Gerard Manley Hopkins

A number of truly extraordinary sonnets, several with alternate lines attached, some left unfinished, like his other work, for years. Cries which have burned their way into the minds and hearts of hundreds of thousands of readers since. A hodgepodge, bitter spelt not from leaves of grass but from scattered leaves rustling across the floor to be read by some Sybil, syllables leaving the indelible impression of someone having been to hell and partway back. Pieces of cloth and flesh left behind for others to somehow reassemble. Among them, a sonnet written sometime between late 1884 and the spring of ’85 , beginning with the complaint: “To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life / Among strangers.”

A stranger to his old school now, to most Englishmen, to many of his friends, to his own Jesuit colleagues often, to his own family. And a stranger now even to himself here in Ireland, this lover of England, wife to his “creating thought,” dismissed as an eccentric on both sides of the Irish Sea. And all—finally—because he has tried to do God’s will and follow in the footsteps of Christ in deed and word. Christ, his peace and parting, his sword and strife, as Christ had warned would happen to those who followed him:

And yet, he knows, from the friends he has made here in Ireland, “Not but in all removes I can / Kind love both give and get.” Only there is this to consider: that a dark God should have hidden Himself from him, so that He is heard neither in his poems, nor in his classes (for he can see it, surely, on the yawning faces of his students), nor even in his letters home or to Bridges. “Cassandra wailings,” his enemy Thomas Carlyle would have called them: a voice crying in the desert. Still, he believes, he holds in his heart a secret worth everything: Christ, his Word/Wisest. And like the good Jesuit he is, would get that news out to others. “But how? For Christ’s own sake, how!?”

“And there they lie . . . [the] beginnings of things, ever so many, which it seems to me might well have been done, ruins and wrecks,” he will confess come May. And what word wisest—whether this be the unaccountable loss of his easy intimacy with Christ or the strain he feels in not being able to get on even with his own work, much less his poems, scattered here and there and piling up unpublished, or, when read in manuscript, misunderstood or rejected by his friends, Catholic, Anglican, or agnostic: all this leaves him always scrambling to defend his style, his meaning, his music. Always to be beginning again, beginning again, at forty a eunuch, a lonely began.

“To hunger and not have, yét hope ón for,” Hopkins’s dark doppelganger Caradoc sings in an ecstasy of despair, knowing that, yes, yes, he has finally given over the struggle and consigned himself to self-damnation, so that now he can settle on the sad scapes of his own self-preoccupations, and watch that self as if on some ill-lit stage “storm and strive and / Be at every assault fresh foiled, worse flung, deeper disappointed.” Such turmoil and torment has, he swears, “a sweetness, / Keeps a kind of joy in it, a zest, an edge, an ecstasy, / Next after sweet success.”

If you can’t succeed, there is at least the perverse pleasure, as Milton’s Satan knows, in going about, head unbowed, in a very special hell of one’s own making, thinking: at least I made this. The heady wine of day-in, day-out failure. The rage and zest of knowing that, whatever else you do, you will fail again each done damned day. But is this Caradoc speaking, or himself? And if himself, how avoid the carrion comfort of such despair, of the sick self feeding vulturelike on the bones of the self? How find fresh water to revive the parched soul, the sweating self?

March 12, 1885. The Feast of St. Gregory the Great: Hopkins meditates on Pope Gregory’s coming upon a cluster of Anglo-Saxon slaves being sold in the Roman marketplace, and thinking: But these are Angeli—These are Angels, not Anglos—and deciding to send missionaries to barbarous England to raise these tribes into the full humanity of Christ. A blessing, then, this coming of Christ to the English twelve centuries before. Ponder, he tells himself, “the best you know of England,” then “the worst,” and then, once more, his hopes for his beloved England’s conversion. After everything, after every failure, even to bring his own family over with him, he will not give up on the dream of what England might be again.

Three days later, he meditates on the woman taken in adultery and on Christ’s saving her from being stoned to death. Jesus’ stooping to write “on the ground has something to do with [Moses’] writing of the tables of the law,” he thinks. But the crowd will have to wait until this new lawgiver has drawn up the new law. Be careful not to pass judgment too easily, Christ warns them. “Let him that is without sin throw the first stone.” Pray, Hopkins warns himself, “pray to keep to this spirit and as far as possible rule in speaking of Mr. Gladstone for instance.” For it is just possible that the man might have some redeeming qualities.

March 16: A meditation on Christ’s feeding of the five thousand with the pitiful little at hand. Remember, he tells himself, that “every effort is good,” every effort counts with God, whatever the outcome, even for those whose days and nights are spent in grading a nation. The following day—the Feast of St. Patrick—he thanks God for the gift of the saint, and for the way Patrick was glorified in God, for he too—like Hopkins—experienced exile from England and suffering, struggling to maintain both his piety and his patience. Consider too the saint’s “selfsacrifice and zeal; his miracles and success.” And thank Patrick for his Confession, which Hopkins loves so deeply, breathing as it does “an enthusiasm which as far as feeling goes I feel but my action does not answer to this.” He ends his meditation by begging for the saint’s “help for Ireland in all its needs” and then for himself in his role as teacher and examiner. Two days later, on the Feast of St. Joseph, he meditates on the saint’s “holiness and his humility,” especially “in having to accept being thought Christ’s father when he was not. Pray to him, then, as the patron of the hidden life.” Pray to him for those “suffering in mind . . . as I do.”

Five days later, he tells Bridges that he is, as always, “in a low way of health . . . especially now in Lent.” Not that he is fasting, but still, “the restriction of diet” does make a difference. In fact, “the delightful old French Father [Mallac] who teaches Logic here . . . will have it that I am dying—of anaemia. I am not, except at the rate that we all are.” Still, how he could do with a little more zest. He has been rereading Bridges’s Nero “carefully for two months now,” and finds that it breathes a “true dramatic life.” Yet, he warns him, for a play to be acted, not only must there be the requisite stir of action but that action must be seen. So, if the death of Nero’s mother is the climax of the story, “it shd. then be the climax of the stage business.” You cannot trust the audience to get it, he explains, for “there is no depth of stupidity and gape a race could not fall to on the stage that in real life gapes on while Gladstone negotiates his surrenders of the empire.” So much for Hopkins’s nine days’ resolve to henceforth think more kindly of the Prime Minister.

He is sending Bridges all he has of St. Winefred’s Well: “the first lines of the first scene, a dozen lines of dialogue or less, as well as the beginning of another soliloquy,” and—at the heart of the endeavor—Caradoc’s “soliloquy after the murder, 71 lines,” which has cost him “a very great effort.” The writing of that, he confesses, has been “laborious, yet it seems to me a success,” and “the unities will be much closer than in modern plays.” But a bare week later he confesses that, though he “once thought well of the pieces,” he no longer knows what he feels. Still, he hopes Bridges will see how, as the emotions become more intense in Caradoc’s soliloquy, the rhythm too “becomes freer and more sprung.” The truth is, he adds, that he has “written nothing stronger than some of those lines.” Nothing that catches the zest, the heady wine of knowing that, whatever you do, no matter how hard you strive, you are powerless over the fact that you have not only lost what is most dear to you, but damned yourself in the process.

He has been setting Dixon’s Ode to Evening to a new kind of music. This is a radical experiment, and “like a new art,” the effect unlike anything he has ever heard. “The air is plain chant where plain chant most departs from modern music,” though the harmonies “are a kind of advance on advanced modern music.” The very old, then, welded to the most technically advanced. The combination of the two Hopkins finds “most singular” but also the “most solemn,” and hopes he has “something very good in hand.” He is thankful for Bridges’s friend, Parry’s, comments on his new harmonies, and though Parry’s remarks are not encouraging, still “they are instructive and if I could manage it I should attend Sir Robert Stewart’s or somebody else’s course, as he advises.” Besides, his own understanding of music is diametrically opposed to Parry’s, for “what he calls variety I call sameness, because modulation reduces all the rich diatonic keyboard with its six or seven authentic . . . modes to one dead level of major.” He hopes Bridges will find the ode “slow and easy to play,” but if he does not like it, it will be because he sees something Bridges has not. In fact, “if the whole world agreed to condemn it or see nothing in it I should only tell them to take a generation and come to me again.”

What he has discovered in the old music are the grounds for a melodic line with “an infinite expressiveness and dramatic richness,” so that “putting in or leaving out . . . a single note in an ‘alphabetic’ passage changes the emotional meaning.” Anyone who knows and loves plainchant feels this, he adds, though “the rest of the world (and I expect this includes Parry), do not,” for modern music with its tyranny of the bar falls far short of what music could express about human emotions if it were allowed to. Listening, for instance, to “one of Chopin’s fragmentary airs struggling and tossing on a surf of accompaniment what does it matter whether one or even half a dozen notes are left out of it? Its being and meaning lies outside itself in the harmonies; they give the tonality, modality, feeling, and all.” And so the human voice is drowned out by a complex of notes, which instead become the raison d’être for the music. Such music, then, is rather like Lucifer’s falling in love with the sound of his own voice. But, he adds with a sardonic chill, if he should ever compose anything, it will probably be his “own requiem, like Mozart, but in plain chant.” In any event, the music he speaks of here chimes eerily with both his unfinished “Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves” and Caradoc’s paean to despair.

Wednesday morning, April 8, 1885: The long-anticipated, long-dreaded visit by Edward, Prince of Wales (future King of England), and his wife, Alexandra, Princess of Wales and daughter of the King of Denmark, is “now an accomplished fact,” The Times notes. The royal couple has “once more landed upon these still friendly though neglected shores, and have received an enthusiastic welcome.” Seventeen years “have passed since the illustrious visitors were last here,” during which time Ireland has experienced its share of adversities, “and generations have come and gone like passing waves.” Still, those loyal to the crown, while challenged “by the ungracious action of a disloyal section, shook off their apathy,” preparing “to give the Royal visitors such a reception as would efface any unfavourable impression . . . produced by the perverse action” of the Dublin Corporation “in refusing to greet the royal couple.”

Still, the memory of the Phoenix Park murders remains fresh, so that police and military security for the visit have been high. “The Prince and Princess of Wales have been and gone,” Hopkins will write his mother six weeks later. “They were well received all things considered: most people wanted to be civil and respectful, on the other hand it was felt with reason that to the royal family Ireland owes little gratitude. The Queen, who spends months every year in Scotland . . . has only thrice in all her [fifty-year] reign visited Ireland and never lived there.” And Hopkins, having been on Irish soil for the past year and more, begins to soften in his opposition to Home Rule.

On April 20, he picks up a copy of the Pall Mall Gazette and reads of the death by drowning of Martin Geldart, his old Oxford companion of twenty years before. Geldart had been on the Newhaven ferry bound for Dieppe ten days earlier when he apparently pitched overboard into rough seas. It is the same Geldart Hopkins had described in a letter to his mother in his salad days as being the ugliest man he had ever laid eyes on. Still, they had become friends, and Hopkins had once stayed with Geldart and his family for a week in the Long Vacation. After Oxford, Geldart had gone on to become an Anglican curate, then, dissatisfied, left to become a Unitarian minister, losing more and more of his faith until even his liberal Liverpool congregation had dismissed him.

Three years earlier, he had published—in Oxford-blue cloth covers, and under the pseudonym Nitram Tradleg, his own name cleverly written backwards—a memoir describing the hell of his undergraduate years, calling it A Son of Belial, for which one was to read Balliol. A nervous, edgy, and strange figure, Geldart had recalled the uneasy religious ambiance of his time at Oxford, satirizing under other names Jowett, Liddon, and Coles, with Hopkins appearing as Gerontius Manley, Geldart’s “ritualistic friend,” the first name borrowed from Newman’s poem of the same title. It was a reminder that, unlike himself, Hopkins had followed Newman over to Rome. “Gerontius Manley and I had many talks on religion,” Geldart had written. “He was quite at one with me on the hollowness of Protestant Orthodoxy, but he had a simple remedy—the authority of the church,” while Geldart himself had opted for Rationalism. “Gerontius Manley, with four or five of my [Anglo] Catholic friends at Belial besides,” had “practically confessed by joining the Church of Rome to the disgust of Canon [Liddon].” As for their mutual friend, V. S. Coles, “logic was never his strong point; gushing was his forte. Gerontius gushed as well, but then he meant it.” Just weeks earlier, Geldart had sent Hopkins a copy of his memoir, which he had since read. Ironically, he was in the midst of writing Geldart when word of his death came.

What hours, O what black hoürs 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.

In the interstices of the long nights, alone, he has had all the time in the world (it seems) to dwell on his own bouts of near madness, melancholy, darkness, despair, even thoughts of suicide. Never-ending nights, years-long nights. The Ow! Ow! Ow! of those dead-end hours fermenting at last to sours, the serpent’s hissing sibilants rustling through the poem. Darkness like a fell of woods—Dante’s selva oscura—or the fell of an animal’s pelt smothering him. To pray, to call out for comfort to dearest him, Christ, Ipse, the only One—only to learn at last that his prayers are like so many dead letters, sent into the insolid Void to an address and an addressee Unknown. To hunger after the Other, only to taste oneself, to be gall, be heartburn, to be thrown back on the pitiful self, in this reenactment of the close of “Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves,” to taste what the damned taste, their sweating selves, where the waters of the Spirit which should feed one have dried up in the long years’ drought. And then to realize—for that brilliant final semicolon carries a nearly infinite weight—that bad as he has it here, the eternally dammed experience far worse, that his hell, bad as it is, is not at least that hell:

Then worse giving way in another agonized sonnet to worst: “No worst, there is none,” he writes, the monosyllables piling up and drumming their way home. A pitch of grief so intense as to become almost diabolically exquisite: “Pitched past pitch of grief, / More pangs will, schooled at fore-pangs, wilder wring.” Wring, ring, rung, wrong. . . . To turn toward his Comforter, Christ and the Holy Spirit, those unfailing Advocates, as he had preached at Oxford and Liverpool to give others succor and consolation. Or to Mary, sweet mother and comforter. Only to find they have all vanished, leaving a terrifying emptiness behind:

Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief-woe,
wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old anvil wínce and síng—
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked “No ling-Ering!
Let me be fell: force I must be brief.”
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

How measure our own descent into the dizzying depths of the self? What metaphor shall we use against those interior yawing sublimities? The pain of separation from God, like an incessant throbbing in the brain, and nothing for it. And what is left, what remedy against such a radical, unmapping disjuncture—to name what is by its inchoate nature nameless—except by the death of consciousness, and if not death, death’s sister, sleep? “Tomorrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,” Macbeth utters in exhaustion,

The only comfort Hopkins can find in this Job-like, Lear-like whirlwind, try as he may, is this: that all life—all / Life—“death does end and each day dies with sleep.” That, and the rough comforter he can pull over his head there in his bleak upper-story room on dank St. Stephen’s Green, a stranger in an alien place far from the comfort of home.

“Mortal my mate, bearing my rock-a-heart,” he writes in another unfinished sonnet from this time. It is addressed “To his Watch,” its cold tick a counterpoint to his warm heart’s tock. Which of the two will fail first, he wonders, “and lie / The ruins of, rifled, once a world of art?” But here’s the difference, he sees: each man and woman has an allotted time, and no more, and then, as in “Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves,” comes “comfort’s carol of all or woe’s worst smart.” Day gives way to day, and there is no recovering time. It has always been so.

“I will this evening begin writing to you,” he signals Baillie in late April, “and God grant it may not be with this as it was with the last letter I wrote to an Oxford friend, that the should-be receiver was dead before it was ended.” He means “poor Geldart, whose death, as it was in Monday last’s Pall Mall,” Baillie must have heard about. “I suppose it was suicide, his mind, for he was a selftormentor, having been unhinged, as it had been once or twice before, by a struggle he had gone through.” And this on top of the suicide of Tom Nash a month before Geldart’s. Nash: another Oxford classmate and friend of Geldart’s, and a lawyer, like Baillie. That death too was most certainly a suicide, Hopkins believes, “and certainly too done in insanity, for he had been sleepless for ten nights: of this too you will have heard.” It is a comfort to Hopkins—of such strange comforts can he count on now—and even “seems providential that I had renewed my friendship with Geldart some weeks before it was too late. I yesterday wrote to his widow.” And so, at forty, he tallies up the losses: “Three of my intimate friends at Oxford have thus drowned themselves, a good many more of my acquaintances and contemporaries have died by their own hands in other ways: it must be, and the fact brings it home to me, a dreadful feature of our days.”

Two weeks pass. He picks up the letter and resumes. In the past few months he has been going through old letters, he confesses to Baillie, “accumulations of actually ever since I was at school, destroying all but a very few, and growing ever lother to destroy, but also to read, so that at last I left off reading; and there they lie and my old notebooks and beginnings of things, ever so many, which it seems to me might well have been done, ruins and wrecks.” Beginnings, only beginnings, leaving him “a lonely began.” But among those old letters he has found comfort in Baillie’s, overflowing as always with kindness. Once, twenty-five years before, Baillie had caught him staring intently at a watering hose on the Outer Quad and commented on it. But what was it, what was it Baillie had said then? Something like “Busy curious thirsting fly”? Or was it “The dying Christian to his soul”? Either way, there was a comment. That he remembers, even if the actual words escape him now. Or perhaps it was someone else who made the comments. And what is the nature of memory, after all, that we can reshape our pasts like this? Or is it that memory, which makes up so much of who we are, has begun to distort and disremember all now?

Surely Baillie must be wondering why it has taken him all this time to write a simple letter. Because it is a symptom of his “disease, so to call it,” he explains, that “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. One, the lightest but a very inconvenient form of it, is daily anxiety about work to be done, which makes me break off or never finish all that lies outside that work.” But it is useless to write on the subject of depression, for even when “I am at the worst, though my judgment is never affected, my state is much like madness.” Worse, he sees “no ground for thinking I shall ever get over it or ever succeed in doing anything that is not forced on me to do of any consequence.”

Still later that same day, he begins a letter to Bridges, once again apologizing for his silence, due solely “to work, worry, and languishment of body and mind—which must be and will be,” his fits of melancholy at their worst resembling madness. He needs change, but that he cannot often get. Bridges’s Ulysses is a fine play, Hopkins acknowledges, but the most he can summon is “a dry admiration.” Its worst fault is its unreality, the bringing in “a goddess among the characters,” a dramatic strategy which revolts him. “Believe me,” he adds, “the Greek gods are a totally unworkable material; the merest frigidity,” and they will “chill and kill every living work of art they are brought into.”

For, besides the hideous, unspeakable stories told of them, they are neither ladies nor gentlemen but cowards only: “loungers, without majesty, without awe, antiquity, foresight, character; old bucks, young bucks, and Biddy Buckskins. What did Athene do after leaving Ulysses? Lounged back to Olympus to afternoon nectar.” Such images have their effect on the psyche, he knows, long after the stories in which they are imbedded are forgotten. They are dangerous, for they gnaw at one’s peace of mind and serenity. Then too Bridges’s archaisms destroy the play’s earnestness. Five months later, Hopkins will have to explain himself to Dixon as well. No doubt, he will tell Dixon, the Greek myths are more beautiful “than other mythologies as Homer’s epic is [superior to] other epics,” free as it is “from that cumber of meaningless and childish rubbish which interrupts and annoys one even in the midst of fine invention in for instance the Irish legends.”

But since mythology is the historical part of religion, he can only feel loathing and horror when he thinks “of man setting up the work of his own hands.” The Indian gods at least are imposing, but the Greek gods remind him of “some company of beaux and fashionable world at Bath in its palmy days or Tunbridge Wells or what not.” Still, they are “susceptible of fine treatment, allegorical treatment for instance,” and handled in this way give “rise to the most beautiful results,” since “the moral evil is got rid of and the pure art, morally neutral and artistically so rich, remains and can be even turned to moral uses.” So with his own Perseus/Christ and Andromeda. But how can “the heathen gods . . . be taken seriously on our stage,” or even humorously, for that matter? Still, he knows he must have “damped and damned and . . . hurt Bridges” in telling him so, and for that he is sorry.

But as for St. Winefred’s Well, how could Bridges think he would “in cold blood write ‘fragments of a dramatic poem’?” For him, “a completed fragment, above all of a play, is the same unreality as a prepared impromptu.” He sent what he had because he hoped Bridges might encourage him to continue. For “in matters of any size” he “must absolutely have encouragement as much as crops rain.” And then he mentions that he has “after long silence written two sonnets, which I am touching: if ever anything was written in blood one of these was.” Exactly which two of the sonnets of desolation he is referring to he does not say, but lines like “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” and “My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief- / Woe, world-sorrow; on an áge-old ánvil wínce and síng” are surely strong contenders. But these Hopkins cannot bring himself now to show to anyone, not even Bridges. Or especially Bridges, who would diagnose them as signs that his friend’s life is as much a failure as poor Geldart’s was, if all were known.

He has been seventeen months in Ireland now, without seeing his family once. How he thirsts to be back on English soil. And so he writes Addis to say he would love to see him when he gets back to London. How good it would be to talk over their lives as converts and now as priests. Addis sends him a short note from his parish in Sydenham in South London to say a bed is at his service there and he will be most welcome. At the beginning of August, Hopkins is back at Oak Hill, and the following day takes the train down to Addis’s parish, Our Lady and St. Philip Neri, to celebrate mass and to preach. It is a new church, just three years old, and it will serve the parish for the next fifty-five years until it is obliterated by German bombers in 1940. On this particular Sunday in the summer of 1885, though, Hopkins preaches on the Pharisee and the Publican, a sermon he has now used three times. He has a particular reason for wanting to preach on the topic of self-righteousness, for Addis has told him that he is being carefully watched by one of his parishioners: a busybody of a woman who finds Addis’s sermons too unorthodox and so has been taking notes in order to present evidence against him to the Bishop.

“Two men went to the Temple to pray,” Hopkins tells Addis’s congregation. “When they went home after their prayer one . . . was made just, and the other was not.” What he is most anxious to do today, then, is to advise both himself and the congregation “against the sin of pride,” for in a few minutes’ time, “one man [was] put into the way of salvation; the other . . . of eternal ruin.” There is a suddenness about the story, Hopkins stresses, “as if the way of God were full of incalculable hurricanes and reverses, in an instant building up and in the same casting down, making it seem better . . . to live recklessly and trust to a single hearty act of sorrow than to toil at prayers and mortifications which a breath of pride may in one fatal instant shatter and bring to nothing.” Let him (or her) who has ears to hear hear.

He spends a week at Oak Hill with his family, and then joins them for their summer holiday in Midhurst in West Sussex, twenty-five miles west of Horsham. On August 17, he leaves to spend two days with the Patmores at Hastings in East Sussex, seventy miles to the southeast. Then, on the evening of the 19th, he takes the train to Holyhead and the overnight ferry back to Kingstown and Dublin. His holidays are over. The Patmores, he writes his mother the following day, were very kind and the current Mrs. Patmore he found to be “a very sweet lady.” There were also two daughters there by Patmore’s first wife, “very nice, not handsome, one [Bertha] sadly lame since a child but a most gifted artist, a true genius,” who “draws butterflies, birds, dormice, vegetation, in a truly marvellous manner; also illuminates.” And then there was little Piffy by the present Mrs. Patmore: Francis Joseph Mary Epiphanius Patmore, “a very interesting and indeed alarming little two-year-old born on Twelfth-night,” of “such a strange sensibility and imagination that it beats anything I ever saw or heard of. He treats flowers as animated things, animals as human, and cries—howls—if he thinks they are hurt or even hears of their being hurt.” Such behavior, he confesses, he “should not like . . . in a brother of mine.”

Before leaving for Clongowes Wood to make his annual eight-day retreat, he writes Patmore to thank him for his hospitality. During one of their private talks, Patmore, always fascinated by the mystical and the erotic, had asked him what he thought about religious contemplation leading to sexual intercourse, a subject Hopkins’s training has taught him to find suspect—hideous, in fact—and which he does not at all feel comfortable discussing, so that he had put off Patmore by promising to write him on the subject once he knew something more. It is a sad fact of the human condition, he tells Patmore now, that “anything however high and innocent may happen to suggest anything however low and loathsome.” But, as he is on the subject, he will mention

among the abuses high contemplation is liable to three things which have come under my notice—(1) Molinos was condemned for saying . . . that during contemplation acts of unnatural vice might take place without the subject’s fault, being due to the malice of the devil and he innocent; (2) Fr. Gagliardi S.J. (early in the history of our Society) found a congregation of nuns somewhere in Italy who imagined that such acts were acts of divine union; (3) such practices appear widely in the Brahmanic mystic literature, though naturally the admirers of the Vedas and their commentators have kept dark about it. Even St. Jude seems to allude to such practices in his Epistle.

Ah, the havoc and the glory of mortal beauty and of our complex responses to it. It is a topic Hopkins finds himself once more wrestling with during his retreat. There is of course Patmore’s preoccupation with sexuality and Christianity. But there is another thing that has come to his attention, which is even more troubling. During his stay at Sydenham, Addis had told him in strict confidence that he had been seeing a woman, one of his parishioners. They have been very discreet—for surely if the disgruntled female parishioner who has been watching him like a hawk had even suspected a liaison, there would be no need to take notes of Father Addis’s sermons, for the other would be reason enough for his immediate dismissal.

No doubt Hopkins has urged Addis, who has—like all parish priests—made a solemn promise of chastity, to end the relationship at once. But Addis is too deeply involved, and—whatever he may have promised Hopkins—he will continue to see the woman until at last he leaves the priesthood (and the Church) and subsequently marries her. And so now, in meditating on the Ignatian Foundation and Creation that Sunday, August 23, Hopkins composes a new sonnet, beginning with the question: “To what serves Mortal Beauty?” It is a poem that directly addresses God’s purpose in creating physical beauty and our desire to possess it. But how possess it? He knows too well—as everyone learns sooner or later—that physical beauty has a deeply erotic charge, is dangerous, unsettling, and can set the blood dancing. That, as charged as music can be, a beautiful or handsome face will throw us out of gaze and unbalance us in an instant, the image of the desired replaying itself over and over in the mind’s eye until caution itself comes to count as nothing.

Of course, that is what mortal beauty is meant to do, Hopkins knows: keep “warm / Men’s wits to the things that are,” to the power and wonder of the Creator who fans fresh our imaginations with so many possibilities. But, he insists, we are meant merely to meet it, acknowledge it, rather than stare it out of countenance until we begin to idolize it. For we will turn our attention to something, whether to the sacred or “block or barren stone” or calf or erotic image. Consider our own history, Hopkins says, English boys brought as slaves to Rome to be sold on the block, and all that entailed: “lovely lads once, wet-fresh windfalls of war’s storm,” and how Pope Gregory, catching sight of them in the Forum, was stirred to send missionaries to Britain to lift such a people from slavery into freedom. It is for us, then, to “merely meet” beauty, own it, “Home at heart, as heaven’s sweet gift,” and then leave it alone, to wish instead for that better beauty, God’s life in us. So he has warned himself many times over, maintaining a strict chastity of the eyes as he winds his way through the siren call of life’s temptations.

A few days later, as he meditates now on Christ’s suffering, he composes yet another powerful sonnet: this one on refusing to give in to the temptation to despair, whether as Geldart and Nash had, or as Addis seems destined to do. Yes, he can feel his exhausted self going slacker and slacker, like a rope unraveling strand by strand. How easy to just let go the oar and go under, feasting on the carrion comfort of despair, to cry out, “I can no more,” as Newman’s Gerontius had once cried out. Gerontius Manley, indeed! But no, there is something he can do: hope, wish the long night over and a beacon light shine his way. What in God’s name is this crippling force, this thing that plays him as a cat plays a mouse or a lion its crippled prey? Why rude (rood) on him, helpless as he is, his all-powerful wring-world right foot rock? Why toss him about like some winnower tossing grain into the air in order to separate it from the chaff, if not that the grain that makes the bread might lie “sheer and clear”?

Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoíd thee
and flee?

And now, in the midst of his retreat, he glimpses into the heart of the matter to see what has been going on all these many months. It is nothing less than his having wrestled with his own dark angel, and this his crucifixion. More, it is God he has been wrestling with all these years, breaking that stubborn will of his that would say yes, but always with a yet, and yet, and a yet. On retreat at Beaumont exactly two years before, he had asked Christ and his mother to lift him up so that he might enter more completely into Christ’s total emptying of himself on the cross. And now here he is, uttering the very words Christ spoke as he hung there, looking about, thirsting, uttering the opening lines of the 42nd Psalm, the very words misunderstood by those below watching him die. Eli eli lama sabbachthani: My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?:

Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh,
cheer.
Cheer whóm though? the hero whose héaven-handling flúng me,
fóot tród
Me? or mé that fóught him? O whích one? is it éach one? That
níght, that yéar
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my
God.

To soldier on, then, regardless of what others do, including his fellow priests falling along the wayside. He has been given his orders and, in the spirit of his Order, he will do his duty to the best of his failing abilities. And since his orders have called for him to be in Ireland when he would rather be anywhere else, and to do the work (useless as it might seem) of examining and instructing a nation, many of whom resent his presence among them, why then, so be it. Soldiers. Why is it we feel a surge of pride when we see our soldiers parade smartly past in their uniforms, even when we know that among them must be the occasional rapist or slacker or thief or cold-eyed killer?

Surely he has spent enough time now reading the papers or giving counsel in the confessional box to know that even these men—Britain’s finest—are, like everyone, frail clay. No, worse: foul clay. Still, it is the heart calls the calling manly, guesses, hopes, even makes believe the soldier or sailor is there to protect the innocent, the women and children, to go into a situation where most of us would rather not find ourselves, to do the right thing. Just so, when we see a noble piece of art, a poem, say, we want to believe the artist or poet is no less, even though we know better, that indeed the uniform (or habit)—red (or black)—at best can only approximate the complexity of the one who wears it, and so “deems; déars the ártist áfter his árt; / So feigns it finds as sterling | all as all is smart.”

And so with Christ, who likewise knew war and rumors of war, who slogged his way through, faced Herod, faced the Pharisees, faced the crowds who followed him when it suited themselves, then turned away. Faced centurions, faced the Temple police sent out to take him in the middle of the night there by the olive press, protected his followers, who then turned and fled like shot dogs, leaving even their clothes behind in the scramble under the feverish torchlights. Faced the High Priest Caiaphas finally, and Caesar’s own man, the steely-eyed Pilate and the playboy Herod, faced his torturers and the conscripts who nailed him to the cross.

Christ, who can reeve a rope best, hold it together, keep those last strands of a man from coming apart, who watches us now in company with his Father, having served his time, Christ playing, but playing for keeps, and—seeing one of us do all we can—leans forward, this Paraclete and Comforter, this good captain, to embrace and kiss our cheek, and call it what it is: a Christ-done deed, Christ acting here, now, in this time and place, at Clongowes Wood College outside Dublin, in the summer of 1885, as in ten thousand places, anno domini.

“Let him who is in desolation strive to remain in patience,” the Spiritual Exercises counsel, “which is the virtue contrary to the troubles which harass him.” “Patience, hard thing!” Hopkins returns now, in this sequel to his curtal sonnet “Peace” written six years earlier. “O surely,” he had written then, “reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu / Some good! And so he leaves Patience exquisite, / That plumes to Peace thereafter.” But that was then, and hard experience has taught him that patience has other qualities than exquisiteness. Hard it is even to ask for patience, or even deem it worth having, especially when deep anxiety verging on madness seems the order of each day.

Patience means war within, means wounds. Patience means weariness, means time’s taskings, to be passed over, do without, be tossed about. Means hard obedience, doing what your superiors tell you to do, even when your heart flinches from the doing. Means having friends who seem never to understand the value of what you have done, whether with one’s life or one’s work. But how else learn patience, except through testing it? Otherwise patience remains a virtue in name only:

Isn’t patience what his Master had to learn? Not only with the crowds who turned away, or with the authorities who would trap him, but even with his own disciples, including Peter, the one he had chosen to establish his community when he should be taken from them? Patience is there to cover the human wreck to which it roots itself, the way purple ivy covers the walls of old monasteries and bare ruined choirs or buildings along St. Stephen’s Green, the wrecks of things long past any purpose they might ever have had. Patience shows itself in purple-crimson flowers and seas of liquid leaves riffling in the breeze and sun all day, so that no one can count how great the cost to the ruined edifice within. How good and kind the patient man is, they say, without any idea of what he has suffered. And we? We who have been there? “We hear our hearts grate on themselves: it kills / To bruise them dearer.”

But so it is: our rebellious wills must be broken, so that—and he can barely get the words out between his clenched teeth—“we do bid God bend to him even so.” And what is the sweet reward for patience, then? What can we hope for? Human kindness and a deeper understanding of others, even if one is misread and misunderstood. Cell by cell, drop by drop, “Patience fills / His crisp combs” the way bees collect the pollen from the ivy flowers, transforming it into honey, gathering itself to a greatness, like that other metaphor of olive oil pressed and gathering, or like Andromeda waiting patiently for her Perseus to rescue her:

Time then, to tell himself (again) to rest, to realize that it is not up to him to grant himself the spiritual consolation and peace he so desires and needs, that that must come in God’s own time, when the work of forging the soul has been deemed at least begun. “My own heart let me more have pity on,” Hopkins tells himself, “let / Me live to my sad self hereafter kind, / Charitable” and not, he says pointedly of himself what he had said of Nash and Geldart, “live this tormented mind / With this tormented mind tormenting yet.” “Comforter, where is your comforting?” he had asked earlier. One thing he does know now: that where he finds himself, here in Ireland in the late summer of 1885, he can no more find comfort

There is a profound spiritual insight here, and it is this: That one may be surrounded by God’s daylight and yet be blind to it. Just so, there are times when thirst can never be satisfied, though we be surrounded with a world of wet, as Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner surely knew, and as those shipwrecked at sea know all too well. It is not for us to unlock God’s consolation, especially when our self-will, our dogged determination to do it our way, insists on blocking the light. And so, he advises his “Soul, self . . . poor Jackself,” jaded as it is, to “call off thoughts awhile / Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size / At God knows when to God knows what.” And you can hear the exasperation—“God knows when” this is going to happen, and only “God knows what” he has in store for him. In any case, God’s “smile / ’S not wrung, see you,” not forced, for if it is his consolation we seek, we will have to realize sooner or later that we are not God. It is in fact a sign of God’s consolation that it should come “unforeseen times rather—as skies / Betweenpie mountains—lights a lovely mile,” the way, after a long day of rough weather, the setting sun suddenly pies between two mountains and lights up the way ahead.

Tuesday, September 1, and back at St. Stephen’s Green: “I have just returned from an absurd adventure,” he writes Bridges in a lighter tone, having tasted a new sense of lightness and freedom in ways he had not foreseen. It is an adventure, “which when I resigned myself to it I could not help enjoying.” Like some colossal smile, lighting a lovely mile of our journey at the end of a retreat, and in an instant putting things in their proper perspective, a smile miles wider, in fact, than that stormfowl’s “colossal smile” he had sung of six years earlier in “Henry Purcell” as its pelted plumage faced into the wind to begin its ascent. “A hairbrained [sic] fellow [named Sweetman] took me down to Kingstown and on board his yacht and, whereas I meant to return to town by six that evening, would not let me go either that night or this morning till past midday. I was afraid it would be compromising, but it was fun while it lasted.”

He has been to England and back, he tells Bridges now, and managed to see his family, Patmore, and several other old friends (Addis among them) and even make some new ones, among them W. H. Cummings, “the tenor singer and composer, who wrote the Life of Purcell,” and who showed him “some of his Purcell treasures and others” and has promised to send him several things. The truth is, he confesses, that he did not try to see Bridges, for he was not sure if he would be welcome just now. Of course he is sorry “to hear of Mrs. Bridges’ disappointment: somehow I had feared that would happen.”

He has a new batch of sonnets he wants to send Bridges: “five or more,” four of which “came like inspirations unbidden and against my will,” as if he would just as soon not have written them, they have cost him so much. If only he could produce something of value—he adds, still not understanding what he has forged in the fire of his trials—he “should not mind its being buried, silenced, and going no further.” What kills him is “to be time’s eunuch and never to beget.” And while his holiday has given him “some buoyancy,” he fears he shall soon “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—and nobody was to blame, except myself partly for not managing myself better and contriving a change.”

But the demons are back soon enough. September and October are taken up with grading Greek exams with great scrupulosity, knowing that a low mark will mean someone’s not being able to attend one of Ireland’s universities. And so he has devised a point and half-point and quarter-point and eighth-point system for hundreds on hundreds of candidates, staying up late in his room, a wet towel about his head to ease the migraines, reading and rereading mediocre papers to be as fair as he possibly can. It is killing work, and it takes a further toll on his eyes and his health. In early November, he meets Father John Conmee by chance in O’Connell Street, who invites him out to Clongowes Wood to take his rest. And suddenly Hopkins takes his hand there in broad daylight and kisses it, he is so thankful, thankful, like that kitten lapping Hopkins’s own hand years before, though his colleague’s extravagant gesture of course quite disconcerts Conmee.

From Clongowes Wood, Hopkins writes Everard, now twenty-five, who has recently read his Eurydice. Looking back at the poem, Hopkins wonders if he may not have gone too far with his run-over rhymes. But what can he do about that now, how paint over his own complex rhymes? Rhymes like “electric” with “wrecked her? He / C,” which he insists have to be read in a startling and rash manner, and only after adequate preparation. Still, he is “sweetly soothed” by his brother’s saying he could make anyone understand the poem by reciting it well. “That,” Hopkins says, “is what I always hoped, thought, and said; it is my precise aim,” for poetry is meant to be spoken, and until “it is spoken it is not performed, it does not perform, it is not itself.”

As for sprung rhythm, that “gives back to poetry its true soul and self.” It gives poetry its living voice, makes verse stressy, refines it “to an emphasis as much brighter, livelier, more lustrous than the regular but commonplace emphasis of common rhythm as poetry in general is brighter than common speech,” though he admits that performing his poems “is not at all easy.” In fact, he is not sure he himself could do it, though that no more matters than a composer not being able “to play his violin music or sing his songs. In fact, the higher wrought the art, clearly the wider severance between the parts of the author and the performer.”

As with all true poetry, his must first be studied and prepared for as one would read music before it is recited. For this reason—that he did not prepare himself to read it properly—Patmore never learned to admire the Eurydice or any of his work, except some in common rhythm. The same is true of plainchant, Hopkins explains, which people dismiss because, though they have heard it murdered, they have never heard it rightly performed. In fact, he has come to believe that just as prose is capable of effects “more beautiful than any verse can attain, so perhaps the inflections and intonations of the speaking voice may give effects more beautiful than any attainable by the fixed pitches of music.” And because that “depends entirely on living tradition,” it is now possible, with the recent invention of the phonograph, to have a living record “of fine spoken utterance,” for “the natural performance and delivery belonging properly to lyric poetry,” which after all is speech, “has not been enough cultivated, and should be. When performers were trained to do it (it needs the rarest gifts) and audiences to appreciate it it would be . . . a lovely art.” Then “each phrase could be fixed and learnt by heart like a song.” In retrospect, the letter reads like his last will and testament as to how he should like his poetry read, if it should ever reach the public’s eye.

Friday, November 13: With the grading of exams for the moment over, he writes his mother. He is completely worn out with the grinding repetition of the work, he tells her, and—worse—annoyed with having to also deal with university officials whose behavior he finds “overbearing and ungentlemanly.” Were he free to act, and not under the constraints of religious obedience, he “should have taken steps” on his own and others’ accounts. How unpleasant to watch one of his colleagues, “a great scholar, one of the old school of fine and laborious scholars . . . very ill treated. It was a painful scene; he was censured by the Standing Committee of the Senate and he replied fiercely and defiantly.” And though Hopkins feels it was a mistake on the fellow’s part to respond as he did, he can’t help but sympathize with him. Such is the world of university politics here. Considering such things, how can the Royal University last much longer? he wonders. No, it must “suffer a sea change into something rich and strange.” Add to the mix the current leader of the Irish Party, Charles Stewart Parnell, Ireland’s uncrowned king and ally of his old enemy, Gladstone, and one can see why he feels as he does. And though Parnell has found that “he cannot shape the destinies of the country without my cooperation at the Pillar Room of the Rotunda on Monday,” Hopkins plans to spend the evening “in unsphering the spirit of Plato or something of the sort.”

And then there is Dixon, still trying to get Hopkins’s name before the public in the oddest ways. This time it has been a published footnote, thanking his “gifted friend, Fr. Hopkins,” for helping him gather information on the Jesuits in Ireland for his study of Reformation England. But even this, he is afraid, is bound to backfire, as with that notice Andrew Lang wrote several years earlier concerning a certain “Gifted Hopkins” who “died of the consequences of his own jocosity.” All Dixon’s praise can do is bring about “the frame of mind with which one reads . . . of the effects of Mother Seigel’s Soothing Syrup which lately burst (or oozed) upon the universe.”

On December 23, he writes Everard again. How sad that Matthew Arnold and others like him who one might once have been trusted to defend England’s good name should now “drift . . . upon the tide of atheism, where all true guiding principle is lost. Unhappy country . . . its foreign policy [administered] by Gladstone; its speculation by Matthew Arnold—not to speak of what is to befall from Ireland.” Still, there is some hope in Leo XIII’s “beautiful letter to the English bishops speaking in terms of such heartfelt affection for England that I kiss the words when I read them.” He will miss being at Oak Hill for the holidays, especially as his parents and two younger, unmarried sisters are moving to smaller, more rural quarters now, and so it will be the family’s last Christmas in Hampstead. Worse, his own holiday will be clouded, for he has just been asked to prepare a supplementary matriculation examination to be held in January, as well as the already-scheduled scholarship exam.

But at least he has friends in Donnybrook, “so hearty and kind that nothing can be more so,” and he plans to visit there on Christmas Eve. The hearties are Francis Xavier MacCabe, fifty-two, and his wife and children, all of whom Hopkins dearly loves. These are the sorts of people he finds himself attracted to: the Anglo-Irish Catholic gentry, people of whom none are nicer, he confesses, but a class fast disappearing in Ireland, and who are now being persecuted by two of Ireland’s Nationalist archbishops, who in turn will “shortly have a crow to pick with the Holy See.”

Several years earlier, when Hopkins was teaching at Stonyhurst, MacCabe had heard him preach and remembered it as the “most beautiful sermon he ever heard on the Blessed Sacrament.” And sixty years on, the three older MacCabe children will remember Father Hopkins from this time, fishing in a punt with them in the stone quarry across from their home, and singing (“I make a cheerful noise,” he used to joke about himself), as if he were intoning plainchant for a Mass for the Dead. And once, out on the water with the boys, he pulled off his priest’s collar, and fairly mimicked in stage Irish, “Goodbye to Rome . . . and to hell with the Pope.”Another time, walking down to Donnybrook for a visit, he got to thinking how well he would be treated there, no doubt being offered a glass of champagne to give him stamina, as he had been offered on a previous visit, and with that he had turned and walked back to St. Stephen’s Green rather than be well treated for his efforts. Later, when MacCabe asked him why he had not visited when he was expected, Hopkins had told him. In fact, when he did visit next, he refused any refreshment, thus once again effectively squashing his affective will with his elective. Abstemious, wary of pleasure, holding himself tightly in rein, he has reneged on what would have given him some pleasure, having forgotten what he had told his heart: how he meant to have more pity on the poor thing.

Another time, when he’d shown up at the MacCabes’ late, he explained that he’d gone into a farrier’s forge nearby and could not tear himself away from the mesmerizing boom of the anvil. And once, when ten-year-old Jack MacCabe came to St. Stephen’s Green to deliver a message, he was awed by how high up Hopkins’s room on the upper floor seemed. Just how high was it here? he had asked Father Hopkins.

Well, Hopkins did not know for sure, but he did have a way of finding out. And with that he had begun taking lumps of coal from the firebox in his room and had young Jack drop them from the window while he counted off the seconds and quarter seconds on his watch before the coal hit the ground, trying to determine by an Edward Lear-like mathematical formula how high they must be. Again and again they had tried the experiment, the wide-eyed boy at the window dutifully dropping lumps of coal, and the priest intently eyeing the second hand on his watch, then splitting the differences between the drops. How he’d laughed at Jack’s reactions as they tried again and again, until all the coal was gone. Thirty-four feet it is, Jack. No. Thirty-five. Or is it fifty-one now? Or ten?

There is an unfinished hymn dating from late this fall. It is songlike, in quatrains of four-stress lines, and it rhymes aab/ba. It is the sort of thing any popular Christian hymnal might include, though it quietly instresses many of Hopkins’s own theological preoccupations. “Thee, God, I come from, to thee go,” it begins, echoing the more peaceable kingdom of some of Hopkins’s early Oxford lyrics:

All dáy long I like fountain flow
From thy hand out, swayed about
Mote-like in thy mighty glow . . .
Once I turned from thee and hid,
Bound on what thou hadst forbid;
Sow the wind I would; I sinned:
I repent of what I did.

Bad I am, but yet thy child.
Father, be thou reconciled.
Spare thou me, since I see
With thy might that thou art mild . . .

It is an uncharacteristically quiet piece (at least on the surface) and it seems to have been written at the close of the most turbulent year of his life, the year that began with the creation of “Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves” and Caradoc’s soliloquy, before moving on to “I wake and feel the fell of dark,” “To seem the stranger,” “No worst, there is none,” and “Carrion Comfort.” It recalls too the great De Processu out and back from the Father, and contains these lines: