Happy Birthday, Gerard Manley Hopkins

Poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was born on this day in 1844. He died of typhus in 1889. A short life that casts a long shadow.

Hopkins was against the grain of traditional Victorian poetry, and the way he worked and the way he put words together, basically, 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.

His poems are unbelievable and I’m sorry I hadn’t found them when I was in high school because I think I would have really responded to them and found comfort in them. His Catholic themes, his reaching out to God, his awareness of the pain of life waiting for him … that was all stuff I would totally have related to as a young Catholic girl. He was a deep thinker, and 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 and he judged his early verse as too worldly and burned it all. His vision of God is simple: God loves His children, God is always present. There is an eternal bond between humanity and the eternal, we are not forgotten. His view is redemptive.

His life seems to be about not just reconciling the two halves of himself (worldly and spiritual, poet and priest) but living with the contradictions. And you know how a lot of people just can’t deal with that! It is thought that one must CHOOSE. Well, Hopkins was determined NOT to choose. Couldn’t the poet live alongside the priest? Hopkins is no smiley-faced Christian, however. His understanding of his Catholic faith was that it was one of endurance and anguish. He was a faithful man, but he was not comfortable in his faith. He always felt unworthy and that sense of unworthiness before God comes through in his poems. His poems have a lushness of language that makes it seem like he almost enjoys that agony. Most Catholics will understand that sensation if they think about it (or maybe it is the late converts who will understand it best); it seems part and parcel of the faith. It is the awareness of the soul being on the rack. Hopkins was homosexual, and this also tortured him, and worked on him. When he was a younger man, he had had a great love who obsessed him. He wrote poems, letters (many of which still exist) showing the depths of this obsession. This young man, unfortunately, drowned and Hopkins never really recovered from that loss.

The individuality of Hopkins’s language is the emotional entryway into his work. He is beloved by real language-freaks, and it is one of the things I love most about his poems. His punctuation and hyphenated words reminds me very much of Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, a strange connection I suppose but in her preface to her novel Hume explains her thoughts about language and describes how she had to basically train the copyeditors who worked on her manuscript NOT to correct her work, unless there was a spelling error. Every correction had to go by her first. She felt rightly that there was a huge difference between “blue-green” and “bluegreen”. Hopkins’ language choices seem equally as individual: “dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon”, “blue-bleak embers”, “fathers-forth”. That last one is interesting. Something in the poem “fathers forth”, but it certainly feels different with that hyphen there. 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 Schmidt writes in his wonderful Lives of the Poets:

At university Hopkins’s discipline began: self-denial in the interest of the self. He evokes the effect of religious faith on the imagination. 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.

Hopkins was at war with himself. Gay relationships between students at universities were, in many ways, accepted at the time, as long as there was no outward scandal, but to take it further into adulthood meant you became a criminal. So … what to do? Many men were faced with that tragic choice. Hopkins wrote this about Walt Whitman, and I LOVE it because it shows that he was, if not comfortable with his competing contradictory impulses, at least aware of how they interacted, and how he responded to them.

I might 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 that I will not.

Amazing.

Hopkins understood, deeply, his own tendencies towards other men, but his feelings about religion (and also, just the time in which he lived) counteracted that. He could not, like Oscar Wilde, decide to live as an aesthete, and push the boundaries of what was acceptable in Victorian life. At least not in his lifestyle. But he DID push the boundaries of what was acceptable in poetry at the time – and his stuff is still relevant. His work feels breathlessly modern. His word choices are unexpected, and yet never too clever, never pleased with itself. It feels organic and personal. His language seems to be the truest expression of what this difficult tormented man was feeling. Hopkins worked HARD at his poetry. He agonized over every word.

Hopkins was a very conscious poet. He wrote:

No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness … I hope in time to have a more balanced and Miltonic style

He wrote a lot about poetry as well. He was a terrific analyst and 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.

Gerard Manley Hopkins’ last words were, “I’m so happy … I’m so happy …”

Knowing the ultimate 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 become even more 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. He almost reads better when you hear it.

Here is my favorite of his poems.

As I mentioned: try it out loud. As with Shakespeare, the emotion is in the line, the emotion is actually contained in the punctuation, the line-break. The emotion is in every letter. That takes technique, craft, and work. Not easy to do.

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.