{"id":6216,"date":"2007-04-08T21:34:43","date_gmt":"2007-04-09T01:34:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=6216"},"modified":"2022-10-12T16:07:25","modified_gmt":"2022-10-12T20:07:25","slug":"national-poetry-month-gerard-manley-hopkins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=6216","title":{"rendered":"National Poetry Month: Gerard Manley Hopkins"},"content":{"rendered":"

I suggest reading this poem out loud (that exquisite “ah” at the end … it just makes a difference if it is spoken, rather than read silently). It feels good to say. The language itself. <\/p>\n

God’s Grandeur<\/b><\/p>\n

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
\nIt will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
\nIt gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
\nCrushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
\nGenerations have trod, have trod, have trod;
\nAnd all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
\nAnd wears man\u0092s smudge and shares man\u0092s smell: the soil
\nIs bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.<\/p>\n

And for all this, nature is never spent;
\nThere lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
\nAnd though the last lights off the black West went
\nOh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs\u0097
\nBecause the Holy Ghost over the bent
\nWorld broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.<\/p>\n

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\n“He belonged to that culture of sentimental and erotic male friendships shaped by both Greece and (Catholic) Rome to which Newman and Faber belonged before him.” — Gregory Woods<\/i><\/p>\n

“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.” — Michael Schmidt, “Lives of the Poets<\/a>\"\"“<\/i><\/p>\n

“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.” — Gerard Manley Hopkins, in 1882<\/i><\/p>\n

“The onomatopoeic theory has not had a fair chance. Cf. Crack, creak, croak, crake, graculus, crackle.” — Gerard Manley Hopkins<\/i><\/p>\n

“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<\/i> and plays, to Swinburne, and perhaps to Morris.” — Gerard Manley Hopkins, in letter to his friend and encourager Robert Bridges, poet laureate<\/i><\/p>\n

“The dark sonnets are his most astonishing work, for here ruptured syntax, inversions, and sound patterning answer a violence of negative spiritual experience. In the work of George Herbert, which Hopkins loved, Christ is the wooer, the soul that wooed. In Hopkins, the soul, painfully aware of its own fallen nature, deliberately woos Christ. There is almost despair, for a beautiful and vigorous Christ has withdrawn, grace is withheld. The earlier ease of loving faith — “I say that we are wound \/ With mercy round and round \/ As if with air” — is gone. After the dark sonnets there is silence.” — Michael Schmidt<\/i><\/p>\n

“No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness … I hope in time to have a more balanced and Miltonic style.” — Gerard Manley Hopkins<\/i><\/p>\n

“I am so happy, I am so happy.” — Gerard Manley Hopkins’s last words<\/i><\/p>\n

More on this fascinating poet here.<\/a><\/p>\n

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