PARTISAN REVIEW
relevant things about Hopkins' poetry without interruption only after
every metrical form possible in English has been discussed at length
and dismissed. The important thing about Father Ong's essay is that he
has a genuinely acute critical intelligence, and his discussion is always
directed towards clearing the stage sO that those relevant evaluations
can be made. As a stage-clearer his work should prove definitive. Near
the beginning of his essay he writes: "Hopkins, rhythm and all, had
taken up his position at a place over which the living current of the lan–
guage was moving, when men whom his age thought great were, as
it latterly appears, stogged to the right and to the left in drying sloughs.
This is what needs explaining. The question is not the one often heard:
How did Hopkins break with tradition? Hopkins is in a tradition or he
could not have survived. . .. Our question, then, can be put this way:
what did Hopkins come upon?" After this, one can follow Father Ong
with a sense of security. His conclusions aren't new, but they are right.
Years ago F. R. Leavis had written: "For the peculiarities of his
(Hopkins') technique appeal for sanction to the spirit of the language:
his innovations accentuate and develop bents it exhibits in living use
and, above all, in the writings of the greatest master who ever used it."
Father Ong writes in this tradition of criticism, and at a time when his
services seem to have been needed, for apparently there is nothing that
offends a certain type of critic more than a language vitally employed.
Father Raymond Schoder's essay on "The Windhover" is also
extremely good. During the past few years there have been a number
of conflicting interpretations of this poem. The differences haven't al–
ways been deep, and most of these critics managed to give intelligent
and sensitive accounts of the poem, and mostly they exhibited a sense
of its intrinsic worth. It remained for Ivor Winters to find in it an
instance of pathetic fallacy, and in its comparison of Christ with a mere
bird (Christ and a bird, Mr. Winters would propound, don't have the
same "haecceity"), bordering on the blasphemous. Mr. Winters prefers
Thomas Hardy's poem entitled "Afterwards," which describes "the dew–
fall hawk." Frankly, in view of his usual critical practice I am surprised
he didn't condemn Hardy's poem on the grounds that dew doesn't fall.
But in any event, it is amusing to find Mr. Winters, after accusing "The
Windhover" of pathetic fallacy, writing a few pages further on (the
passage should be read in context for its full richness): "At this present
time I own a young dog who seems to me exceptionally beautiful, espe–
cially when he is in motion. No less than Hopkins' falcon, he is one of
God's little creatures ... in addition, I am fairly certain that his moral
character is more admirable than that of the bird."
