Gerald Manly Hopkins

It is possible to put readers of Hopkins too much at their ease,” F. R. Leavis warned in New Bearings in English Poetry (1932). He held that the difficulty of Hopkins’s poems was a quality inseparable from the issues involved, not a problem to be dismissed or a perversity to be regretted. But his warning also applies to biographers: they, too, want to put readers too much at their ease, making them feel that the narrated life encompasses the particular writings and resolves their opacities. Paul Mariani goes further. Among the several biographers of Hopkins, he is the most pious. He evidently thinks that an ideal biography would consist of judiciously selected quotations from the poet’s letters, poems, journals, sermons, and spiritual exercises.[1] There would be no critical distance between poet and biographer. The “historic present tense” of the narration—“Christmas he spends at Manresa with his community”—keeps Hopkins and Mariani at one in an intimate fellowship. If the poet did not raise a particular question, the question should not now arise.
Several issues brought up by earlier critics of Hopkins can be set aside, apparently, because Hopkins did not mention them. I note a few such. One: In Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), William Empson took the word “Buckle!” in Hopkins’s “The Windhover” as an instance of the seventh type of ambiguity, in which “the two meanings of the word, the two values of the ambiguity, are the two opposite meanings defined by the context, so that the total effect is to show a fundamental division in the writer’s mind.” In other words: poet and priest were in contradiction. In still other words: being a priest damaged Hopkins’s being a poet. (Empson hated Christianity; he thought it blood lust.) But Geoffrey Hill has maintained that “there is no evidence that [Hopkins] ever sided with his genius against his vocation.” That makes for a critical debate, not to be found in Mariani’s book. Two: It has often been maintained that Hopkins was gay. Was he gay in desire or act or not at all? Was he in love with Digby Mackworth Dolben, whom he met only once, in February 1865, and who died by drowning in July 1867? Mariani does not ask the question. Three: Was Hopkins’s sense of self so acute as to be a danger to his soul? On August 20, 1880 during his retreat at Liverpool and while he was pondering the Scriptum Primum Oxoniense of Scotus and the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius, he wrote:
I find myself both as man and as myself something most determined and distinctive, at pitch, more distinctive and higher pitched than anything else I see. When I consider my selfbeing, my consciousness and feeling of myself, that taste of myself, of I and me above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnutleaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to another man (as when I was a child I used to ask myself: What must it be to be someone else?). Nothing else in nature comes near this unspeakable stress of pitch, distinctiveness, and selving, this selfbeing of my own: searching nature I taste self but at one tankard, that of my own being.
And in the poem “As kingfishers catch fire” we read:
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves—goes its self; myself it speaks and spells, Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
Is this not a problem, a spiritual risk, if we take seriously the humility recommended by the Sermon on the Mount?
Most of Mariani’s book follows Hopkins’s life step by step or at least month by month, quoting or paraphrasing the poet. When he adds something of his own to a quotation, he often commits an indelicacy. The journal for March 13, 1872 reads in full:
After a time of trial and especially a morning in which I did not know which way to turn as the account of De Rancé’s final conversion was being read at dinner the verse Qui confidunt in Domino sicut mons Sion which satisfied him and resolved him to enter his abbey of La Trappe by the mercy of God came strongly home to me too, so that I was choked for a little while and could not keep in my tears.
We want to understand Hopkins’s quandary, “a morning in which I did not know which way to turn.” He was not yet an ordained priest, but he was four years into his training. Mariani’s version of the journal entry repeats the reference but doesn’t clarify it, and at the end it takes a sudden flight of fancy:
March 13, and still winter. He is in the dining hall as the community listens to an account of de Rancé’s conversion. It has been a time of trial and a particularly difficult day for him, he knows. No doubt news of Challis’s apostasy and the silence of so many of his old Oxford friends as of his family troubles him here in this flint-backed northern country, so that he does not know now which way to turn. Suddenly he hears the lector read the words Qui confidunt in Domino sicut mons Sion, the opening verse of Psalm 15: Whoever trusts in the Lord is like Mount Sion. It is the verse which hit home for de Rancé “and resolved him to enter his monastery [sic] of La Trappe,” and now, on this evening, “by the mercy of God,” it comes “strongly home” to Hopkins as well, so that he suddenly finds himself choking back tears and then, there at the table, weeping, Lord, he realizes, to whom shall I turn if not you?
There is not a word of evidence for this last turn: It is a pious fancy.
Gerard Manley Hopkins was born on July 28, 1844, at Stratford, Essex, first child of Kate and Manley Hopkins, well-to-do parents, Anglican by conviction: Manley was a successful businessman in marine insurance. When Gerard was eight, the family moved to a more salubrious address, Oak Hill, Hampstead, and he attended the local day school. Two years later, he became a boarder at Highgate School. On April 17, 1863, he entered Oxford on an Exhibition at Balliol, and in proper sequence was coached in philosophy by Walter Pater, Robert Williams, and T. H. Green. He had already started writing poems, but did not try to have them published: being a poet was presumably a more rarefied state than being a published poet. In the summer of 1866 he became convinced that he should become a Roman Catholic, despite the distress this would cause his parents. He wrote in his journal for July 17: “It was this night I believe but possibly the next that I saw clearly the impossibility of staying in the Church of England.” On October 21, he was received into the Roman Church by the most distinguished English convert, John Henry Newman. On November 4, he was confirmed by Archbishop Manning. On May 2, 1866 he resolved to become a priest and nine days later burned all his poems as being inconsistent with that vocation. “Slaughter of the innocents,” he wrote in his journal. On September 7, 1868, he entered the Jesuit Novitiate at Roehampton for the first two years of a long training. He became a priest of the Jesuit Order during a fraternal retreat that took place from September 21–23, 1877. His first duties were mainly parish work, but, gradually, he was directed to teach Greek and Latin at Stonyhurst and other religious houses. He ended his career as Professor of Greek and Latin Literature at University College, Dublin, where he spent five on-the-whole fretful and complaining years, and where he died of typhoid on June 8, 1889. Not quite forty-five years old.
New Bearings was the book from which I gained my first sense of modern poetry, with Hopkins, Pound, and Eliot as the crucial poets. Hardy, Yeats, Stevens, and Frost came later, making awkward adjustments necessary in the critical relations among the major poets. I was in no danger of being at my ease with Hopkins. On the one hand, I couldn’t decide whether he was the earliest of the moderns or a Victorian poet of some bizarre kind. Born in 1844, he died in 1889: How could he be modern? On the other hand, his language—diction, syntax, prosody—wasn’t Victorian, he didn’t write at all like Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Clough, or any other Victorian poet:
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me Thy wring-earth right foot rock? Lay a lionlimb against me?
He started writing poems when he was about twenty and became an irrefutable poet in 1876 with “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” He continued writing poems till he died, but he didn’t try to have any of them published after the “Wreck” was rejected. Leavis speculated that if the poems had been published when they were written, “they would have fertilized some young talent and we should not now be contemplating the futility of the Georgian attempt to regenerate English poetry.” Hopkins’s friend Robert Bridges, half-hearted custodian of the poems, held off publishing them till 1918, in the hope of finding determined readers; they attracted a few such, notably I. A. Richards. Charles Williams edited a second edition in 1930, bringing Hopkins into modern poetry, however belatedly: Some alert readers came forward, including Empson, Yvor Winters, and Allen Tate. Scholarly editions followed in 1948 and 1967.
Leavis announced that Hopkins was a major poet, but he didn’t indicate the principles on which the poet’s style was founded—apart from saying that he was sensitive to the spirit of the English language with Shakespeare as his master. That doesn’t strike me as persuasive. If I were to take Hopkins’s word for it, I would call Dryden his master, and Milton his fated adversary. Some years later, I found myself pointed in a more helpful direction by Austin Warren’s Rage for Order (1948), which emphasized Hopkins’s affiliation as a distinctly English poet, a Saxonizing nationalist who deplored the Norman Conquest and, of course, the Protestant Reformation for their sinister impact on the English language—not to speak of their more lethal consequences.
Much as Hopkins admired Shakespeare, he resented the hospitality extended by English writers—in the period between Chaucer and Milton—to Italian, French, and Spanish words. English ought to have been kept up by poets mindful of its origin in Anglo-Saxon: It should have been developed from that source in appropriately indigenous ways. Hopkins was late in learning Anglo-Saxon, but he gathered enough of it to have his prejudice confirmed by reading G. P. Marsh’s Lectures on the English Language (1859), William Barnes’s An Outline of English Speech-Craft (1878), R. C. Trench’s English, Past and Present (1855), and other books by devotees of “what English might have been.” What England should have remained was Catholic. Hopkins thought an English Catholic speech could still be brought forward, and he wrote as if the Reformation were not definitive. As in the last stanza of “The Wreck of the Deutschland”:
Dame, at our door Drówned, and among oúr shoals, Remember us in the roads, the heaven-haven of the reward: Our Kíng back, Oh, upon Énglish sóuls! Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east, More brightening her, rare-dear Britain, as his reign rolls, Pride, rose, prince, hero of us, high-priest, Our héarts’ charity’s héarth’s fire, our thóughts’ chivalry’s thróng’s Lórd.
Not that he was always consistent. He indulged himself in the French chivalric categories of “The Windhover:”
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king- dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dáwn-drawn Falcon, in his riding… .
But even in that poem he hoped to counteract the Protestant character of English poetry by composing a Catholic music for the lyric, devising compound adjectives—“the rolling level underneath him steady air”—and breaking the standard iambic pentameter; as Eric Griffiths put it in The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry (1989): “His own style of word pitted against word, a polemic quality in the lyric voice, as the poems accumulate combatant sounds through which the voice will eventually come.” He did not concede that the English language was decisively what it had become in the form of Standard English; if it might have been different, it could still be different.
But the critical intervention that helped me most—or seemed to, for many years—was Kenneth Burke’s A Rhetoric of Motives (1950). A new motive entered Hopkins’s mind, Burke said, when a superior suggested that a poem might be written in commemoration of the nuns who had lost their lives in the wreck of the Deutschland: “Here, of a sudden, was a way whereby he could welcome the very gift he had rejected.” He could take notes for the glory of God. He was already of Ruskin’s party in paying attention to the natural world. “The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world,” Ruskin said, “is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way”:
Hopkins could now fill his notebooks with minute observations of natural objects. For if he saw in them, or thought he saw in them, an essence derivable from God, the more accurate his study in the empirical and positivist sense, the more devotional he could be in his conviction that these objects were signatures of the divine presence. Nature could serve as a kind of Christly pontification between the observer and God. If he, in a Schellingesque identification of subject and object, could identify himself as agent with particulars of the natural scene, and if (in his somewhat idealistic interpretation of Scotist haecceitas) he could identify the particularity of natural objects with the divine, when all was going well he would have a happy communion of self, nature, and God.
There are many passages of such note-taking in Hopkins, where he renders the natural scene human by making it holy; by saving it, or parts of it, from the mechanization imposed on it by the Industrial Revolution. On September 24, 1870, he wrote in his journal:
First saw the Northern Lights. My eye was caught by beams of light and dark very like the crown of horny rays the sun makes behind a cloud. At first I thought of silvery cloud until I saw that these were more luminous and did not dim the clearness of the stars in the Bear. They rose slightly radiating thrown out from the earthline. Then I saw soft pulses of light one after another rise and pass upwards arched in shape but waveringly and with the arch broken. They seemed to float, not following the warp of the sphere as falling stars look to do but free though concentrical with it. This busy working of nature wholly independent of the earth and seeming to go on in a strain of time not reckoned by our reckoning of days and years but simpler and as if correcting the preoccupation of the world by being preoccupied with and appealing to and dated to the day of judgment was like a new witness to God and filled me with delightful fear.
A strenuous act of mind brings him from the Northern Lights to delightful fear—otherwise the sublime—that he feels in the presence of this “new witness to God.” Burke says that the quality of Hopkins’s attention to such scenes in nature amounts to prayer. And so it does, when all is going well. It is as if he recalled the natural scenes and transcribed them in his journal, praying with pen and ink. In “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection,” note-taking becomes incantation. The notes have already been taken, so Hopkins can take them for granted: “Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows.”
But there are other passages in which the witness of the natural world gives dismally bewildered evidence. In a sermon preached at St. Francis Xavier’s, Liverpool, on October 25, 1880, Hopkins told his congregation that if you search the whole world “you will find it a million-million fold contrivance of providence planned for our use and patterned for our admiration.” But then he added a seemingly interminable passage that dwells on the imperfections of the same providence:
But yet this providence is imperfect, plainly imperfect. The sun shines too long and withers the harvest, the rain is too heavy and rots it or in floods spreading washes it away; the air and water carry in their currents the poison of disease; there are poison plants, venomous snakes and scorpions; the beasts our subjects rebel, not only the bloodthirsty tiger that slaughters yearly its thousands, but even the bull will gore and the stallion bite or strike; at night the moon sometimes has no light to give, at others the clouds darken her; she measures time most strangely and gives us reckonings most difficult to make and never exact enough; the coalpits and oilwells are full of explosions, fires, and outbreaks of sudden death, the sea of storms and wrecks, the snow has avalanches, the earth landslips; we contend with cold, want, weakness, hunger, disease, death, and often we fight a losing battle, never a triumphant one; everything is full of fault, flaw, imperfection, shortcoming; as many marks as there are of God’s wisdom in providing for us so many marks there may be set against them of more being needed still, of something having made of this very providence a shattered frame and a broken web.
It is no surprise that he released his congregation from haggling with God over such imperfection: “Let us not now enquire, brethren, why this should be; we most sadly feel and know that so it is.” On another occasion he maintained that “weakness, ill health, every cross is a help” toward spiritual enrichment. But in the sermon, he went on to say that God has provided “one great means” to make up for “the shortcomings of His general and common providence,” giving each of us “His guardian angel”:
He has given, the Scripture says, his angels commands about thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. And we learn from what our Lord said to his disciples that every child, that every human being, however low and of little account, is given in charge to a blessed and heavenly spirit, a guardian angel: Beware, said he, of despising one of these little ones (which means not only children but all who are in any other way little or of little account): I tell you their angels always see the face of my Father in heaven.
Laboring to explain what my guardian angel does for me, and doesn’t, Hopkins ended by conceding that “God’s providence is dark and we cannot hope to know the why and wherefore of all that is allowed to befall us.” I recall from my childhood a prayer, which I said when instructed to do so:
Angel of God, my Guardian dear, To whom God’s love commits me here: Ever this night be at my side To light, to guard, to rule and guide … Amen.
But in the thousands of homilies to which I have listened at Mass in the meantime, I have never heard guardian angels mentioned or invoked. (Nor have I since childhood called upon my angel for safekeeping.) I wonder what Hopkins’s Liverpudlians made of this sermon.
I remain tender toward Kenneth Burke’s formula for reading Hopkins. I only wish it covered all the occasions. It doesn’t help with the “terrible” sonnets or “(Carrion Comfort)”; these remember Job, the fourth Act of King Lear and Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy.” “(Carrion Comfort)” begins:
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.
Empson said of the opening of Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy”—“No, no! go not to Lethe, neither twist/ Wolf’s bane”—that “somebody, or some force in the poet’s mind, must have wanted to go to Lethe very much, if it took four negatives in the first line to stop them.” It took three “nots” in the first line to keep Hopkins from feasting on Despair. Colloquial English would have said “No!” rather than the first “Not.”
… scanWith darksome devouring eyes my bruiséd bones? and fan, O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?
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, chéer. Cheer whóm though? The héro whose héaven-handling flung me, fóot trod Me? or mé that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.
The poem recalls Job and Matthew 3:12, but mostly Keats on melancholy.
In an essay “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” T. W. Adorno argues that “the lyric work is always the subjective expression of a social antagonism … its withdrawal into itself, its self-absorption, its detachment from the social surface, is socially motivated behind the author’s back.” That marks the problem with Mariani’s biography. It gives the social antagonisms—usually by quoting from Hopkins’s letters and journals—so far as the poet encounters them directly: Anglican and Roman Catholic; family resentments; the employed and unemployed workers; middle class and the proletariat, the country and the city; the English language and the better thing it might have become; frustrations in the Order of Jesus. But the book doesn’t give any sense of the social forces that crowd in behind the poet’s back. If Mariani had stood even a few yards away from Hopkins, he would have seen these and divined their mutual bearing. He evidently preferred the intimacy of speaking in Hopkins’s own voice and the distinctive pleasure of quoting such an idiosyncratic writer.