Sprung rhythm: Solastalgia and the Ecological Body in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Abstract

Solastalgia, Glenn Albrecht’s term for the psychic distress produced by environmental change experienced in place, is a diagnostic vocabulary that emerged only in 2005. Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry, written a century earlier amid the ecological upheavals of Victorian industrialisation, arguably stages this affective condition long before medical or environmental psychology named it. Through the reading of Hopkins’s “Binsey Poplars”, “God’s Grandeur”, “Inversnaid”, and “The Sea and the Skylark”, this paper proposes that Hopkins’s metrical innovation “sprung rhythm” functions as a formal correlative of environmental grief. Here, the composition is analysed through the strain, compression, and self-interruption of his lines, which enact the perceptual disruption his speakers describe. The analysis is structured around three affective registers: direct loss, anticipatory dread, and sensory disruption. The essay situates this reading within an emerging body of scholarship (Parham’s Green Man Hopkins, recent work on Hopkins’s ecological perception) while extending it toward the psychological humanities, a field that has typically treated literary form as illustrative of affective experience. Further, this paper repositions Hopkins’s prosody as evidentiary, demonstrating that his metrical strain functions as evidence of ecological grief. The paper’s broader claim is that nineteenth-century nature poetry constitutes an underused archive for the psychological humanities.