The Priestly Poems of G.M. Hopkins
Peter Milward, S.J.
Copyright © 2012 Peter Milward, S.J.
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2012-12-01
Introduction
It may truly be said of Gerard Manley Hopkins that, for all his complaints to the contrary, he enjoyed the inestimable advantage of having been unable to get most of his poems published before his premature death in 1889. Even then he had to remain in the realm of the blessed for another thirty years before the time was judged right by his all too critical friend Robert Bridges for the publication of his Poems by the Oxford University Press in 1918. And even then it took another twelve years before they went into a second edition thanks to Charles Williams in 1930, and another eighteen years before the more authoritative third edition was brought out by W.H. Gardner in 1948. Only then may it be said that the poet at long last came into his own, and even then it was not so much in his native England as in an American exile, according to the sad saying of Jesus that “No man is a prophet in his own country.”
Then, we may ask, what was so advantageous to Hopkins in such a long period of waiting for world recognition of his poems? It was simply because this deprived him of any incentive to write for his Victorian contemporaries or to adapt his thoughts and words to their narrowly insular tastes. As G.K. Chesterton truly says of them in his magisterial Victorian Age in Literature, the authors of that age, for all the world-wide extent of the boasted British Empire, were all so narrowly imperialistic, looking on the world around them with red-tinted spectacles and looking down on so many less favoured countries with self-satisfied complacency. It was from these contemporaries that Hopkins cut himself off first by conversion to the Catholic Church in 1866, thanks to the mediation of John Henry Newman (the least narrow-minded of the Victorians, in Chesterton’s opinion), secondly by admission into the Society of Jesus two years later.
What is more, on that occasion he sacrificed all his previous poems (to the best of his ability), with the resolution to compose no more except under obedience to his Jesuit superiors. So there followed seven years of “elected silence”, during which he came under the influence of Ignatius and the Spiritual Exercises, and the scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages, especially as he discovered it in the writings of Duns Scotus. This all provided him with a viewpoint that extended far beyond the narrow provincialism (alias imperialism) of the Victorian age. For the British Empire, however far flung it may have become, (in Dr. Johnson’s words) “from China to Peru”, only dated back to 1600 with the charter granted by Queen Elizabeth to the East India Company, whereas through the Catholic Church and the Society of Jesus Hopkins was at one with the more truly ancient and universal ideal of Christendom. No wonder he felt out of touch with his Victorian contemporaries, and no wonder he had to wait till the Modern age to come into his own.
In his poems subsequent to his seven years of “elected silence”, therefore, Hopkins had no need – such as the Anglo-Catholic T.S. Eliot had in his time – to appeal to the limited outlook and tastes of his contemporaries, but he could freely write as the spirit moved him, as he states in the opening stanza of his newly minted poem, “Thou mastering me God… Over again I feel thy finger and find thee!” The whole of this poem, inspired by the news of a recent shipwreck involving the drowning of five Franciscan nuns, reads like a prayer raised from the heart of the poet to the heart of God himself, from the above-quoted exordium to the double doxology at the end of each Part. Yet as a whole The Wreck of the Deutschland isn’t so much a prayer to God as a meditation in God’s presence, in the style of the meditations proposed in the Spiritual Exercises, on the mysterious ways of divine providence with human beings.
That was but the beginning, now that the poet’s mouth was opened in a new song, of a series of poems, now mostly composed in the form of the sonnet. First, what we have from the poet’s pen are those called “bright sonnets”, in which he responds to the beauties he perceives in the world of Nature as proceeding from him “whose beauty is past change”, in a movement from the Ignatian motto “Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam” (or AMDG) to the other motto “Laus Deo Semper” (LDS). Then, after a lapse of time (another seven years) and place (from England to Ireland), we have a further series of “dark sonnets”, as the poet reflects on his inner sufferings as Man and feels not the presence but the absence of God. Finally, in one notable sonnet, arguably the longest sonnet ever written, entitled with corresponding length, “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire, and of the comfort of the Resurrection,” we find the poet looking beyond the changes of Nature, which seem to involve Man himself, to the Resurrection.
In this he is following not only the thought of the Greek “weeping philosopher” Heraclitus, but also the teaching of Christ as interpreted for him by the Franciscan theologian Bonaventure whose Itinerarium Mentis ad Deum proceeds from the affirmative way of Nature, through the negative way of Man, to the eminent way of God – or in the Dominican pattern of the Holy Rosary by way of the Joyful, through the Sorrowful, to the Glorious Mysteries.
Such is the basic structure of what may be called “the priestly poems” of Hopkins, beginning with the time of his study of theology at St.Beuno’s College in North Wales by way of preparation for his ordination to the priesthood in 1877. All too often a contrast has been drawn between “the poet” and “the priest” in Hopkins, as if he was primarily an aesthete (as if under the influence of his tutor at Oxford Walter Pater), subsequently obliged to buckle down as priest and Jesuit to the demands of an ascetic vocation. It is a contrast noted in the two parts of the sonnet form as used by him, the descriptive and the reflective. Yet it is precisely this priestly and Jesuit formation that enters into all Hopkins’ mature poems following on the sacrifice of his juvenilia and the ensuing elected silence, and continuing in them till the day of his death. It may be said that without this formation and its implicit asceticism (and, I may add, mysticism), Hopkins would never have achieved the poetic greatness he did on entering into his own in the Modern age.
It will, moreover, be noted that in the course of these meditations on the priestly poems of Hopkins I have drawn no less on the plays and poems of Shakespeare than on the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius or the writings of the medieval thinkers from Augustine to A Kempis or the Bible itself. Yet never once does Hopkins, unlike his spiritual mentor Newman or the contemporary Shakespeare scholar Richard Simpson, express an opinion on the religion of Shakespeare, even while making liberal use of his phraseology. For him Shakespeare is the one inspired master of the English language, if followed at a distance by Milton, in contrast to his closer contemporaries Wordsworth and Tennyson who are all too ready to relapse into what he despises as “Parnassian”, that kind of poetic diction which requires no special inspiration.
One particular point of comparison between the two poets in which they may be seen as enjoying an inestimable advantage over their contemporaries is also a point of contrast, in that, whereas Hopkins had the advantage of never having had his poems published in his lifetime, Shakespeare had the advantage of never having been subjected to a university education, and so he could become (as Milton calls him) “Fancy’s child, warbling his native woodnotes wild”. Then, too, whereas Hopkins was free to express his meditations on Nature, Man and God in all his priestly poems, poor Shakespeare was obliged to earn his daily bread as a professional playwright, making himself, as he complains, “a motley to the
