so beautiful as spring.” That is what he calls the “inscape” of spring, not in general terms but in a particular description almost as if chosen at random. There, he says, pointing them out one by one, are the flowers of spring growing by the hedgerow. And there is the thrush’s nest lined with little speckled blue eggs. And there – can’t you hear him? – is the thrush himself, doing his little best to “recapture his first fine careless rapture”, not once but again and again. And there in the field, beyond the pear trees in white blossom, are the lambs frisking about and gambolling together for very joy of being alive.
“Nothing is so beautiful as spring.”Such sights and such sounds, taken together, gathering as they do “to a greatness” and growing as they do to “something of great constancy”, prompt the poet to ask, without waiting for an answer, “What can be so beautiful?” In one sense, there is no answer to such a question. But in another sense the obvious answer is Cordelia’s “Nothing!” All is a manifestation of “the beauty of Our Lord”, such as Hopkins once saw in a single bluebell. And in the beauty of Our Lord he recognizes the divine name of Being, “I am”. So, too, in “Hurrahing in Harvest” he hears the “rapturous love’s greeting” of our Saviour.
“I remember a house where all were good to me”
“I remember.” Nothing, as Hopkins might have remarked, is so memorable as memory. It has the dignity of being counted as first among the three faculties of the soul. In their proper order memory comes before understanding, and will last. First one has to exercise the memory over various past experiences, before one can understand them, or even try to understand them. After all, one might well add, nothing is so baffling or bewildering as experience.
“I remember.” After all, who is so simplistic, or so pedantic, or so presumptuous, as John Locke in his profession to have based his whole philosophy on experience? What else have philosophers for the basis of their philosophy? After all, as Pope puts it so aptly, “What can we reason but from what we know?” It is from experience, as recalled by memory, that we begin to reason and so to understand to some extent, more or less, in much the same way as (in the other words of Dryden) the moon bestows her borrowed light on “lonely, weary, wandering travellers”.
“I remember.” So when Hopkins begins his poem “In the Valley of the River Elwy” with the words “I remember”, I am irresistibly reminded (as perhaps Hopkins himself was) of the opening words of another poem by another poet, Thomas Hood, “I remember, I remember The house where I was born.” No less irresistibly I feel the temptation to alter the words in the manner of nonsense verse to “I remember, I remember The day when I was born” – presumably as an infant prodigy!
“I remember.” In this other poem I feel an irresistible magic not only in the fact of memory or its capacity to penetrate into the dim recesses of the past, but also in the repetition of “I remember”. And it is further repeated at the beginning of each stanza as a kind of incantation. That repetition is so charged with romantic nostalgia! After all, isn’t the human reason characterized, in Hamlet’s definition, as the power of looking “before and after”? Then the further we look “into the dark backward and abysm of time”, the more we are forced to draw upon the faculty of memory. Then we may look back not just to “a house where all were good to me”, but even to “the house where I was born”, even with a memorial gleam of “the day when I was born”.
“I remember.” This moment of birth may be defined by Wordsworth as “a sleep and a forgetting”. But surely Shakespeare is more accurate when he recalls, in Lear’s words, that “when we are born we cry that we are come To this great stage of fools.”
“I remember.” All the same, whatever difference there may be between the poetic memory of Hopkins and that of Hood, the latter is speaking of his childhood memories in much the same spirit as Wordsworth. But the former isn’t speaking of such things at all. There is something soothing about the nostalgic mood of Hood. Here, we feel, is a genuine romantic, a man after Wordsworth’s own heart. But Hopkins seems to be flying in the face of both Hood and Wordsworth, defying them and issuing a challenge to them.
“I remember a house.” In these opening words of his poem Hopkins speaks of remembering “a house where all were good to me”. Already in the title of his poem he seems to be identifying the house as somewhere “in the valley of the Elwy”, a river in North Wales. Now we know that he spent three years studying theology at St. Beuno’s College near the cathedral city of St. Asaph, where the river Elwy flows into the larger river Clwyd. And so we may conclude that the poet is here speaking of his fond memories of that college.
“I remember a house.” But no! He tells us, as he told his friend in a private letter, that he is speaking of another house far from North Wales in the South-Eastern county of Kent. It seems as if he is slapping his Jesuit colleagues in the face, by preferring the domestic house in Kent to the collegial residence in North Wales. So we say, “Comparisons are odious.”
“I remember.” At least, we may conclude, in contrast to the dripping nostalgia of Hood’s poem, we find little nostalgic in that of Hopkins. Rather, here as elsewhere, it seems as if he is, in a contrary mood, out to shock his reader. He is, one may say, leading us up the garden path not to St. Beuno’s College but to his friend’s house on Shooter’s Hill. Then why, we may ask, must he drag in this Kentish house when his poem as a whole purports to be about the river Elwy in North Wales?
“I remember a house.” Well, in contrast to the friendliness and fragrance of that house in Kent, he has found something less than friendly or fragrant in the valley of the Elwy – though not in the college of St. Beuno’s.
“I remember a house where all were good to me.” Yet the valley itself isn’t so bad. The poet might even have exclaimed, “Nothing is so beautiful as the Elwy in springtime!” Only, he adds, “the inmate doesn’t correspond.” The people who dwell in the valley, for some reason which the poet fails to divulge, aren’t so friendly as the beauty of their Welsh surroundings would lead us to expect. Perhaps it is because they are Welsh, regarding the English students at St. Beuno’s as foreigners – as they did in my time. (I also spent three years of my early Jesuit life at the same college.)
“I remember.” Or perhaps the poet is recalling a particular incident of unfriendly treatment when he was caught fishing in the river Elwy without having obtained the requisite permission. Perhaps it is from this particular memory that he speaks unfavorably of “the inmate” in general, as if all Welshmen were just as inhospitable as this individual. Anyhow, to counter this seeming “discrimination” against the Welsh – while remembering that a poet with a name like Hopkins must have hailed from Welsh ancestry – Hopkins concludes his poem with a prayer for the people, “Complete thy creature dear O where it fails!”
“On ear and ear two noises too old to end trench”
“On ear and ear.” How many eyes, I may ask, does a poet have? Why, two of course! Yes, on any normal computation – with due allowance made for monsters like Polyphemus – he surely has two, like any other human being, unless one of them has been put out for some reason. And then we say of him that even a one-eyed man, like Eliot’s One-eyed Riley, “is king in the kingdom of the blind”.
“On ear and ear.” But then, I may further ask, why does Shakespeare give the poet only one eye in the words of Theseus, “The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven”? Is it that, while ordinary people have two eyes, the poet is allowed only one eye – like the sun, which is poetically called “the eye of heaven”? No, strictly speaking, the poet is like any other human being in having two eyes, but his two eyes, like the eyes of other
