Gerard Manley Hopkins: Priest, Professor, Poet

an introduction to his life and literature

In 1873, Germany approved anti-Catholic decrees known as the Falk Laws. Seeking refuge abroad, over two hundred German Catholics boarded a passenger ship named the Deutschland. It never reached its destination, and among the lives claimed by the sea were those of five Franciscan nuns. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) eulogized these women, whom he described as “exiles,” in a poem entitled The Wreck of the Deutschland. Thus it begins:

              Thou mastering me
              God! giver of breath and bread;
      World’s strand, sway of the sea;
         Lord of living and dead;
   Thou hast bound bones & veins in me, fastened me flesh,
   And after it is almost unmade, what with dread,
      Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?
Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.

This one stanza is enough to suggest why Hopkins is praised with such words as “innovative,” “stunning originality,” “daring,” “liberating”—all the more so if you’re familiar with Victorian poetry, which tends to be quite conservative in both form and content. Just to give you an idea of the contrast, I’ll include a representative example from Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909), who was emphatically not conservative in his personal life; note the regularity of the meter and the relatively straightforward expression of thoughts.

Before our lives divide for ever,
      While time is with us and hands are free,
(Time, swift to fasten and swift to sever
      Hand from hand, as we stand by the sea)
I will say no word that a man might say
Whose whole life’s love goes down in a day;
For this could never have been; and never,
      Though the gods and the years relent, shall be.

The Wreck of the Deutschland is a difficult poem. I wonder how many of you would enjoy it on a basic aesthetic level. My reaction is mixed. On the one hand, I am fascinated by its elusive mysticality and its intricate structures, and I find that it has a mildly enchanting effect. It transports you even as you ponder, perhaps with some vexation, what these strange words and phrases might mean. As with modernist poetry, to which Hopkins was something of a precursor, you start to wonder which words and phrases “mean” anything at all, and which communicate simply through sound, dreamlike images, or evocations of the subconscious. On the other hand, and I’m just being honest here, the poem is confusing enough to provoke tedium and experimental enough to clash with my appreciation for elegant verse, which was integral to Western poetry from Homer to—well, all the way to morally depraved artists like Swinburne.

Shipwreck off Nantucket, by William Bradford

Even if The Wreck of the Deutschland isn’t quite to your taste, the poem is highly significant as Hopkins’ first successful use of “sprung rhythm,” which I mentioned last Sunday and will discuss in detail on Tuesday. Sprung rhythm is a fundamental departure from traditional English meter, without being dismissive—as much later poetry is—of meter in general.

The twenty-third stanza is especially impressive, and it shows Hopkins using accent marks to help us read the poem as he intended. We have to be unusually attentive to sound when experiencing his verse, which he himself said was “less to be read than heard.”

              Joy fall to thee, father Francis,
              Drawn to the Life that died;
      With the gnarls of the nails in thee, niche of the lance, his
         Lovescape crucified
   And seal of his seraph-arrival! and these thy daughters
   And five-livèd and leavèd favour and pride,
      Are sisterly sealed in wild waters,
To bathe in his fall-gold mercies, to breathe in his all-fire glances.

This is a fine example of Hopkins’ extraordinary instinct for creative word choice. That’s the sort of creativity that can easily go awry, but Hopkins manages to twist the English language into new shapes without doing violence to the language itself or to our relationship with it. Terms like “lovescape” and “seraph-arrival” surprise without causing too much disorientation, and the use of “sisterly” as an adverb modifying “sealed” is striking in a good way. (“Sisterly” is properly an adjective, which means that this is an instance of the rhetorical figure known as anthimeria, i.e., using a word as though it belongs to a different part of speech. Shakespeare was a master of anthimeria.) The compounds “fall-gold” and “all-fire” also are forcefully original and vibrant with sensory associations. Notice how they give an insistent rhythm to the final line: “To BATHE in his FALL-GOLD MERcies [pause] to BREATHE in his ALL-FIRE GLANces.” Hopkins had a special gift for translating emotions into verbal rhythms.

Stanza 34 is mysteriously arresting. It’s one of those moments, not too common in my experience, when you struggle to interpret the words you’re reading while marveling at the genius of the person who wrote them.

              Now burn, new born to the world,
              Doubled-natured name,
      The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled
         Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame,
   Mid-numberèd he in three of the thunder-throne!
   Not a dooms-day dazzle in his coming nor dark as he came;
      Kind, but royally reclaiming his own;
A released shower, let flash to the shire, not a lightning of fire hard-hurled.

The flood of images here is almost overwhelming; the words can’t keep up with them, or with the passion that seems to be pushing Hopkins toward the breaking point of verbal language. The phrase “heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled / Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame” surpasses anything I’ve ever read as a poetic synonym for the Incarnation, and the phrase “Mid-numbered he in three of the thunder-throne” is similarly astonishing as a reference to the Blessed Trinity. The bold command that opens the stanza, “Now burn,” takes us back to that impassioned yearning of the “mid-numbered” one Himself: “I am come to send fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already burning.”

Shipwreck off the Coast in Winter, by William Joy

Speaking of burning: that’s exactly what happened to Hopkins’ first compositions. He started writing poetry in the early 1860s, but after his conversion to Roman Catholicism and shortly before joining the Jesuits, he consigned his verses to the flames, presumably to assert his detachment from worldly pursuits or vain pleasures. Such zealous excesses are part of human nature, and they usually resolve naturally over time. After a seven-year hiatus, Hopkins read about the tragedy of the Deutschland and decided to poeticize it. The following summary, written by the literary scholar Julia Saville, will help you to appreciate The Wreck of the Deutschland if you want to work through the poem more systematically:

Written in two parts, the first describing Hopkins’s own revelatory experience, and the second the epiphany of a drowning nun, this ode interprets the shipwreck typologically. Hopkins presents it as both a fulfillment of Christ’s promise and power to redeem humanity through suffering, and as a prefiguration of Britain’s rebirth into a new age of faith.

Hopkins is quite famous now, at least in literary circles. In life, he was known as a priest and a professor—but not as a poet. His works were published posthumously, having been preserved in manuscript form by Robert Bridges, who also edited the first anthology, published in 1918, of Hopkins’ poetry. Bridges was a poet himself, and a hymn-writer who preferred hymns with an archaic flair, rather than religious songs intended to “make the worldly man feel at home,” as he said. It’s interesting that a man committed to respecting the aesthetics of traditional hymns would perceive so much value in Hopkins’ experimental verse.

I’ve written before about the disconcerting relationship, evident mostly in the modern era, between poetic skill and general personal happiness. This relationship, unfortunately, is what mathematicians would call inversely proportional: more poetic skill = less happiness. Here’s an excerpt, for those who haven’t read “The Violin Song of Autumn”:

The Frenchman Paul Verlaine (1844–1896) was yet another entry in the long list of modern poets who seem incapable of combining poetic talent with a well-ordered, healthy, morally functional life. Now that I think of it, maybe the typical fate of poets could serve as a dividing line between the medieval period and the modern period: In the Middle Ages, some of the greatest poets were devout churchmen, and many others were gentlefolk who led relatively peaceful, psychologically balanced lives. In the early modern period, however, we have people like Christopher Marlowe—who was allegedly a government spy, was accused of harboring pernicious beliefs, and was stabbed to death in a brawl at age twenty-nine—and Robert Greene, who was a scholar and a prolific author yet died at age thirty-four in utter degradation, already infamous for drunken sloth, marital infidelity, dishonesty, chicanery, gluttony, vanity, and vulgarity.

Even Gerard Manley Hopkins, despite his respectable profession and sincere religious convictions, was not immune to this trend. In the 1880s, after moving to Ireland, he felt isolated and overburdened by his teaching duties. The result was severe depression, and during this time he wrote poems known as the “Terrible Sonnets” (“terrible” here pertaining to their emotional qualities, not their literary merit…). A prevailing theme in these texts is the sense of being abandoned by Christ. The piece below is a powerful, almost dizzying, meditation on the darkness that sometimes envelops the soul—a darkness to which we are all subject, and which is not always easily explained, and for which one might even have a certain affection in this season of Lent, when Easter joy must sometimes be overshadowed by the desolation that preceded it.

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief, 
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring. 
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, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing— 
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.