WHAT IS SOUND?” GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS’S POETIC ACOUSTICS IN “THE SILVER JUBILEE"

“What is sound?” This question is asked by the plural poetizing subject in the third line of “The Silver Jubilee” (1876). Its scope should not be reduced, minimized, or neglected, since it questions coeval public and institutional sonic experience and culture, which Hopkins collectively literarizes in this poem in two complementary ways, both man-oriented, artificial, and eventually ineffectual: 1. on the one hand, “high-hung bells” (l. 1), whose “allusion” implies a reference “to the great cathedrals, non longer Catholic” (N. H. MacLenzie, A Reader’s Guide to Gerard Manley Hopkins, Philadelphia, Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2008², p. 48); 2. on the other hand, “braggart bugles” (l. 2), whose sonic manifestation evokes the codes of “military signalling” (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “bugle, n. 2”). The definition of the latter as “din” (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “din, n.1a”: “a loud noise; particularly a continued confused or resonant sound, which stuns or distresses the ear”) is highly relevant here, since it is included within a wider category of “sound” that does not fit in with the commonplace twentieth-century opposition between sound and noise. In “The Silver Jubilee”, however, both “bells” and “bugles” (with their metallic alloys, musical languages, and anthropocentric soundscapes) are relativized – though not marginalized or erased - by a more comprehensive and universal sonic environment, “Nature’s round” (l. 3), that counterpoints with them from a more strategic position and that will re-emerge again in Hopkins’s poetry, e.g., in a fulminating line of a later poem, “Repeat that, repeat” (1879?): “the whole landscape flushes on a sudden at a sound” (l. 5). This essay examines this counterpointing relationship to show how it contributes to Hopkins’s conception of reality as “pied beauty”.