to say, in a manner I am a Communist. Their ideal bating some things is nobler than that professed by any secular statesman I know of (I must own I live in bat-light and shoot at a venture). Besides it is just. – I do not mean the means of getting to it are. But it is a dreadful thing for the greatest and most necessary part of a very rich nation to live a hard life without dignity, knowledge, comforts, delight, or hopes in the midst of plenty – which plenty they make. They profess that they do not care what they wreck and burn, the old civilisation and order must be destroyed. This is a dreadful look out but what has the old civilisation done for them? As it at present stands in England it is itself in great measure founded on wrecking. But they got none of the spoils, they came in for nothing but harm from it then and thereafter. England has grown hugely wealthy but this wealth has not reached the working classes; I expect it has made their condition worse. Besides this iniquitous order the old civilisation embodies another order mostly old and what is new in direct entail from the old, the old religion, learning, law, art, etc. and all the history that is preserved in standing monuments. But as the working classes have not been educated they know next to nothing of all this and cannot be expected to care if they destroy it. The more I look the more black and deservedly black the future looks, so I will write no more …
Believe me your affectionate friend,
Gerard Hopkins S.J.
Journals
(1864–1875)
Hopkins included relatively few personal notes in his journals, and those few reveal the quality of his own highly “stressed” character. Since he had forbidden himself his natural outlet of poetry, the journals became an outpouring of self-expression. Higgins describes them as “the counterpoint to days of study, whether academic or theological. There are times, however, when he slips back into the self-reporting mode, feeling emotionally bruised. Hopkins is, first and last, a textual being.…”10 The entries oscillate between ecstatic descriptions of natural phenomena and painful self-examination. After 1875, when he ceased keeping journals, the stress and compression that marked his nature took both form and content in his verse once again.
1864
January 27. Two swans flew high up over the river on which I was, their necks stretched straight out and wings billowing.
Note on green wheat. The difference between this green and that of long grass is that first suggests silver, latter azure. Former more opacity, body, smoothness. It is the exact complement of carnation.
Nearest to emerald of any green I know, the real emerald stone. It is lucent. Perhaps it has a chrysoprase [golden-green stone] bloom. Both blue greens.
It is a happy thing that there is no royal road to poetry. The world shd. know by this time that one cannot reach Parnassus except by flying thither. Yet fr. time to time more men go up and either perish in its gullies fluttering excelsior flags or else come down again with full folios and blank countenances. Yet the old fallacy keeps its ground. Every age has its false alarms.
The poetical language lowest. To use that, wh. poetasters, and indeed almost everyone, can do, is no more necessarily to be uttering poetry than striking the keys of piano is playing a tune. Only, when the tune is played it is on the keys. So when poetry is uttered it is in this language. Next, Parnassian. Can only be used by real poets. Can be written without inspiration. Good instance in Enoch Arden’s island.11 Common in professedly descriptive pieces. Much of it in Paradise Lost and Regained. Nearly all The Faery Queen. It is the effect of fine age to enable ordinary people to write something very near it. – Third and highest poetry proper, language of inspiration. Explain inspiration. On first reading a strange poet his merest Parnassian seems inspired. This is because then first we perceive genius. But when we have read more of him and are accustomed to the genius we shall see distinctly the inspirations and much that wd. have struck us with great pleasure at first loses much of its charm and becomes Parnassian. – Castalian, highest sort of Parnassian. e.g. “Yet despair touches me not, Tho’ pensive as a bird Whose vernal coverts winter hath laid bare.”12 … Much Parnassian takes down a poet’s reputation, lowers his average, as it were. Pope and all artificial schools great writers of Parnassian. This is the real meaning of an artificial poet.
1866
May 3. Cold. Morning raw and wet, afternoon fine. Walked then with Addis, crossing Bablock Hythe, round by Skinner’s Weir through many fields into the Witney road. Sky sleepy blue without liquidity. Fr. Cumnor Hill saw St. Philip’s and the other spires through blue haze rising pale in a pink light. On further side of the Witney road hills, just fleeced with grain or other green growth, by their dips and waves foreshortened here and there and so differenced in brightness and opacity the green on them, with delicate effect. On left, brow of the near hill glistening with very bright newly turned sods and a scarf of vivid green slanting away beyond the skyline, against which the clouds shewed the slightest tinge of rose or purple. Copses in grey-red or greyyellow – the tinges immediately forerunning the opening of full leaf. Meadows skirting Seven-bridge road voluptuous green. Some oaks are out in small leaf. Ashes not out, only tufted with their fringy blooms. Hedges springing richly. Elms in small leaf, with more or less opacity. White poplars most beautiful in small grey crisp spray-like leaf. Cowslips capriciously colouring meadows in creamy drifts. Bluebells, purple orchis. Over the green water of the river passing the slums of the town and under its bridges swallows shooting, blue and purple above and shewing their amber-tinged breasts reflected in the water, their flight unsteady with wagging wings and leaning first to one side then the other. Peewits flying. Towards sunset the sky partly swept, as often, with moist white cloud, tailing off across which are morsels of greyblack woolly clouds. Sun seemed to make a bright liquid hole in this, its texture had an upward northerly sweep or drift fr. the West marked softly in grey. Dog violets. Eastward after sunset range of clouds rising in bulky heads moulded softly in tufts or bunches of snow – so it looks – and membered somewhat elaborately, rose-coloured. Notice often imperfect fairy rings. Apple and other fruit trees blossomed beautifully.…
June 30. Thunderstorms all day, great claps and lightning running up and down. When it was bright between times great towering clouds behind which the sun put out his shaded horns very clearly and a longish way. Level curds and whey sky after sunset. – Graceful growth of Etzkoltzias or however those unhappy flowers are spelt. Yews and evergreen trees now very thin and putting out their young pale shoots.
July 17.… It was this night I believe but possibly the next that I saw clearly the impossibility of staying in the Church of England, but resolved to say nothing to anyone till three months are over, that is the end of the Long, and then of course to take no step till after my Degree.
July 19.… Alone in the woods … I have now found the law of the oak leaves.…
“Found the law of the oak leaves”? At the heart of Hopkins’s lifelong and consistent poetic reside the concepts of inscape and instress, thus named by Hopkins when he was an undergraduate. By “inscape” Hopkins means pattern in nature, and by “nature” he means not only oak leaves in the woods and clouds in the summer, but the more general reality of the universe, of “the way things are.” For Hopkins, inscape results from divinely intelligent creation. Catherine Phillips, one editor of Hopkins’s collected works, explains his idea of instress this way: “Unlike ‘inscape,’ which is the result of mental analysis and perception, ‘instress’ is more nebulous, often, although not always, associated with feeling; it is the identifying impression a thing can communicate to a careful and receptive observer. Hopkins also uses the term to mean ‘the stress within,’ the force which binds something or a person into a unit.”13 Those of us who have the eyes to see and the will to know can instress an inscape by not just “taking” it in, but by “stressing” it in. “The law
