“I shall shortly have some sonnets to send you, five or more. Four of these came like inspirations unbidden and against my will. And in the life I lead now, which is one of a continually jaded and harassed mind, if in any leisure I try to do anything I make no way–nor with my work, alas! but so it must be.” — Gerard Manley Hopkins, letter to Robert Bridges, 1885 (referencing the “desolation sonnets”)
Gerard Manley Hopkins is a poet near and dear to my heart. Born on this day in 1844, he died of typhus in 1889. A short life casting a long shadow.
Hopkins was against the grain of traditional Victorian poetry, and the way he worked and how he used language was quite controversial at the time. His poems didn’t look like other people’s poems. The conflict between the spiritual and the worldly is central to his work.
I’m sorry I didn’t discover GMH in high school – he wasn’t in our poetry curriculum at least – because I think I would have really responded to his work and found comfort in them. His Catholic themes, his reaching out to God, his awareness of the pain of life waiting for him … this was all stuff I would totally have related to as a young intense Catholic girl. He was a deep thinker, as well as a man who really struggled with himself. He was drawn to Catholicism, against the wishes of his parents, and was ordained as a Jesuit priest. He had already been writing poetry for years by that point – he won a prize in high school – and he judged his early verse as too worldly and burned it all.
Hopkins’ vision of God is simple: God loves His children, God is always present. We are not forgotten. Hopkins’ God is redemptive. However: Hopkins was no Pollyanna. He was not a smiley-faced Christian. In fact, quite the opposite. The late sonnets he wrote – now referred to as the “Sonnets of Desolation” (6 in total) – are howls of anguish. Perhaps it is only someone who suffers as greatly as Hopkins did can believe in and accept transcendence and redemption to such an intense degree.
His life seems to have been about not just reconciling the two halves of himself (worldly and spiritual, poet and priest) but living with the contradictions. A lot of people just can’t deal with that, then and now. It is assumed that one must CHOOSE. Well, Hopkins was determined NOT to choose. Couldn’t the poet live alongside the priest? His understanding of his Catholic faith was that it was one of endurance and pain. He always felt unworthy and that sense of unworthiness before God comes through in his poems. The lushness of his poetic language suggests he almost enjoys the agony. Most Catholics will understand the sensation – it’s baked into the faith, its rituals, its incense and statues and colored glass – Maybe late converts like Hopkins perceive this best. Catholicism is the awareness of the soul on the rack, the awareness of Christ’s suffering on the Cross. Hopkins’ homosexuality tortured him, and worked on him. When he was a younger man, he fell in love, and it would impact him for the rest of his life. He wrote poems, letters to this man (many of which still exist), showing the depths of his obsession. Unfortunately, the object of Hopkins’ love drowned. Hopkins never recovered from the loss.
The individuality of Hopkins’s language is the emotional entryway into his work. He is beloved by language-freaks. His punctuation and hyphenated words are extremely intricate, and all chosen for their stresses and intonations, internal rhymes, whatever. You have to really dig in sometimes to see how his language operates. Hopkins’ language choices seem very individual: “dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon”, “blue-bleak embers” (God, I love that), “fathers-forth”. That last one is interesting. Something in the poem “fathers forth”, but doesn’t the hyphen change things, subtly, for you as a reader? The meaning is connected not only to the sound but to the LOOK of the words: “selfwrung, selfstrung, sheath- and shelterless.” Some of this experimentation with sound predicts the Beat poets in the 1950s. Hopkins was way ahead of his time.
Michael Schmidtm Lives of the Poets:
Imagine, he says, the world reflected in a water drop: a small, precise reflection. Then imagine the world reflected in a drop of Christ’s blood: the same reflection, but suffused with the hue of love, sacrifice, God made man, and redemption. Religious faith discovers for a troubled imagination an underlying coherence which knows that it cannot be fully or adequately explained. In its liberating, suffusing light, Hopkins could relish out loud the uniqueness of things, which made them “individually distinctive.” This he called “inscape” – an artist’s term. “Instress”, another bit of individual jargon, refers to the force maintaining inscape. Inscape is manifest, instress divine, the immanent presence of the divine in the object.
Inscape. Instress. Understanding what Hopkins meant by these invented terms – and he explains them at length in letters and notebooks – is essential to understanding his work as a whole.
Gay relationships between students at universities were accepted at the time, as long as there was no outward scandal. However, to take it further into adulthood made you a criminal. Literally. So … what to do? Hopkins was at war with himself. Many men faced this tragic choice. Hopkins understood his own tendencies towards other men (he “recognized” Walt Whitman – see his comments below), but his feelings about religion (and also, the time in which he lived) counteracted his desires. He could not, like Oscar Wilde, live as an aesthete, pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable in Victorian life. But Hopkins DID push the boundaries of what was acceptable in poetry. His work feels breathlessly modern. (Most of it, if I recall correctly, was published posthumously. He was virtually unknown in his lifetime. When you read him, he doesn’t feel 19th-century-ish at all.) His word choices are unexpected. His language seems to be the truest expression of what this difficult tormented man felt/saw. Hopkins worked HARD at his poetry. He agonized over every word.
Hopkins was a very conscious poet, writing:
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.
He wrote a lot about poetry as well. He was a terrific critic. He had theories, ideas, philosophies. For example, he wrote to his friend, Robert Bridges, the poet laureate at the time:
It seems to me that the poetical language of an age shd. be the current language heightened, to any degree heightened and unlike itself, but not (I mean normally; freaks and graces are another thing) an obsolete one. This is Shakespeare’s and Milton’s practice and the want of it will be fatal to Tennyson’s Idylls and plays, to Swinburne, and perhaps to Morris.
Prophetic. Prescient. He was right.
His six “sonnets of desolation” are difficult. I would suggest with Hopkins that you read him out loud. Follow his strange punctuation. That’s where the emotion is. Here is one of the “desolate sonnets” just to give you an idea.
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.
I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.
“Where I say hours, I mean years, mean life.” I love that line and it has come to me in dark moments, explaining my experience (it helps when someone else puts it into words.) Kind of like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s observation that in a “dark night of the soul” it is “always three o’clock in the morning.” Yup. In the middle of the night, when things are bad, it can seem years until the daytime starts. Or, to speak metaphorically, in the darkness of desolation, hours feel like years and years feel like a lifetime. Desolation is not sadness. It’s something else. It has no end.
Gerard Manley Hopkins’ last words were, “I’m so happy … I’m so happy …”
He died in obscurity. But his friend, poet Robert Bridges, brought out a volume of his work in 1918. The world wasn’t ready for him in the 1870s. The world was ready for him in the wake of WWI. He didn’t sound old-fashioned at all. He sounded NOW.
Knowing the sadness of his life, knowing his own thwarted impulses, not to mention the unrelenting sickness he endured for his last couple of years, these final words are so revealing.
It is that tension between ultimate “happiness” (because of his belief in God, which pulses and breathes in his every word), and terrible unhappiness – due to the muck of unpredictable life – that makes Hopkins’s work so moving.
It’s good to read him out loud. You need to HEAR it.
Tangent, Yet Related
And funny how connections remain, dovetailing, the details of certain experiences will never be lodged free of the brain, even if they bring a pang of pain (fainter now, but still present – always? – present) – Gerard Manley Hopkins makes me think of a night long ago now, a crazy birthday party in Soho, one of the most memorable New York nights I have experienced in my entire time living here. I fell in love at first sight that night (an experience I do NOT recommend), and Gerard Manley Hopkins came up during the marathon night, and it was … meaningful? In a way that felt beyond meaning. Like: I settled in to what the night provided. I NEVER settle in. When you find members of your tribe, you don’t forget. And that guy was a member of my tribe. Every time I saw him afterwards – mostly by accident, but a couple of times deliberately, one night being the SECOND most memorable New York night in my time living here (some violence in that story, just FYI.) – that thing was there between us, every time we met, and I finally learned to just … never see him again, basically. I wrote an essay about the night we met at that birthday party, and so I’ll share it here: Grace Note (or: Love In a Time of Constitutional Crisis.
If someone throws around a reference to Gerard Manley Hopkins, and then shouts a line of his poetry into the 3 a.m. Soho night, you can bet I’ll pay close attention. And – of course – because it was that kind of night and we had that kind of insta-connection, practically bordering on ESP – the line he shouted into the air – was from my favorite poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins.
I still love the poem, although when I read it now, what I see is darkened sleeping Soho, the cobblestones, the city humming still but muffled, where the only real sound was our voices, talking and laughing, and also all that came after, good and bad.
God’s Grandeur
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
QUOTES:
The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:
Gerard Manley Hopkins, who wrote so little and died so young, was one of the most original poets to write in English at any period.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, letter to Robert Bridges:
I am a eunuch, but it is for the kingdom of God’s sake.
Harold Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language
Hopkins’s rhythms frequently return to Old English examples, and yet can seem (as he saw) akin to Whitman’s innovations. My favorite poem by Hopkins, the sonnet “To R.B.” (Bridges), seeks to confess poetic failure, as the Jesuit poet confronts death, but is a brilliant success, worthy of one of Keats’s true heirs.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, letter to his mother, 1875, on an important early poem “The Wreck of the Deutschland”:
You sent two duplicates, for one thing, and the other was that you omitted the most interesting piece of all, the account of the actual shipwreck: fortunately I had read it but still I should have been glad to have had it by me to refer to again, for I am writing something on this wreck, which may perhaps appear but it depends on how I am speeded. It made a deep impression on me, more than any other wreck or accident I ever read of.
Introduction to Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:
The late nineteenth-century poets Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Gerard Manley Hopkins fall outside the period’s boundaries. Yet these three figures stand like giants at the threshold, precursors who heralded key developments in the early twentieth-century poetry that is generally called “modern.” Their groundbreaking poetry, disdained by or largely unknown to their contemporaries, found both readers and disciples in the twentieth century.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, letter to Robert Bridges, August 21, 1877:
So that I may say my apparent licences are counter-balanced, and more, by my strictness. In fact all English verse, except Milton’s, almost, offends me as “licentious.” Remember this…The choruses in Samson Agonistes are intermediate between counterpointed and sprung rhythm. In reality they are sprung, but Milton keeps up a fiction of counterpointing the heard rhythm (which is the same as the mounted rhythm) upon a standard rhythm which is never heard but only counted and therefore really does not exist. The want of a metrical notation and the fear of being thought to write mere rhythmic or (who knows what the critics might not have said?) even unrhythmic prose drove him to this. Such rhythm as French and Welsh poetry has is sprung, counterpointed upon a counted rhythm, but it differs from Milton’s in being little calculated, not more perhaps than prose consciously written rhythmically, like orations for instance; it is in fact the native rhythm of the words used bodily imported into verse; whereas Milton’s mounted rhythm is a real poetical rhythm, having its own laws and recurrence, but further embarrassed by having to count.
Ted Hughes:
By the time I got to university, at twenty-one, my sacred canon was fixed: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, letter to Robert Bridges, 1884:
It always seems to me that poetry is unprofessional, but that is what I have said to myself, not others to me. No doubt if I kept producing I should have to ask myself what I meant to do with it all, but I have long been at a standstill, and so the things lie. It would be less tedious talking than writing: now at all events I must stop.
Elizabeth Bishop, letter to Robert Lowell, May 28, 1963:
[Flavio] writes really well, in Portuguese–wrote that highbrow jazz column starting when he was 17–is now writing a lot of poetry, not “beat” as we’d expected, but delicate and sometimes quite beautiful. He is overcome by Hopkins and the metaphysicals at the moment. “Why didn’t you tell me about Hopkins before?” he said.
The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:
Thomas Hardy and Gerard Manley Hopkins stand like two warders at the portals of modern poetry. Hopkins died before the twentieth century began. Hardy lived almost to its third decade. Hopkins might be heraldically represented with an eye turned upward, whereas Hardy, whose poetry is retrospective and elegiac, would be posed casting a backward look.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, letter to R.W. Dixon, December 22, 1880:
The greater demand for perfection in the work, the greater impatience with technical faults. In the particular case of Tennyson’s Ode to Memory I find in my own case all these: it has a mysterious stress of feeling, especially in the refrain — I am to my loss less sensitive to that; it has no great meaning of any importance nor power of thought–I am to my advantage more alive to that; from great familiarity with the style I am deadened to its individual and beauty, which is again my loss; and I perceive the shortcomings of the execution, which is my own advance in critical power. Absolutely speaking, I believe that if I were now reading Tennyson for the first time I should form the same judgment of him that I form as things are, but I should not feel, I should lose, I should never have gone through, that boyish stress of enchantment that this Ode and the Lady of Shalott and many other of his pieces once laid me under.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, letter to Robert Bridges, August 14, 1879, on writing the poem “Brothers” and the sonnet “Andromeda”:
I hope to enclose a little scene that touched me at Mount St. Mary’s. It is something in Wordsworth’s manner; which is, I know, inimitable and unapproachable, still I shall be glad to know if you think it a success, for pathos has a point as precise as jest has and its happiness “lies ever in the ear of him that hears, not in the mouth of him that makes.”…Lastly, I enclose a sonnet on which I invite minute criticism. I endeavoured in it at a more Miltonic plainness and severity than I have anywhere else. I cannot say it has turned out severe, still less plain, but it seems almost free from quaintness and in aiming at one excellence I may have hit another.
W.B. Yeats, Oxford Book of Modern Verse:
[Hopkins’] stoppage and sudden onrush of syllables were to him a necessary expression of his slight constant excitement.
The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:
While Hopkins was a professor in Dublin, he met the young poet W.B. Yeats one day in 1886. Hopkins disliked Yeats’s early verse, but he said that at least one poem had many fine lines and vivid images. Yeats, for his part, wrote later that he had not cared much for the Jesuit priest, who seemed a querulous, sensitive scholar, alien to a young man with Walt Whitman in his pocket. But Hopkins had carried Whitman in his pocket too.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Notebooks (1881):
All things therefore are charged with love, are charged with God and if we know how to touch them give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him.
Introduction to Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:
He did not desert rhyme or meter, but he pulled, twisted, and stretched them until they sounded like nothing seen before in English verse.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, letter to Robert Bridges, October 13, 1886:
We must then try to be known, aim at it, take means to it. And this without puffing in the process or pride in the success. But still. Besides, we are Englishmen. A great work by an Englishman is like a great battle won by England.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, letter to Robert Bridges, November 6, 1887:
Plainly if it is possible to express a subtle and recondite subject in a subtle and recondite way and with great felicity and perfection, in the end, something must be sacrificed.
Gerard Manley Hopkins on Robert Burns, letter, August 14, 1879, on Robert Burns:
Now Burns loses prodigiously by trnaslation. I have never however read them since my undergraduate days except the one quoted in Gosse’s paper, the beauty of which you must allow. I think the use of dialect a sort of unfair play, giving as you say, ‘a peculiar but shortlived charm,’ setting off for instance a Scotch or Lancashire joke which in standard English comes to nothing. But its lawful charm and use I take to be this, that it sort of guarantees the spontaneousness of the thought and puts you in the position to appraise it on its merits as coming from nature and not books and education. It heightens one’s admiration for a phrase just as in architecture it heightens one’s admiration of a design to know that it is old work, not new: in itself the design is the same but as taken together with the designer and his merit this circumstance makes a world of difference. Now the use of dialect to a man like Burns is to tie him down to the things that he or another Dorset man has said or might say, which though it narrows his field heightens his effects. His poems use to charm me also by their Westcountry ‘instress’, a most peculiar product of England, which I associate with airs like Weeping Winefred, Polly Oliver, or Poor Mary Ann, with Herrick and Herbert, with the Worcestershire, Herefordshire, and Welsh landscape, and above all with the smell of oxeyes and applelofts: this instress is helped by particular rhythms and these Barnes employs; as I remember, in ‘Linden Ore’ and a thing with a refrain like ‘Alive in the Spring.’
The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:
Faith was not an escape or a refuge for Hopkins, but a source of anguish; he said that he never wavered in it, but that he never felt worthy of it. He made his misery clear in many poems, most notably in those he wrote in his last years, known variously as the “sonnets of desolation,” “the terrible sonnets,” or “the dark sonnets.”…Many of his poems set anguish and rapture against each other, and the inner combat is continued to the last moment in a poem such as “Carrion Comfort,” in which Christ is adversary as well as savior … In Hopkins’s poetry, pain is the principal ingredient in joy.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, letter to Robert Bridges, April 29, 1889:
Swinburne has a new volume out, which is reviewed in its own style. “The rush and the rampage, the pause and the pull-up of these lustrous and lumpophorous lines.” It is all now a “self-drawing web”; a perpetual functioning of genius without truth, feeling, or any adequate matter to be at fucntion on. There is some heavydom, in long waterlogged lines (he has no real understanding of rhythm, and though he sometimes hits brilliantly at other times he misses badly) about the Armada, that pitfall of the patriotic muse; and rot about babies, a blethery bathos into which Hugo and he from opposite coasts have long driven Channel-tunnels. I am afraid I am going too far with the poor fellow. Enough now, but his babies make a Herodian of me.
Gerard Manley Hopkins:
Do you know, a horrible thing has happened to me. I have begun to doubt Tennyson.
This was a lifelong process for him. Tennyson was a giant. “Going after him” was daunting.
The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:
He also invented new words, often in the “kenning,” or periphrastic, mode of Old English that he had studied, such as “beechbole” (trunk of a beech tree), “bloomfall” (fall of flowers), “bower of bone” (body), “churlsgrace” (grace of a churl or laborer), “firedint” (spark), “firefolk” (stars), “leafmeal” (a fusion of leaf and piecemeal), and “unleaving” (losing leaves)… In addition, Hopkins made new and original use of internal rhyme, alliteration, consonance, dissonance. Some of his effects he took from classical prosody, some from Welsh poetry (which he studied for the purpose), and some from alliterative Middle English verse, especially from William Landgland, author of Piers Plowman.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, after reading some of Yeats’ first published verses:
… a strained and unworkable allegory about a young man and a sphinx on a rock in the sea (how did they get there? what did they eat? and so on; people think such criticisms very prosaic, but common-sense is never out of place anywhere …) but still containing fine lines and vivid imagery.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1885:
Soon I am afraid I shall be ground down to a state like this last spring’s and summer’s, when my spirits were so crushed that madness seemed to be making approaches.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, from “Fragments of Richard” (1864):
Here at the very furthest reach away
(The furthest reach this side, on that the bay
Most dented) lay Sylvester, reading Keats’
Epistles, while the running pastoral bleats
Of sheep from the high fields and other wild
Sounds reached him.
Gregory Woods:
He belonged to that culture of sentimental and erotic male friendships shaped by both Greece and (Catholic) Rome to which Newman and Faber had belonged before him.
More on “Inscape” and “Instress”:
The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:
Hopkins also coined a critical vocabulary, feeling the need for a new set of terms to explain what he was doing. His earlier expression, “vividness of idea,” gave way to “inscape.” This word, formed on the analogy of landscape, meant “individually distinctive beauty,” the inner design or essential “whatness” of a thing, suddenly apprehended like an electrical impulse, a divine spark…A second term Hopkins needed arose from a conception of “liveliness,” which he made more precise as “instress.” This power holds inscape together, as force binds the atom; the ultimate instress of all things is their divine creator. The sense that everything is not passively meaningless, but actively asserts its distinctive totality of symbolical being, connects Hopkins with other symbolist poets.
Michael Schmidt:
His spirituality was carnal; was perhaps a way of dealing with and rendering transcendent what in a different man would have been a carnal choice, a spiritual abdication.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, journal, 1864:
Next, Parnassian. Can only be used by real poets. Can be written without inspiration. Good instance in Enoch Arden’s island. Common in professedly descriptive pieces. Much of it is in Paradise Lost and Regained. Nearly all The Fairie Queen. It is the effect of fine age to enable ordinary people to write something very near it.
Robert Graves:
…poor, tortured Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, letter to Robert Bridges, May 26, 1879:
I agree with you that English terza rima is (so far as I have seen it) badly made and tedious and for the reason you give, but you are mistaken in thinking the triplet structure is unknown: Shelley’s West Wind ode (if I mistake not) and some other ones are printed in detached 3-line stanzas.
from “A Letter to Lord Byron”
By W.H. Auden
The vogue for Black Mass and the cult of devils
Has sunk. The Good, the Beautiful, the True
Still fluctuate about the lower levels.
Joyces are firm and there there’s nothing new.
Eliots have hardened just a point or two.
Hopkins are brisk, thanks to some recent boosts.
There’s been some further weakening in Prousts.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, journal, July 17, 1866:
It was this night I believe but possibly the next that I saw clearly the impossibility of staying in the Church of England, but resolved to say nothing to anyone till three months are over, that is the end of the Long, and then of course to take no step till after my Degree.
Michael Schmidt:
For Hopkins, sound and rhythm are quite as important as they are for Swinburne, but Hopkins develops areas of imagination and intelligence that Swinburne neglects altogether. His Paterlike aestheticism transcended itself into religious faith; his sexual ambivalence honed his chastity, so that at times his posture in relation to God is comparable to Donne’s, though his sense of the literal surrounding world, through which grace is manifest, is more solid than Donne’s, less deliberately dramatic. His faith breaks with the Anglican tradition; so too his poetry breaks with much that came before.
The depth of learning/analysis/opinion here is breathtaking. I highly recommend reading Hopkins’ collected letters. He never wrote a boring letter. Sometimes it sounds like he’s talking to himself:
Gerard Manley Hopkins, letter to R.W. Dixon, December, 1881:
This modern medieval school is descended from the Romantic school (Romantic is a bad word) of Keats, Leigh Hunt, Hood, indeed of Scott early in the century. That was one school; another was that of the Lake poets and also of Shelley and Landor; the third was the sentimental school, of Byron, Moore, Mrs. Hemans, and Haynes Bailey. Schools are very difficult to class: the best guide, I think, are keepings. Keats’ school chooses medieval keepings, not pure nor drawn from the middle ages direct but as brought down through that Elizabethan tradition of Shakespeare and his contemporaries which died out in such men as Herbert and Herrick. They were also great realists and observers of nature. The Lake poets and all that school represent, as it seems to me, the mean or standard of English style and diction, which culminated in Milton but was never very continuous or vigorously transmitted, and in fact none of these men unless perhaps Landor were great masters of style, though their diction is generally pure, lucid, and unarchaic. They were faithful but not rich observers of nature. Their keepings are their weak point, a sort of colourless classical keepings: when Wordsworth wants to describe a city or a cloudscape which reminds him of a city it is some ordinary rhetorical stage-effect of domes, palaces, and temples. Byron’s school had a deep feeling but the most untrustworthy and barbarous eye, for nature; a diction markedly modern; and their keepings any gaud or a lot of Oriental rubbish. I suppose Crabbe to have been in form a descendant of the school of Pope with a strong and modern realistic eye; Rogers something between Pope’s school and that of Wordsworth and Landor; and Campbell between this last and Byron’s, with a good deal of Popery too, and a perfect master of style. Now since this time Tennyson and his school seem to me to have struck a mean or compromise between Keats and the medievalists on the one hand and Wordsworth and the Lake School on the other (Tennyson has some jarring notes of Byron in Lady Clare Vere de Vere, Locksley Hall and elsewhere). The Lake School expires in Keble and Faber and Cardinal Newman. The Bronwings may be reckoned to the Romantics. Swinburne is a strange phenomenon: his poetry seems a powerful effort at establishing a new standard of poetical diction, of the rhetoric of poetry; but to waive every other objection it is essentially archaic, biblical a good deal, and so on: now that is a thing that can never last; a perfect style must be of its age. In virtue of this archaism and on other grounds he must rank with the medievalists.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, journal, 1870:
One day in the Long Retreat (which ended on Xmas Day) they were reading in the refectory Sister Emmerich’s account of the Agony of the Garden and I suddenly began to cry and sob and could not stop. I put it down for this reason, that if I had been asked a minute beforehand I should have said that nothing of the sort was going to happen and even when it did I stood in a manner wondering at myself not seeing in my reason the traces of an adequate cause for such strong emotion — the traces of it I say because of course the cause in itself is adequate for the sorrow of a lifetime.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, journal, 1871:
What you look hard at seems to look hard at you, hence the true and false instress of nature.
AMAZING.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, journal, 1873:
At the Kensington Museum. Bold masterly rudeness of the blue twelvemonth service of plates or platters by Luca Della Robbia – Giobanni’s (1260) and Niccola (early in the next century) Pisano’s pulpits – Bronze gilt doors for Cathedral of Florence by?–The cartoons and a full sized chalk drawing from the Transfiguration–Standard portfolios of Indian architecture–also of Michael Angelo’s paintings at the Vatican: the might, with which I was more deeply struck than ever before, though this was in the dark side courts and I could not see well, seems to come not merely from the simplifying and then amplifying or emphasizing of parts but from a masterly realism in the simplification, both these things: there is the simplifying and strong emphasizing of anatomy in Rubens, the emphasizing and great simplifying in Raphael for instance, and on the other hand the realism in Velasquez, but here force came together from both sides–Thought more highly of Mulready than ever before–Watts: Two sisters and a couple of Italian peasants with a yoke of oxen–instress of expression in their faces, as in other characteristic English work, Burne Jones’, Mason’s, Walker’s etc.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1879 letter to Bridges:
…the onomatopetic theory has not had a fair chance. Cf. Crack, creak, croak, crake, graculus, crackle.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1885:
The melancholy I have all my life been subject to has become of late years not indeed more intense in its fits but rather more distributed, constant, and crippling … my state is much like madness.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, letter to father, October 16, 1866:
Only one thing remains to be done: I cannot fight against God Who calls me to His Church: if I were to delay and die in the meantime I shd. have no plea why my soul was not forfeit. I have no power in fact to stir a finger: it is God Who makes the decision and not I.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1889:
All my undertakings miscarry: I am like a straining eunuch. I wish then for death.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, letter to Robert Bridges, October 28, 1886:
In my judgment the amount of gift and genius which goes into novels in the English literature of this generation is perhaps not much inferior to what made the Elizabethan drama, and unhappily it is in great part wasted. How admirable are Blackmore and Hardy! Their merits are much eclipsed by the overdone reputation of the Evans–Eliot–Lewis–Cross woman (poor creature! one ought not to speak slightingly, I know), half real power, half imposition. Do you know the bonfire scenes in the Return of the Native and still better the sword-exercise scene in the Madding Crowd, breathing epic? or the wife-sale in the Mayor of Casterbridge (read by chance)? But these writers only rise to their great strokes; they do not write continuously well: now [Robert Louis] Stevenson is master of a consummate style and each phrase is finished as in poetry.
Michael Schmidt:
In 1885-86 he wrote the dark sonnets, expressing a religious doubt far more bleak and self-searing than any before in English poetry…. The dark sonnets are his most astonishing work, for here ruptured syntax, inversions and sound patterning, answer a violence of negative spiritual experience.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, letter to Robert Bridges, April 2, 1878:
My muse turned utterly sullen in the Sheffield smoke-ridden air and I had not written a line till the foundering of the Eurydice the other day and that worked on me and I am making a poem — in my own rhythm but in a measure something like Tennyson’s Violet (bound with Maud).
His extraordinary thoughts on Walt Whitman:
Gerard Manley Hopkins, letter to Robert Bridges, October 18, 1882:
I have read of Whitman’s (1) “Pete” in the library at Bedford Square (and perhaps something else; if so I forget), which you pointed out; (2) two pieces in the Athenaeum or Academy, one on the Man-of-War Bird, the other beginning “Spirit that formed this scene”; (3) short extracts in a review by Saintsbury in the Academy: this is all I remember … This, though very little, is quite enough to give a strong impression of his marked and original manner and way of thought and in particular of his rhythm. It might be even enough, I shall not deny, to originate or, much more, influence another’s style: they say the French trace their whole modern school of landscape to a single piece of Constable’s exhibited at the Salon early this century.
The question then is only about the fact. But first I may as well say what I should not otherwise have said, that I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like my own than any other man’s living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession. And this also makes me the more desirous to read him and the more determined I will not.
…Prose rhythm in English is always one of two things … either iambic or anapaestic. You may make a third measure (let us call it) by intermixing them. One of these three simple measures then, all iambic or all anapaestic or mingled iambic and anapaestic, is what he in every case means to write. He dreams of no other and he means a rugged or, as he calls it in that very piece “Spirit that formed this scene” (which is very instructive and should be read on this very subject), a “savage” art and rhythm. …
The above remarks are not meant to run down Whitman. His “savage” style has advantages, and he has chosen it; he says so. But you cannot eat your cake and keep it: he eats his off-hand, I keep mine. It makes a very great difference. Neither do I deny all resemblance.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, letter to Robert Bridges, May 21, 1878:
To do the Eurydice any kind of justice you must not slovenly read it with the eyes but with your ears, as if the paper were declaiming it at you. For instance the line “she had come from a cruise training seamen” read without stress and declaim is mere Lloyd’s Shipping Intelligence; properly read it is quite a different thing. Stress is the life of it.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, letter to Robert Bridges, October 28, 1886, on Jekyll and Hyde:
You are certainly wrong about Hyde being overdrawn; my Hyde is much worse.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
Nice post, Sheila. GMH’s “Inversnaid” is one I had to learn at school, and I can still recite it. I usually prefer to sing it. I’ve recorded a version today and uploaded it to my blog along with an analysis I did recently: https://gists.wordpress.com/2020/07/28/inversnaid-an-analysis/
wow – thank you for providing the link. That’s amazing!!
I’ve always been struck by how un- Jesuitical Hopkins seems. It’s as though he selected the most cerebral order he could find in an effort to further distance himself from himself. His poetry is full of word play and, I think, sensuality, and it must have created a great deal of cognitive dissonance for him.
hi,
I had an English teacher, a catholic priest, who introduced my class to GMH, I learned Inversnaid and Pied Beauty (in 1974-77). I was not the most academic of students but some things get into my heart and soul and become a passion.
Two years ago I went on a spiritual retreat at St Bueno’s in north Wales and was fascinated to learn that GMH, had lived and studied there in 1874 until 1877. I rekindled a love of the great poet and man. Today I visited St Winifrid’s well in Holywell NW, and there I listened to the wonderful voice of Richard Burton reading The Leaden Echo & The Golden Echo, while I was stood alone at the well.
Thanks for your interesting input here, I can learn very much from it.
Paul Mullarkey
WIDNES
Paul!! What a beautiful comment. I love to hear journeys like this! that spiritual retreat sounds incredible – and now I need to hear Richard Burton read those poems.
There’s something truly mystical about GMH’s use of language – such a bold freedom with how he wanted to say things, which is wild to me because he had such a strict intellectual BASIS for why he said things the way he did – but the work doesn’t feel strict or intellectual. I don’t know how he does it.
thanks again for sharing your journey with this special totally unique artist.