The Gospel in Gerard Manley Hopkins. Gerard Manley Hopkins
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classify him as Victorian, since his short life spanned 1844–89. The Victorian period, 1837–1901, was the great age of teapots, three-volume novels, and piano legs wearing skirts. The Victorian sun never set on the Union Jack, and one out of three inhabitants of the planet was a British subject. Conventional style was heavy – windows hung with dark drapes, parlors densely ornamented. Women wore lace cuffs and men wore stiff collars. The short, stout Queen, ruling the empire with unfailing dignity for six and a half decades, raised terrier dogs. She bore eleven children. She oversaw such events as the Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851, the Crimean War, and the controversy over Darwin. She slept every night for twenty-five years with a copy of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” under her pillow.
Into the cream of this quirky age, Gerard Hopkins was born. Appropriately eccentric, a firstborn son, surrounded by gifted people, he was destined for success as a wealthy Anglican. His biographers have characterized him as frail, pale, anemic, short (5’2”), thin, too tired to wake up in the mornings, unpunctual, and inclined to wear little girls’ slippers with ankle straps. One anti-hagiographical critic claimed that his high-pitched voice conveyed the powerful stereotype of an affluent Englishman, and that his arched eyebrows and long nose conferred on him the appearance of a cartoon snob. A fellow Jesuit described him as “effeminate, with mouse-colored hair.” Saying Mass, he was apparently slow and scrupulous, jerking nervously at the slightest noise. When he taught school, the boys described his lessons as bearing “little marketable value.” He once foolishly told a group of high school boys that he regretted that he had never seen a naked woman.
But he was also independent and willful, wiry and athletic: his brother Cyril wrote of Gerard’s boyhood activities, “He was a fearless climber of trees and would go up in the lofty elm tree standing in our garden … to the alarm of onlookers like myself.”2 At Highgate School, he fought stubbornly with his headmaster, Mr. Dyne. Hopkins, age seventeen, wrote in a letter to Charles Luxmoore, “Dyne and I had a terrific altercation. I was driven out of patience and cheeked him wildly and he blazed into me with his riding whip.”3
As a mature but unpublished poet, he refused to revise a single line of his work, calling his verses “grubs in amber.” He possessed unshakable certainties. In brief, he actually was equipped for success – born with numerous silver spoons in his mouth, academically accomplished, artistically sensitive, stoic in the English way. So how could a man who claimed that “the holding of himself back … is the root of all moral good” embody such creative fertility that he set a new table for poetry forever? Because of this obscure Victorian Jesuit, the subsequent century produced an enlarged and liberated poetry, including lines like these:
Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
Dylan Thomas, from “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London”
Hopkins’s conversion at age twenty-two to Roman Catholicism notoriously and quite entirely derailed any hope of secular success. He went straight from a Double First at Oxford to incompetently teaching grammar school in the industrial city of Birmingham. In 1868, he capped his apparent folly by entering the Jesuits. A fellow Jesuit wrote, “I have rarely known anyone who sacrificed so much in taking the yoke of religion.”4 When he decided on a religious vocation, he destroyed the sentimental and anxious poems he had written before age twenty-three. The next time he acted as a serious poet, at age thirty-one, having filtered and brewed a fresh poetic, he unleashed the power of nuclear fission in “The Wreck of the Deutschland.”
He had burned his early poems – he referred to this moment as his “slaughter of the innocents” – and by the time he wrote “The Wreck,” he was an experienced Catholic. He had already claimed that he became a Catholic because “two plus two makes four”; but also, and the poems of the 1870s demonstrate this, he said that he had converted because of the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. “Religion without it,” he wrote, “is somber and illogical.” Having recognized the power of words at the consecration of the Eucharist – words which, Catholics believe, transform ordinary bread and ordinary wine into the real body and real blood – never again could language prove merely decorative. For him, a consecration made from human language reversed existential randomness and estrangement, the experience of which shadowed many of his contemporaries. Assuming that human language possessed this power, Hopkins went on to untie the bindings and stretch the known limits of poetry. He obliged his few readers to expand their receptivity.
During the later 1870s, Hopkins’s new voice would ring out in the nature sonnets: “God’s Grandeur,” “The Starlight Night,” “Spring,” “In the Valley of the Elwy,” “The Sea and the Skylark,” “The Windhover,” “Pied Beauty,” “Hurrahing in Harvest,” “The Caged Skylark,” “The Lantern out of Doors.” One could say that Hopkins practiced transubstantiation in every poem. By mysterious talent, he changed plain element into reality sublime. He encountered a jumble of weather, birds, trees, branches, waters, blooms, dewdrops, candle flames, prayers, then instressed them and, delighted, wrote in his journal, “Chance left free to act falls into an order.”
Transubstantiation also, for Hopkins, reorganized molecular disorder: instead of losing heat, as the laws of thermodynamics indicate, Creation rebooted every time divine power zapped the altar with the sacred words hoc est corpus meum (this is my body). The localization of power into, onto, everyday elements like bread and wine added to Hopkins’s overall sense of compression, of the felt pressure, of the stressing inward, of religious meaning. And just as the determined and talented young boy Gerard had once forced his little brothers to eat flowers so that they would really understand flowers, the adult Gerard believed that only by eating the Eucharist could he “take in” (his word was “instress”) God. The Incarnation of Christ raised the energy of everything. And when Hopkins placed his conviction of this into poetry, he tended to mention electricity, lightning, fire, flash, flame. He wrote in his late, great poem, “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and the comfort of the Resurrection”: “In a flash, at a trumpet crash, / I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am and / This jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch matchwood, immortal diamond, / Is immortal diamond.”
His posthumously collected poems were published in 1918, the final year of the World War which left western civilization gassed and devastated. All art would undergo transformation. Ironically, almost thirty years after his death, Hopkins’s slight volume encapsulated like an unexploded bomb the energetic proof that he had already transformed English poetry. Today, more than a century and a quarter after his death, he is universally recognized among the greatest English poets. And his greatest greatness, I think, lies in his appropriation of nature to establish religious meaning. Nature, as he idiosyncratically saw it, fastened him to God. He “instressed” an “inscape” (pattern), and this act energized him and whatever he looked upon. And though he would spend the final five years of his life plagued by “fits of sadness so severe they resemble madness,” Hopkins never abandoned the solution he had achieved through his reading of nature’s explosive titration with God.
The mid-Victorian period, with its legacy of Romantic poetry and painting, produced many amateur naturalists. Observers repeatedly described Hopkins as stooping down to study wet sand or blades of grass or little blue flowers. When he was eighteen, he drew an excellent likeness of weeds which he labeled neatly, “Dandelion, Hemlock & Ivy.” It was not unusual for nineteenth-century poets to associate nature with heightened emotional states, or even to bind it to the notion that God himself may have written nature like a book. This book could reveal the divine to those who had eyes to read. Keats had coined the phrase “egotistical sublime” to describe Wordsworth’s enhanced self-consciousness in the presence of nature. Hopkins, on the other hand, instressed the sublime to enhance his other-consciousness.
Hopkins grew up in Wordsworth’s and Keats’s poetic shadows, in a household filled with good artists, and in an era that encouraged the close study of natural phenomena. He was raised to fulfill the expectations of a milieu that privileged certain pursuits of noble leisure – drawing, poetry, piety.