no less;

Encountering the commas in this passage is downright painful. Every one of them is a contortion, a stumble, a choke, a mistake. They chop up the cadence of the lines; they muddy the syntax of the phrasing. And the most uncomfortable of them all, to my ear, is “That,” which appears at the beginning of line 5.

“That,” could be the mirror opposite of “Yes.” Whereas “Yes.” was solidly decisive, “That,” is timid and changeable. Whereas “Yes.” was a brave loner, “That,” repeats itself two words later in the same line, right before the sentence launches into the hurried mouthful of “makesbelieve.” The poem’s shift in tone is both dramatic and awkward, as if the speaker is playing two parts simultaneously.

“The Soldier” is a sonnet; and I’ve noticed that, in many sonnets, the first words in the lines often seem to propel the poem. I wasn’t thinking of that power when I reacted to the word-punctuation combinations “Yes.” and “That,” but I am beginning to see that Hopkins’s choice of punctuation both emphasizes and undercuts this natural propulsion. Instead of driving me forward into the sonnet, both the period and the comma force me to stop, look back, look ahead, scratch my head, ask, “Wait a minute: what’s going here?”

In the words of teacher Carlene Gadapee, Hopkins’s punctuation functions as both “convention and invention.” The comma in “That,” does, on one level, exactly what we’d expect of a comma. It indicates a pause—a brief moment of silence in the line that also gives the reader time to make sense of the sentence’s syntactical shift. At the same time, the comma’s placement is clumsy, even ugly: it is both visually and sonically unsettling.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned after reading and rereading “The Soldier,” it’s that the poet is not shy about using commas. The poem overflows with them, and almost all contribute to the strained, contorted cadence of the lines and sentences. Hopkins’s own term for this cadence was sprung rhythm, which, in Robert Pinsky’s simplified explanation, “refers generally to the jamming in of stressed syllables.” By inserting pauses among the jammed-in syllables, the commas reinforce these unexpected stresses while also slowing the poem’s pace.

“No doubt,” Hopkins said in a letter to his friend Robert Bridges, “my poetry errs on the side of oddness.” One supreme oddness of “The Soldier” is the poet’s inconsistency. He follows traditional spelling rules and then suddenly tosses in “makesbelieve.” He revels in commas and then suddenly avoids them. Notice how his comma use changes in lines 12 through 14:

For love he leans forth, needs his neck must fall on, kiss,
And cry “O Christ-done-deed! So God-made-flesh does too:
Were I come o’er again” cries Christ “it should be this.”

Typically commas set off dialogue, so we might expect to see them after “And cry” in line 13 as well as “again” and “cries Christ” in line 14. But no: Hopkins hurries us straight into the punctuation-heavy dialogue, leaving me entirely confused, at first, as to whether Christ is doing all the talking or whether the man whose neck he “must fall on” is speaking line 13. I had to reread the entire poem to be sure that the problem wasn’t a missing quotation mark.

In his novel The Wapshot Chronicle, John Cheever makes reference to historical figure Lord Timothy Dexter, a Massachusetts eccentric, who, in the second edition of his 1802 book A Pickle for the Knowing Ones or Plain Truth in a Homespun Dress, “put all punctuation marks, prepositions, adverbs, articles, etc., at end of communication and urged reader to distribute same as he saw fit.”When reading a Hopkins poem, I sometimes wish the poet had given me that option. His punctuation is visceral yet inscrutable; heavy-handed even in absence; strangely distracting, like a marble in the mouth. It seems as determined to mislead me as it is to force me to watch and listen.

Writing of Hopkins’s poem “The Windhover,” Ange Mlinko has said, “If we hear through our eyes when we read any page of text, Hopkins taught me that in a great poem’s soundscapes, we ‘see’ through our ears as well.” By tinkering with his poems’ punctuation, Hopkins manipulated the subtleties of these soundscapes. He showed that a comma or its absence is more than a visual sign. It can be a sonic presence, an intellectual and emotional presence. “It fancies, feigns, deems, dears the artist after his art.”