Here, then, in so many words, is Hopkins’s ‘avant toute chose’ at a higher level of elaboration.  ‘Inscape’ is still, in spite of the apparent differentiation, musical; but a quality of formalism seems to have entered with the specific designation.  With formalism comes rigidity; and in this case the rigidity is bound to overwhelm the sense.  For the relative constant in the composition of poetry is the law of language which admits only a certain amount of adaptation.  Musical design must be subordinate to it, and the poet should be aware that even in speaking of musical design he is indulging a metaphor.  Hopkins admitted this, if we may judge by his practice, only towards the end of his life.  There is no escape by sound from the meaning of the posthumous sonnets, though we may hesitate to pronounce whether this directness was due to a modification of his poetical principles or to the urgency of the content of the sonnets, which, concerned with a matter of life and death, would permit no obscuring of their sense for musical reasons.

  ’I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. 
  What hours, O what black hours we have spent
  This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went! 
  And more must in yet longer light’s delay. 
    With witness I speak this.  But where I say
  Hours I mean years, mean life.  And my lament
  Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
  To dearest him that lives, alas! away.’

There is compression, but not beyond immediate comprehension; music, but a music of overtones; rhythm, but a rhythm which explicates meaning and makes it more intense.

Between the ‘May Magnificat’ and these sonnets is the bulk of Hopkins’s poetical work and his peculiar achievement.  Perhaps it could be regarded as a phase in his evolution towards the ’more balanced and Miltonic style’ which he hoped for, and of which the posthumous sonnets are precursors; but the attempt to see him from this angle would be perverse.  Hopkins was not the man to feel, save on exceptional occasions, that urgency of content of which we have spoken.  The communication of thought was seldom the dominant impulse of his creative moment, and it is curious how simple his thought often proves to be when the obscurity of his language has been penetrated.  Musical elaboration is the chief characteristic of his work, and for this reason what seem to be the strangest of his experiments are his most essential achievement So, for instance, ’The Golden Echo’:—­

        ’Spare! 
  There is one, yes, I have one (Hush there!);
  Only not within seeing of sun,
  Not within the singeing of the strong sun,
  Tall sun’s tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth’s air,
  Somewhere else where there is, ah, well, where! one,
  One.  Yes, I can tell such a key, I do know such a place,
  Where, whatever’s prized and passes of us, everything that’s fresh and
                    fast