crispy sparkling chains with pearly shadows up to the edges. At sunset, wh. was in a grey bank with moist gold dabs and racks, the whole round of skyline had level clouds naturally lead-colour but the upper parts ruddied, some more, some less rosy. Spits or gleams braided or built in with slanting pellet flakes made their way. Through such clouds anvil-shaped pink ones and up-blown fleece-of-wool flat-topped dangerous-looking pieces.
Hopkins’s journals, like his letters, contain the same jolting, irregular phrases which will spring into the rhythm of his mature poetry.
In 1874 Hopkins moved to St. Beuno’s College in Wales to pursue the theologate, and there he wrote “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” His journal stopped. He then entered high gear as a poet who wrote ten major poems in less than one year, was ordained a priest (1877), left Wales, and did much apparently grueling parish work. In preparation for Final Vows, which Jesuits take thirteen years after First Vows, he made tertianship (1881–82) and another Thirty-Day Retreat, during which he experienced a nervous breakdown. After Final Vows, he moved to Dublin (1884) to teach at Newman’s failing Catholic University, sank into a five-year depression, wrote the “terrible sonnets,” wrote “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire” (1888), and died of typhoid fever at the age of forty-four in 1889.
This terse chronology omits the early triumphs that rested on Gerard Manley Hopkins like a bright mantle until he became a Catholic; after that, usually, when he undertook priestly work, he seemed doomed to profound exhaustion. Another convert, Evelyn Waugh, explains that there was nothing pretty about English Catholicism:
My readers outside England should understand that the aesthetic appeal of the Church of England is unique and peculiar in those islands. Elsewhere a first interest in the Catholic Church is often kindled in the convert’s imagination by the splendors of her worship in contrast with the bleakness and meanness of the Protestant sects. In England the pull is all the other way. The medieval cathedrals and churches, the rich ceremonies that surround the monarchy, the historic titles of Canterbury and York, the social organization of the country parishes, the traditional culture of Oxford and Cambridge, the liturgy composed in the heyday of English prose style – all these are the property of the Church of England, while Catholics meet in modern buildings, often of deplorable design, and are usually served by simple Irish missionaries.8
Arguably Roman Catholicism taught Hopkins more than private drawing lessons, prep school, or Oxford could have about being a great deviser of major art. His celebration of the nature he observed approaches but skirts the pantheism of his Romantic predecessors. The way he saw beauty caused lines like this to break from him: “The heart rears wings … / and hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.” His former schoolteacher Richard Watson Dixon, an Anglican clergyman, tried to console Hopkins into thinking of his verses “as a means of serving … religion.” But Hopkins replied that writing poetry was “a waste of time.” Surely no other major poet has ever thought of his own work as a waste of time.
In this fallen setting, Hopkins doubted himself. Never, however, did he seem to doubt his conversion. And the self-compression and self-restraint required by his vocation, the “holding of himself back,” would become the best hammer and anvil for his genius. He became, in the judgment of others, isolated, melancholic, and idiosyncratic. Yet his letters were energetic, his journal entries vital and inventive, and his relatively few mature poems fantastically ambitious. The preeminent detail about both Hopkins and his extraordinary body of writing is surely that he foregrounded theological considerations. For him, a world without a living God would have been unthinkable.
When Hopkins was young and merely a highly strung Anglican, he felt strong loves and delights: to his mother he wrote from Oxford (1864), “Except for much work and that I can never keep my hands cool, I am almost too happy.” He went to wine parties every day and was described as “popular with classmates.” Although within two years he would leave Oxford and abandon the future he surely would have enjoyed there, he never lost his gentleman’s loyalty to the place. In 1880, fourteen years after becoming a Catholic, he wrote to his Oxford friend Mowbray Baillie, “Not to love my university would be to undo the very buttons of my being.”
And yet, for all this zest and apparent joie de vivre at the time of his conversion, when he entered the passage in his diary, resolving “No pudding on Sundays” and other little foreswearings, he demonstrated a personality apparently born with a predilection for difficulty. Indeed, his brand of quaint asceticism was popular among the post-Tractarians at Oxford. Dr. Pusey himself kept custody of the eyes. But as Hopkins made his pious resolutions, he also wrote in his diary, “Grey clouds in knops” and “Eyelids like leaves, petals, caps, tufted hats, handkerchiefs, sleeves, gloves” – like the verbal virtuoso he was unconsciously rehearsing to become.
E. H. Coleridge, grandson of the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was a religiously inclined classmate of Hopkins at Balliol. The day before Hopkins recorded his Lenten resolution to eschew pudding and so on, he wrote to young Coleridge an important credo which illuminates not only his sense of being “called,” but of being called to read the world through the lens of the Incarnation and of the sacramental view that constantly mirrors it: “I think that the trivialness of life is … done away with by the Incarnation.… Our Lord submitted not only to the pains of life, the fasting, scourging, crucifixion etc., or the insults, as the mocking, blindfolding, spitting etc., but also to the mean and trivial accidents of humanity.”
Roman Catholicism in general, and the Jesuit order in particular, offered Hopkins elements that he craved constitutionally, and then provided him with the follow-through to become the self he was meant to be – an ingenious but hidden poet, a priest exhausted by his own scrupulosity, a “Jack, joke, poor potsherd” with bleeding hemorrhoids and failing eyesight, an “immortal diamond.” He was destined to realize his purpose in the doctrines of incarnation, transubstantiation, and resurrection; in the radical ascesis of The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola; and in the Mass itself.
When, as a boy, he made his little brothers eat flowers, this action proved predictive of his lifelong mind: he said he became a Roman Catholic mostly because the Sacrament of the Altar contained the real presence of Christ, and this he had to eat. He felt every step of the way a need to instress, to take in and gulp down, the proof of God’s presence. Whether he could also express that proof as a ministry to others was uncertain. Before taking holy orders, at age twenty-four, he wrote to Baillie: “I want to write still and as a priest I very likely can do that too, not so freely as I shd. have liked, e.g., nothing or little in the verse way, but no doubt what would best serve the cause of my religion.”
Eventually, he did produce great verse, and in all of it nature and theology blend like combustible chemicals producing a sparkling solution under the influence of high heat. His entire career, poetic and spiritual, launched a campaign against cliché and blur. He chose to suppress his instinct to write poetry to serve a “higher end,” and yet he managed to produce great art.
Poems
(1864–1868)
Barnfloor and Winepress
“And he said, If the Lord do not help thee, whence shall I help thee? out of the barnfloor, or out of the winepress?”
— 2 Kings 6:27
Thou that on sin’s wages starvest,
Behold we have the joy in Harvest:
For us was gathered the first-fruits
For us was lifted from the roots,
Sheaved
