The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins: Volume VI: Sketches and Scholarly Studies, Part II: Musical Settings and Sketches, edited by R. K. R. Thornton

After years of preparation, Volume VI, Part II has finally arrived.It is a slimmer volume than the others in the Collected Works, but it is extremely dense and will demand a reader's close attention.It will also need a musician's trained ear to begin to understand what Hopkins was after in terms of creating a music which he hoped would be as original and as new as his poetry.R. K. R. Thornton has been extremely meticulous in explaining what Hopkins was after in his musical compositions, citing as many critical sources as he could uncover on a topic which has too often been overlooked-or better-avoided because of its complex nature.The fact is that what Hopkins was after in his musical compositions-relying as it did on plainchant, Greek choral music, Latin hymns, a music bypassing much of the nineteenth century, and demanding a new, experimental music closer to what the twentieth century would offer.It was a music which too often frustrated those who heard it, including Bridges, Patmore, and Dixon, as well as teachers of music in Dublin, Oxford, and London.Often Hopkins-devoid even of a piano in Dublin-seems to have fallen short, as he himself admitted.But at other times he insisted that he heard something that others did not or would not hear.If this argument about his musical compositions sounds familiar, it should, because it is what his first readers felt about his poetic compositions, with their sprung rhythm and the innovative accentuations he gave to his lines, though he calculated the music of his lines with the precision of a mathematician.In this, he was decades ahead of his fellow poets, including Robert Bridges, the friend and by then poet laureate of England, who took nearly three decades to publish Hopkins's poetry, and even then, half apologized for the strangeness of his Jesuit friend's poems.The drawings, most of which Hopkins kept in his sketchbooks, date from his earlier years, when he was a student at Highgate and later at Balliol College, Oxford-the period of the 1860s.The editors have included them all in this volume, which take up a full two-thirds of the text.There are some well-executed architectural studies of his home in Hampstead and while he was on summer vacation with his family on the Isle of Wight, and several sketches of church windows and groins, many of them sketched