Page:Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1918.djvu/133

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110
NOTES

poem as it came to be corrected ('83 or after), without the above note and dated 'Mount St. Mary, Derbyshire, Apr. '78'.—Text follows B.—The injurious rhymes are partly explained in the old note.

St. 9. Shorten sail. The seamanship at fault: but this expression may be glossed by supposing the boatswain to have sounded that call on his whistle.

St. 12. Cheer's death, i.e. despair.

St. 14. It is even seen. In a letter May 30, '78, he explains: 'You mistake the sense of this as I feared it would be mistaken. I believed Hare to be a brave and conscientious man, what I say is that even those who seem unconscientious will act the right part at a great push.... About mortholes I wince a little.'

St. 26. A starlight-wender, i.e. The island was so Marian that the folk supposed the Milky Way was a fingerpost to guide pilgrims to the shrine of the Virgin at Walsingham. And one, that is Duns Scotus the champion of the Immaculate Conception. See Sonnet No. 20.

St. 27. Well wept. Grammar is as in 'Well hit! well run!' &c. The meaning 'You do well to weep'.

St. 28. O Hero savest. Omission of relative pronoun at its worst.= O Hero that savest. The prayer is in a mourner's mouth, who prays that Christ will have saved her hero, and in stanza 29 the grammar triumphs.

18. 'The May Magnificat. (Sprung rhythm, four stresses in each line of the first couplet, three in each of the second. Stonyhurst, May '78.' Autograph in A.—Text from later autograph in B. He wrote to me: 'A Maypiece in which I see little good but the freedom of the rhythm.' In penult stanza cuckoo-call has its hyphen deleted in B, leaving the words separate.
19. 'Binsey Poplars, felled 1879. Oxford, March 1879.' Autograph in A. Text from B, which alters four places. l. 8 weed-winding: an early draft has weed-wounden.
20. 'Duns Scotus's Oxford. Oxford, March 1879.' Autograph in A. Copy in B agrees but dates 1878.

21. 'Henry Purcell. (Alexandrine: six stresses to the line. Oxford, April 1879.)' Autograph in A with argument as printed. Copy in B is uncorrected except that it adds the word fresh in last line.

'"Have fair fallen." Have is the sing, imperative (or