GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89) was born in Essex, the eldest son of a prosperous middle-class family. He was educated at Highgate School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read Classics and began his lifelong friendship with Robert Bridges. In 1866 he entered the Roman Catholic Church and two years later he became a member of the Society of Jesus. In 1877 he was ordained and was priest in a number of parishes including a slum district in Liverpool. From 1882 to 1884 he taught at Stonyhurst College and in 1884 he became Classics Professor at University College, Dublin. In his lifetime Hopkins was hardly known as a poet, except to one or two friends; his poems were not published until 1918, in a volume edited by Robert Bridges.
POEMS AND PROSE OF GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
SELECTED WITH AN INTRODUCTION
AND NOTES
BY
W. H. GARDNER
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This selection first published 1953
Reprinted in Penguin Classics 1985
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TO THE MEMORY OF
ROBERT BRIDGES
1844–1930
POET LAUREATE 1913–1930,
FRIEND AND ADVISER
OF GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS,
PRESERVER AND FIRST
EDITOR OF HIS
POEMS
*
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
THE poems in this selection, taken originally from my Third Edition of Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Oxford University Press, 1948), have since the ninth impression been gradually collated and brought into line in a number of instances with the text of the more authoritative Fourth Edition (O.U.P., 1967) by kind permission of the publishers, and of my co-editor in the Fourth Edition, Professor N. H. MacKenzie, from whom most of the emendations originated. The prose selections from the published works follow the texts of the O.U.P. editions of 1935–1959 (see below, p. 221), to the editors of which, Professor Claude Colleer Abbott and the late Humphry House, I am in many ways deeply indebted. I must also acknowledge the valuable contributions to the understanding of Hopkins made by the Rev. C. Devlin, S.J., and the writers whose works are listed on p. 255.
Moreover this selection would not have been possible without the generous cooperation of the Rev. Philip Caraman, S.J., who, acting for the copyright holders, the Society of Jesus, gave me permission to draw freely from Hopkins’s writings. I am also grateful to the Rev. D. Anthony Bischoff, S.J., for allowing me to print passages from the Journal of 1866–1868, which he discovered in 1947 and which has now appeared in The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins (2nd edn.), 1959.
My thanks are also due to the following: the Oxford University Press, as literary executors of Robert Bridges, for permission to quote from R. B.’s notes to the First Edition of Hopkins’s Poems; Mr L. Handley-Derry and the Librarian of the Bodleian for permission to reproduce facsimile poems from MS. book ‘B’; the late Gerard Hopkins for valuable advice and facilities at all times; Mr E. L. Hillman for helping me with the proof-reading; and lastly my wife – for more assistance both manual and critical than I could ever specify.
W.H.G.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
NOTE TO TENTH IMPRESSION
SECTION A-POETRY
FOUR EARLY POEMS (1865–1866)
1. The Alchemist in the City
2. ‘Let me be to Thee as the circling bird’
3. Heaven-Haven
4. The Habit of Perfection
POEMS (1876–1889)
AUTHOR’S PREFACE (with explanatory notes by the Editor)
5. The Wreck of the Deutschland
6. Penmaen Pool
7. The Silver Jubilee
8. God’s Grandeur
9. The Starlight Night
10. Spring
11. The Lantern out of Doors
12. The Sea and the Skylark
13. The Windhover
14. Pied Beauty
15. Hurrahing in Harvest
16. The Caged Skylark
17. In the Valley of the Elwy
18. The Loss of the Eurydice
19. The May Magnificat
20. Binsey Poplars
21. Duns Scotus’s Oxford
22. Henry Purcell
23. Peace
24. The Bugler’s First Communion
25. Morning, Midday, and Evening Sacrifice
26. Andromeda
27. The Candle Indoors
28. The Handsome Heart
29. At the Wedding March
30. Felix Randal
31. Brothers
32. Spring and Fall
33. Inversnaid
34. ‘As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame’
35. Ribblesdale
36. The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo
37. The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe.
38. To what serves Mortal Beauty?
39. Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves
40. (The Soldier)
41. (Carrion Comfort)
42. ‘No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief’
43. ‘To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life’
44. ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day’
45. ‘Patience, hard thing! the hard thing but pray’
46. ‘My own heart let me more have pity on; let’
47. Tom’s Garland
48. Harry Ploughman
49. That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection
50. St Alphonsus Rodriguez
51. ‘Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend’
52. ‘The shepherd’s brow, fronting forked lightning, owns’
53. To R. B.
SOME UNFINISHED POEMS AND FRAGMENTS (1876–1889)
54. Moonrise
55. The Woodlark
56. Cheery Beggar
57. ‘The furl of fresh-leaved dogrose down’
58. St. Winefred’s Well
59. (Margaret Clitheroe)
60. ‘Repeat that, repeat’
61. On a Piece of Music
62. (Ash-boughs)
63. ‘Thee, God, I come from, to thee go’
64. On the Portrait of Two Beautiful Young People
65. Epithalamion
SECTION B-PROSE
FROM NOTE-BOOKS, JOURNAL, ETC.
Early Diary (1863–1864)
From ‘On the Origin of Beauty: A Platonic Dialogue’ (1865)
From the Journal (1866–1875)
Sermon: on Luke ii. 33 (Nov. 23,1879)
From ‘The Principle or Foundation: An address, etc.’
From ‘Comments on The Spiritual Exercises’
SELECTED LETTERS
I. To C. N. Luxmoore (May 7, 1862)
II. To A. W. M. Baillie (Sept. 10, 1864)
III. To E. H. Coleridge (Jan. 22, 1866)
IV. To Rev. Dr J. H. Newman (Aug. 28, 1866)
V. do. (Oct. 15, 1866)
VI. To his father (Oct. 16, [1866])
VII. To A. W. M. Baillie (Feb. 12, 1868)
VIII. To Miss Kate Hopkins (April 25, 1871)
IX. To Robert Bridges (Aug. 2, 1871)
X. To his mother (March 5, 1872)
XI. To his father (Aug. 29, 1874)
XII. To Robert Bridges (Feb. 20, 1875)
XIII. do. (May 13,1878)
XIV. To R. W. Dixon (June 4, 1878)
XV. do. (June 13, 1878)
XVI. do. (Oct. 5,1878)
XVII. do. (Oct. 24,1879)
XVIII. do. (Oct. 31,1879)
XIX. To A. W. M. Baillie (May 22,1880)
XX. To R. W. Dixon (Dec. 1, 1881)
XXI. To Robert Bridges (Feb. 3, 1883)
XXII. To Robert Bridges (Nov. II, 1884)
XXIII. do. (May 17,1885)
XXIV. To Coventry Patmore (June 4,1886)
XXV. do. (May 20,1888)
XXVI. To Robert Bridges (Sept. 25,1888)
XXVII. do. (Oct. 19,1888)
XXVIII. To his mother (May 5, 1889)
SECTION C-EDITOR’S NOTES
(a) Notes on the Poems
(b) Additional Notes on the Prose
SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX OF FIRST LINES
INDEX TO THE PROSE
ILLUSTRATIONS
Reduced facsimile of Henry Purcell, from MS. book ‘B’ Handwriting of Robert Bridges
Reduced facsimile of Felix Randal, from MS. book ‘B’ Handwriting of Robert Bridges
Reduced facsimile of Harry Ploughman, from MS. book ‘B’ Handwriting of G. M. Hopkins
INTRODUCTION,1
WITH that boyish gusto which is sometimes found in Hopkins’s letters to his relations and friends, he once remarked to Robert Bridges: ‘What fun if you were a classic!’ At that time Hopkins himself was an unpublished poet with very little prospect of even getting into print, to say nothing of being honoured by posterity. Now, however, the slow dialectic of time has brought in its compensations. Chiefly through the care and foresight of Bridges, the small but precious collection of Hopkins’s poems has been saved from oblivion. Not only has this ‘eccentric’ and ‘obscure’ Victorian poet-priest attained the once undreamt of distinction of being widely read, discussed, and lectured on, but we can now reasonably assume that he himself has been raised to what might be called, in his own idiom, that ‘higher cleave’ of posthumous being – the status of a classic.
The permanent worth of Hopkins as a writer is threefold. Firstly, he is one of the most powerful and profound of our religious poets and is also one of the most satisfying of the so-called ‘nature poets’ in English; secondly, to isolate a merit which is really an essential part of his total quality, he is one of the acknowledged masters of original style – one of the few strikingly successful innovators in poetic language and rhythm; thirdly, the publication of much of his prose – notebooks, journals, letters, sermons – has given us a body of autobiographical and critical writing which, apart from its broader human interest, throws much light on the development of a unique artistic personality. It is no disparagement of Hopkins’s prose to say that its value depends to a large extent, though not entirely, upon what it tells us about the poet himself, and especially about his intense practical concern with those interests which inform and shape his poetry, namely his religion, his personal reading of nature, his love of people, and his critical approach to art – and to poetic technique in particular. Of Hopkins the poet much needs to be said; but we may introduce him by observing that he succeeded in breaking up, by a kind of creative violence, an outworn convention. He led poetry forward by taking it back – to its primal linguistic origins: he showed how poetry could gain in resourcefulness and power by incorporating in its own artistic processes those natural principles of growth and adaptation which govern our everyday speech – which give to a living, developing language its peculiar tang, colour, range, and expressiveness. At the same time he was a learned poet, who knew how to make full use of all that seemed to him good in the whole European poetic tradition. He achieved one important kind of perfection, which both invites and defies imitation. He invites imitation because he uses a large number of highly effective poetic and rhetorical devices, any one or more of which can be imitated; he defies imitation because the Hopkins manner is so essentially a part of the man himself, and is so sharply distinctive, that anything resembling it seems at once to wear the look of pastiche.
No one can read Hopkins for the first time without being struck by two things: the strangeness of his style and the obvious genuineness of his poetic gift. Looking for an author, we discover also a man – a man of unusual integrity, both intellectual and moral. This is not to say that Hopkins, as man and writer, had no faults. With his shortcomings as a man and a priest he himself was always deeply concerned – to the point of scrupulosity. As a prose writer he can justly claim a certain indulgence, for, with the possible exception of the Commentary on the Spiritual Exercises, none of his prose was ever intended for publication. The natural subtlety of his intellect and his love of detailed explanation sometimes make his style a little crabbed or involved; but his spontaneous, earnest writing is always the utterance of a vigorous and sensitive mind – often humorous or witty, usually searching and stimulating, never commonplace or pedestrian. On Hopkins’s ‘bad faults’ as a poet his friend and literary sponsor, Robert Bridges, wrote at some length in his Preface to the First Edition of 1918. He pointed out the obscurity – due to an extreme condensation of thought and language; the grammatical licences, such as the occasional absence of an indispensable nominative relative pronoun (as in ‘O Hero savest’ for ‘O Hero that savest’); the ambiguous use of homophones, and the forced ingenuity of a few (very few) of the rhymes. Bridges admitted that most of these stylistic ‘tricks’ were seriously used and were integral to the personal manner which produced so many ‘rare masterly beauties’. He was right in warning the common reader of the initial difficulties he would encounter; but forgetting his Shakespeare, Donne, and Browning, he made the extraordinary mistake of declaring that any poetry which demanded ‘a conscious effort of interpretation’ was necessarily bad poetry. Since 1918, the publication of Hopkins’s letters and note-books has enabled us to see more clearly what he was trying to do; and though many who are now reading Hopkins for the first time may still be repelled by real or supposed ‘errors of taste’, by ‘occasional affectation’, ‘obscurity’, and ‘oddity’, they will surely find that after a reasonable effort of interpretation most of the obscurities will (as Hopkins said) ‘explode’ into meaning, and that the unusual features of grammar and diction do, with few exceptions, subserve a very precise and genuine artistic purpose. In 1878 Hopkins wrote to Bridges:
‘Obscurity I do and will try to avoid so far as is consistent with excellences higher than clearness at a first reading… As for affectation I do not believe I am guilty of it: you should point out instances, but as long as mere novelty and boldness strikes you as affectation your criticism strikes me as – as water of the Lower Isis.’
This poet’s impressive quality, like his occasional faults, arose out of his basic belief about the poetic nature:
‘Every poet, I thought, must be original and originality a condition of poetic genius; so that each poet is like a species in nature (not an individuum genericum or specificum) and can never recur. That nothing should be old or borrowed however cannot be.’
Hopkins’s ideal was a poem, a work of art, which was ‘beautiful to individuation’, by which he probably meant ‘beautiful to the point of bringing out all the complex individuality of the subject, which includes, in effect, the individuality of the artist’. And this aim, though justified in the total result, did at times lead to a striving after ‘individuation’ which produced the strange word or queer construction without the necessary counterbalancing sense of fitness or beauty. Hopkins assured Patmore that his ‘thoughts involuntary moved’ in the language and rhythm that we know – that he did not write his poems from preconceived theories. That is undoubtedly true in the sense that no genuine poet in the act of poetic creation is consciously trying to make his poem justify a number of preconceived rules; but it must not conceal the fact that Hopkins had thought long and deeply about the principles of poetry. The best way to understand the technical and ethical foundations of his work as a whole is to trace briefly the development of his mind in relation to the main events of his life, and to that we shall now proceed.
II
Born at Stratford, Essex, in 1844, Gerard Manley Hopkins was the eldest of eight children and was brought up in a prosperous middle-class home. In 1843 his father, Manley Hopkins, had published a volume of verse dedicated to Thomas Hood. The mother was devout, and the father, besides writing books, had a passion for curious psychological problems and out-of-the-way knowledge – a quality which was handed on to the eldest son. In his family, music and drawing were sedulously cultivated, and two of Gerard’s brothers became professional artists. He himself was an excellent draughtsman, and his later skill, as a poet, in communicating through words the essence and individuality of visual forms in nature was partly fostered by his early training with the pencil. Indeed, his first ambition was to be a painter, and throughout his impressionable schooldays and the first two years at Oxford the influence of Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites was as marked as that of the pious, contemplative mother and the busy, intellectually-curious father.
At Highgate School he won the Poetry Prize in 1860, made many friends, championed the rights of the mere schoolboy against the tyranny of the headmaster, and coloured his reputation as a precocious scholar by a streak of eccentricity and honourable notoriety: to prove his own strength of will and the fact that most people drank too much, he won a wager by abstaining from liquids for a whole week. Here at school the child was father to the man: lashed by the headmaster’s tongue and riding-whip (I), Hopkins was confirmed in those two tendencies, self-denial and independence of spirit, which later determined the character of his bare twenty-four years of adult life. At the same time, the sensuous side of the boy’s nature is shown in the following typical passages from the Keatsian A Vision of the Mermaids, written in 1862:
‘Plum-purple was the west; but spikes of
light Spear’d open lustrous gashes, crimson-white;
(Where the eye fix’d, fled the encrimsoning spot,
And, gathering, floated where the gaze was not;)
And through their parting lids there came and went
Keen glimpses of the inner firmament:
Fair beds they seem’d of water-lily flakes
Clustering entrancingly in beryl lakes:
Anon, across their swimming splendour strook,
An intense line of throbbing blood-light shook
A quivering pennon; then, for eye too keen,
Ebb’d back beneath its snowy lids, unseen.’ (ll. 7–18).
. . . . .
‘Soon – as when Summer of his sister Spring
Crushes and tears the rare enjewelling,
And boasting “I have fairer things than these”
Plashes amidst the billowy apple-trees
His lusty hands, in gusts of scented wind
Swirling out bloom till all the air is blind
With rosy foam and pelting blossom and mists
Of driving vermeil-rain; and, as he lists,
The dainty onyx-coronals deflowers,
A glorious wanton; – all the wrecks in showers
Crowd down upon a stream, and, jostling thick
With bubbles bugle-eyed, struggle and stick
On tangled shoals that bar the brook – a crowd
Of filmy globes and rosy-floating cloud:
So those Mermaidens crowded to my rock…’ (ll. 84–98).
In 1863 Hopkins went up to Balliol College, Oxford, with an exhibition, and while reading Classics began his lifelong friendship with Robert Bridges. Hopkins’s earliest diaries are full of sensitive observations on nature and poetic imagery. Our first extract (p. 89) shows with what zest he studied words and the ‘onomatopoetic theory’ of the origin of language. Thus early he evinced a feeling for combined meaning, sound, and suggestion which was later turned to good account in his mature poetry. Another interesting product of this formative period is that long letter to Baillie (II) in which he makes a shrewd critical distinction between the language of true poetry and what he calls ‘Parnassian’ – the personal dialect of a true poet when he is writing (as the great Victorians so often did) without inspiration. Most of the poems and verse-plays which Hopkins himself attempted between 1862 and 1868 were either derivative or abortive, though in the best of them, from the Vision quoted above to The Habit of Perfection (No. 4), we see with what technical skill and genuine poetic passion he could handle the conventional forms and metres.
Oxford in the 1860s was still resonant with echoes of the Tractarians. The Oxford Movement, begun in 1833, was a great effort to establish the Authority and Catholicity of the English Church and to infuse into it something of the medieval spirit of intellectual and practical piety. In 1845, John Henry Newman had gone over to the Church of Rome; but counter to the Romanizing tendency was the growing influence of the ‘liberals’ or Broad Church rationalists within the Protestant fold. Hence the leading High Churchmen (Anglo-Catholics) decided to rally round Dr E. B. Pusey in defence of the Anglican ‘middle way’. Together with William Addis and other undergraduates, Hopkins became an ardent Puseyite and Ritualist; but, as Pusey realized, his disciples were being tugged hard by the Papacy on one side and by liberalism on the other. Foremost among the Broad Church rationalizers was Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol and Regius Professor of Greek, whose lectures Hopkins attended and the ‘purity’ of whose character he admired. Two other important influences directly brought to bear upon Hopkins were the humanism of Matthew Arnold (then Professor of Poetry) and the new Aestheticism as it was then just beginning to be formulated in the teaching and criticism of Walter Pater, who was one of Hopkins’s tutors.
Among the many Oxford men with whom Hopkins kept up a correspondence, A. W. M. Baillie remained an agnostic to the end of his life; E. H. Coleridge adhered (in spite of Letter III) to the Anglican persuasion; Robert Bridges developed, through his poetry, a private cult of Beauty, while Addis and several more went over to the Catholics. With Hopkins the desire to find ‘the one visible Church’ was very strong, yet there were plenty of forces to pull him away from the magnetic example of Newman.
In 1865, while he was arguing about Authority and also mastering the classics, Hopkins was under the spell of two Anglican poets, George Herbert and Christina Rossetti. In the same year we detect, in his own poems, the first note of frustration and despair: ‘My prayers all meet a brazen heaven/And fail or scatter all away.’ At twenty-one he feels ‘the long success of sin’, and the backslidings recorded for confessional purposes in his diaries show the extent of his moral earnestness. Anticipating some of the great sonnets which were wrung from a far deeper level of experience in 1885, this second-year student says that prayer is now ‘A warfare of my lips in truth/Battling with God…’ Yet only a month later he could write:
‘I have found the dominant of my range and state –
Love, O my God, to call Thee Love and Love.’ (No. 2.)
Like other Anglo-Catholics, he practised the milder forms of asceticism. Like Milton, he strove to attain a perfect chastity of mind and body, not merely in the interests of Art, but in what he considered to be the higher interests of character, sanctity – ‘immortal beauty’ as he called it.1 But in 1866, only a few months before he resolved to become a Catholic, he wrote a poem called Nondum, in one stanza of which he expressed a mood almost as sombre as that of James Thomson’s City of Dreadful Night:
‘We see the glories of the earth
But not the hand that wrought them all:
Night to a myriad worlds gives birth,
Yet like a lighted empty hall
Where stands no host at door or hearth
Vacant creation’s lamps appal.’
Nevertheless, the glories of the earth were always important for Hopkins. Although his hopes of becoming a painter or poet were receding, he was still possessed by a zeal for noting anything that delighted his eye and stimulated his sense of form. And here it is necessary to consider his Journal, which runs, with only one break,2 from May 1866 to February 1875. The entries range from bald weather reports to critical notes on Royal Academy paintings; but the best part of the work consists of carefully written observations on natural phenomena – on colour, organic form, movement, in fact the intrinsic quality of any object which was capable of striking through the senses and into the mind with a feeling of novelty and discovery. Indeed, many vivid images and descriptions recorded in the Journal were ‘stalled’ by the poet’s mind and used later, with a functional precision, in the mature poems. With a searching vision, which often has to coin or re-mint words to express itself, Hopkins describes trees, breaking waves, the ribbed glacier, and the distant hill whose contour is like a ‘slow tune’; he eagerly observes the growth and disintegration of anything from a cloud to a bluebell. But he is mainly interested in all those aspects of a thing which make it distinctive and individual. He is always intent on examining that unified complex of characteristics which constitute ‘the outward reflection of the inner nature of a thing’1 – its individual essence. He was always looking for the law or principle which gave to any object or grouping of objects its delicate and surprising uniqueness. Very often this is, for Hopkins, the fundamental beauty which is the active principle of all true being, the source of all true knowledge and delight – even of religious ecstasy; for speaking of a bluebell he says: ‘I know the beauty of our Lord by it.’
Now this feeling for intrinsic quality, for the unified pattern of essential characteristics, is the special mark of the artist, whose business is to select these characteristics and organize them into what Clive Bell has called ‘significant form’. So too Hopkins must have felt that he had discovered a new aesthetic or metaphysical principle. As a name for that ‘individually-distinctive’ form (made up of various sense-data) which constitutes the rich and revealing ‘oneness’ of the natural object, he coined the word inscape; and for that energy of being by which all things are upheld, for that natural (but ultimately supernatural) stress which determines an inscape and keeps it in being – for that he coined the name instress. In our Journal extracts from May 3, 1866, onwards (especially May 6th and July 11th) we see him feeling his way towards a satisfying formulation of what he had discovered.
It was not until 1868 that the terms inscape and instress began to appear frequently, and in a distracting variety of contexts. Early in that year Pater had introduced Hopkins to Swinburne and the painter Simeon Solomon, so it is possible that Hopkins’s preoccupation with ‘pattern’, ‘design’, was in part due to his conversation with those aesthetes. But the trend of his thought is not hard to discern. Instress is akin to what Shelley (following Plato) called ‘the One Spirit’s plastic stress’, which sweeps through the ‘dull dense world’ of matter and imposes on it the predestined forms and reflections of the Prime Good.1 But instress is not only the unifying force in the object; it connotes also that impulsefrom the ‘inscape’ which acts on the senses and, through them, actualizes the inscape in the mind of the beholder (or rather ‘perceiver’, for inscape may be perceived through all the senses at once). Instress, then, is often the sensation of inscape – a quasi-mystical illumination, a sudden perception of that deeper pattern, order, and unity which gives meaning to external forms, e.g.:
‘I saw the inscape though freshly, as if my eye were still growing, though with a companion the eye and the ear are for the most part shut and instress cannot come.’ (p. 127).
‘There lives the dearest freshness deep down things’, Hopkins says in God’s Grandeur, and in the Journal he writes:
‘I thought how sadly beauty of inscape was unknown and buried away from simple people and yet how near at hand it was if they had eyes to see it and it could be called out everywhere again.’
Although, as he says, living people are commonly dead to the world of inscape, this something called inscape can still preserve in the dead thing the distinctive quality of the living:
‘…there is one notable dead tree,… the inscape markedly holding its most simple and beautiful oneness up from the ground through a graceful swerve below (I think) the spring of the branches up to the tops of the timber.’
All the above has a direct bearing upon Hopkins the poet. In 1880, his friend Dixon, who had not yet heard of inscape, praised him for his power of ‘forcibly and delicately giving the essence of things in nature’, and it is true to say that Hopkins’s individual poetic style was directly influenced by the inscape of natural organic forms.1 In 1879 he replied to a criticism by Bridges:
‘No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness… 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. Now it is the virtue of design, pattern, or inscape to be distinctive and it is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer. This vice I cannot have escaped.’
Inscape in poetry is further explained by Hopkins himself: it is ‘the essential and only lasting thing… species or individually-distinctive beauty of style’. He never quite believed in his own admission of literary ‘vice’, and his best defence is that he is never odd or queer without a purpose. The main reason for the initial strangeness of his style is the serious artistic purpose of ‘inscaping’ into a perfect unity (i) the inward fusion of thought and feeling,2 and (ii) the corresponding outward harmony of rhythm and sound-texture. For Hopkins, inscape was ‘the very soul of art’.
The theory of inscape probably owed something to Walter Pater. The Platonic dialogue On the Origin of Beauty, one third of which is given in this selection, might well have been written for that tutor, and Pater’s influence can also be felt in some lecture notes on ‘Poetry and Verse’ (1874):
‘Some matter or meaning is essential to [poetry] but only as an element necessary to support and employ the shape which is contemplated for its own sake. (Poetry is in fact speech employed to carry the inscape of speech for the inscape’s sake – and therefore the inscape must be dwelt on.)’
There we have a suggestive theory of poetry coming very near to the aesthetic doctrine of ‘art for art’s sake’. Yet even before he left Oxford, Hopkins had realized that pure aestheticism, to the exclusion of every other purpose in art, was a dangerous single path to follow, as the case of Oscar Wilde subsequently proved.1 Much of the power of Hopkins’s mature poetry came from the tension between the inborn creative personality of the artist and the acquired religious character of the Jesuit priest. This tension sometimes resulted in what Bridges called ‘the naked encounter of sensualism and asceticism’; but Bridges did not do justice to the fine and significant balance which Hopkins maintained between these two opposite but necessary forces.
To return to the life-story, the undergraduate Hopkins’s main problem was solved when, in October 1866, he was received by Dr Newman into the Catholic Church. In the following year he took a First Class in ‘Greats’ and was proclaimed ‘the star of Balliol’. For a few months after leaving the university he taught at Newman’s Oratory School at Edgbaston; then, in 1868, after the holiday in Switzerland which is recorded in the Journal, he entered the Novitiate of the Society of Jesus. On becoming a Jesuit he burnt (as he thought) all the verses he had written, and ‘resolved to write no more, as not belonging to my profession, unless by the wish of my superiors’. But, as he noted down in 1873, ‘all the world is full of inscape, and chance left free to act falls into an order as well as purpose’. Thus in 1872, while studying medieval philosophy as part of his nine years’ training for the priesthood, he came across the writings of Duns Scotus, and in that subtle thinker’s ‘principle of Individuation’ and ‘theory of knowledge’ he discovered what seemed to be a philosophical corroboration of his own private theory of inscape and instress. ‘From this time’, he writes, ‘I was flush with a new enthusiasm. It may come to nothing or it may be a mercy from God.’ So much did in fact come of it that a few words about Scotus seem to be necessary.
Unlike St. Thomas Aquinas, official theologian of the Jesuit order, Scotus attached great importance to individuality and personality. The difference, he said, between the concept ‘a man’ and the concept ‘Socrates’ is due to the addition to the specific nature (humanitas) of an individualizing difference, or final perfection, which makes ‘this man this’ and not ‘that’. To this final individualizing ‘form’ (which is, of course, inherent in the object as a whole) Scotus gave the name Thisness (haecceitas). Again, whereas Aquinas had said that the ‘individual’ is really unknowable (only the ‘universal’ being known), Scotus declared that the ‘individual’, on the contrary, is immediately knowable by the intellect in union with the senses. By a ‘first act of knowledge’ the mind has a direct but vague intuition of the individual concrete object as a ‘most special image’ – a ‘particular glimpse’, so to speak, of the haecceitas. Further, it is through this knowledge of the singular that the mind, by abstracting and comparing in a ‘second act’, arrives eventually at its knowledge of the universal.
That is an over-simplified summary, but we can imagine how so much emphasis on the value of the concrete thing, the object of sense, must have appealed to the poet in Hopkins. ‘Just then’, he wrote, ‘when I took in any inscape of the sky or sea I thought of Scotus’; and we may add that he was influenced by Scotus in the writing of at least a dozen of his best poems.1 Nine years later, in Duns Scotus’s Oxford, he described the Subtle Doctor as the one ‘who of all men most sways my spirits to peace; / Of realty the rarestveiněd unraveller.’ This theologian seemed to give him a sanction for doing as a Christian poet what, as a Jesuit priest, he could not possibly do, that is, assert his individuality. For Hopkins, poetic creation occurred when the poet’s own nature (his own ‘inscape’) had been instressed by some complementary inscape discovered in external Nature. The resulting poem is therefore a new inscape, and like all poetry must have, ‘down to the least separable part, an individualizing touch’. Hence he could write to Bridges, as late as 1888:
‘The effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise. So it must be on every original artist to some degree, on me to a marked degree.’
But Scotism was not the only important formative influence in those seven fallow years between 1868 and 1875. The almost military discipline of the Society of Jesus is based on The Spiritual Exercises, written by its founder, St. Ignatius Loyola, and the religious character of Hopkins was so effectually moulded by this discipline that many of his poems are (or contain) poetic interpretations or embodiments of the Ignatian teaching. Sworn to chastity, poverty, and obedience, the Jesuit devotes his intellect and will to the service of Christ, and this deliberate sacrifice of personal ambition merits a supernatural liberation of the spirit for the higher service of mankind. ‘This life’, Hopkins wrote to Baillie, ‘though it is hard is God’s will for me as I most intimately know, which is more than violets knee-deep.’ In Hopkins’s writings therefore we discern the ‘poisěd powers’ of a saintly self-abnegation and an intense self-consciousness. As we see by the opening passage of his Commentary on the Spiritual Exercises (p. 145), he valued the human personality as the direct link between man and his Creator, a relationship which is part of that vast hierarchy of being which is made up of all creatures, animate and inanimate, with Christ as their summit. The value of haecceity, selfhood, inscape as a key to the universal is stressed in Henry Purcell (No. 22), and again in that markedly ‘Scotist’ sonnet ‘As kingfishers catch fire’ (No. 34). Each mortal thing expresses its own being (‘Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells’); but on the moral plane man, and especially the Jesuit, must orientate his life towards his highest spiritual good:
‘There’s none but truth can stead you. Christ is truth.’
(No. 64.)
The full force of the impact upon Hopkins of the Ignatian discipline, with its supreme ideal of Sacrifice, is brought out in The Windhover, The Soldier, and In Honour of St. Alphonsus Rodriguez.
III
In 1874, while Hopkins was reading his theology in North Wales, he showed signs of those physical and nervous disabilities which weighed on him to the end of his life. The Journal entry for September 6th (p. 132) strongly suggests, moreover, that his artistic energies craved an outlet in literary and musical interests and activities. Then and later he was kindly treated by his superiors, being given frequent rest periods and many changes of occupation. In spite of moral scruples (p. 133), he did manage to learn Welsh, and he turned his knowledge of classical Welsh poetry to good account when, in December 1875, and at the wish of his Rector, he broke a seven years’ silence and wrote his first great poem, The Wreck of the Deutschland. In this tour de force he incorporated almost all the elements of his ‘new rhythm’, his new ‘inscaped’ diction, and his deeply meditated Christian philosophy of life. Owing to the reasons set out in Letter XVI, the editor of the Jesuit magazine, The Month, could not print the work, and so began Hopkins’s career as an almost unrecognized poet. Even Bridges refused to grapple and board The Deutschland a second time – a rebuff which drew from the disappointed author the wry humour of Letter XIII. Two years later The Loss of the Eurydice was itself, seemingly, a total loss, foundering on the same editorial rocks.
In 1877, the year of his ordination, Hopkins produced his most joyous sonnets on the instress of God in nature and the instressing of both God and nature in man. At the same time he showed, in God’s Grandeur and The Sea and the Skylark, a critical reaction to the ruthless industrialism of the age. His concern about social conditions is partly explained by the ‘Communist’ letter of 1871 (IX) and is echoed later in the pregnant obscurities of Tom’s Garland (No. 47). In 1874 Hopkins had renewed his intellectual contact with Bridges, and the letters which passed between them, full of mutual esteem, appraisal and encouragement, form a chapter in our literary history which is marred only by R. B.’s decision to destroy his own side of the correspondence and by his strange refusal, in 1909, to allow the Rev. Joseph Keating, S.J. to bring out a complete edition of Hopkins’s poems.1
Between 1877 and 1881 Hopkins served as select preacher, missioner, or parish priest in London, Oxford, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Chesterfield. As a priest he was devout, conscientious, and everywhere liked, but he was not altogether suited either to preaching or to the more exacting kinds of parochial work. The poverty and squalor of the great industrial centres oppressed his spirit, and physical debility often reduced him to despair: ‘all I want’, he wrote, is a working strength.’ Many of the poems of this period were inspired by his personal experiences as a priest, and most of them, like The Handsome Heart and the superb Felix Randal, show a deep anxiety for the spiritual welfare of the young and for the ultimate fate of ‘dear and dogged man’.
In 1878 he reintroduced himself to his old schoolmaster, R. W. Dixon (XIV), and thenceforward wrote to him, as to Bridges, many long letters packed with criticism, theory, and self-revelation. On first reading some poems by Hopkins, the gentle Dixon immediately expressed his ‘excited delight’, his ‘deep and intense admiration’. Hopkins acknowledged the Canon’s plaudits with ‘great joy’ and ‘I thank you for your comforting praises’; but the latter could not rest until such work was published, and his well-meaning attempt to get The Loss of the Eurydice into a Carlisle newspaper provoked the pathetic and alarmed protest of Letters XVII and XVIII. Dixon, however, was not satisfied; and when in 1881 Hopkins entered his ‘Third Year’ Probation, which included a thirty-day silent ‘retreat’ for the renewal of his spiritual aims and ideals, the older and freer man remarked: ‘I suppose you are determined to go on with it!’ The reply was characteristic:
‘I should be black with perjury if I drew back now. And beyond that I can say with St Peter: “To whom shall I go! Tu verba vitae aeternae habes.” Besides all which, my mind is here more at peace than it has ever been and I would gladly live all my life, if it were to be so, in as great or greater seclusion from the world and be busied only with God.’
He admits that in his normal working life ‘worldly interests freshen, and worldly ambitions revive’; but there can be no doubt that his will (both ‘affective’ and ‘active’) was now and always firmly set towards the ideal of renunciation and sanctity.
From 1882 to 1884 Hopkins taught Latin and Greek at Stonyhurst College, Blackburn, and the final appointment of his life was to the Chair of Classics at University College, Dublin, which was then managed and partly staffed by the Society of Jesus. In Ireland he felt that he was ‘at a third remove’ (No. 43), being separated from his Irish colleagues by national and political allegiances as he was now severed from his family and English friends by distance and religion. In spite of frequent holidays, his old physical weakness troubled him more and more; he complained that he always felt ‘jaded’. By the time he had carried out his normal academic and social duties, he had no surplus energy with which to write the books that he believed he could and should write, such as a treatise on Sacrifice and a study of Greek metres. ‘I am a eunuch’, he wrote to Bridges, ‘but it is for the kingdom of heaven’s sake.’ He could still, at times, turn to poetry; but, as he said, ‘I have made writing so difficult’–and inspiration seldom came.1 The number of fragments and promising unfinished poems which he left is due partly to the necessary limitation of his experience and partly to the flagging of his physical and imaginative powers. Nowhere has the frustration of the creative spirit been more poignantly expressed than in Nos. 51 and 53. Yet intellectually, Hopkins was far from idle. His letters to Bridges and Dixon often contained long, detailed critiques of their manuscript verse. In 1883 he cheerfully undertook the task of helping Patmore to revise all his poems for a new edition. He also gave much time to the study of musical composition, for which he had a small but interesting gift and a great enthusiasm (XXII).
The desolations recorded in the sonnets of 1885 were in some perceptible measure due to an entanglement of personal and professional problems. In one set of retreat notes he is worried about the part played by some of the Irish clergy in support of Irish nationalism, and these qualms of an English patriot are immediately followed by doubts about his own fitness for the position he held and his personal responsibility for the right use of his talents. In his letters, he sharply denounced the Home Rule policy of the ‘traitor’ Gladstone, yet he was fully aware of the wrongs that Ireland had suffered and was sternly critical, from a Catholic point of view, of the secularist tendencies of England and the whole British Empire (XXIV).
And what of the view, often asserted, that the last sonnets are, for all their art, unmistakable symptoms of acute neurosis due to thwarted impulses, both sexual and artistic? The first issue cannot be discussed here, but even if an unwarrantably large concession were made to the psychoanalytic diagnosis, the deeper spiritual significances of the sonnets numbered 41 to 46 would remain untouched. As an artist, Hopkins must have felt the lack of that success which he often declared to be right and proper for his own poet-friends: ‘I say deliberately and before God, I would have you and Canon Dixon and all true poets remember that fame, the being known, though one of the most dangerous things to man, is nevertheless the true and appointed air, element, and setting of genius and its works.’ Yet for Hopkins himself the Jesuit standard, as we can see from Letter XX, was quite different. In reading the last poems we must take into account those Christian values and supernatural stresses which he himself regarded as the prime realities. ‘The life I lead’, he dryly told Dixon, ‘is liable to many mortifications, but the want of fame as a poet is not one of them.’ Some critics have taken the signs of inner conflict in these poems to be indications of fundamental doubt, a mood of rebellion, a submerged and rather unseemly scuffle between a Jesuit-Jekyll and a hedonist-Hyde. (He confessed that his own ‘Hyde’ was worse than R. L. Stevenson’s; but then St. Augustine would have confessed the same.) Hopkins also said: ‘I have never wavered in my vocation, but I have not lived up to it.’ As for his poems, ‘I could wish’, he admitted, ‘that my pieces could at some time become known but in some spontaneous way… and without my forcing.’ Nevertheless, we still have to account for the tense and tragic note of inhibition in No. 43:
‘Only what word
Wisest my heart breeds dark heaven’s baffling ban
Bars, or hell’s spell thwarts. This to hoard unheard,
Heard unheeded, leaves me a lonely began.’
Dixon found in Hopkins’s poetry ‘a terrible pathos – something of what you call temper in poetry: a right temper which goes to the point of the terrible; the terrible crystal.’ The words ‘temper’ and ‘crystal’ express admirably the fusion of poetic passion and poetic form, especially as it is found in the poems numbered 39 to 46. As regards their content, such moods of ‘desolation’ conform to those periods of spiritual dryness which are carefully described, and prescribed for, by St Ignatius in the Spiritual Exercises. Desolation is the human shuddering recoil from the strain of a rigorous discipline – a sourness, loss of hope, of joy, almost a suspension of faith itself, which makes the victim feel that he is totally separated from his God. Nos. 44, 46, and 51 indicate not so much a conflict as a deep sense of privation; as Dr John Pick has said, they are, in a sense, love-letters:
‘cries like dead letters sent To dearest him that lives alas! away.’
But Hopkins speaks also of a ‘woe, world-sorrow’ (No. 42), which suggests that he was inwardly grieved at the ‘schism in the soul’ of nineteenth-century man, at the common lack of a spiritual centre, at the inroads into the Christian ethos which were daily being made by scientific rationalism and materialism – that ‘wilder beast from West’ which was about to devour his Andromeda (No. 26). Such a precise and unromantic Weltschmerz would account for the pained comment, at the end of Letter XXVII, on the Rev. W. Addis’s secession from the Roman Catholic Church. At the same time there is much to be said for the view that the spiritual dereliction of these last sonnets is akin to that ‘dark night of the soul’ which is described by mystics as an advanced phase in the progress of the soul towards the ineffable peace of union with God; for to be ‘busied only with God’ was Hopkins’s fervent wish in 1881. Dixon’s ‘terrible pathos’ does not quite hit the centre of Hopkins’s poetry. There is, from the Deutschland to the last sonnet, more of heroic acceptance than self-pity: underneath the despair and complaint the note of willing self-surrender to the higher necessity is always implicit.
That Hopkins, during the last four years of his life, was not continuously unhappy is proved by oral tradition, by the varied and frequent zest of his letters,1 and above all by the bold experimentation and sensuous nature-poetry of such later pieces as Harry Ploughman, Epithalamion, and That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire, with its bright imagery and apocalyptic ‘comfort’:
‘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.’
Hopkins’s deep underlying faith, from which he drew his powers of spiritual recovery, is also seen in Carrion Comfort, ‘Patience, hard thing’, and ‘My own heart let me more have pity on’. In the bitter experiences of the later ‘terrible’ sonnets we may miss ‘the roll, the rise, the carol, the creation’ of some of the earlier poems; but in their austere concentration, their clear, incisive intensity, the sonnets of 1885–1889 are in many ways Hopkins’s crowning achievement. They are the work of a man who, while putting the whole of his ‘sad self’ into a poem, could still preserve the sensitivity and control of the artist, and who must have found in the making (though unfortunately too seldom) a deep sense of relief and fulfilment.
In the early part of 1889 Hopkins’s health began to fail rapidly, and he contracted typhoid fever. Eventually peritonitis set in, and his parents were summoned from England. The last rites were administered, and on June 8th he died, his last words being, ‘I am so happy, so happy’.
IV
Something more positive still remains to be said about Hopkins’s prosody and style, and it is best to begin with the former. In The Wreck of the Deutschland he tried out and almost perfected what he called his ‘new rhythm’. By this he meant primarily Sprung Rhythm, which is fully explained in the Author’s Preface and Letter XVI. Many of the subsequent poems were written in Counterpoint Rhythm, and these two rhythmical modes, together with other refinements such as ‘outrides’ or ‘outriding feet’, were often elucidated in the MSS. by various stress- and expression-marks.1 Most of these for a number of reasons, chiefly typographical, have always been omitted from the printed text, and in justification of this omission it should be stated that Hopkins, while feeling strongly the need for such guides to the correct speech-movement, felt also that they were ‘objectionable’, ‘offensive’. Bridges wisely retained a few essential stress-marks, and to these a few more have been added; but most of the marks, even when they are consistent, are not indispensable. Many of them are illustrated in the Notes and there too will be found all the really essential ‘outrides’. In the reading aloud of such poems as The Windhover, Hurrahing in Harvest, and Felix Randal (and Hopkins always insisted that his poems should be read with the ear and not with the eye)2 it is often the ‘outride’ which tells us the poet’s precise rhythmical intention. Moreover the author’s own description of the metrical scheme of a poem has always, wherever it exists, been transcribed in the Notes.
Next to be considered is what may be called the sound-texture of the poetry, for this is really an integral part of the rhythm. Partly to give richness to his language, partly to bring out subtle relationships between ideas and images, and partly as a guide to the rhythmical stresses, Hopkins made greater use than any other English poet of alliteration, assonance, internal full- and half-rhyme, and those subtle vocalic scales which he called ‘vowelling on’ and ‘vowelling off’. All these devices are generally employed with taste and control; they give intensity, variety in unity, and, strange to say, inevitability to the poetic thought; they contribute, in short, to that inscape of speech, that ‘starriness’, pattern, and melody without which poetry, for Hopkins, could hardly exist. The influence of the Welsh cynghanedd on this aspect of Hopkins’s style is briefly illustrated in Notes B and C (p. 249). To sum up, ‘before we can read one of these poems as Hopkins intended it to be read, we must first ascertain the number of stressed syllables in each line – unless, as in Nos. 36 and 65, the rhythm is ‘free’ – and also carefully study the ‘outrides’, when these occur;1 we then allow the sense and feeling of the words (as these are ‘fetched out’ by alliteration, assonance, etc.) to determine the correct beat and movement of the verse. In the following there are no ‘outrides’:2
Ínto the snóws she swéeps,
Húrling the háven behínd,
The Déutschland, on Súnday; and só the sky kéeps,
For the ínfinite áir is unkínd,
And the séa flínt-fláke, bláck-bácked in the régular blów,
Sitting Eástnortheást, in cúrsed quárter, the wínd;
Wiry and whìte-fíery and whírlwind-swivellèd snów
Spíns to the wídow-máking unchílding unfáthering déeps.
(No. 5, st. 13.)
It should be noted that stressed syllables are usually long, either by nature or by position. Uncertainty in the stressing is often caused by the juxtaposition of two strong syllables which seem to be equally important; but this difficulty may be solved by the use of a half-stress (\) for one of them, as in the scansion of the above stanza. Another solution would be the quick, equal stressing indicated by
the mark in Hopkins’s own note to No. 38 (below, p. 238), which would give us:
‘And the séa flint-flake, black-backed in the régular blów…
A good example of the way internal rhyme and alliteration bring out both the meaning and the rhythm in this ‘Sprung’ verse is to be found in No. 5, st. 12, lines 5–6:
O Fáther, not under thý féathers nor éver as guéssing
The góal was a shóal, of a fóurth the dóom to be drówned…’
Fate had ordained that the ‘goal’ of the Deutschland should be not New York but a sandbank; for a quarter of the emigrants, ‘doom’ and ‘drowning’ were indeed identical. Equally apt is the alliterative link between the italicized words in the following (ibid., st.II):
‘But wé dréam we are róoted in éarth – Dúst!’
After ‘rhythm’, the main cause of initial difficulty is Hopkins’s bold creative handling of language – both in the choice of words and in the position of words in the sentence. Hopkins said that poetical language ‘should be the current language heightened, to any degree heightened and unlike itself, but not (I mean normally: passing freaks and graces are another thing) an obsolete one. This is Shakespeare’s and Milton’s practice…’ As special ‘graces’ he admits a fair sprinkling of archaic and dialect words; but the chief characteristic of his rich and surprising vocabulary is the use he makes of all types of word, both ‘shaggy’ and ‘combed’, though he shows a marked preference for the pure Anglo-Saxon. Equally striking is his genius for compounding words to make new and distinctive wholes, whether by close fusion, on the analogy of familiar compounds (‘quickgold’, ‘daredeaths’, ‘moonmarks’),1 or by means of a hyphen (‘dapple-dawn-drawn falcon’), or in an unhyphened adjectival group (‘Thóu mastering mé God!’, ‘the rólling level úndernéath him steady air’).2
The purpose of this compounding is to weld together, in one concentrated image, all the essential characteristics of the object, to inscape them in words, to communicate to the reader that same ‘instress of feeling’ which first moved the poet himself. ’When he speaks, in Harry Ploughman, of the masculine beauty and power of the labourer as
‘Chúrlsgrace too, chíld of Amánsstrength…’2
he does not mean ‘a man’s strèngth’, which reminds us of an advertisement for Phosferine or Guinness; he means precisely one thing, ‘Amansstrength’ (with a great stress on –man–) – that union of health and braced muscular forces which characterizes this particular ploughman in action and is typical of all workmen of the same kind. This is one of the inscapes of the world which ‘simple people’ (most of us) normally miss. Hopkins’s use of original compounds often enables him to fuse into one complex image a whole series of actions or states, as in his vivid inscape of the Incarnation:
‘The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled
Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame,
Mid-numbered He in three of the thunder-throne!’
(No. 5, st. 34.)
The second line contains a tmesis: ‘Miracle-of-flame in Mary’ is rearranged so that the position of ‘in-Mary’ suggests the furling of the child in the mother and also suggests that Mary herself is an intrinsic part of the miracle. It will be noticed too that all the words before and after ‘He’ constitute one long individualizing description of the Christ, Second Person of the Holy Trinity. Similarly in the delightful Epithalamion the poet gives us a dynamic and precise picture of bathers in a rock pool: he tells
‘how the boys
With dare and with downdolphinry and bellbright bodies
huddling out,
Are earthworld, airworld, waterworld thorough hurled, all
by turn and turn about.’
In both the above examples Hopkins catches the inscape of a complex action, and a certain dramatic quality gives us the instress of the experience. The use of dare as a noun is typical of his Shakespearian feeling for the sharp immediacy of the mood and plunge, just as the Elizabethan thorough for ‘through’ shows his affection for an old word which still has an echo in current usage (‘thoroughfare’).
Of all poets who have revered Shakespeare, Hopkins has learnt most from the master’s skill in utilizing the full resources of the English language. His own manner is in many ways a development of Shakespeare’s latest condensed and elliptical style; but he goes much further than Shakespeare in manipulating and poethandling (so to speak) the stiff English sentence so as to make it a vehicle for his impassioned thought, casting out the dull colourless particles whenever he can and so placing his words that the most important get the greatest emphasis. Sometimes his violent transposition, omission, or clotting of words gives the impression of a man trying to utter all his thoughts at once; and then, as Bridges said, ‘emphasis seems to oust euphony’. Most of the obscurities occasioned by this ‘artistic wantonness’ are touched on in the Notes; but it must be admitted that now and again his individualizing twists are too un-English to be pleasant, as when in Tom’s Garland a navvy who need not go hungry becomes
‘(feel
That ne’er need hunger, Tom…’
or when, in The Lantern out of Doors, he makes a weird clause out of an eye following a person receding through a crowd:
‘wind
What most I may eye after,be in at the end
I cannot, and out of sight is out of mind.’
But these palpable faults are comparatively few; usually, an image or turn of phrase which at first seems queer or obscure will not only ‘explode’ but will also justify itself as a strong or delicate harmony of thought, feeling, and sound. Consider, for instance, the magical concentration of
‘I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst’s all-in-all in all a world of wet.’ (No. 46.)
Moreover in this poetry the flexibility of style which allows a passage of simple, almost colloquial language to rise naturally into sonorous incantation, as in Felix Randal, is matched by the poet’s happy audacity in so placing an adjective that it modifies with relevant force two or even three words in the same sentence:
‘Only what word
Wisest my heart breeds dark heaven’s baffling ban
Bars…’ (No. 43.)
‘And frightful a nightfall folded rueful a day’
(No. 5, st. 15.)
– which to me conveys as much as: ‘And terribly, yet pitifully too, a menacing night closed down upon a hope-shattering day.’ But examples of Hopkins’s verve, variety, and subtlety could be multiplied, and most readers will find inexhaustible pleasure in winding their way, though somewhat gingerly at first, into this poet’s meaning.
Lastly we must commend the range of Hopkins’s imagery, from the simple childlike up to the complex metaphysical; the significant symbolism in such poems as Nos. 5 and 13; the objective value of his Christian vision of things earthly and divine; and no less the amazing architectonic of verse which buckles so many liberties of rhythm, diction, and syntax within the discipline of an elaborate stanza or the nicely proportioned parts of the Italian or Miltonic sonnet. The sonnet-form he moulds admirably to his purpose, now lengthening and now shortening it, in one poem extending and in the next contracting the line-length according to the nature (astringent or expansive) of the theme in hand.
If we consider quality before quantity, as in these days of overproduction we probably should, it is perhaps truer to say that Hopkins is one of our lesser great poets than to say, with the late Desmond MacCarthy, that he is one of our great lesser poets. It is not the ‘Parnassian’ redundancies and repetitions that count, but the essence; and Hopkins is nearly all essence. In him, as in the world’s greater poets, the fusion of throught and form, the combination of rare insight and an even rarer power and music in the presentation, lifts the poetry from the personal to the universal plane. Though he is inimitable, Hopkins (as Mr Stephen Spender has said) ‘ferments in other poets’. No one can really know him without acquiring a higher standard of poetic beauty, a sharper vision of the world, and a deeper sense of the underlying spiritual reality.
W. H. GARDNER
University of Natal,
Pietermaritzburg.
August 1952.
NOTE TO TENTH IMPRESSION
This reprint incorporates, as did (prematurely) the 1966 reprint, some thirty improved readings which are among the many established mainly by my fellow editor, Professor N. H. MacKenzie, for the new Fourth Edition of Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (O.U.P., 1967). In acknowledging this debt I must warn readers that whenever new emendations in this Penguin reprint coincide with readings in the Oxford Fourth Edition, the text of the Fourth Edition is the earlier – the authoritative source.
The comma after ‘plume’ in line 9 of The Windhover (omitted in some previous impressions of this book) has now been restored, the change being authenticated in the new note on No. 13, 1. 9 (p. 227). At the same time, a few other defective readings, inherited from earlier editions of the poems, have been carefully corrected. These emendations have full and unquestionable MS. authority, and the most important are as follows: Poem No. 1, st. 7, 1. 4 (tower); No. 5, st. 12, l. 8 (million); No. 15, l. 1 (rise); No. 25, st. 1, l. 2 (the wimpkd lip); No. 26, l. 4 (dragon food); No. 43, l. 4 (my peace/my parting); No. 56, l. 4 (fineflour). Furthermore, a number of minor misprints, which crept in when the book was reset, have now been removed.