sonnet, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” But human language, including poetic language, is full of such banality. Only, whether it is objectionably banal or not depends not so much on the particular word or phrase as on what follows
“Nothing is so beautiful.” In the one case, Hopkins goes on to speak more precisely of springtime, “When weeds in wheels shoot long and lovely and lush”. What is that but a downright rejection of banality? In the other case, Shakespeare goes on to reject the expected affirmative answer to “Shall I?” Instead, he follows it up with an implicit denial in the form of a comparative, “Thou art more lovely and more temperate.”
“Nothing is so beautiful.”In either case the seeming banality of the opening line takes on a deeper, unsuspected meaning, awakening the reader to a deeper, unsuspected reality. For reality, especially when it proceeds from divine inspiration, cannot but be shocking. It may be compared to an alarm-clock, or to Haydn’s “Surprise Symphony”
“Nothing is so beautiful.” Thus one might say of Hopkins’ opening line, “Nothing is so shocking as ‘Nothing’!” In beginning with “Nothing”, he is almost echoing the opening response of Cordelia to her father Lear’s question, “What can you say to draw A third more opulent than your sisters?” Of course, to such a question framed in such mercenary terms she can’t say anything. She can only say, “Nothing!” Then there is indeed nothing banal in her “Nothing!” Rather, it resonates throughout the play of King Lear, till she may be said to take it back with her other response to his word of recognition. Then, awakening from his madness, he exclaims, “Do not laugh at me. For as I am a man, I think this lady To be my child Cordelia.” And then she gives him her affirmative response, with no conditions attached, “And so I am, I am!” So she moves from her opening negation to her closing affirmation, from non-being to being, from “No!” to “Yes!”
“Nothing is so beautiful.” Yet there remains the objection of banality. After all, what can be so banal as “No!” followed by “Yes!”? What can be so banal as negation followed by affirmation? Isn’t it basic to human grammar? Isn’t it basic to the conjugation of the present tense of the verb “To be”? Isn’t it what we are saying all the time, in season and out of season, till we get tired and prefer to relapse into an equally banal silence? Even then, even when we fall asleep in the banality of silence, we can’t help coming upon a depth of unsuspected meaning as well in being as in non-being.
“Nothing.” First, we may note how the “Nothing!” of Cordelia draws down the sound and fury of her father’s “Nothing will come of nothing!” Here we may note that we have two Nothing’s. That of Cordelia is a full Nothing, implying what she has just told the audience in an aside, “Love, and be silent!” Like Jesus before his accusers, she has nothing to say. So she says nothing, she is silent. That of Lear, however, is an empty Nothing, by which he communicates his own nothingness to his good daughter, so as (in his intention) to deprive her of everything.
“Nothing.” Only, what Lear fails to see in his anger, the King of France sees in Cordelia. Now he greets her with the words, “Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich, being poor, Most choice, forsaken, and most loved, despised.” In other words, in her he sees a figure of the Man of Sorrows, who in becoming man has taken on himself the form of a servant and emptied himself of his divine glory. In her he sees what Paul calls the divine “kenosis”, not just emptying himself but even annihilating himself, making himself nothing. In the subsequent words of the mysterious Gentleman, she is the “one daughter, Who redeems nature from the general curse Which twain have brought her to.” But then, on her return to England and in her reunion with Lear, she rises as it were above the level of human Non-being to that of divine Being with a seeming usurpation of the divine name, in her new words, “And so I am, I am!”
“Nothing.” All this, and even more, is what Shakespeare reveals in the meaning of “Nothing!” in his dramatic masterpiece of King Lear. Whether Hopkins has this revelation in mind when he opens his poem on “Spring” with the word “Nothing” may perhaps be doubted. Yet to the Christian mind this is the meaning implicit in both “Nothing” and “I am”, however banal the two words may appear at first sight.
“Nothing.” True, Cordelia says nothing more than “Nothing!” in her opening response to her father, whereas Hopkins goes on to complete the sentence he has in mind, “Nothing is so beautiful as Spring!” It is almost the same as saying, “Spring is more beautiful than anything else!” Then we may examine him with reference to other things that may be considered more beautiful than spring.
“Nothing is so beautiful.” What about the moment when, as the poet declares in “God’s Grandeur”, “morning at the brown brink eastward springs”, as in a brief temporal spring at the beginning of each day? Or what about the starry heavens which appear after the sun has set “off the black West”, and which evoke the poet’s enthusiasm in “The Starlight Night”, with his opening cries, “Look at the stars! Look, look up at the skies!”
“Nothing is so beautiful.” Thus once we take him up on his “Nothing”, with instance after instance forcing him to admit his exaggeration, we may seem to be underlining his banality, undermining his self-confidence. All the same, he may respond with what he has already admitted in his Wreck of the Deutschland, “No, but it was not these!” Or we ourselves may come to his tongue-tied assistance with the other words of T.S. Eliot, in his “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, “That is not what I meant at all. That is not it at all.” Then, we may ask, what is it that Hopkins has in mind?
“Nothing is so beautiful.” What Hopkins has in mind is surely what Paul says to the Corinthians, “Star differs from star in glory.” Surely, when he concentrates his attention on the hour of sunrise, he may well exclaim, “Nothing is so beautiful as the sun rising!” And he may well say the same of the hour of sunset. And he may well say the same of the stars as they come out of “the black West” and fill him with even greater enthusiasm. And then he may well echo Paul as he directs his delighted gaze from one star to another. Each sight in itself fills him with evocative delight, prompting his mind to repetition upon repetition of “Nothing!” “Nothing is so beautiful as this, and this, and this, and this, and this!”
“Nothing is so beautiful.” Like the elder, anonymous Duke in the Forest of Arden, the poet finds “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything”. Then, when he looks carefully at this particular tree, say a beech or an oak or an ash, and studies its peculiar features, or when he directs his gaze downwards into the running brook, till everything around him seems to be moving and only the flowing water is still, or when he sees the stones of a ruined monastery and imagines them preaching to him out of their silence, he deeply feels how good are all these things in the surrounding forest. He may even feel, summing up all their various forms of goodness, the divine approval, “Very good!”
“Nothing is so beautiful.” Nothing in truth is so beautiful as this tree, and this brook, and these stones of this ruin, when attending to the “this-ness” of each one in turn. So for Hopkins the “this-ness” of spring is borne in upon him as he concentrates on this moment. It is “when weeds in wheels grow long and lovely and lush”, when “thrush’s eggs look little low heavens”, when the thrush himself “through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring the ear”, and when “it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing.”
“Nothing is so beautiful.” Such, one might note from the outset, is the significance of the opening “Nothing”. Then with its seeming banality it clears the mind. It calls on the attention of the listener to take a leap of faith. It is a leap from the “spring” that closes the first line to the “when” that opens the second line, with alliterated series of w’s and l’s, “when weeds in wheels shoot long and lovely
