Ten Unfogettable Poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Note: I recently taught a course on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins at the Osher Institute of Towson University, Maryland, which has inspired me to write about his poetry.  What follows is a series of poems by Hopkins, along with a brief discussion of each poem.  The poems are what I consider to be the most important ones to remember  for students who are interested in poetry--the selection is somewhat arbitrary, of course, but only somewhat: each of the poems discussed is a masterwork written by one of the greatest poets of the nineteenth century. I have tried to keep my comments brief, so that those interested can copy this article and refer to these wonderful poems, without getting lost in commentary.  Although primarily written for my students, all are invited to read, and if so desired, to make a copy of the Ten Unforgettable Poems.

A very brief introduction: Gerard Manley Hopkins, (1844-1889), was one of the most musical and innovative poets of all time.  He stated that he wanted readers to pay special attention to the sound of his poems, the mark of a true poet.  His themes--the beauty and importance of transcendence and of nature, etc. are still very pertinent for us today.

1.  God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

   It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

   It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed.  Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

   And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

   And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell; the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never pent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last light off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

   World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Commentary  

This poem dates from 1877, eleven years after Hopkins's conversion from the Anglican Church to Catholicism; he had become a fully ordained Jesuit priest in this year.

This is certainly a great religious poem, written at a time when such poetry was losing its prominence in Western literature.  Every word is a perfect fit; Hopkins give his full attention not only to the whole but to every detail.  Two lines have always been especially significant for me: the first and the ninth line.  In the first, we have a consummate example of word-painting.  The "o" vowel in "world" is enunciated lower in the throat from the "a" of "charged"--you thus can hear the electricity when the word "charged" is pronounced.  Hopkins indicated that the next major stress is on the word, "God."  "with the grandeur of" to be read more quickly, and with less emphasis--the poem moves here to what is most important: "God."  That the sound and movement of the words indicate the meaning is a rare poetic achievement; there are many other such examples in Hopkins's poetry.

Line nine, "There lives the dearest freshness deep down things," should be committed to memory, because it is so well-put, so essential, and so true.  We have caused environmental damage to a degree unimagined in Hopkins's time; nevertheless, industrialization had already caused widespread damage in the nineteenth century, especially to cities.  When one is confronted, however, with ugliness all one needs to do is really look at a plant, even a weed, to realize the truth of this line.

Hopkins was a conservative Catholic, but this poem is also catholic in the universal sense of that word.  If one finds the reference to the Holy Ghost too dogmatic, all one needs to do is to realize what the significance of this line is: it is a variation of line nine.

Notice how primary rhythm and sound are for Hopkins.  For instance, he does not write, "Now, why then, do men not reck his rod," but the much more rhythmically beautiful, "Why do men then now not reck his rod."

The "what," the content of this poem is good, but the "how" of the poem, its technique, is what makes this and all the major poems by Hopkins unforgettable.  Even greater was to fuse both aspects into an unforgettable whole.

2. Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things--

  For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

      For rose-moles in all stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough;

       And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things, original, spare, strange;

  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

       With swift, slow; sweet, sour, adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change;

                                     Praise him.

Commentary

This is one of the most popular poems that Hopkins wrote.  It is written in "paeonic sprung rhythm."  Paeonic rhythm, which was used in classical Greek poetry and prose, consists of four stresses to the line, with the first stress emphasized.  "Sprung rhythm," which originated with Hopkins, signifies dividing the line into stresses, with an arbitrary (usually four or less) number of feet in between.  The result of sprung rhythm is a closer approximation of the cadences of spoken language; Hopkins's ear sensed that if the meter is too exact, the result can be boring.

This is what Hopkins called a "curtal sonnet," that is, a poem that has been curtailed, a poem that has the effect of a sonnet, but contains fewer lines.

This poem is a hymn to diversity in nature, and applied to our times, to cultural diversity as well.  Hopkins was different, and he knew it. (A significant aspect of Hopkins's poetry is that, without being confessional--in the earlier poems at least--the autobiographical elements of his poetry are prominent.  Like Hitchcock, he not only directed his art, but usually made an appearance in each work as well.  Hopkins was known to be "eccentric and slightly effeminate."  He was also a great genius; he also sensed the oddness of this.  

The transcendent, intrinsic beauty of majestic manifestations of nature he referred to as"inscapes."  The ability to appreciate this majesty he referred to as "instress."  These two coinages give a good indication that Hopkins had an extraordinarily rich inner life.  Only one who realizes the inscape in himself is able to appreciate the inscapes that surround him.

3. The Windhover

           To Christ Our Lord

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-

  dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon in his

         riding

  Of the rolling level underneath him seady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

   As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and

        gliding

   Rebuffed the big wind.  My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird,--the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty ad valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

    Buckle; AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

  No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

   Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

Commentary

One of the most beautiful poems in the English language!  The musicality of this poem is breathtaking.  Here meaning and music are seamlessly fused; the wonder we can have, should have, and often do have. regarding the awesome inscapes of this world has rarely been better expressed as it has been here. 

One could write a book about this poem!  For reasons of space, however, I will point out only one of its technical aspects, then concentrate on an interpretation. The technical aspect; Hopkins placed one of the four stresses of the second line on "dawn"--what a difference that makes!

The octet of the sonnet expresses the majesty of the falcon.  (Notice that Hopkins uses the upper-case, "Falcon," here, while he always refers to Christ with a lower-case "him,"  as in the last line of "Pied Beauty." I will leave the interpretation of this up to you.)  The bird  flies high above the observer; it represents the transcendent.  In the sestet, the transcendent comes down to Earth and becomes manifest in Christ and in humanity in general..  With hard work and sacrifice, the "gold-vermillion" the very essence of life, in Christ and, potentially at least, in all human beings, becomes manifest.

Hopkins seems to be telling us that angels (the windhovers) are transcendent the easy way, by their very nature; we humans have a harder path--the way of the Cross--but the "gold-vermillion" result is even more impressive.

4. Inversnaid

This darksome burn, horseback brown,

his rollrock highroad roaring down,

In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam

Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fawn-froth

Turns and twindles over the broth

Of a pool so pitchblack, fell-frowning,

It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning. 

Degged with dew,dappled with dew

Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads throuh,

Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,

And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft

Of wet and of wildness?  Let them be left,

O let them be left, wildness and wet;

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Commentary

This poem was written in 1881, while Hopkins was an assitent in Glasgow.  In his free time, he took a trip to Loch Lomond; he wrote this poem after a visit to the falls of Inversanid, a nearby town.  One could hardly guess from this poem that Hopkins, due to overwork, increasing isolation and the stress from frequent moves, was beginning to feel increasingly dispirited.  The only hint of this is the word, "Despair", which undoubtedly welled up from deep inside him; despair will not be so easily drowned in subsequent poems.

At first reading, it does not matter if the meaning remains obscure; the music is primary.  Upon further readings, what the physicality of the word evokes becomes clear: the delightful portrait of a falls.  (It is well known that Hopkins had a special fondness for water.)  This poem I consider to be a companion piece to the next poem.  Both are unique in Hopkins's canon as portraits of nature without any reference to God.  Hopkins would be appalled if one classified these as secular poems, since religion was of the utmost importance to him; they do, however, have a secular feel.

This poem should be read aloud at a somewhat faster tempo than that of other poems by Hopkins, thus giving expression to the bubbly, forward-driving quality of the words and what they evoke: a moving body of water.

In this poem, the joy of nature is apparent; in the second poem, the subject is the uprooting of this joy due to man-made destruction of the natural world. 

5. Binsey Poplars

     felled 1879

    My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,

    Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,

    All felled, felled, are all felled;

         Of a fresh and following folded rank

                        Not spared, not one

                        That dandled a sandalled

                  Shadow that swam or sank

   On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-

          winding bank.

      O if we but knew what we do

               When we delve or hew—

      Hack and rack the growing green!

               Since country is so tender

      To touch, her being so slender,

      That, like this sleek and seeing ball

       But a prick will make no eye at all,

       Where we, even where we mean

                                   To mend her we end her,

                  When we hew or delve:

After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.

         Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve

                 Strokes of havoc unselve

                           The sweet especial scene,

               Rural scene, a rural scene,

               Sweet especial rural scene.

Commentary

The sheer virtuosity and musicality of this poem rival that of the masterful “Windhover.”  Hopkins takes his experimentation here, however, to a new level.  This poem stands out first of all due to the asymmetry of the stanzas.  Indentation no longer signifies that the line in question has an end-rhyme with a line similarly indented; what is key in this poem is musical movement independent of stanzaic symmetry, as is the case with his sonnets.  He is experimenting with longer lines, anticipating the experimentation of such poets as Charles Wright, not to mention that of that master of versification, Marianne Moore.

How contemporary this poem is in the age of the Sixth Extinction!  We now live in what’s called the Anthropocene Age, characterized by the significant influence, largely negative, of mankind on the environment—for the first time in natural history.   If people read great poets more, this poem could have become the anthem of the environmental movement.

Binsey is a town on the opposite bank of the Isis (Thames) River, not far from Oxford.  Hopkins was very close to trees, and their destruction bothered him a great deal, as this poem indicates.  The poem has a beautiful sing-song quality, which Hopkins interrupts with a disturbing image: he compares the destruction of the trees to the gouging out of eyes.  It’s a potent image: “After-comers cannot guess the beauty been,” when something is destroyed.  Nature is delicate, Hopkins is telling us, an essential message that is much more pertinent to us today, when greed is threatening the visions our eyes receive from “the eyeball of the Earth,” as it were.

Unforgettables 6 through 10 will soon follow. Comments welcome.