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tion for him lie beyond language and its capacities for self–
interpretation. For Hopkins's
"The world
is charged with the grandeur
of God" Lawler revises
"The word,"
not the unrevised old Logos, but
the poet's language; word becomes for him Word, eventually, but not
by anything like the processes of baroque epigrammatic wit, for
example. In one sense, this whole book can be considered an ultimate
act of comprehending Hopkins, and of going beyond the limitations of
his theories of meter and music. Hopkins's very prosodic vocabulary
treated the rhythmic consequences of the English language's unique
relation between word-accent and syntax, which have made it such an
energetic language for poetry, as ontological and psychological par–
ables. Lawler has coped with the inscape of many other sorts of pattern:
his ear and eye for arrangement and for What Might Be Going on
There are always open in a kind of shrewd adoration. One might
characterize this book's temper by saying that while it does not
necessarily view the idea of the Merely Decorative as wholly the devil's
work, it does regard treating as if it were wallpaper, or Muzak, a troped
scheme- a device of form itself made parabolic-as a sin . As, in fact, an
interpretive murder, or an analogue of treating a person as a thing, or a
work of art as a package of marketability.
The poets Lawler cites most frequently are Wordsworth, Keats,
Milton, Hopkins, Yeats, Browning, Coleridge, Blake, Donne, and
Stevens. This is not surprising, given their greatness, and the fascinat–
ing interplay of oral and scribal forces always at work in their formal
schemes. (For some reason, Whitman, Frost, and Hart Crane, all of
whom provide realms of instances, never come up at all.) The organiza–
tion of his book implicitly invokes a mythology of
poesis
and suggests
that the "celestial pantomime" of his Stevensian title shou ld perhaps
have been
The Creation as the Letter
C-the chapter headings, and
the classification of his patterns are all designated by single words
beginning with C. The sequence of terms "Canon," "Commerce,"
"Caprice," "Clue," "Culmination," "Collision" unrolls in itself a
little fable about reading and interpretation by its implied succession
of phased modes of textual attention. Hopkins-like, Lawler imports
into his apparatus tropes of something beyond it-all these energetic
instances of C as the broken circle of perfection, as well as the modern
hermeneutic one, broken by nature (but thereby allowing light to get
in, or a handhold for grasping the otherwise slippery entity). And yet
nowhere in the text does an idiosyncratic apparatus, a coll ection of
gestures masquerading as technical terms, get in the way of exposition,
or of the interpretation which emanates from it.
