ce--
at present I have not even correct copies--, that, if anyone should
like, they might be published after my death. And that again is
unlikely, as well as remote. . . . No doubt my poetry errs on the
side of oddness. I hope in time to have a more balanced and Miltonic
style. But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music
and design in painting, so design, pattern, or what I am in the
habit of calling inscape is what I above all aim at in poetry. Now
it is the virtue of design, pattern, or inscape to be distinctive
and it is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer. This vice I
cannot have escaped.' And again two months later: 'Moreover
the oddness may make them repulsive at first and yet Lang
might have liked them on a second reading. Indeed when, on
somebody returning me the _Eurydice_, I opened and read some
lines, as one commonly reads whether prose or verse, with the
eyes, so to say, only, it struck me aghast with a kind of raw
nakedness and unmitigated violence I was unprepared for: but
take breath and read it with the ears, as I always wish to be
read, and my verse becomes all right.'

_Obscurity_ As regards Oddity then, it is plain that the poet was
Himself fully alive to it, but he was not sufficiently aware of
obscurity, and he could not understand why his friends found his
sentences so difficult: he would never have believed that, among
all the ellipses and liberties of his grammar, the one chief cause
is his habitual omission of the relative pronoun; and yet this is
so, and the examination of a simple example or two may serve a
general purpose:

_Omission of relative pronoun_ This grammatical liberty, though it
is a common convenience in conversation and has therefore its
proper place in good writing, is apt to confuse the parts of speech,
and to reduce a normal sequence of words to mere jargon. Writers
who carelessly rely on their elliptical speech-forms to govern the
elaborate sentences of their literary composition little know what
a conscious effort of interpretation they often impose on their
readers. But it was not carelessness in Gerard Hopkins: he had full
skill and practice and scholarship in conventional forms, and it is
easy to see that he banished these purely constructional syllables
from his verse because they took up room which he thought he could
not afford them: he needed in his scheme all his space for his
poetical words, and he wished those to crowd out every merely g