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 gram- matical colourless or toneless element; and so when he had got into the habit of doing without these relative pronouns--though he must, I suppose, have supplied them in his thought,--he abuses the licence beyond precedent, as when he writes (no. _17_) 'O Hero savest!' for 'O Hero that savest!'. _Identical Forms_ Another example of this (from the 5th stanza of no. _23_) will discover another cause of obscurity; the line 'Squander the hell-rook ranks sally to molest him' means 'Scatter the ranks that sally to molest him': but since the words _squander_ and _sally_ occupy similar positions in the two sections of the verse, and are enforced by a similar accentuation, the second verb deprived of its pronoun will follow the first and appear as an imperative; and there is nothing to prevent its being so taken but the contradiction that it makes in the meaning; whereas the grammar should expose and enforce the meaning, not have to be determined by the meaning. More- over, there is no way of enunciating this line which will avoid the confusion; because if, knowing that _sally_ should not have the same intonation as _squander_, the reader mitigates the accent, and in doing so lessens or obliterates the caesural pause which exposes its accent, then _ranks_ becomes a genitive and _sally_ a substantive.