Bro. Anthony Joesph

"God with honour hang your head"–such were the strange first words of my introduction to the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Along with some other lines of the poem, "At the Wedding March," they were spoken on the occasion of my sister's wedding by a venerable and learned retired professor who was asked by my father to speak on behalf of the bride. After a rather informal and amusing introduction to the subject at hand, he went on to introduce his audience to the largely unknown figure of a man who, he said, was not just any poet, but one of the greatest of the English language. This was high praise indeed for someone whom no one in the room had ever heard of, much less read. He then recited some lines from the poem. Needless to say, it caught my interest, and for nearly ten years since then I have been enjoying Hopkins's poetry.

Gerard Manley Hopkins was an English Jesuit priest: a convert from the Church of England. At the time of his death in 1889, only a handful of family members and friends knew that he was a poet. Twenty-nine years later his provocative, yet winsome, idiosyncratic poetry was published, stupefying the best poetry critics of the day. He is recognized today among the rarest and best poets England has produced.

Hopkins has been described as one of the most original of poets for two reasons: his masterly euphonious "new rhythm" and his extraordinarily adroit and peculiar use of the English language. This last quality was due largely to the influence of Welsh poetry and his knowledge of archaic Anglo-Saxon words. Before entering the novitiate, Hopkins burnt his poetry manuscripts and resolved to write no more. Unless given permission by his superiors, he felt writing poetry incompatible with the religious state. For seven years, he tells us in a letter to R. W. Dixon, "I wrote nothing but two or three little presentation pieces which occasion called for."¹ When he finally did break the silence, it was with one of his greatest works–The Wreck of the Deutschland. When the ship Deutschland foundered in the mouth of the Thames on December 7, 1875, five Franciscan nuns were among the dead. Hopkins shared his grief about the tragedy with his rector, and the rector in turn expressed a wish that someone in the community write a poem on the subject. With this hint, Hopkins set to work. This epic poem was described by perhaps his closest friend, Poet Laureate Robert Bridges, as, "the dragon folded at the gate to forbid all entrance" to the appreciation of his other works. More favorable is the opinion of the most thorough of Hopkins's critics, W. H. Gardner, who described it as a great symphony or overture, introducing his other works and not forbidding them.

The Wreck of the Deutshcland, Dec. 6-7, 1875 (Illustrated London News).

It is this poem that introduces the "new rhythm" which "had long been haunting" his ear, and henceforward Hopkins felt himself free to compose verse, yet he was not completely free. His life as a Jesuit priest would bind him to more important duties. This fact, combined with such qualities as a powerful attraction to the beauties of nature, his striving, as Bridges said, "for an unattainable perfection of language," a rather scrupulous conscience, and an ardent sense of his duty before God as priest and religious, all contributed to giving his poetry that special intensity which, Gardner affirms, puts him in the class of Dante and Shakespeare.

In the last five years of his life, Hopkins suffered enormously from aridity and spiritual desolation, finding it difficult to put pen to paper; and when he did, he felt it was a luxury detrimental to his vocation. The non-Catholic and modern critic's answer is, of course, that his life as a poet had been stifled by religion and that the Jesuits were responsible for repressing his genius and leading him prematurely to the grave. Beyond any doubt, however, his best verse was written during this period, and, were it not for the external pressure put on him by the Jesuit discipline in the service of God, we most certainly would not have had the pure intensity in his poetry that R.W. Dixon called, "the terrible crystal."

Formative Years (1844-68)

Gerard was born on July 28, 1844, in Stratford, Essex, the first of nine children given to Manley and Kate Hopkins. His Welsh father was a marine insurance broker, and Consul-General in London for the Kingdom of Hawaii for over 40 years.

His mother was English. Both parents loved art, music, and poetry. (Manley Hopkins published three books of his own verse.) They fostered that love in their children, who were all artistic and musical. Two of Gerard's brothers, Arthur and Everard, achieved professional success as magazine and book illustrators, and Gerard said his youngest sister, Grace, was "musical beyond the common."

The Hopkins family was moderately High-Church Anglican. They took their religion, therefore, a little more seriously than the majority. Indeed, Gerard's eldest sister, Milicent, became an Anglican nun, and Gerard himself was friendly with the leaders of the High-Church Party, Dr. Pusey and Canon Liddon, having the latter for his "confessor." Before his son's conversion, Manley Hopkins urgently wrote to Liddon to try to convince his son not to do so.

The Hopkinses were a congenial family and delighted in exchanging together their piquant and stimulating wit. Gerard's brother Lionel remarked that these sessions consisted of cultivating the "strictly funny."² It was natural that such a healthy atmosphere produced a good sense of humor in the children.

In 1852, the family moved to Hampstead, and Gerard attended the Cholmondeley Grammar school, Highgate, from 1854 to 1863. He was a precocious child but had a fairly happy and active existence amongst his fellow classmates. One of these, Luxmoore, says this of his friend:

As a senior boy, Hopkins's precocity occasionally showed itself when he would get into trouble with the headmaster for speaking his mind. Hopkins related how he was "driven out of patience" on one occasion and made some cutting remark for which the headmaster took to him with a riding-whip!

In April of 1863, Hopkins went up to Balliol College, Oxford. When he graduated four years later with a double-first in "Greats," he was considered by the future legendary Master of Balliol, Benjamin Jowett, as one of the finest Greek scholars he had ever seen.

It was at Balliol that Hopkins began to write a journal that reveals much about the young student's taste and lofty opinions on art and poetry. The journal is replete with his interest in and knowledge of philology (particularly the etymology of words), his elaborately detailed and frankly tedious "Ruskinese" descriptions of and sensitive responses to the beauties of nature, and some fine examples of his early poetry.

Oxford Influences

Oxford in the 1860's was a hive of activity, swarming with new ideas and trends in religion, art, and poetry. The young undergraduate was no exception to being impressionably marked by these influences. From 1865, Hopkins was involved in two Anglo-Catholic movements, one that was by this time nationwide, the other being an undergraduate Anglo-Catholic society. Both these organizations sought to bring about some form of "workable union" between the "disestablished" Church of England and the Church of Rome. It was partly because of ritual, but mostly because he was becoming increasingly aware of the shortcomings and contradictions of the Tractarian position, that he was attracted to these gatherings.

Dr. Pusey and Canon Liddon of the Tractarian Movement were certainly stunned when Gerard was received into the Church by Dr. John Henry Newman, on October 21, 1866. They had high expectations for their gifted disciple and were unaware of Gerard's leanings to the "Roman Church," and that he had read many of Newman's works having been considerably impressed by them.

Savonarola, the great Dominican reformer, who died in 1498 in Florence, profoundly influenced Hopkins in the field of art. Abbot of the monastery of San Marco, Florence, and a famed preacher, Savonarola was eventually hanged and burned for his outspoken views, condemning the immoral lifestyle of both laymen and clergy. Hopkins referred to him as "the prophet of Christian art" and spoke in glowing terms of "the poetical and picturesque character of his mind."⁴

The Pre-Raphaelites, however, both with regards to art and poetry, constituted the most significant influence in the artistic development of Hopkins in this period. The aim of the "Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood," as it was called, was as follows:

Ford Madox Brown, Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti were the original Pre-Raphaelites and were later joined in one way or another by Morris, Swinburne, Ruskin, and Edward Burne-Jones.

Wordsworth, Tennyson, Keats, and Matthew Arnold, along with the Pre-Raphaelite poets, were the chief influences on his early poetry. The truth-in-nature philosophy of Wordsworth, the nostalgic colorful medievalism of Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites, the sensuousness of Keats, the refined sensibility of Arnold's poetry, Arnold's stance as a social critic in reflecting British complacency, and his adroitness in exposing the spiritual anarchy underlying the prevalent optimism all contributed significantly to molding the young Oxford undergraduate.

Hopkins, however, was not caught up in the movement of extreme aestheticism of "art for art's sake," begun by his tutor and literary friend Walter Pater, and later taken to its ludicrous and farcical conclusion by Oscar Wilde. Long hair, a velvet coat with a green carnation and sunflower, peacock feathers, a long fat tie and knee breeches, and an air of flamboyant sophistication characterized the eccentricities of Wilde, the "Fleshly Poet," as he was called. In fact Hopkins, who loved Gilbert and Sullivan, was wholeheartedly behind the joke played on Wilde by their operetta, Patience, and referred to Wilde, caricatured by Bunthorne in the play, as the "utterly utter." (Patience was originally intended as a satire of Swinburne. But by the time the play was to be performed, Swinburne had shed much of his flamboyance, and so the joke was re-directed at Wilde.)

Originality

Beyond doubt, Hopkins is one, if not the most original, of English poets. This however, is not to say that all his originality is flawless or the most sublime monument to poetry. He had his fair share of unenthusiastic critics. This simply means that perhaps no other English poet had so plumbed the resources of the language. In every element of poetry (words, rhythm, accent, and quantity) Hopkins has, more than any other poet, formed a system to be characteristic of only one man. Nevertheless, he stood daunted before Shakespeare's genius and wondered whether any originality was possible after him.

Hopkins never in fact completed this "system" which was, more precisely, a development of the "new rhythm" (or revived Sprung Rhythm, originating from Greek lyric poetry and echoed in English nursery rhymes) that he employed in his great ode, The Wreck of the Deutschland. This "system" consisted of multifarious experiments (not always successful) including some ten variations of the Italian sonnet form; an entire prosodic theory; a completely new stanza form (cf. The Wreck), and his peculiar uses of alliteration and hyphenated compounds; his frequent marooning of the preposition; the omitting of the relative pronoun; and his awkward changing of the sentence structure for the sake of rhythm and assonance. All these last experiments are a result of his delving into the Anglo-Saxon roots of the language, with the influence of Welsh poetry, and to some extent that of Shakespeare.

He wrote to his friend R.W. Dixon (see endnote 1) about "a new rhythm, which had long been haunting my ear" but makes no pretense that the rhythm is all his own: "I do not say the idea is altogether new...but no one has professedly used it and made it the principle throughout, that I know of...." And acknowledging his shortcomings, he writes to his friend Bridges:

"Shocking" is probably a better adjective for his distinctive originality. It was so shocking that Bridges, his life-long friend, who was given custody of Hopkins's works, withheld the publication of them for nearly 30 years after the poet's death. Bridges was very critical of some of his friend's experiments and sought for the opportune time to release the poems to the general public. The initial reaction was, more or less, one of wholesale rejection. Then came an entourage of critics debating his merits, then a cult following in the 1930's and 40's, until, finally, a balance of opinion prevailed, giving Hopkins a rightful place among England's finest poets.

The criticisms Hopkins received, though many and varied, can be reduced to two; they are the principal criticisms of Dr. Bridges: oddity and obscurity. It should be remarked from the start that Bridges was not Catholic and was frankly appalled by some of the Catholic images and metaphors used by Hopkins. But aside from this, Bridges makes some very valid points about the difficulty of Hopkins's verse. In his critical essay, The Oddities of Genius, Bridges remarks:

As was shown above, Hopkins recognized that his poetry "erred on the side of oddness," yet he had no intention of retracting anything he had written. He acknowledged to Bridges that, "it is clear, I must go no further on this road"⁸ (referring to the sonnets "Harry Ploughman" and "Tom's Garland"). He was not altogether repentant of his oddity, however, and even less of his obscurity.

Commenting on the rhythms of certain passages of Hopkins's verse, one critic remarks "...they appear as arbitrary wrenchings of sense for the sake of a desired pattern."⁹ An example of this point is found in the sonnet "Harry Ploughman." Anyone reading it without an introduction to Hopkins's style will invariably be at sea, first as to how it should be read, and second as to what on earth it means! The same critic adds:

Concerning the charge of obscurity Bridges writes, "he could not understand why his friends found his sentences so difficult," and later, "Writers who carelessly rely on their elliptical speech forms to govern the elaborate sentences of their literary composition little know what a conscious effort of interpretation they often impose on their readers."¹¹Bridges then goes on to explain that Hopkins was not a careless writer, but one who knew, and that with great skill, the use and practice of conventional forms. His obscurity was quite deliberate, because he wanted his readers not merely to relish a new sound in their ears but also to reflect with the mind and consider with the heart his verse "barbarous in beauty."

"At the Wedding March" is a short lyric in Sprung Rhythm packed with design:

It is a personal poem. Hopkins knew the couple well, and he wishes them every happiness, "lissome scions, sweet scions," and that their love for one another may be perfected in Christ, "Each be others comfort kind. Deep, deeper than divined, Divine charity, dear charity..." Then, as the Wedding March is being played, Hopkins, the priest, remembers that he too is married to Christ, through his priesthood and religious consecration, and that it is only through love of Christ and devotion in His service, as in the married couple's love for each another, that he can share in the "triumph and immortal years."

Anyone familiar with Hopkins knows the sonnet, "As kingfishers Catch Fire," written between 1881 and 1882, in the prime of his life. It is loaded with pattern, design, and harmony in alliteration:

Critic W. H. Gardner, commenting on the magical first line, observes that: "The vocalic quantities" (or the feet, stress, and accents) "...tell us that whereas the kingfisher darts and is gone, the dragonfly draws its zig-zag flight less rapidly across our vision."¹² In addition, there are in the next three lines of the sonnet four groups of triple alliteration:

"Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves" has an exquisite example of cumulative rhythm (accumulations of epithets, nouns, and verbs following one another) of which Hopkins is, Gardner asserts, "undoubtedly, the greatest master in English, perhaps in any language."¹³ Here is a fragment of his praise of the moon:

In "Morning Midday and Evening Sacrifice" there is a very apt example of how he frequently maroons the preposition, corroborating the charges of obscurity and oddness:

This is certainly a paltry example of the sheer magnitude of Hopkins's genius in originality, yet it also shows that he had his faults and was not free from some rather harsh criticism:

Themes and Imagery

Before Hopkins had entered the novitiate of Manresa House, Roehampton, Newman had written: "Don't call the 'Jesuit discipline' hard: it will bring you to heaven." The life of a Jesuit is founded on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, and so it was for Hopkins. Though he found the going tough at first, he recognized his vocation and never doubted it. For 21 years the Exercises gave direction to everything he did, thought, and wrote.

The philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, but more especially that of Duns Scotus, were likewise at the foundation of all that he wrote as a Jesuit. Scotus fascinated Hopkins because he found in his philosophy a supposed justification of his own view of seeing all creatures with their highly distinctive and individualistic forms. As John Pick wrote:

Scotus was also instrumental in teaching Hopkins (according to his theories on knowledge and grace) how to supernaturalize, by an act of the will, all his natural love of beauty. Thus, we come back to St. Thomas who also teaches that the beauty of creatures is nothing else than the likeness of the beauty of God and back to the "Principle and Foundation" of the Exercises, which exhorts us to use all created things insofar as they lead us to God. These, then, are the primary sources for all the themes and imagery found in Hopkins's poetry.

The themes themselves can be divided into six: 1) Man ought to praise God through His Creation. 2) He is to find his perfection in Christ. 3) God's grace is more beautiful than nature. 4) Election and self-sacrifice are critical. 5) Redemption comes through suffering. 6) The Christian is a soldier of Christ.

First Theme: Man ought to praise God through His Creation.

The first theme is dominant throughout Hopkins's verse. Surely there is no other poet who wrote so joyously and spontaneously about God's Creation and man's obligation to praise Him for it. The most obvious example of this debt of praise he rendered to God is "Pied Beauty":

Hopkins rejoices at the diversity of God's Creation, from a beautiful sunset or cloudstreaked sky, to the spots on the trout and, "Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)." All creatures are founded on His immutability:

The sonnet "Spring "is the best example of the usual exhilaration Hopkins felt when observing nature, especially during springtime:

In line two of the sonnet, the "weeds, in wheels" may actually be referring to the species of lily known as "Solomon's Seal" which still grows wild in the valley of the Elwy, Wales, where Hopkins composed the work.¹⁶ Or it may simply be referring to the briers of the woodlands that bow down in half-wheel shapes. The description of the thrush's eggs as "little low heavens" is to proclaim God's goodness for making something so tiny resemble His unfathomable universe, with their bright blue and be-speckled shells. Then there follows his characteristic joy at hearing the song of the thrush.

The climax of the sonnet, however, comes in the opening lines of the sestet while the poet seems to be walking through a field watching "the racing lambs" and exclaims: "What is all this juice and all this joy?" He answers by saying it is, "A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning / In Eden garden." Hopkins then introduces here, to finish, the image of innocent children, begging Christ Our Lord to save them in their innocence, since they are "Most, O maid's child, thy choice and worthy the winning."

Second Theme: Man is to find his perfection in Christ.

The second theme of man's finding his perfection in Christ is best illustrated by the celebrated sonnet, "As kingfishers Catch Fire," already quoted. In the octet, Hopkins describes how everything animate and inanimate admirably does what it was created to do. The sestet concerns man's relation to his Creator, and, in particular, the just man with sanctifying grace and how he "Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is." The Heavenly Father sees Christ in the soul of one in the state of grace, "for Christ plays in ten thousand places, /Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his / To the Father through the features of men's faces."

Third Theme: God's grace is more beautiful than nature.

The most lustrous example of the third theme is the sonnet that Hopkins himself declared was the best thing he had ever written, "The Windhover," dedicated to Christ our Lord.

In the opening two lines, the poet introduces the superb metaphor of the falcon as analogous to Christ. Yet the falcon in the octet is only a falcon. It will be transformed in the sestet. The windhover is morning's darling or favorite (minion being used here in its earlier, not its later derogatory sense of slave), and the poet catches a glimpse of his magnificent flight as he flashes across the horizon at dawn. He is the royal Son of daylight's kingdom.

The image evoked here, as the falcon circles in the sky, is that of a horse being led around on a training line. Then, as it breaks from that pattern, it swings round, contradicting the force of the wind (as the skate's blade contradicts the force of the ice) to resemble the graceful movement of a skater rounding a turn.

"My heart in hiding / Stirred for a bird" is preparing us for the transformation about to take place. Earlier, the octet has been concerned with the beauties of physical realities, the material world. The sestet is a manifestation of the far more beautiful spiritual world. "My heart in hiding" refers to the poet's being awakened by the power and beauty of the windhover's flight, and also, metaphorically, to the aridity of Hopkins's soul, being stirred to action by the example of Christ:

"Brute beauty...here Buckle," all the beauties of this physical world at this moment "here Buckle" collapse in the poet's vision, and the world of the spirit (the fire) breaking through is dramatically introduced by the emphasis given to "AND." Only now does the poet address Christ directly "the fire that breaks from thee...O my chevalier!" Here is the climax of the poem and the point at which the critics differ most. Some refer the act of buckling to when the falcon, after hovering in the air, dives to the ground in an act of self-immolation. For others, the "Brute beauty...here, Buckle!" are, so to speak, buckled-up in the beauty of the falcon's flight. In any case, the words "buckle" and "break" are pivotal to the sonnet's structure. "And the fire that breaks, from thee then" refers, in the immediate sense, to the beauty and power of the windhover's flight, and perhaps, in a more metaphorical sense, to the falcon's being consumed with flames like the mythical phoenix to begin a new life. And yet the fire (the charity) that breaks from Christ is incomparably more beautiful than that of the windhover:

Here, the poet seems to say, there should be no wonder this vision of trans-formation occurs, since it happens every day with the commonest things: "Sheer plod makes plough down sillion Shine"–when the ploughshare hits the earth it makes the furrow (sillion) shine. And the brilliance "gold-vermillion," hidden in the "blue-bleak embers," is revealed only at the moment of their apparent destruction. John Pick aptly compares the "bluebleak embers " to our Lord's suffering in His Passion; and "Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion" to His subsequent victory over death.

Fourth Theme: Election and self-sacrifice are critical.

There are several poems that could be chosen to illustrate specifically each theme, and The Wreck of the Deutschland could be used for all of them. It is a colossal work of 35 stanzas and so will be discussed only briefly as it relates to the themes of election and self-sacrifice.

It is, as Hopkins himself admitted to Bridges, genuinely difficult: the fruit of seven years of theological studies, meditation, prayer, and poetical silence. "To read it," wrote the editor of his letters, C.C. Abbott, "brings to mind pent-up floodwaters at last released by the bursting of a dam."¹⁷ It is as if he thought he might never again be given an opportunity to write, and so he had to put down in this poem everything he valued.

The poem is an ode–not merely a narrative–about the shipwreck. Essentially, it is about conversion and is divided into two parts. Part the First is about his own conversion. Part the Second concerns the hoped-for conversion of England. The story of the shipwreck in Part the Second is only the occasion and not the theme of the poem. There is, however, an underlying theme which gives enormous significance to the title. God, the "giver of breath and bread," calls us to the service of his Son by the example of His suffering and death. If we choose to serve Him we must be ready to suffer the cross with Him. The Deutschland, then, represents the cross in all its terror, and it is here "the faithful waver, the faithless fable and miss."

God is acknowledged to be the Lord of all, and the poet here stresses he is keenly aware of His Providence, "over again I feel thy finger and find thee."

God is, nevertheless, a most tender Father and lightens the cross He gives us by revealing a likeness of His beauty through his creatures. "For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand."

Here the poet refers to both the spiritual visits of grace and the occasions of seeing and blessing God in His creatures.

In Part the Second, the telling of the story of the shipwreck, Hopkins opens the account with what most commentators say is (from the technical standpoint at least) the most beautiful stanza of the poem. The subject of the theme, however, is not at all beautiful, since it is about the grim reality of death.

Death may come to us by any means "flame, Fang, or flood," and we too often think that death will never overtake us; "we...forget that there must / The sour scythe cringe, and the blear share come."

It is worth noting also how brilliant Hopkins is in his descriptions of the roll and tumble of water and the desperate scene of the shipwreck:

The rhythm of the first lines give one the feeling of going up and down with the rolling of the waves "(Crushed them)...or rolled / With the sea-romp over the wreck." The last two lines refer to the nun in the poem, who serves as a heroine in the shipwreck and an heavenly intercessor for the conversion of England.

For his finale, Hopkins pulls out all the organ stops as if finishing a great fugue. This is the central theme upon which all the others have been developed:  conversion to Christ and His Catholic Church. The final line with all of its possessive cases is difficult to interpret. According to Paul L. Mariani: "He [Christ] must become the fire of charity in our English ("hearth's) hearts, and it must be he to whom all our noblest thoughts are addressed."¹⁸

Fifth Theme: Redemption comes through suffering.

The fifth theme in Hopkins's work is that of redemption through suffering, and the most outstanding example of it is found in the famous sonnet "Felix Randal."

Hopkins wrote the poem in 1880 amid the "charming heartiness" of his Liverpool parishioners (though the farrier himself was more probably from Bedford Leigh where Hopkins had been recently stationed). Filled as it is, not only with one of the most beautiful examples of priestly compassion and divine mercy for the sick ever expressed in poetry but also with great technical excellence, it has been called by George Orwell, "the best short poem in the language."¹⁹ Not short enough, however, to be quoted here in full!

Hopkins, the priest, laments the death of a young farrier, or blacksmith, whom he has seen grown up to manhood, and has tendered to his sickness with Extreme Unction and Viaticum, "sweet reprieve and ransom." The sickness, we learn, has lasted "some months" and the dying man has been touched by grace to accept his illness. It is not only the dying man, however, who has been moved by the spectacle. The priest, too, sad to hear of his death, but knowing, through faith, what a blessing he has given the man, is likewise deeply moved.

Interestingly, though the poem is almost certainly autobiographical, "Felix Randal" is certainly not the real name of the blacksmith. The name is designed to fit the meaning of the poem. Felix, being Latin for happy, fruitful, fortunate one, and, by extension, blessed, it is easy for one who has read the poem to see how these adjectives describe the farrier.

Fr. Hopkins, then, has shielded the farrier's once wayward soul for its journey into eternity, just as the farrier had given a special protection to the "great grey drayhorse."

The transformation of the drayhorse into a light and fast mythical steed is an exact parallel of the farrier's spiritual transformation. This is another wonder of Hopkins's resourcefulness that he has seen in the daily occurrence of shoeing horses an application of the sacramental helps Christ offers to all those willing to receive His grace.

Sixth Theme: The Christian is a soldier of Christ.

The last theme to be considered here is, more simply, an image:  the Christian as a soldier of Christ. The sonnet, "In honour of St. Alphonsus Rodriguez (Laybrother of the Society of Jesus)" is about the inner conflict that this humble lay brother has engaged in by doing nothing but his ordinary duty of state as the porter of the religious house in Majorca:

Honor for a soldier in the world's eyes is given to the one who valiantly fights in the battle and has the scars to prove it:

Christ our Lord has suffered the wounds of battle, as have many martyrs. No one sees, however, the signs of the spiritual war being waged by God's faithful servants in their dull struggle against the world, the flesh, and the devil–a war far more brutal than that waged on earth, since it lasts till death:

The Creator of heaven and earth, who is capable of fashioning the greatest and smallest of things has, "with trickling increment," molded and fashioned the soul of Alphonsus. By "crowding his career" with small victories, God has, over time, rewarded his fidelity and forged his heroic life.

The "Terrible Sonnets"

The "terrible sonnets" are a collection of seven sonnets written in the last five years of Hopkins's life while in Dublin; "terrible" because they are full of thoughts of desolation and near despair. (There are eight if you include the sonnet "Patience," but there is also a note of consolation and recovery in that poem). Before discussing the sonnets themselves, it would be helpful to review the various causes of the poet's desolation.

In the first place, there is the internal conflict of one who was so gifted with poetic genius and so sensitive to the beauties of nature, and who, by his priestly obligations, was unable to express himself so completely as he might have wished. As has been mentioned, after having been given permission to write The Wreck, Hopkins presumed permission for everything else he wrote with the exception of the sonnet on St. Alphonsus, which he was asked to write on the occasion of the saint's first feast day. He did not need express permission to write as a priest and outside of the novitiate, especially since there was no question of publishing. Nevertheless, he seems to have experienced an underlying pang of conscience for the time he dedicated to his poetry.

Augmenting this internal conflict was his ill health. Hopkins had a weak constitution and suffered frequently from dysentery, colds, influenza, and similar complaints, rendering his whole priestly life an especially trying cross for him. He also suffered acutely from a stinging sensation in his eyes caused by overuse in marking exam papers and from a nervous condition that would at times cause an irritation of the skin. Added to this was his rather unsuccessful life as a preacher and the depressing surroundings of the increasingly industrialized cities of Glasgow, St. Helens, Bedford Leigh, and Liverpool which he deplored.

At length, in 1884 he was elected Fellow of the Royal University of Ireland (or University College, Dublin) in the department of Classics. Here he was to serve until his death in 1889 as lecturer of Latin and examiner of Greek. This work exhausted him and brought him at times, or so he thought, close to madness. In a letter to Bridges, dated, October 28, 1886, Hopkins remarks with some humor that after recently returning from a vacation in Wales and feeling much the better for it, "331 accounts of the First Punic War with trimmings, have sweated me down to nearer my lees and usual alluvial low water mudflats, groans, despair, and yearnings."²¹

He did not despair, however. Amid his personal sufferings, he found time to write some very lighthearted and amusing letters to friends and family; and in this period of his life is to be found some of his most beautiful poetry, e.g., "Spelt from Sybil's Leaves" and "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection." In a letter written to his sister Kate (though written in the first year of his stay in Ireland), he shows his good spirits:

Aside from the difficulty of his work, there was the social pressure of being a foreigner in Dublin (and a proud Englishman at that), at a time when political unrest and hatred for England was becoming increasingly apparent. His own opinion on the Home Rule question was that it be rejected for the sake of England's conversion. He wrote to Newman expressing his belief that the longer the English have ties with the Catholic influence of Ireland the better, deploring as he did the actions of the Irish rebels. Newman replied, not very helpfully, by saying, "If I were an Irishman, I should be (in heart) a rebel."²³

Now, to the sonnets themselves. For the sake of brevity only three will be discussed, and the first of these concerns his loneliness in Ireland:

Here the poet laments his separation from his fellow countrymen and especially from his own family members who are not Catholic. The whole quatrain references the two sayings of our Lord, "I did not come to bring peace but the sword," and, "He that loveth father or mother more than Me, is not worthy of Me."

Hopkins despairs of the anti-Christian rationalism and self-sufficient optimism of his fellow Englishmen, although he loved his country dearly. In a letter to his friend Coventry Patmore he writes:

And in another letter to Bridges, encouraging his friend to write more and make himself well known he says:

Perhaps because he himself was not able to be known and have his works published contributed to his melancholy.

Leaving the sestet of the above sonnet behind, the next sonnet to be examined is "Carrion Comfort" and deals more particularly with the spiritual condition of desolation. Note also, for all the "terrible sonnets," Hopkins uses standard rhythm:

These lines of real pathos hearken back to Shakespeare and the famous "To be or not to be" monologue of Hamlet. Hopkins, although weak and tired of life, will not give up in despair. It is a passage that sums up much of his life and his whole spirit in suffering. Essentially, he believed in God's goodness:

God to the soul in severe desolation seems to take on the form of the devil, "With darksome devouring eyes" and, indeed, the devil does have sport with the victims of desolation, and will frequently "lay a lionlimb" against them:

Here the poet understands God is allowing these sufferings for his own purification "that my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear," meaning that my sins, imperfections, and attachment to creatures may be purged and virtue made perfect. Then, when he realizes God's goodness in the plan, his heart recovers somewhat, "Nay...since I kissed the rod...my heart lo! lapped strength." The final tercet ends with more darkness of mind, with the soul's wondering who it is she ought to bless. After feeling abandoned by God and then accepting the suffering, the poet seems to ask confusedly whether it was truly God's benevolence or his own good actions that brought relief:

The last of the "terrible sonnets" to be discussed briefly, "No worst there is none," is more desperate still, and the soul cries out for help from the Holy Ghost and the Blessed Virgin, "Comforter, where, where is your comforting? Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?" The sestet recalls to mind the cliff at Dover scene and the hovel on the heath of King Lear:

Final Illness and Death

On April 29, 1889, Hopkins wrote to Bridges, "I am ill today, but no matter for that as my spirits are good." He was, in fact, less than six weeks from death. Two days later, he wrote his mother that he was suffering from an attack of rheumatic fever and promised to see a doctor if it persisted. He did see a doctor, who, he told his father, "treated my complaint as a fleabite, a treatment which begets confidence but not gratitude." On the May 8th, he let his mother know he had contracted a "sort of typhoid," but nothing to worry about.

Two weeks later, Fr. Wheeler, who devotedly looked after Hopkins in his illness, notified family and friends he was on the road to recovery. Then he took a turn for the worse and began to fail. According to those who attended him, he was, "the placidest soul in the world," and the only complaint they heard from him was that the food kept "coming in like cricket balls." Some time earlier he had written in his Dublin notebook, "Weakness, ill health, every cross is a help. Calix quem Pater meus dedit mihi non bibam illud?"²⁶(Shall I not drink the Chalice my Father has given to me?)

In the first week of June, Hopkins asked for Viaticum every day. His parents were called for on June 5th, and the dying son was naturally very happy to see them, although it pained him that his parents should see him in that condition. On the morning of June 8, the Vigil of Pentecost, Fr. Wheeler administered Viaticum for the last time (Accipe, frater, viaticum corporis Domini nostri Jesu Christi). Then, while Hopkins's father and mother joined in the prayers for the dying, Fr. Wheeler gave him Extreme Unction. He was conscious and kept his wits the whole time, joining in the prayers himself.

Echoing these sentiments of his final hour are some of the words of a prayer for salvation that he composed some years earlier:

When he finally came to the end, before lapsing into unconsciousness and dying, he was heard to repeat three times the words, "I am so happy."

Conclusion

It must be understood that Hopkins, although possessed of a melancholy temperament, was not always sullen and morose. This is the stigma frequently assigned to his character by those who have perhaps read only one of his "terrible sonnets." Nor is it to be thought his last five years in Ireland were filled only with sadness and dejection. His priestly love of our Lord was great, and he was rewarded for it. His life as a religious priest and poet raises the question as to whether or not literature is an obstacle to union with God. To return to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius for the answer, man is to use creatures insofar as they are a means to go to God and reject them insofar as they turn him away from God. This was the life of Hopkins.

He died at age 44 of typhoid fever and he was buried in the Jesuit cemetery of Glasnevin, Dublin. His father, Manley Hopkins, was quite moved by the reverence of the ceremonies and the respect offered his son. In his estimate there were, "Seventy ecclesiastics and an immense congregation" assisting. According to other accounts, however, the numbers of clergy and faithful present were considerably lower. The small circle of Fr. Gerard's close friends were profoundly shaken by his death. Coventry Patmore wrote to Bridges on August 12 to comfort him and to express his own grief and reverence for the passing of one whom he admired above all others:

There is no account of what the most faithful admirer of his works, Canon R. W. Dixon, had to say about the loss; he was most certainly devastated.

Robert Bridges did eventually publish in 1918 everything Hopkins left behind that was not discarded or burned. He had, of course, in his own possession, many of the manuscripts Hopkins had given him while living. The sonnet Bridges wrote in Gerard's honor, prefixed to every edition of the poems he edited, is one of the finest tributes paid him. In the same letter of April 29 quoted above, Hopkins wrote his final sonnet. It is addressed to Bridges and is an humble elucidation and summation of his abstruse life and poetry:

1. C.C. Abbott, ed., The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 14. Hereafter, Letters, Vol. 2.

2. C.C. Abbott, ed., The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges (London: Oxford University Press,  1935), p. 133. Hereafter, Letters, Vol. 1.

3. Note-books and papers (First Edition, 1937), p. 438.

4. Quoted from W. H. Gardner, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89), Vol. 2, p. 16.

5. The College Survey of English Literature (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1947), Vol. 2, p. 768.

6. Letters, Vol.1, p. 66.

7. Geoffrey H. Hartman, ed., Hopkins: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice and Hall, 1966), p. 71.

8. Quoted from Gardner, Vol. 1, p. 146.

9. Elisabeth W. Schneider, The Dragon in the Gate: Studies in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (University of California Press, 1968), p. 86.

10. Ibid.

11. Hartman, Hopkins: Critical Essays, p. 71

12. Gardner, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Vol. 2, p. 316

13. Ibid. p. 130.

14. Hartman, Hopkins: Critical Essays, p. 74

15. John Pick, Gerard Manley Hopkins: Priest and Poet (Oxford University Press, 1942), p. 35

16. Paul L. Mariani, A Commentary on the Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Cornell University Press, 1970), p. 100.

17. Pick, p. 40.

18. Mariani, Commentary, p. 72.

19. Gardner, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Vol. 2, p. 306.

20. Mariani, Commentary, p. 170.

21. Letters, Vol. 1, p. 236.

22. John Pick, ed., A Hopkins Reader (Image Book, 1966), pp. 325-26.

23. Further Letters, pp. 265-66.

24. Ibid, p. 367.

25. Letters, Vol. 1, p. 231.

26. Eleanor Ruggles, Gerard Manley Hopkins, A Life (W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 1944), p. 290.

27. Letters, Vol. 2, p. 160.