SOURCE: "Hopkins: Numinous Numbers in the Virgin Mary Poems," in Papers on Language and Literature, Vol. 26, No. 4, Fall, 1990, pp. 513-21.

In the following essay, Anderson points out that little attention has been paid to the numerical inscapes in Hopkin's poetry, and argues that the Virgin Mary poems demonstrate the development and complexity of the dialectic between verbal and numerical structures in his work.

While much has been written about Gerard Manley Hopkins's innovations in meter, such as sprung rhythm, inscape, and instress, little attention has been given the numerical structure that he builds into his work. Hopkins provides us with both verbal and numerical inscapes, and the "symmetry" between the two creates a "beauty" that "explodes" with revelations to reinforce the meaning. This dual structure acts as a kind of dialectic and conforms with Hopkins's theory of beauty in diversity, outlined in his essay "On the Origin of...