Hopkins at 30, in 1874. Photograph: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin

Late on the afternoon of August 28, 1873, a scraggly-bearded Gerard Manley Hopkins in black soutane, his hair parted neatly down the center, reaches Manresa House, in southwest London, with his bags. Once the opulent estate of the second Earl of Bessborough and now a seminary, Manresa is a classic 18th-century structure done over in the best quasi-military style of the practical English Jesuits. Hopkins, 29, first entered this building five years ago. Now the young Jesuit is coming not as a novice but as professor of rhetoric, whose charge will be teaching 11 Jesuit novice/juniors. They are unlike any other students he has had or will ever have: all very tractable, responding to their teachers’ assignments and lectures with the seriousness of those who have taken a vow of obedience. This is a plum of a job, given to him because his superiors have noticed how physically exhausted he gets, and because his Oxford education and penchant for literature would seem to ideally suit him for teaching classical rhetoric. That first evening at Manresa he just manages to catch Fr. Gallwey, the newly appointed English provincial (the senior Jesuit in England at the time), who—as always—speaks to him “most kindly and encouragingly,” assuring Gerard that he is going to do just fine now that he is back in London and closer to the world he has known from childhood.

Within days, the community begins its annual eight-day retreat, after which, in the two weeks remaining before classes begin, Hopkins writes up some of his lectures and attends sev-eral art shows in London. On September 8, he talks with Brother Duffy on the grounds at Manresa about plowing, something which has always fascinated him, and Duffy names the plowing tools for him. There is “the cross, side-plate, muzzle, regulator, and short chain,” the Irish brother explains. Hopkins listens intently to the shape of the man’s language: “combing the ground,” and “spraying out” for “splaying out.” He watches a beautiful sunrise from the hall window of Manresa and at night catches a glimpse of the full moon “in a palecoloured heartsease made of clouds.” Out walking the grounds, he comes upon “toadstool rings in the big pasture before the house, some very big” and notes that the August drought has made the grass “fagged, drained, and baked.”

On a trip to the Kensington Museum in the heart of town, he catches the “bold masterly rudeness” of della Robbia’s blue plates, Pisano’s pulpits, the bronze gilt doors for the Duomo with their representation of the Transfiguration, and copies of Michelangelo’s paintings at the Vatican, and is particularly struck by Michelangelo’s simplicity, force, and “masterly realism.” He notes too “the instress* of expression in the faces” of two sisters in a portrait by G.F. Watts, something he has also remarked in the work of Edward Burne-Jones and his favorite, Fred Walker. He studies a display of classical musical instruments—harpsichords, spinets, virginals, dulcimers—comparing their forms and functions to what the music theorist François-Joseph Fetis has to say about the beautiful if silent instruments before him.

On September 22 classes begin, and he meets with his students to begin explaining the elements of classical and modern rhetoric. “I have paid a good deal of attention to Milton’s versification and collected his later rhythms,” he will tell a friend four years after. “I did it when I had to lecture on rhetoric some years since. I found [Milton’s] most advanced effects in the Paradise Regained and, lyrically, in the Agonistes. I have often thought of writing on them, indeed on rhythm in general; I think the subject is little understood.” From the abundant but scattered notes of his that have survived, it is clear just how deeply Hopkins thought about these things during his year at Manresa. Not only is Milton on his mind, but the whole range of Greek and Latin prosody, as well as French, German, Italian, Irish, Icelandic, Anglo-Saxon, and Middle English, especially Piers Plowman and Chaucer. Indeed, he has undertaken in his characteristic inclusiveness to pass on to his poor students the whole history of English poetry.

One senses that his learning is so advanced, so multifaceted, so esoteric, that he must surely have overwhelmed the novices, though his self-deprecating humor may often have saved the day. A few fragments, then, to give a sense of what he taught them. “The accent of a word means its strongest accent,” he explains, “and this is of two kinds: pitch (tonic) and stress (emphasis),” for “words like bodies have both centers of gravity and centers of illumination (highspots).” For the English language, he notes that stress or accent is strong, the pitch weak. “The Greek name for accent is prosodia, that is the tune sung to a word, the note or pitch of a syllable. The Latin for this is accentus.”

Rhythm is the “repetition of feet, the same or mixed, without regard to how long” the individual foot is. Meter comes down to “the grouping of a certain number of ‘feet.’” Prose often employs rhythm, which does not mean that it employs meter. “In modern verse a verse means a complete metrical figure, a metrical unit, for as the foot is the rhythmic unit, which it repeats, so a verse is the metrical unit of repetition,” whether it be a line or couplet or triplet or stanza. A poetic line, on the other hand, “is an intermediate division between foot and verse, like a clause, and marked off by rhyme or other means,” which “we must judge by the ear.”

Then it is on to verse, which he defines as “the recasting of speech into sound-words, sound-clauses and sound-sentences of uniform commensurable length and accentuations.” When we speak of the music of poetry, on the other hand, we mean a “recasting of speech used in a wide sense, of vocal utterance, into words, clauses, and sentences of pitched sounds.” Thought of in these terms, “the musical syllable is the note, the musical foot or word the bar.” To assist the reader, we speak of feet in a line, each of which “give their names to the rhythms that are made out of them.” Moreover, every foot and every rhythm takes on a particular character. With the iamb or the anapest, for instance, “the rhythm is forward and expresses present action.” In contrast to this, the downward spiraling trochee or dactyl implies “a sense of succession,” which is why that form is used frequently for narrative poetry.

But in all of this Hopkins is feeling his way, and in time he will reveal his brilliance in prosodic matters, creating a revolution not only in his own poetry but in the poetry of generations to come. In another two and a half years, this theorizing will break forth into the sprung rhythm of his great ode, The Wreck of the Deutschland, whose opening lines will signal a revolution in poetry. “Thou mastering me/God!” he will begin, with all the stunning, percussive power of a Mozart or a Beethoven in his abrupt rhythms, the accents piling up where they will make the most force, stressing themselves—because stress is the English heart of it all—on ear and mind and heart:

Giver of breath and bread;
Wórld’s stránd, swáy of the sea;
Lord of living and dead;
Thou hast bóund bónes and véins in me, fástened me flésh,
And áfter it álmost únmade, what with dréad,
Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?
Óver agáin I féel thy fínger and fínd thée.

We are still unpacking the lessons Hopkins began giving us 135 years ago, initiating a music whose rhythmic echoes continue to challenge our own sense of what can be done with the poetic line. But it is with these unpromising beginnings, in a modest Jesuit classroom with 11 unsuspecting novices, in a southwest corner of London, that the ideas for the revolution are first being tried on.

Paul Mariani is the University Professor of English at Boston College and the author of 16 books. His essay is drawn from his most recent book, Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life (copyright © 2008 by Paul Mariani), by arrangement with Viking Penguin.