Gerard Manley Hopkins

"The Best ideal is the true/ And other truth is none./All glory be ascribèd to/The holy Three in One."

Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. (28 July 1844 – 8 June 1889), was an English poet, Roman Catholic convert, and Jesuit priest, whose 20th-century fame established him posthumously among the leading Victorian poets. His experimental explorations in prosody (especially sprung rhythm) and his use of imagery established him as a daring innovator in a period of largely traditional verse.

Life

He was educated at Highgate School from 1854 to 1863 and then Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied classics. Hopkins was an unusually sensitive student and poet, as witnessed by his class-notes and early poetic pieces. It was at Oxford that he forged a friendship with Robert Bridges (eventual Poet Laureate of England) which would be of importance in his development as a poet, and his posthumous acclaim.

Hopkins began his time in Oxford as a keen socialite and prolific poet, but he seemed to have alarmed himself with the changes in his behaviour that resulted, and he became more studious and began recording his "sins" in his diary. As an undergraduate he engaged in friendships that may be viewed as romantic, though they tended to be idealised and spiritualised. In particular, he found it hard to accept his sexual attraction to other men - including a deep infatuation for Digby Mackworth Dolben. There is nothing to suggest, however, any physical consummation and indeed he seems to have remained celibate throughout his life. However, he began to exercise strict self-control in regard to his homosexual desire, especially after he became a follower of Henry Parry Liddon and of Edward Pusey, the last, lingering member of the original Oxford Movement. It was during this time of intense scrupulosity that Hopkins seems to have especially begun confronting his strong homoerotic impulses. (See section below on Erotic influences)^[1].

In 1866, following the example of John Henry Newman, he converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism. This decision estranged him from both his family and a number of his acquaintances. After his graduation in 1867 Hopkins was provided a teaching post at The Oratory School by Newman, but the following year he decided to enter the priesthood, pausing only to visit Switzerland, which officially forbade Jesuits to enter^[2].

Hopkins's attempts at poetry began at an early age, influenced by his father's own attempts at the art. His decision to become a Jesuit led him to burn much of his early poetry as he felt it incompatible with his vocation. Writing would remain something of a concern for him as he felt that his interest in poetry prevented him from wholly devoting himself to his religion. He continued to write a detailed journal until 1874. Unable to suppress his desire to describe the natural world, he also wrote music, sketched, and for church occasions he wrote some "verses," as he called them. He would later write sermons and other religious pieces.

While he was studying in the Jesuit house of theological studies, St Beuno's, near St Asaph in North Wales, he was asked by his religious superior to write a poem to commemorate the foundering of a German ship in a storm. So in 1875 he was moved to take up poetry once more and write a lengthy poem, The Wreck of the Deutschland. This work was inspired by the Deutschland incident, a naval disaster in which 157 people died including five Franciscan nuns who had been leaving Germany due to harsh anti-Catholic laws (see Kulturkampf). The work displays both the religious concerns and some of the unusual meter and rhythms of his subsequent poetry not present in his few remaining early works. It not only depicts the dramatic events and heroic deeds but also tells of the poet's reconciling the terrible events with God's higher purpose. The poem was accepted but not printed by a Jesuit publication, and this rejection fuelled his ambivalence about his poetry. Most of his poetry remained unpublished until after his death.

Hopkins chose the austere and restrictive life of a Jesuit and was at times gloomy. The brilliant student who had left Oxford with a first class honours degree failed his final theology exam. This failure almost certainly meant that, though ordained in 1877, Hopkins would not progress in the order. Though rigorous and sometimes unpleasant, his life during Jesuit training had at least some stability; the uncertain and varied work after ordination was even harder on his sensibilities. In 1874 he returned to Manresa House to teach classics. He then went to St Beuno's College in North Wales for three years of theological studies. He served in various parishes in London, Chesterfield, Oxford, Liverpool and Glasgow. Whilst ministering in Oxford he became a founding member of Oxford University Newman Society, a society established in 1878 for the Catholic members of Oxford University. He taught Greek and Latin at Mount St Mary's College, Sheffield, and Stonyhurst College, Lancashire. In 1884 he became professor of Greek literature at University College Dublin. His English roots and his disagreement with the Irish politics of the time, as well as his own small stature (5'2"), unprepossessing nature and personal oddities meant that he was not a particularly effective teacher. This as well as his isolation in Ireland deepened his gloom and his poems of the time, such as I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, reflected this. They came to be known as the "terrible sonnets," not because of their quality but because according to Hopkins's friend Canon Dixon, they reached the "terrible crystal," meaning that they crystallized the melancholy dejection which plagued the later part of his life.

Final years

Blue plaque commemorating Hopkins in Roehampton, London

After suffering ill health for several years and bouts of diarrhea, Hopkins died of typhoid fever in 1889 and was buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.

Although he probably suffered from what today might be diagnosed as either bipolar disorder or chronic unipolar depression, and battled a deep sense of anguish throughout his life, upon his death bed he evidently overcame some of that despondency, at times stygian in its intensity: his last words were "I am so happy, I am so happy."

Poetry

Sprung rhythm

Much of Hopkins's historical importance has to do with the changes he brought to the form of poetry; which ran contrary to conventional ideas of metre. Prior to Hopkins, most Middle English and Modern English poetry was based on a rhythmic structure inherited from the Norman side of English literary heritage. This structure is based on repeating groups of two or three syllables, with the stressed syllable falling in the same place on each repetition. Hopkins called this structure "running rhythm", and though he wrote some of his early verse in running rhythm he became fascinated with the older rhythmic structure of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, of which Beowulf is the most famous example. Hopkins called his own rhythmic structure sprung rhythm. Sprung rhythm is structured around feet with a variable number of syllables, generally between one and four syllables per foot, with the stress always falling on the first syllable in a foot. In reality, it more closely resembles the "rolling stresses" of Robinson Jeffers, another poet who rejected conventional meter. Hopkins saw sprung rhythm as a way to escape the constraints of running rhythm, which he said inevitably pushed poetry written in it to become "same and tame." In this way, Hopkins can be seen as anticipating much of free verse. His work has no great affinity with either of the contemporary Pre-Raphaelite and neo-romanticism schools, although he does share their descriptive love of nature and he is often seen as a precursor to modernist poetry or as a bridge between the two poetic eras.

Last Poems

Several problems conspired to depress Hopkins's spirits and restrict his poetic inspiration during the last five years of his life. His work load was extremely heavy. He disliked living in Dublin, away from England and friends. His general health deteriorated as his eyesight began to fail. He felt confined and dejected. As a devout Jesuit, he found himself in an artistic dilemma. To subdue any egotism which would violate the humility required by his religious position, he decided never to publish his poems. But Hopkins realized that any true poet requires an audience for criticism and encouragement. This conflict between his religious obligations and his poetic talent caused him to feel that he had failed them both.

Use of language

The language of Hopkins’s poems is often striking. His imagery can be simple, as in Heaven-Haven, where the comparison is between a nun entering a convent and a ship entering a harbour out of a storm. It can be splendidly metaphysical and intricate, as it is in As Kingfishers Catch Fire, where he leaps from one image to another to show how each thing expresses its own uniqueness, and how divinity reflects itself through all of them.

He uses many archaic and dialect words, but also coins new words. One example of this is twindles, which seems from its context in Inversnaid to mean a combination of twines and dwindles. He often creates compound adjectives, sometimes with a hyphen (such as dapple-dawn-drawn falcon) but often without, as in rolling level underneath him steady air. This concentrates his images, communicating the instress of the poet’s perceptions of an inscape to his reader.

Added richness comes from Hopkins’s extensive use of alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia and rhyme, both at the end of lines and internally as in:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Hopkins was influenced by the Welsh language that he acquired while studying theology at St Beuno's College near St Asaph. The poetic forms of Welsh literature and particularly cynghanedd with its emphasis on repeating sounds accorded with his own style and became a prominent feature of his work. This reliance on similar sounding words with close or differing senses mean that his poems are best understood if read aloud. An important element in his work is Hopkins's own concept of "inscape" which was derived, in part, from the medieval theologian Duns Scotus. The exact detail of "inscape" is uncertain and probably known to Hopkins alone but it has to do with the individual essence and uniqueness of every physical thing. This is communicated from an object by its "instress" and ensures the transmission of the item's importance in the wider creation. His poems would then try to present this "inscape" so that a poem like "The Windhover" aims to depict not the bird in general but instead one instance and its relation to the breeze. This is just one interpretation of probably Hopkins's most studied poem and one which he called his best.[2]

During his lifetime, Hopkins published few poems. It was only through the efforts of Robert Bridges that his works were seen. Despite Hopkins burning all his poems on entering the Jesuit novitiate, he had already sent some to Bridges who, with a few other friends, was one of the few people to see many of them for some years. After Hopkins's death they were distributed to a wider audience, mostly fellow poets, and in 1918 Bridges, by then poet laureate, published a collected edition; an expanded edition, prepared by Charles Williams, appeared in 1930, and a greatly expanded edition by W. H. Gardiner appeared in 1948 (eventually reaching a fourth edition, 1967, with N. H. Mackenzie).

Notable collections of Hopkins's manuscripts and publications are in Campion Hall, Oxford; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; and the Foley Library at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.

Erotic influences

Some contemporary critics believe that Hopkins's suppressed erotic impulses played an important role in the tone, quality and even content of his works. These impulses seem to have taken on a degree of specificity after he met Robert Bridges's distant cousin, friend, and fellow Etonian Digby Mackworth Dolben, "a Christian Uranian"^[3]. Hopkins's biographer Robert Bernard Martin asserts that Hopkins’s meeting with Dolben – on the occasion of the boy's 17th birthday – at Oxford in February 1865, "was, quite simply, the most momentous emotional event of [his] undergraduate years, probably of his entire life" ^[4].

Hopkins was completely taken with Dolben, who was nearly four years his junior, and his private journal for confessions the following year proves how absorbed he was in imperfectly suppressed erotic thoughts of him^[5]

Hopkins kept up a correspondence with Dolben, wrote about him in his diary and composed two poems about the youth, "Where art thou friend" and "The Beginning of the End." Robert Bridges, who edited the first edition of Dolben's poems as well as Hopkins's, cautioned that the second poem "must never be printed," though Bridges finally decided to include it in the first edition (1918).^[6] Another indication of the nature of his feelings for Dolben is that Hopkins's High Anglican confessor seems to have forbidden him to have any contact with Dolben except by letter. Their relationship was abruptly ended by Dolben's drowning in June 1867, an event which greatly affected Hopkins, although his feeling for Dolben seems to have cooled a good deal by that time. "Ironically, fate may have bestowed more through Dolben’s death than it could ever have bestowed through longer life ... [for] many of Hopkins’s best poems — impregnated with an elegiac longing for Dolben, his lost belovèd and his muse — were the result."^[7]

Some of his poems, such as "The Bugler's First Communion" and "Epithalamion", arguably embody homoerotic themes, and he has been associated recently with the Uranian poets, whose writings derived, in many ways, from the prose works of Walter Pater, Hopkins's academic coach for his Greats exams, and later his lifelong friend.^[8]

Some critics have argued that homoerotic readings are either highly tendentious, or, that they can be classified under the broader category of "homosociality," over the gender, sexual-specific "homosexual" term. Hopkins’s journal writings, they argue, offer a clear admiration for feminized beauty, an observation often neglected when considering where Hopkins’s sexual allegiances may lie. That is not to say that such theorizing does not have its merits, it turns troublesome when it completely replaces the religious emphasis of the poems. Consider Justus George Lawler’s point in his book Hopkins Reconstructed (2000):

"The ineluctable, and for me distressing, conclusion is that Martin [referring to Robert Martin’s controversial biography Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life (published in 1991)] cannot see the heterosexual beam... for the homosexual biographical mote in his own eye... it amounts to a slanted eisegesis" (61-2).

The poems that elicit homoerotic readings are not merely exercises in sublimation, in other words; they are powerful renditions of religious conviction, a conviction that caused strain in his family and even led him to burn some of his poems (he felt they were unnecessarily self-centered). Julia Saville’s book A Queer Chivalry views the religious imagery in the poems as Hopkins’s way of expressing the tension with homosexual identity and desire. The male figure of Christ allows him to safely express such feelings, which mitigates the political implications.

Notes

Bibliography of poems

• The Wreck of the Deutschland
• The May Magnificat
• Moonrise
• Spring
• God's Grandeur
• The Caged Skylark
• Hurrahing in Harvest
• As Kingfishers Catch Fire
• In the Valley of the Elwy
• Pied Beauty (a curtal sonnet)
• Carrion Comfort
• The Windhover: To Christ our Lord
• Spring and Fall, To a Young Child
• The Habit of Perfection
• The Sea and the Skylark
• Inversnaid
• That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection
• Felix Randal

Audio

• Richard Austin reads Hopkins' poetry in Back to Beauty's Giver.^[1]

Bibliography

• Abbot, Claude Coller (Ed.), 1955. The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon (London: Oxford University Press.)
• Abbot, Claude Coller (Ed.), 1955. The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges (London: Oxford University Press.)
• Fiddes, Paul S., 2009. 'G.M. Hopkins', in Rebecca Lemon, Emma Mason, Jonathan Roberts, and Christopher Rowland, eds, The Blackwell companion to the Bible in English literature (Blackwell companions to religion, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell), pp. 563-76
• MacKenzie, Norman H. (Ed.), 1989. The Early Poetic Manuscripts and Note-books of Gerard Manley Hopkins in Facsimile. (New York and London: Garland Publishing.)
• MacKenzie, Norman H. (Ed.), 1991 The Later Poetic Manuscripts of Gerard Manley Hopkins in Facsimile (New York: Garland Publishing.)
• Martin, Robert Bernard, 1992. Gerard Manley Hopkins - A Very Private Life (London: Flamingo/HarperCollins Publishers)
• Sagar, Keith, 2005. "Hopkins and the Religion of the Diamond Body", in Literature and the Crime Against Nature, (London: Chaucer Press.)
• White, Norman, 1992. Hopkins - A literary Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

See also

• Caudate sonnet
• Curtal sonnet (invented by G. M. Hopkins)
• Sprung rhythm
• Inscape
• Inscape (visual art)

References

1. ^ Audio book, CD, ISBN 0-9548188-0-6, 2003. 27 poems, including The Wreck Of The Deutschland, God's Grandeur, The Windhover, Pied Beauty and Binsley Poplars, and the 'Terrible Sonnets'.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Gerard Manley Hopkins

Wikisource has original text related to this article: Gerard Manley Hopkins

• Gerard Manley Hopkins at Project Gutenberg
• Poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins at PoetryFoundation.org
• Works by or about Gerard Manley Hopkins in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Gerard Manley Hopkins Society
• Gerard Manley Hopkins's Grave
• Gerard Manley Hopkins Poems In Musical Adaptations
• The Hopkins Quarterly
• Online texts of Hopkins Poems: First Edition (1918)
• Gerard Manley Hopkins Biography, Poems, Context, Analysis - Crossref-it.info
• Web Concordance of Hopkins Poems
• Readings of Hopkins's Poetry
• The Victorian Web - Gerard Manley Hopkins - An Overview
• 2004 essay by Jim Boushay about Gerard Manley Hopkins and the ‘pain’ of deep gratitude titled To give prayerful thanks with a grateful heart
• That Nature Is A Heraclitean Fire - Excerpt - Musical adaptation by Sean O'Leary (MP3)
• The Wreck Of The Deutschland - Verse 1 - Musical adaptation by Sean O'Leary (MP3)
• 8 Song Samples from Musical Adaptations of Hopkins's Poetry
• LibriVox - Free Audio Recording of As Kingfishers Catch Fire
• Michael Matthew Kaylor, Secreted Desires: The Major Uranians: Hopkins, Pater and Wilde (2006), a 500-page scholarly volume that situates Hopkins among the Victorian writers of Uranian Poetry - Free, open-access, PDF version.
• Religious Crisis in Hopkins's Terrible Sonnets
• Dark Night of the Soul
• Gerard Manley Hopkins at St Beuno's
• The Poet and the Wreck Mark Ford essay on Hopkins from The New York Review of Books