himself openly without pandering to the tastes of an increasingly agnostic, even atheistic audience, and without at the same time having to look over his shoulder at the possibility of an unsympathetic Jesuit censor, poor Shakespeare had to live and write in an age subject to constant and severe censorship, particularly on matters of politics and religion. Thus the words he puts into the mouth of Hamlet, “But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue!” called for no echo from the mouth of Hopkins. And the words he applies to the mysterious duke-friar in Measure for Measure, “His givings out were of an infinite distance from his true-meant design,” are only applicable to Hopkins in terms of his poetic aim to give precise expression to the inscape and instress he finds in things.
In any case, what distinguishes the plays of Shakespeare from those of all his contemporary dramatists is exactly what distinguishes the poems of Hopkins from those of all his contemporary poets, namely the power of their genius to transcend the narrow limits whether of the Elizabethan or the Victorian age, by means of their respect for and familiarity with the height and depth, the length and breadth of the tradition of Catholic Christendom. That is why, after William Shakespeare, I point unhesitatingly to Gerard Manley Hopkins as the greatest poetic genius in all English literature, even with the inclusion of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Milton.
“Thee, God, I come from, to thee go”
“Thee, God, I come from.” In the beginning of this poem – as in the beginning of the Bible, beginning with the Book of Genesis, where God says, “Let there be light!” and there is light – there is something special, something memorable, something deeply significant.
“Thee, God, I come from.” This is something that gives light and inspiration to the poet, urging him to carry on, as he has begun, so to continue and so to bring his poem to its completion. This is the coming of his heavenly Muse, enabling him to begin in heaven, before coming down, as he must, to earth, and before eventually returning to heaven. This is what Shakespeare says of the poet’s eye that, in a fine frenzy rolling, it first glances from heaven to earth and then back from earth to heaven.
“Thee, God, I come from.” This is also what we say of the poet, as maker and creator of poetry, that he is born, not made. For his poetic inspiration he has to be born in heaven. But then for the material of his poetry he has to come down to earth, while still keeping his eyes fixed on heaven. This may not be what we find in every poet, some of whom seem to be less heavenly, more earthly than others. But in them, as in everyone else, we have to look from what merely seems to be to what really is. “Seems, madam!” as Hamlet expostulates with his mother, “Nay, it is! I know not seems.”
“Thee, God, I come from.” All the same, among so many poets, surely Gerard Manley Hopkins is supreme in this respect. More than any other poet, more even than Shakespeare, he begins and ends his poems in heaven. More than any other poet, he is led by his heavenly Muse to raise his eyes from man to God. So he begins the simplest of his poems with the simple invocation, “Thee, God, I come from.” So he continues, as it were looking from the beginning immediately to the end, “To thee go.”
In this respect Hopkins is more fortunate than most other poets, including Shakespeare. “Alas, ‘tis true I have gone here and there,” laments that great poet, “And made myself a motley to the view.” Poor Shakespeare, as poet and dramatist, he had to keep his readers and spectators ever in view. He had to write for them and for their passing fads and fashions, and so he “gored his own thoughts, sold cheap what was most dear.” He was a slave to the Elizabethan stage. So he has come down from heavenly fame to earthly posterity as an Elizabethan dramatist, if the greatest among them. All the while, his heavenly Muse has had to remain hidden, like the “glorious morning”, soon concealed by the “basest clouds” and their “ugly rack”. “To thee go.”
Not so, however, was it with Hopkins. He was fortunately unable to publish any of his poems in his lifetime. He was unable to submit them to anyone apart from a “fit audience, though but few”. In his eyes, much as he might have liked to bring his poems to the notice of the world, he was obliged to write above all – like the craftsmen working on the bosses of mediaeval cathedrals – for a heavenly audience. Ironically, this left him free to begin and end his poems with God. At the same time, he could apply to himself the equally inspired words of Roman Virgil to the god of wisdom, “A te principium, tibi desinam.” “From thee is my beginning, and for thee my end.”
Such in his eyes is the manifestation of that “lovely-felicitous Providence”, which he further describes as “Finger of a tender of, O of a feathery delicacy”. Such in his eyes is the love of the heavenly Father. Under his feathers takes place all that takes place on earth, including the tragedies – such as being left “a lonely began” – no less than the comedies. “To thee go.”
So when Hopkins died in Dublin in 1889, and when he was buried with his fellow-Jesuits in their communal grave at Glasnevin, he was unknown. Nor did he come to be known till thirty years later. Then at last, in 1918, his friend Robert Bridges, to whom he had entrusted the manuscripts of his poems, considered the time ripe for their publication from the Oxford University Press. “To thee go.”
Then at last Hopkins could say of his poems, what he says in one of them concerning the incarnate Word of God, “Now burn, new born to the world.” Before then, he had been free during his earthly life to compose his poems for the sake of, and in the sight of, God alone, the angels and his few poetic friends. But now, when they were all finished, as he had meant them to be, without having had to make himself “a motley to the view”, they were at last ready to be presented to “the yet unknowing world”. Even so, they appeared to many readers as purely religious poems. Even so, they seemed to belong, in the supercilious eyes of T.S. Eliot, to a minor genre. But now, in the outcome, they challenge comparison with the poems and plays of Shakespeare, not to mention the poems and plays of Eliot himself. “To thee go.”
Beginning and ending as his poems do with God – why, what a poetic revolution is this in a world that has largely come to make do without God! Critics may speak of Hopkins’ revolution in prosody, in poetic theory, in the vocabulary, grammar and syntax of English. But what are these matters if not minor in relation to the revolution thus silently effected in bringing the word of God back into English poetry. It is just what the poet put in the climax of his Wreck of the Deutschland, “Our King back, Oh, upon English souls!” “To thee go.”
In our age the secularization of England has almost run its course. The name of God is no longer sanctified but positively avoided, even by believers, in public life. Yet here in our age is a poet who isn’t afraid to put God openly, if not blatantly, at the heart and centre of his poetry! All the same, instead of being pushed aside and ignored, as well he might have been, in today’s literary world, Hopkins has come to be acclaimed as one of the greatest of England’s poets, he who died in such obscurity in Dublin, hardly known for his poetry even by his fellow Jesuits. He, with his spiritual mentor John Henry Newman, may well be seen as two living miracles of the modern world, between them revealing God to men and women today. “To thee go.”
“Thou mastering me God!”
“Thou mastering me.” “I – Thee!” Can there be any relation, any contrast, deeper or more heart-rending than this? “O that you would rend the heavens and come down!” Such is the heart-felt prayer of the prophet. All too often the heavens seem to be made of bronze. The face of God himself seems to be made of bronze. The poet himself once felt his prayer “lost in desert ways”, his hymn “in the vast silence” dead.
“Thou mastering me.” Yet we know, we believe that this is not so. The face of God is what we seek, even through heaven, even in spite of heaven. The silence of these vast spaces may frighten us, even terrorize us.
