Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Present Absence of God

The great nineteenth century English poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, wrote some of the finest religious poems in the English language. A Jesuit priest, he was indeed a man of faith, but that faith became problematic as he grew older.  Although he continued to believe, religion provided little consolation in the last years of his life.  He thought God could intervene and alleviate his increasing sense of desperation, but came to the conclusion that grace and consolation were not forthcoming,  Once a transcendent god recedes beyond the clouds and is no longer felt to be present below them, traditional forms of theism becomes- problematic indeed.  We will examine in this little essay Hopkins's inner journey from joy of God's presence to despair of His absence; two poems, one written at a time of exuberant faith, the other written two years later as doubt that God would help him began to set in, will help guide us in our understanding of that journey.

1, The First Poem: The Windhover

Gerard Manley Hopkins, the eldest of nine children, was born on July 28, 1844 into a devout, artistic Anglican family.  His father was a successful businessman, but like so many on both sides of the family, was artistically gifted as well.  In his lifetime, he published three volumes of poetry, far more publications than his son had during his lifetime; the first collection of Gerard's poems had to wait until Robert Bridges's edition of 1918--and it took a few decades after that for his poetry to gain critical acclaim.  The major theme of Hopkins's father's poetry is that the more you delved into nature, the more the presence of God becomes apparent. Gerard's poetry follows this tradition, a worldview especially evident in the poems written in the years immediately after his first great work, The Wreck of The Deutschland--e.g. God's Grandeur, Pied Beauty and the one we will now discuss, The Windhover.

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 steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
in his ecstacy! 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 and 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 god-vermillion.

This is one of the most beautiful religious poem in the English language.  Written in 1877, nine years after Hopkins's conversion to Catholicism, (we will discuss possible reasons for this conversion in a later essay), the poem exudes the joyous experience of faith.  Hopkins, who studied to become a Jesuit beginning in 1868, was at the time of this poem soon to be a fully ordained Jesuit priest, having solemnly professed a life of poverty, chastity, and obedience.  (His ordination took place in September of 1877.)  This was a happy time for Hopkins, the overwork and waning enthusiasm of his many assignments were all in the future.

We will concentrate on the content here, in accordance with the subject of this essay, and ignore the poem's dazzling technique, which, admittedly, is not easy to do.

Hopkins not only adored the God behind nature, but nature as well; both loves are in evidence here.  In the octet, we are confronted with an unforgettable image of the windhover soaring above both Hopkins's and the reader's heads.  It is a fine example of what Hopkins referred to as inscape, a dazzlingly unique phenomenon of nature.

The windhover is a symbol as well, a symbol of transcendence. The majestic bird is like an angel, soaring above the fray of human suffering, closer to God indeed, yet below the holy person who has passed through the ordeal  of inner and outer temptations with his soul intact.  Its transcendent beauty is, however, breathtaking.  "My heart in hiding/Stirred for a bird"--it is not an exaggeration if we see Hopkins referring to himself here.  That his heart is in hiding can refer to the inner, recondite nature of the poet as well as to the disappearance of individuality as one forgets everything except the blissful image above one.

The wings of the windhover remind one of the Holy Ghost as depicted in the final three lines of Hopkins's great poem, God's Grandeur:

   Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastwards, springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
   World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

In the sestet, however, the windhover is identified with Christ.  Christ is a "billion times more lovelier and more dangerous," because He comes down from the sky and suffers like the rest of us.  The weight of the Cross crushes Him, but as it does we see, with the eye of the spirit, resurrection, symbolized in the poem by  the gash of gold-vermillion as blue-bleak embers fall.  This flash of golden light is the very essence of life, the Zen center of reality, far superior to the wondrous vision of the windhover, soaring above us in innocent majesty.

A profound poem, a joyful poem, a dazzling poem indeed.

We will now compare it to a poem that Hopkins wrote two years later, in 1879.

2. The Second Poem: Andromeda

Now Time's Andromeda on this rock rude,
With not her either beauty's equal or
Her injury's, looks off by both horns of shore,
Her flower, her piece of being, doomed dragon food.

Time past she has been attempted and pursued
By many blows and banes; but now hears roar
A wilder beast from West than all were, more
Rife in her wrongs, more lawless, and more lewd.

Her Perseus linger and leave her to her extremes?--
Pillowy air he treads a time and hangs
His thought on her, forsaken that she seems,

All while her patience, morselled into pangs,
Mounts; then to alight disarming, no one dreams,
With Gorgan's gear and barebill/thongs and fangs.

This poem, written in 1879, two years after The Windhover illustrates Hopkins's waning optimism.  In my view, as we shall see in a future essay, Hopkins became a priest to chiefly to curb his sensual nature.  Plagued by guilt by his sexual attraction to males at a time when there was a good deal more social opprobrium relating to what we now call homosexuality than there is now, Hopkins sought refuge in grace from God, obtained after conquering his desires through obedience, chastity, and poverty.  By 1879, he was discovering that the hard, time-consuming work as a Jesuit left little time for his first love, poetry; not only that, he was beginning to discover that he did not have a calling for parish work or even for teaching. 

This poem has been interpreted by many as an allegory depicting the trials of the Church, awaiting redemption in an evil world.  I very much disagree with this view.  As I have pointed out on several occasions, nearly all of Hopkins's poems have strong autobiographical elements; the poem under discussion is no exception,  Andromeda is best understood as an allegory of Hopkins's inner life as well as an allegory of he human condition as he saw it.

The poem is not a favorite in the canon of the poet.  Its allegorical nature renders it less direct; it needs interpretation more than other poems of Hopkins.  Although the poem evinces the poet's great musicality, the last line, however, can fall a little flat on the ear at first.  Once the initial mystery of "thongs and fangs" are removed, however, the beauty of this poem in its entirety becomes apparent.

This is the only major poem by Hopkins whose subject is derived from Greek mythology; we begin with a brief summary of the Andromeda myth.

Andromda, was he daughter of Cepheus, an Ethiopian king, and his wife, Cassiopeia.  When her mother claimed that Andromeda was more beautiful than the Nereids, nymphs sacred to Poseidon, the latter, in order to punish Cassiopeia's hubris, sent the sea monster, Cetus, to ravage Ethiopia.  Cepheus has his daughter chained to a rock as a sacrifice to Cetus, hoping to thus appease the monster and prevent further destruction.  Perseus, however, arrives just in time; he slays Cetus and saves Andromeda.

As mentioned earlier, I consider this poem to be a metaphor of the poet's inner life.  Hopkins saw himself as a human being threatened by a host of devils, whose only hope was the slaying of those demons by divine intervention.  A female alter ego makes a frequent appearance in Hopkins's poems--a critic, for instance, has asserted that the Margaret in Hopkins's famous "Spring and Fall" poem is the poet himself. (I will provide a more striking example of the cross-identification in a further essay.)

Andromeda depicts Hopkins's troubled inner life.  He/she is "Time's Andromeda" since the troubles that beset him/her are temporal; if the trials are overcome on Earth, eternal, trouble-free life awaits.  Andromeda is, however, completely powerless to work out her salvation by herself, a plight which is symbolized by her being chained to a rock.  She has endured and defeated demons in the past; now however, she is in mortal and perhaps even in immortal danger.

What is the identity of her present nemesis, the "wilder beast from West?"  Perhaps this beast represents several entities, such as the onslaught of science and the decreasing power of dogma and tradition, as well as decreasing inhibitions, especially sexual inhibitions, as Western culture becomes more and more secular.

It is important to note that the "her" in line eight refers to the beast and not to Andromeda.  I interpret the feminine pronoun as referring to Hopkins's sensual nature.  She is no ascetic; she is not even Catholic, but is a lawless beast.  Note, the sexual reference: she is lewd.  She is everything that Andromeda, as it were, secretly desires, desires which so frighten her that she, as it were again, becomes a priest.

Andromeda/Hopkins is in dire straits.  Will Perseus/Christ linger and leave her to her extremes?  The concluding lines leave everything in suspension.  Perseus/Christ is able to slay the dragon with the Gorgan's head/Cross, but why the  tortuous delay?

By means of his magic sandals, the hero floats on the "pillowy air" above the chained prisoner.  He represents Christ, the windhover of the first poem, a majestic being hovering overhead.  In the first poem, however, Christ comes down to Earth, suffers and redeems humanity.  Not here; the savior figure, still all-powerful and able to defeat all enemies, remains a transcendent vision overhead, poised to intervene in suffering humanity, but for some reason does not do so.

(A possible solution to Hopkins's increasing spiritual crisis, as well as to our own, is indicated by the "then" in the penultimate line of the poem.  "No one dreams" that help is possible in a state of extreme anxiety, such as that of the woman portrayed in the poem.  I am reminded of the final words attributed to the Buddha: Seek your salvation with diligence.  It is impossible to proceed along this path in a state of unbearable mental duress.  A degree of equanimity must be obtained first.

The last line brings home Hopkins's view of his own abandonment and that of besieged humanity as well.  Perseus's weapon in the sky is opposed to the bare bill of the monster on Earth; the thongs--the winged sandals--the means by which Perseus can come down to Earth, sre opposed to the fangs threatening Andromeda.  The desperate situation demands an immediate intervention; yet the poem leaves us with the assertion hat "no one dreams" that it will come anytime soon.

Thus, for practical purposes, God might as well not be there.  Perhaps the belief that God can intervene but won't is even worse, since abandonment at the hands of a loving and just deity can increase a sense of unworthiness and guilt on the part of the one who feels hopelessly lost.  Hopkins had faith in the Catholic God to the very end of his life; however,  that God, as Hopkins's final sonnets attest,  became a remote entity to whom he wrote "dead letters" and "who lived alas! away."

Hopkins's needs for a balance between flesh and spirit, recognition and solitude, were not met.  His life became increasing afflicted by self-loathing.  One imagines that with a little bit of loving, mortal intervention might have brought much relief to a man who saw himself as Andromeda chained to a rock, about to be devoured by a monster.  His poems, however, including the ones in which he expresses despair, remain as great works of art.  It is unfortunate that this great poet died without an inkling of the joys that his poetry has provided to generations that came after him, delights it shall, undoubtedly, continue to provide to generations to come.