What is 'Sprung Verse'?

"The world is charged with the grandeur of God" -Hopkins

Sprung Verse is an attempt to "spring" the rhythm of a line/poem by alliterating, forcing unstressed syllables to take on stress by the force of alliteration & for already stressed syllables to increase their force, if I understand it correctly, which I may not

I thought it meant the kind of rhythm which is set up by beginning a verse with strongly-stressed syllables at regularly-spaced intervals - after which the reader will instinctively keep this pattern up by speeding up extra syllables between the stressed ones, and for the stressed syllables, stressing them fully, when in natural speech they might have only been moderately stressed. So, in the Hopkins example, 'the WORLD is CHARGED with the GRANdeur of GOD', the lower case parts all take up the same amount of time as each other even though the last two parts have two syllables and the first two parts only one, and 'grandeur' is given a first-level stress, when in ordinary speech it would only have a second-level one (out of 4 levels). This technique is used a lot in nursery rhymes.

Oh, to be an English lit teacher--I never thought this kind of question would ever come up in my life outside of the classroom.

Gerard Manley Hopkins claimed to have discovered the idea of 'sprung rhythm.' It's really just a rhythm that attempts to reflect the way people really talk. Instead of setting up iambs, trochees, spondees, etc. Hopkins suggested that a poem be built around natural stresses--like sb says, the unstressed syllables are "sped up" to accomodate the natural stresses. Really, it seems like he was just trying to explain the way free verse has rhythm even if it doesn't have a strict metrical structure.