This CD offers readings of twenty-seven poems and clocks in at
just over seventy minutes’ playing time. It comes in a beautifully
designed fold-out package which includes photos of Hopkins and
Richard Austin; sketches by the poet; a short but informative
biography of the poet; an introductory text by Joseph J. Feeney,
S.J., and a note by Austin explaining the purpose of his project.
Feeney’s text is an enthusiastic presentation of Hopkins
the poet and the man, which lays particular emphasis on the aural
qualities of the poems and their more striking features and imagery.
The brevity of Austin’s introduction can be supplemented
by reading the moving and unusually candid autobiographical piece
to be found on his website, ‘How I became a Hopkins performer’,
in which he describes the sometimes painful circumstances leading
gradually, over many years, to his vocation as a reciter of Hopkins’s
poems. His performances of the poems have become a highlight of
Hopkins Society conferences, where they provide a welcome respite
from, and an illuminating complement to, the cerebral intensity
of academic discussion. The readings on this CD by Austin, a British
actor with wide experience of the stage and television, are done
with great conviction, shot through as they are with his special
fondness for Hopkins and his poems.
In his article ‘Speech framed to be heard: the Function
and Value of Sound Effects in The Wreck of the Deutschland’
(Milward & Schoder eds., Readings of the Wreck, 1 76), Kunio
Shimane argued:
“To read and study [Hopkins’s] poetry necessitates
the work of transcribing his poetry from written language to
that of spoken language. This transformation means that we place
his poetry in a revitalized oral tradition.”
After the actor Cyril Cusack, who made a fine though, to my ear,
over-aesthetic, slightly prissy recording of Hopkins’s poems
for Caedmon in 1958, Richard Austin contributes with his recitals
to this work of transcription and of revitalization, work that,
in our day, began in the late 1950s and early 1960s when the Beats
in America and, under their influence, the Liverpool Poets in
Britain, made poetry accessible to wide audiences through public
performance. Even so, poets from Tennyson onwards, of whom there
exists a c.1890 wax cylinder recording, through Eliot and Auden
and up to Larkin, Hughes, Heaney and beyond, have often made sound
recordings of their works for posterity: of these readers of their
own work, Dylan Thomas, incidentally a passionate lover and reciter
of Hopkins, is widely held to be the most outstanding. Hopkins
always conceived his mature texts for performance and the complex
metrical and musical markings of the manuscripts of the poems
were specifically intended to aid recital. These markings are
reproduced by Norman MacKenzie in his 1990 OUP edition of the
poetical works more fully than in any previous edition, and for
this reason some listeners may be surprised that Austin rejects
it as a recital text in favour of Catherine Phillips’s 1986
Oxford Authors edition. By the way, Shimane also convincingly
suggested that Hopkins’s pronunciation of English was RP,
so that Austin’s voice which, with the exception of the
occasional hard ‘r’ sound, as in West Country or North
American English, is also RP, suits Hopkins well in this respect.
The listener should not expect the running order of the poems
on the CD to be a chronological representation of Hopkins’s
poetry-writing career, except in one respect: the CD concludes
with nine poems from the Irish period, in more or less the order
in which they are thought to have been composed, rounding off
with ‘To R.B.’ The earliest poem to be included is
‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, and that is placed
almost at mid-point in the CD. A wise move, for - as Bridges sensed
in a different context - neophytes might well have been put off
by this lengthy work filled with recondite theological and liturgical
complexities. Instead, the recording starts dramatically with
the dazzling ‘Kingfishers’ sonnet: one cannot help
feeling that this sonnet, especially the words “What I dó
is me: for that I came.”, is felicitously placed in initial
position because it “speaks and spells” as much (for)
Austin as the poet himself. It is directly followed by ‘Pied
Beauty’ and ‘The Windhover’: here, Austin’s
readings serve to highlight what Robert Lowell called “the
éclat of [Hopkins’s] technique and utterance".
These poems and others, on the first half of the CD especially,
are boldly and vigorously declaimed, which is why I was all the
more struck by one of the most memorable of the readings, ‘To
what serves mortal beauty?’ Austin takes the poem sotto
voce, a truly inspired performance idea which enables him to bring
out all the more the sensual attractions and subversive ambiguities
that strain at the heart of this work. ‘To seem the stranger’
is recited in a similarly understated, almost confidential mode.
Some listeners may occasionally find Austin’s tone too declamatory
or insistent, while others will feel that his approach suits compositions
which were, after all, designed to be, in Hopkins’s words,
“rhetorical and emphatic”. One of the most arresting
readings is ‘God's Grandeur’, in which Austin brings
his voice down to express the lament of the second quatrain, before
bringing it back up as the poem - and the earth - revive from
the beginning of the sestet onwards.
The tripping rhythms and simple, secular plea of the brief ‘Inversnaid’
provide a fitting counterpoint to the great ode of 1875 which
precedes it on the CD. With ‘Binsey Poplars’ and ‘Ribblesdale’,
‘Inversnaid’ inaugurates a trio of poems whose theme
is ecological, a domain to which Austin is particularly sensitive.
Behind the exuberant language of ‘Binsey Poplars’
-
“not one/That dandled a sandalled/Shadow that swam or
sank/On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank”
- lies a searing lament whose elegiac character is fully brought
out by Austin’s impassioned yet restrained reading. The
grouping of ‘(Carrion Comfort)’, ‘My Own Heart’
and ‘No Worst’ enables the listener more than the
reader to realise to what extent these poems of desolation are
rigorously centred on the poet’s attempt to discern comfort
– a word all three poems mention once or several times -
within the shifting quicksands of his depressed emotional and
spiritual life in Dublin. Austin shows scrupulous respect for
the structure and articulations of the poems. He effectively marks
the major turn of the Heraclitean sonnet, the vastly dramatic
affirmation of Hopkins’s faith: “Enough! the Resurrection,/A
heart's-clarion!” Austin also skilfully brings an appropriate
expression of surprise to his voice first on the word “immortal”-
and then –“diamond” in the line
“This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal
diamond”
in which the final noun group, despite being one of a list, is
the antithesis of the previous ones.
As with other “selecteds” and anthologies, there
may be quibbles over the choice of poems. Why, for example, include
‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’, (excellently
recited, besides), yet leave out Caradoc's soliloquy, one of Hopkins’s
darkest and most violent pieces, an exploration of the nature
of individual evil and, I would have thought, eminently attractive
to an actor as a recital piece? Of the middle-period poems, ‘Peace’
is here - though it is arguably a somewhat slight run-through
for ‘Patience, hard thing!’, also missing - while
the delightful ‘Morning, Midday, and Evening Sacrifice’
is omitted. ‘The May Magnificat’ is included, though
no lover of Hopkins could, I think, reasonably claim it as one
of his finest hours: his superiors can be credited, for rejecting
it, with more artistic sense than is sometimes the case, and such
rhymes as “upon her/honour” and “brighter/delight
her” do seem more suited to the popular ballad or the music
hall than to a Marian tribute. But as he groups it with ‘The
Blessed Virgin compared...’ and ‘Spring’, Austin
may have wanted to reflect Hopkins’s particular devotion
to Our Lady. Austin’s pronunciation is remarkably precise,
though why he chooses to pronounce “the wind” in line
102 (stanza 13) of ‘The Wreck’ as /waInd/ rather than
/wInd/ is unclear; the inverse applies to the admittedly more
obscure “shivelights” of the Heraclitean sonnet, the
‘i’ of the prefix pronounced as ‘I’ rather
than the expected ‘aI’.
Despite these cavils, Austin’s performances show particular
sensitivity both to the structure and the prosodic and semantic
nuances of Hopkins’s poems, those configurations of sound
and sense that have no equal in English poetry. His readings adhere
closely to the modulations of the poems. By concentrating on the
sense of a difficult, sound-conscious line like
“The keener to come at the comfort for feeling the combating
keen?” ('The Wreck', 1. 200, stanza 25),
he is able through sheer talent to make the line sound as natural
as possible. In the same poem, by shortening the pause between
stanzas 32 and 33, he reminds us that the two stanzas are linked
through rhyme, theme, syntax, and punctuation, as though they
formed a sixteen-line stanza unit comparable to Hopkins’s
experiments with longer sonnet forms. In ‘Justus quidem
tu es, Domine’, Austin chooses, with absolute rightness,
to stress the tragic contrast between the sinners’ thriving
in “spare hours” on the one hand, and what the speaker
feels to be the barrenness of his entire, God-devoted “life”
on the other. Along with those I have mentioned, my favourite
moments on the CD are those during the development of the poems
when discursive considerations fall away, the poetic pressure
steps up, and the poem moves into the realm of pure sound in which
it would be churlish to ask what it means: despite my criticising
the poem above, the fifth and sixth stanzas of ‘The May
Magnificat’ (“Flesh and fleece... sheath or shell”)
are the example that most remains in my mind.
Austin’s introductory text on the CD sleeve insightfully
underlines Hopkins’s entrusting of his compositions to providence.
This oblative attitude of Hopkins’s as regards his work
had far- reaching consequences not only for its public future
but for the very texts of the poems, since it afforded him a poetic
and aesthetic freedom no earthly authority could have given him.
Austin, in turn, adopts a similar attitude. For not the least
of the qualities of his readings is the primacy he gives to the
text, as opposed to his own reading of it. Thus he never attempts
to shine at the poem’s expense, and resists the temptation
to propose flamboyant readings which would only undermine the
current of feeling running within all these poems. His diction
is “sheer and clear”, and he literally makes every
syllable of the poems distinct. In the November 1885 letter to
his brother Everard in which the poet explained his commitment
to the performing of lyric poetry, Hopkins wrote of such performance:
“When performers were trained to do it (it needs the
rarest gifts) and audiences to appreciate it, it would be, I
am persuaded, a lovely art.”
Richard Austin has those gifts; and it is to be hoped that, both
within and without the confines of the academic world, his CD
will gain as wide a hearing as possible. |
