Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) in 1885
This is the second edition of a two-part article showcasing ten of the best poems written by the nineteenth century English poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Both articles can be googled; they are on my blog, thomasdorsett@blogspot.com. Written primarily for my students, I invite anyone interested in poetry to read these poems, whether for the first time or whether one is familiar with the poet and the poems. Each one is followed by a brief commentary.
6. Peace
When will you ever, Peace, wild
wooddove, shy wings shut,
Your round me roaming end, and
under be my boughs?
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace?
I’ll not play hypocrite
To own my heart: I yield you do
come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor
peace. What pure peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars,
the death of it?
O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord
should leave in lieu
Some good! And so he does leave
Patience exquisite,
That plumes to Peace thereafter.
And when Peace here does home
He comes with work to do, he does
not come to coo,
He comes to brood and sit.
Commentary
This poem was written in 1879, just
after Hopkins found out he was to be transferred to work as a parish priest in
Liverpool. It is along with “Pied
Beauty,” an example of a curtal sonnet, discussed previously. Hopkins dreaded
his new position; the frequent moves, over which he had no control, were
beginning to wear him down. I suppose he
felt that functioning as a priest in a working-class environment of a big
industrial city was not a good match; if this is true, his intimation was indeed correct.
Notice the hushed, soft tones of
this poem—the w’s and r’s, the relative paucity of hard consonants. No bold, celebratory lines such as “The world
is charged with the grandeur of God” here.
The soft tones of the music evince sadness and resignation; the subject
of the poem is the absence of peace,
not its presence.
Also notice the Latin-like
manipulations of normal English word order: “under be my boughs” for “be under
my boughs;” and “To own my heart” for “To my own heart”. Hopkins is not trying to be odd here; for him
music and rhythm are primary.
The image of “reaving Peace” is
striking. Peace is lacerating because she lives alas! away.
For me, what makes this poem truly
unforgettable is the last line. After
the easy rhyme of “do” with “coo,” the ear expects a resolution, a happy
ending. The understatement of the last
line is like a stab in the heart. (I
read this line a little faster and softer, giving the understatement an even
greater impact.) Even when she makes a
rare appearance, Peace doesn’t come as relief; Peace comes as rumination; Peace
comes as depression.
Hopkins’s poems evince a largely
negative emotional progression, albeit with some notable exceptions. In two short years after “Pied Beauty,” we
see his vision begin to darken. The
technical wizardry, however, will remain undiminished.
7. Spring and Fall
to a Young Child
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for,
can you?
Ah! As the heart grows older
It will come to such sighs colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal
lie.
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name,
Sorrow’s sprigs are the same,
No mouth had, no nor mind,
expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
Commentary
Hopkins wrote this poem in 1880; at
this time, he was functioning as a priest at St. Francis Xavier’s, Liverpool. He was not happy there. He had some difficulty relating to the
working-class parishioners of this large, industrial, troubled city.
He was also much overworked. The
poet informed Bridges that the young girl of the title is fictional. I mentioned
previously that Hopkins’s poems prior to the confessional Terrible Sonnets were nevertheless more
biographical than their objective, rather anonymous treatment indicates. Hopkins is quite possibly the young girl of
the poem, having become more and more aware of death and sorrow as his life
became more difficult.
“It is the blight man was born
for.” One can’t help noticing that there is no “Grave where is thy victory;
death where is thy sting?” here; the absence of religious consolation is
striking. It’s not that Hopkins lost
faith; he was, however, increasingly aware of his faith’s inability to resolve his increasing sorrow.
The poem contains four stresses per
line; it is written in sprung rhythm throughout. Once again, we are confronted
with strong rhythms and neologisms, e.g. “wanwood” and “leafmeal”. “Leafmeal” indicates the dissolution of
fallen leaves, an understatement of the horror of death.
What a beautiful last line! It sums up the whole poem. The stress on
“Margaret” is very effective. Falling
leaves are not the problem; world sorrow is not the issue: it is the sudden,
personal realization of the demise of one’s self that is so effectively
portrayed here. For Hopkins, hope,
albeit an increasing inaccessible hope, remained in Pandora’s box; death however
has escaped and will not, even by faith, be banished back to an unopened
casket.
8. Felix Randall
Felix Randal the farrier, O is he
dead then? My duty all ended,
Who have watched his mould of man,
big-boned and hardy-handsome
Pining, pining, till time when
reason rambled in it and some
Fatal four disorders, fleshed
there, all contended?
Sickness broke him. Impatient, he
cursed at first, but mended
Being anointed and all; though a
heavenlier heart began some
Months earlier, since I had our
sweet reprieve and ransom
Tended to him. Ah well, God rest him all road ever he
offended!
This seeing the sick endears them
to us, us too it endears.
My tongue had taught thee comfort,
touch had quenched thy tears,
Thy tears that touched my heart,
child, Felix, poor Felix Randal;
How far from then forethought of,
all thy more boisterous years,
When thou at the random grim forge,
powerful amidst peers,
Didst fettle for the great grey
drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!
Commentary
Written in the same year, 1880,
Felix Randall is a companion piece of Spring and Fall; both deal with
death. In the latter, a young child
realizes she, too, will die some day; in the former, death comes to an adult. There is a symmetry here; the spring poem
begins with a child in good health; the Randall poem begins with the death of
an adult. In the first poem, death is a
concept, soon to be banished from the little girl's mind as she is absorbed by distractions that surround her. In the other poem, death is a reality.
Margaret will presumably have a long life ahead of her; in the second
poem, a priest recalls the life of a man who is already dead. Between these two brash realities, namely,
the realization of one’s mortality during youth, and that mortality coming to
pass at the end of one's life, is a period of (usually) many years, when, caught up
in the workaday world while possessing the vigor of youth, one is able to
(almost) forget one’s own eventual demise.
This latency phase is beautifully portrayed in the last three lines of
this poem, all the more poignant since it is a recollection of a deceased man in the bloom
of youth, at a time when that bloom has withered and already has become part of
the leafmeal of the forest.
9.
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we
have spent
This night! What sights you, heart,
saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer
light’s delay.
With witness I speak thus. But
where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And
my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead
letters sent
To dearest him who lives alas!
away.
I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s
most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my
taste was me,
Bones build in me, flesh filled,
blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough
sours. I see
The lost are like this, their
scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating
selves; but worse.
Commentary
Hopkins greatest poems were written
over a period of about ten years. What a range
of subjects! Love of nature, love of
God—and unfortunately for him, rejection of the self, which is readily apparent in his
Terrible Sonnets, this one, like most of the others, being a virtuosic example of vitriol against the
self. This and the other dark poems were written
sometime after 1885. From 1884 until his
death in 1889, Hopkins’s official position was the most important one he had ever
held: that of Fellow in Classics and Professor of Greek and Latin Literature,
at University College of Dublin. But it
sounds better than it was: the Jesuit College was formed to prove that a
Catholic college could compete with the Protestant ones. The emphasis was not so much on the love of learning as it was on passing examinations. The Irish found an Irishman to run the science
department; Hopkins was chosen because a qualified Irish Classics scholar could not be found. It was an era of nationalism; the Irish were
not fond, to put it mildly, of the English. They even looked down on recent converts to Catholicism.
Hopkins was overworked and increasingly isolated. A poignant illustration of his isolation is
his retiring every evening at 10 P.M., just when the faculty gathered to enjoy each
other’s company.
Although the Terrible Sonnets indicate that Hopkins was suffering from serious depression, the artist in him was still in supreme control. Something negative expressed with what Keats called Negative Capability, is a double negative, something very positive indeed. We must feel grateful that Hopkins composed these Terrible Sonnets, terrible in their honesty and unforgettable in their austere beauty.
My favorite line of this poem is “Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours,” one of the finest examples of Hopkins’s intensification of meaning through sound. “Selfyeast of spirit” has a neutral tonal quality; it is followed by two hammering alliterative stresses of “dull” and “dough.” Then comes the amazing “sours,” which comes across as an implosion of self-disgust. (Read it slowly; read it as if you were chewing on something very bitter.) I have found in all literature no expression of self-hate that is more powerful than these six words. For me they are the negative image of the glorious “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” discussed earlier.
10.
Mine own heart let me more have
pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter
kind,
Charitable; not live this
toremented mind
With this tormenting mind
tormenting yet.
I cast for comfort I can no more
get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or
thirst can find
Thirst’s all-in-all in a world of
wet.
Soul, self; come poor Jackself, I
do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off
thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room;
let joy size
At God knows when to God knows
what, whose smile
‘s not wrung, see you,
unforeseentimes rather—as skies
Betweenpie mountains—lights a
lovely mile.
Commentary
Sometimes I wish I could travel back
in time and give Hopkins some much-needed lessons in Buddhism, a system which is
perfectly capable of finding-by-not-finding Thirst’s all in all in a world of
wet. I wish I could have brought the
current pope along with me, so that he could repeat what he said regarding
those who have “the wrong sexual orientation,” namely, “Who am I to judge?"
This is the eye of a Terrible
Hurricane: you know that comfort will not only not find “root-room;” it will soon
be uprooted, and perhaps never return.
The movement of this poem evinces
Hopkins at the height of his powers.
(It’s important to state here that in the midst of writing desperate
sonnets, he wrote on other subjects as well and continued to function, albeit unhappily,
at the University College Dublin). Notice the emphasis on “Charitable”—as if it were
something foreign to him, yet something of extreme importance. Notice how the effect would be lost if that
word came at the end of the previous line.
This poem contains several examples
of Hopkins’s assault—a glorious assault, but an assault nevertheless--on conventional grammar. There is no noun after the
adjective “comfortless,” which is used here as a noun, or more likely, as an adjective modifying an assumed noun such as “world.”
Notice the “’s” beginning the next line after “smile”—it works here, but
this device should be used rarely, if at all--E.E. Cummings being a notable exception.
The last three lines are
enigmatic. “Betweenpie” is used as a
verb here. I suggest that the meaning here is, "Between mountains skies pie (that is, make pied) with a play of light and dark the valley between them). But “lights" is a singular form
of the verb, while “skies” is plural.
What “lights” is the smile of joy which breaks out unexpectedly like sun rays piercing an overcast sky. This takes some figuring out; I sense that many modern readers have little patience for such grammatical idiosyncrasies. The musicality of these lines, however, is well-nigh perfect.
This completes this selection of ten of my favorite Hopkins poems. Yes, there are others—but not many others; Hopkins left relatively fewer completed great poems than is the case with other major poets.
I suggest that the reader peruse the poems periodically at a periodicity I leave up to her or him. One has to give them “root-room.” The effort is indeed worth it, for they are among the best poems in the language.
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