Sound Lab
Reading poetry can be fun. Reading poetry well, however, takes work and knowledge. The way in which a poem is read, moreover, can significantly alter the meaning of the poem, depending on where the reader decides to place the stresses and slacks, which words are going to be emphasized and which are going to be glossed over quickly. In the case of Hopkins’ poetry and given his complex use of prosody (see Meter & Rhythm) and the complicated textual history of his poems (see Poems), reading can be extremely challenging.
After all, Hopkins went to a lot of trouble, as he states in his Preface, to annotate and mark up his poetry. As he himself affirms, his placement of stresses and slacks and his use of meter are unusual and, sometimes, it goes directly against what convention and a reader’s instinct may dictate. Thus, he uses accents liberally, he places slurs to make what would normally be read as two syllables one and, in some cases, to elongate one syllable into the time of two. Moreover, he uses the indentations of the lines to signal to the reader how many stresses are going to be found in each line. For example, in part one of The Wreck of the Deutschland the stresses are 2 in the first line, 3 in the second, 4 in the third, 3 in the fourth, 5 in the fifth, 5 again in the sixth, 4 in the seventh and 6 in the eighth and final line. In part two, however, the number of stresses as indicated by line indentation changes slightly and the order becomes 3, 3, 4, 3, 5, 5, 4, 6.
What happens, then, when editorial choices remove some of these crucial elements from the text? What happens when a reader encounters these poems without the necessary notation marks, like they will if they read Bridges’ 1918 edition, or any subsequent printings based on that edition? Furthermore, what happens when a reader encounters the text in online formats, like that at Poetry Foundation for example, in which not only the punctuation marks but also the indentation of the lines have been removed? The way in which the reader reads the poem will certainly change depending on the version, but to what extent will those deviations in reading alter the meaning of the poem?
The goal of this sound lab is to attempt to answer some of these questions and to allow users to play around and experiment with these ideas on their own. For that purpose, at the bottom of the page there are different text versions of the second part of The Wreck of the Deutschland with different levels of notation, which the reader can use to experiment with how it feels to read Hopkins’ poetry with different levels of knowledge and notation.
Audio Recordings
If reading is not your forte or if you prefer to experiment with sound in another way, you can also listen to the recordings of the different textual variants done by volunteer readers. Reading 1 belongs to the unannotated 1918 edition of the second part of The Wreck of the Deutschland, and reading 2 is based on the version annotated by Hopkins found in text B of Robert Bridges’ notebooks.
Textual Variants for Reading
