The Charm and the Strangeness: Gerard Manly Hopkins

The poet Gerard Manly Hopkins of the most influential writers of our time, The Atlantic turns to DANIEL SARGENT,himself a poet and a teacher, fora reappraisal of Hopkins’s work. Mr. Sargent graduated from Harvard College in 1913, taught the history of literature at his alma mater over the years until 1936. and has under his signature three volumes of poetry, the most recent of which is God’s Ambuscade.

by DANIEL SARGENT

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IT WAS in 1804 at Oxford, during the reign of Walter Pater and Benjamin Jowett, that two young Englishmen, Robert Bridges, student at Corpus Christi College, and Gerard Manly Hopkins, student at Balliol College, first met. They did not outwardly seem made for intimacy, for Bridges had the mien of an athlete and Hopkins the mien of an aesthete, but they had similar tastes in music and poetry, and they struck up a friendship.

As the years went by, their ways markedly diverged, for Bridges, who had first planned to take up holy orders in the Church of England, became, instead, a poet; while Hopkins, who had once thought of becoming a painter, and who, like Bridges, had belonged to the Anglican Church, became a Catholic and took up the labors of a Jesuit priest. Yet they continued to be friends, and carried on a correspondence principally on the subject of poetry.

Even the death of Hopkins did not end the friendship; for Bridges, on hearing of it in 1889, wrote to the Jesuits asking for the poems which he knew that his friend had written, and in 1918, nearly thirty years later, when he was England’s Poet Laureate, published them to the world, more out of friendship for Hopkins than out of admiration for the poems.

The consequences of this act of friendship were not such as Bridges or any other man could have expected. Hopkins, thirty years dead, became a young poet walking about London. He became the literary celebrity of the hour. Especially the radical poets threw their arms around him, just as if he were not by his dates a Victorian, and by profession a Jesuit. When his notebooks and letters were published, they were greeted as if they were the latest words of a most up-to-date contemporary.

All this was odd, but I do not think that it is so odd as the fact that Hopkins is still a celebrity. Some of the young poets who hailed Hopkins as their precursor have fallen from publicity, or they have changed their style. Yet Hopkins could not change his style, and his fame has even increased. Not only do radicals claim him as their own, but traditionalists. Some dare not to like him, but fewdare not to have an opinion of him. The poets of the 1940’s either copy him or go out of their way not to.

He is certainly not a forgotten poet. On the occasion of the centenary of his birth, 1944, a salvo of half a dozen books saluted him, and this when paper was scarce and when generals were the news. The salute still continues.

The curious phenomenon of this fame leads people to ask how long it will endure. Certain it is that some causes of his publicity will not last, He is still a novelty, and still a matter of literary controversy. He will surely cease to lie a novelty, and there are other poets for critics to battle about. He has also attracted a good deal of attention simply as a psychological problem. We live in the age of psychoanalysts, writers of detective stories, and solvers of puzzles. Hopkins is to them a godsend — though they do not call him that. He was a Jesuit who wrote poetry. Was not his poetry his escape from the prison of dogma and discipline? But the psychoanalysts may till die from boring one another. At any rate, they can find other problems. Hopkins’s ultimate fame will not rest on the fact that he was a Jesuit — happy or unhappy in being so — but on his poetry.

The only poetry of Hopkins’s that is entitled to our consideration as having his peculiar mark is that which he wrote from the time when he was thirtyone till his death at forty-five—that is, during fourteen busy years of his career as a Jesuit. His poems, if we set aside the fragments of those unfinished, are only forty-seven in number. One of them is ten pages long, two others are several pages, most of them are less t ban a page — usually sonnets. In subject they range from the description of a wild shipwreck to a meditation on peace. Yet they are all unmistakably his, such as he did not write in his youth, such as nobody else in his day was writing.

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THE first of the poems really his is titled “The Wreck of the Deutschland.”it is also the longest, and for that reason it is usually called an ode. Bridges, who printed Hopkins’s verse in chronological order, was forced regretfully to print this first. The reason for his regret was that he considered the poem as a kind of dragon which might frighten readers front going on to the other poems that he liked better. I am glad to begin with it; for, once having seen it, one can recognize all of Hopkins’s poetry. This poem was written after seven years of poetic silence which he had imposed on himself on his entry into the Society of Jesus. It is surely that silence, with its attendant meditation and discipline and also seclusion from the literary world, that enabled him to break with the poetic fashions of his day.

It is also not amiss to describe the occasion which brought it forth. Hopkins in the autumn of 1875 was studying theology at a small Jesuit college, Saint Beuno’s, in North Wales, preparatory for his ordination to the priesthood. News came to tincommunity of a dramatic shipwreck. A German steamer, the Deutschland, bound for Canada from Bremen, had been caught in a blizzard in the Thames Estuary and had run on a shoal, with the consequent loss of a fourth of those aboard, among them five Franciscan nuns, who had been exiled from Germany by the Falk Laws.

Hopkins felt impelled to write a poem on the subject, but remembering his self-imposed vow to write no poetry except under command, he restrained himself, until a suggestion made by the Jesuit Superior, that someone ought to write a poem on it, was taken by him as a command.

He began by describing his own relations to God: —

Then he went on explaining how the stressful moments which God deals him spring not from Heaven’s bliss, but from Christ’s Passion. They have the purpose of crushing from him a word “the best or worst.”

He does not lament at this. It is all the work of God’s mercy, and he cries out: —

Make mercy in all of us, out of us all
Mastery, but be adored, but be adored King.

Then, after ten eight-line stanzas, he turns to the nuns. He describes the stress that God inflicted on them. It was outwardly very terrifying. He describes the wreck of their ship: —

Hopkins does not minimize the terror which assails the nuns. It might well have thrown them into panic. He visualizes an incident which he must have read in the newspapers. A sailor let himself down from the rigging to save the nuns, lashing himself with rope, but the swaying of the ship flung him to his death, and in full sight of the Franciscans, he continued to swing as a dead corpse among them, being “dandled,” the poet says, “for hours through the cobbled foam-fleece.”

Yet the nuns showed themselves heroic. They in their final moment uttered the right word, and were thus royally received by their Prince. Hopkins can therefore greet the chief of them in heaven as he does in the thirty-fifth and final stanza: —

Various epithets have been applied to this poem by various people. It is monstrous with ugliness, it is terrible with beauty. It is natural, it is tricky. It is as clear as a flash of lightning, as blinding as a hailstorm. It is abrupt and masculine, or it is frenetic and feminine. There is only one adjective which all amicably apply to it: strange.

The only reason why all agree on this adjective strange is that it has many meanings. It can mean that a thing is simply what we are not used to, or that it is what we are not used to and hope that we shall never be, or, finally, that it is what we are not used to but wish that we were. I shall consider these three meanings as they apply not only to “The Wreck of the Deutschland” but to all the other poems which, following it, came into the world bearing its marks as inheritance from a parent.

The word strange in its first meaning — that is, meaning what is simply unexpected — can be applied to all of Hopkins’s poems and to every line of them, for they all wear what is to us still an unaccustomed garb. They are like children who have come to call on us, who walk and talk quite normally, but are dressed in clothes not in the convention of our town and time. This is in a poem, I grant, more serious than in a child, for the clothes belong to the poem and they merely cover the child. But there is a clothing to a poem, which is the technique; and that it seems momentarily eccentric does not prove that the poem is so. Poetry has changing fashions, and the one that we are not used to may have as much right to exist as that with which we are brought up.

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HOPKINS in his isolation from the literary world found it very easy to adopt a manner of writing verse that was his own. While it sprang from him spontaneously, it was also something which he was ready to justify in his reasoning. He adopted instinctively, when he burst forth in “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” an abrupt, forthright impetuosity which was not habitual in his contemporaries. He justified this in his letters to Bridges and other poet-friends — principally Richard Watson Dixon and Coventry Patmore — by pointing out that he was not following personal caprice, but was adapting his verse to the genius of the English language as it was spoken. He was merely being colloquial.

One of his means of making his poetry colloquial was to use a meter that was indigenous. For half a thousnnd years English poetry had worn a dress derived from the Mediterranean tongues which had civilized England or had brought it closer to the Continent. It had expressed itself in a meter, smooth and flowing, admirably suited to the languages which delighted in vowels. It had based its measures on syllables. Well and good. Yet Englishmen, in spite of the Latin and Gallic words that they had accepted, still spoke explosively with a singular disregard of vowels and mere syllables, for their Anglo-Saxon words were made up of many consonants which choked the vowels. He therefore borrowed from the old consonant-loving exclamatory Anglo-Saxon bards a method of measuring verse by its explosions. The length of a line did not depend on its number of syllables, bill on its number of emphatic detonations. Thus he had the privilege, in his sonnet about Oxford, of making a line of some seventeen syllables into live clangs of a bell:

With the same aim of having his poems colloquial, he used what he called “living words.” Keats, whom he had once followed, and whom he still admired, had sought to heighten his poetry by using medieval or pseudo-medieval words purposely chosen to estrange poetry from the spoken tongue. So, in a reaction similar to that of Pope — who, though we may call his diction artificial from its urbanity, was trying to be natural and was really only writing poetry as educated people in London coffeehouses talked — Hopkins repudiated the literary diction of Keats’s day and of his own day, and used words which he in turn found natural.

He was not, like Pope, a city man, nor a talker in coffeehouses, lie was a somewhat solitary priest who delighted to hold converse in spare hours with farmers and herdsmen who Jived round the Jesuit houses in Lancashire and Wales, and gather their provincialisms. He adopted their words as his words for poetry. Also he took a delight in technical terms as precise. He took them from carpenters or fishermen but also from the lettered professions: from philosophers with whom he argued, from accurate theologians by whom he was taught. Words which literary people used he used, provided they had touch with reality.

Then he noticed that poems in his time were being composed as if they were meant only to be printed, and merely read by the eye, and not recited. This too caused a divorce from the colloquial. The normal-speaking man, especially under excitement, leaves out words that the eye expects, such as who and and and when. Speech is, therefore, more swift than what is written. Hopkins took his chance with the grammarians. He tried to be curt, like one with much to say. Where he seems wordy, as perhaps in the final stanza of “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” where he runs on, “Pride, rose, prince, hero of us, high-priest,” it is rather that he is letting each noun take the place of a whole sentence.

This colloquialism gives a great vigor to all his poems, and a speed, and a naturalness. Yet the point which I wish to make is simply that it was and is strange, for we are not used to it. We have as much right to be taken aback by it, at our first encounter with it, as the Hollanders had, at their first glance, by the shadowy new pictures of Rembrandt, but no more right. The Hollanders became used to Rembrandt’s style, and so can we to that of Hopkins.

Indeed, there are a number of poems by Hopkins which, in spite of a show of this first kind of strangeness, have already become popular and been accepted into anthologies.

One of these is “Pied Beauty,” which some might have difficulty scanning with the eye, but which no one has difficulty reading aloud: —

Another of them, “Starlight Night,” has not only even rarer words, but a manner of exclamatory speaking which is not unlike what we might have expected of Pickwick’s friend, Mr. Alfred Jingle, had he taken to verse. Yet most readers have grown to accept, its style as a refreshing vivacity.

Then there is the second strangeness — call it eccentricity or queerness— which is not only what we are not used to but what we hope that we never shall be. A dozen examples of it might be cited, but I shall single out only one. It is a stanza which anyone could recognize as Hopkins’s. It is the twenty-sixth in “The Wreck of the Deutschland”:—

I believe that there are Hopkins enthusiasts who might defend this stanza as being strange only in its unfamiliar technique. II we say that we have difficulty in understanding it, they say that wo ought not to have difficulty. Why do we not relish “pied and peeled May” when we relish “the mothsoft Milky Way"? Our answer is that whereas in the latter phrase he is using his technique, in the former he is abusing it. His words, his syntax, become unintelligible.

“Unintelligible!” exclaim others. “That is the charm of Hopkins. He wrote in a kind of ecstasy.” I would remonstrate that unintelligibility is not the charm of Hopkins. He was highly intellectual and was not writing in a mysticism higher or lower than logic. He had always a clear idea in his own mind, and wanted to present it clear to us. When he did not, his verses were a failure.

Hopkins failed more than most poets of his ability, and the reason is clear. We all know that we have each of us a tendency to queerness, but it is usually very painfully checked in us by others, and we soon learn to check ourselves, partly through timidity. Hopkins knew that he had a tendency to queerness, for he was told so, but he had no timidity, and he knew that he had been queer only by hindsight. When one day, in a sermon in the Farm Street Church in London, he likened the Church to a cow wandering through a meadow with her calves hanging from her udders, he did not know that he had been queer until he had retired to the sacristy. He had the defect of not understanding the minds of his readers, and it led to frequent lapses from what is intelligible.

This second strangeness of his is not, therefore, to be praised or excused. Were it everywhere, all his poetry would be ruined. At the same time, its importance should not be exaggerated. It spoiled a half-dozen poems completely, but for the most part it causes only scattered blemishes. It is entirely unfair to single out those blemishes and say that they represent Hopkins when he is most Hopkins.

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BUT let us turn to Hopkins’s nobler strangeness, the strangeness that astonishes us to breathless commendation of it. It is the kind of strangeness that we find in a hummingbird if we are used to hopping robins and running sparrows. The hummingbird is a genius of a bird. If it has legs, we do not see them. It is all wings and animation. It can fly forward and backward and sideways. It is all flight, a picture of inspiration. Indeed, the hummingbird possesses a resemblance to the best, of Hopkins’s verse.

There is really no other word but inspired that applies to such poetry. Hopkins himself commented on it. He recognized that it must be rare. Even good poets must be content, therefore, in many passages, with what he called “Parnassian or not inspired verse — that is, verse which is tolerable and skillful and proper. Indeed, it takes a good poet to be Parnassian. But great poets, to have their poems great, must occasionally rise to inspiration.

There is a sense in which all of Hopkins’s poetry is inspired. That is, we are never aware that he is out of breath, that he has nothing more to say, and that he is hesitating from exhaustion. It is this which gives all of his poems, even the queerest of them, a beautiful unity. “The Wreck of the Deutschland” is written as if it were one vehement ejaculation. It is even written too much that way, for it is too long to be an ejaculation, and should, for its length, dally and be more “Parnassian.”But in the sonnets this characteristic is all to the good.

One of the sonnets where the unity is particularly excellent is a poem written during the ill-health and spiritual aridity of his last years: —

This poem is superb simply by its wholeness.

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BUT there are other single passages in which the inspiration is not seen so much in unity as in freedom. It is the freedom of mastery, of apparently effortless and utterly felicitous expression. It is what men achieve only in heaven, and poems only in a line or two on earth.

A sonnet called “God’s Grandeur” is all of it a good poem, but in its final sestet it loosens itself to this freedom: —

There are other emparadised lines, such as the final one in a sonnet entitled “Felix Randal,” written in the middle years of his writing: —

Then in the next to the last year of his life, when ill-health foreboded death, and when he was thinking of his ultimate resurrection, he wrote a poem somewhat awkward and queer, which has the explanatory title, “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection,” but this title does not entirely explain the enigma of the first lines. Even this poem finally arrives at a freedom which frees the whole poem: —

In all these selections, whatever their type of strangeness, it can be remarked that it is the voice of a Christian that speaks. It is not so much that Christ is always mentioned as that all the universe is to Hopkins Christ’s. He cannot not see Christ in it. This does not make him a moralizing poet, for he decidedly was not one, nor does it make him a preacher in rhyme, for when he preached, it was in prose — in a Jesuit pulpit somewhere in London, Oxford, Liverpool. He was not even so much a preacher as Dante was, for Dante had no pulpit to preach in, and made up for it by preaching in verse. Yet Hopkins was truly a Christian poet.

This does not mean, however, that he is to be relegated to a category of so-called “religious” poets, nor that he appeals only to those who have what, one might, call an aesthetic liking for a pious manner. Such has not been his fate so far, and there is little likelihood of the fate being conferred on him. He is as much for all men as is Dante. In fact, one of the strangest things about this strange poet is that by his very strangeness he has made Christian poetry more normal.