Hopkins and Whitman

In preparation for a series of four lectures entitled, “A Dozen Perfect Poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins,” I came across the following excerpt from a letter of Hopkins to Robert Bridges from1882: “But first I may as  well say what I should not otherwise have said, that I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like mine than any other man living.  As he is a very great scoundrel, this is not a pleasant confession.  And this always makes me more desirous to read him and the more determined that I will not.”

I was taken aback; who would have thought Hopkins and Whitman were soulmates?  Hopkins’s turning a compliment of another into a weapon to disparage himself is consistent with his personality, since self-acceptance was not part of his inner makeup.  Aside from the fact that both wrote great poetry, when Whitman comes to mind one thinks of a joyful acceptance of things as they are, a love that even had a place for evil, and for which a belief in God, at least in the traditional sense, was not necessary.  These traits seem to be the polar opposites of the qualities of Hopkins’s personality, such as shyness, self-denial and orthodox belief. 

What did Hopkins have in mind when he wrote those lines to Bridges?  We will explore several possibilities in the first part of this essay, including a trait common to both which Hopkins may have had in mind; in the second part, we will briefly discuss why Hopkins chose a radically different path from that of Whitman, in order to escape what he could not accept.

Originality

Hopkins and Whitman have a great affinity here; both were innovators.  Each author developed a style radically different from that of the poetry written at the time.  The two poets, in their own ways, invigorated poetry by combining the rhythms of spoken English with the artifice of composition.  Hopkins, as one might expect, did this in a more formal way.  He invented a system called sprung rhythm in which each line in a poem had the same amount of stresses  but had a varying amount of syllables associated with each stress, giving his poetry a freedom that traditional poetry, with its limited number of choices of metrical feet, lacked. The gregarious Whitman was more directly inspired by the speech he encountered in daily conversation, and subsequently interspersed his great poem, Song of Myself, with sections of great lyricism, along with descriptive sections, bordering on prose.  (His style here reminds me of classical operas, in which lyrical and/or dramatic arias are introduced by recitatives.)  Both Hopkins and Whitman possessed great ears, that is, both had an acute sensitivity to the sound of poetry. 

Hopkins was undoubtedly aware that both he and the American master were innovators, but this commonality cannot be what he meant when he wrote that “he knew in his mind” that he and Whitman were so similar.  Originality was certainly not the factor that caused Hopkins to consider Whitman “a very great scoundrel.”

Personality

Not many similarities here.  Whitman's libido was more like a male lion's rather than a monk's; Hopkins penchant for self-denial made them polar opposites in this regard.  (As we will see, there were libidinous similarities between them as well; the difference is that Hopkins spent his life trying to deny the sensual side of his nature.) One sang of the body, including its desires; the other sang of grace, and admitted to students at the end of his life that he was still a virgin—no, not much similarity here.

Views Regarding Class

Whitman was a “people’s person;” he associated with persons of all classes.  He was just as comfortable with famous people as he was with carpenters and trolley conductors.  Most people in the United States today live in communities segregated not only by race, but by class as well.  Whitman would have had none of this.

Hopkins was much more bookish and reserved.  In his one political poem, Tom Garland, his political naivete is striking.  He asserted that workers were happy because they worked so hard and thus had little time to be pensive.  Hopkins's political views were conservative; he asserted that as long as the poor had food to eat, class distinctions should be preserved. One could imagine him, if he were a contemporary American, being a registered Republican.  If alive now, Whitman would undoubtedly be appalled about such things as the lack of universal health care, the failure to raise the minimum wage, and the rigid interpretation  of the Second Amendment.

Relationship to Nature

In an essay written in 1865, On the Origin of Beauty: A Platonic Dialogue,’ Hopkins reveals a knowledge of flora that reminds one of a botanist’s.  He was a close observer of nature, of which his poems provide ample evidence. Images of both fauna and flora, as well as examples of inanimate nature, such as bodies of water, occur in his poems; a strong condemnation of civilization’s desecration of nature occurs as well.  His eye for nature was keen, as this phrase from Pied Beauty, one of his most celebrated short poems, attests: “For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim...”  When I first read this I thought that the two words, “that swim” were just there for the rhyme, and thus a defect.  (Even Hopkins nods.) Later I read that, upon death, trout lose their rose moles rapidly.  “Swim” rhymes with “trim,” but the two words didn’t constitute a facile rhyme.  The image of a living trout reveals how exact Hopkins’s observation of nature was.  Whitman, in contrast, was a city dweller, and his imagery reflects life in an urban environment.  One would not find a lament regarding the felling of trees in his poetry, in contrast to Hopkins’s famous poem, “Binsey Poplars”—in Whitman’s world, the trees had already been removed to make room for the city.  Whitman's acuity of vision was directed at humanity, not nature.

Spirituality

Both poets evinced a very deep spiritual life.  Hopkins, however, chose a dogmatic version of Catholicism--we shall see why soon—while Whitman’s spirituality wasn’t dogmatic at all.  Can you image Hopkins ever writing such lines as:

Creeds and schools in abeyance,

Retiring back a while sufficient at what they are, but never forgotten,

I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,

Nature without check with original energy.
                           
                                       --from Song of Myself

Lines like these might well have brought Hopkins to the conclusion that the American poet was a “very great scoundrel” indeed.

Sensuality

They had much in common here, except for a very essential fact: Whitman celebrated his senses, while Hopkins did his best to deny his sexuality; he saw “mortal beauty” as a threat to salvation, as he made clear in a later sonnet entitled, "To What Serves Mortal Beauty?"

In Whitman’s world, sex is everywhere.  Can one ever imagine Hopkins comparing the mystery of rain to the mystery of ejaculation?  “Something I cannot see puts upward libidinous prongs,/ Seas of bright juice suffuse heaven"--from Song of Myself.

Being a very sensual man himself, sexual imagery occurs frequently in Hopkins’s works as well, but these references are much less explicit, even subconscious in origin.  (one of many instances: the monster who is attacking Andromeda in the eponymously named poem is described as being “lewd”; the mythical monster thus becomes a sexual predator.

Why did Hopkins do his best to deny his sexuality?  This we will briefly explore in the last section of this essay.

2. The Possible Source of Hopkins’s Asceticism

In the first edition of Hopkins’s poem from 1918, Robert Bridges included two early poems.  One from 1866, is entitled, “The Habit of Perfection,” the subject of which is denial of the senses in order to lead a life suffused with divine grace. In the poem, Hopkins enumerates each sense in turn, followed by the spiritual benefits of denying each one.  Of taste he writes,

Palate, the hutch of tasty lust,

Desire not to be rinsed with wine

From these and from the poem in general, one is impressed by the author's sensuality; we can infer that his giving up the joys of the senses for God was not going to be easy.

Two years earlier, he wrote the following poem, also included in the first edition of his poetry:

Heaven-Haven

A nun takes the veil

   I have desired to go

        Where springs not fail

To fields where falls no sharp and sided hail

    And a few lilies blow.

    And I have asked to be

          Where no storm comes,

Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,

     And out of the swing of the sea.

As I have pointed out on several occasions, there is a marked autobiographical element in nearly every one of Hopkins’s poems.  In addition, a good case can be made of the author’s use of females as alter egos. This poem is a good example of both.  Hopkins is the nun of this poem, imagining an idealized  future of peace, once his earthly desires are left behind.  Getting “out of the swing of the sea,” however, is not an easy task, and is, in my opinion, in most cases, futile and self-destructive as well.  Nuns who take the veil bring their inner conflicts—and we all have inner conflicts—with them; they are not post conflict post vows.  A more insightful quote comes from Horace: Caelum non animam mutant, qui trans mare currunt, “Those who travel across the sea change the sky above them but not their personality”.  An obsession with self-denial usually does not end well, as it didn’t in Hopkins’s life.  What is the source of Hopkins’s desire to end all desire; what is the source of his “self-loathing,” a word which Hopkins used in reference to himself at the end of his life?

Another early poem, this one from 1865, providess an important clue:

She schools the flighty pupils of her eyes,

With levell’d lashes stilling their disquiet;

And puts in leash her pair’d lips lest surprise

Bare the condition of a realm at riot.

If he suspect that she has ought to sigh at

His injury she’ll avenge with raging shame.

She kept her love-thoughts on most lenten diet,

And learnt her not to startle at his name.

In this very autobiographical poem, Hopkins once again assumes a female alter ego. The subject of the poem is the ”love that dare not speak its name” and the  necessity of concealing it, which, if discovered, would result in “raging shame.”  That Hopkins is talking about his own difficulties with his sexual orientation is clear.  If we take this poem literally, it makes little sense.  If a man discovers that a woman is attracted to him, he is hardly going to feel injured; when he discovers that it is a male, however, both “injury” in the one and “raging shame” in the other would have been a likely result of this discovery at the time.  The outer world—especially its Catholic version—condemned and still often vociferously opposes homosexuality; Hopkins’s inner world viewed it as sinful as well. (We must not forget that the term "homosexuality" was not in use at Hopkins's time; this hardly means, however, that Hopkins believed that "sodomites," to use the Victorian term, hadn't gone sinfully astray). His attraction to males was strong. There is much documentation supporting this proclivity. On one occasion during his Oxford years, for instance, he slipped off to a church to get a good look at a handsome choirboy.  One of the reasons he gave up painting was the realization that painting male nudes would be far too stimulating for him.  On another occasion, he wrote in his journal that he was disturbed by imagining a male friend in the nude.

Shortly after the "raging shame" poem was written, Robert Bridges introduced a distant relative to Hopkins, Digby Dolben.  He thought that Hopkins could acquaint the younger Dolben, who was interested in studying at Balliol College, with life at Oxford.  This brief encounter was of great significance for Hopkins; one critic described Dolben as “the love of his life.”  This love was, however, apparently not mutual.  Hopkins wrote many letters to him, but received few replies, and when one came, Dolben was indifferent and unresponsive.  The following year after the brief encounter at Oxford, Hopkins had a crisis of faith, which he resolved, at least temporarily, with his conversion to Catholicism. Two years later, he vowed to become a Jesuit, in preparation for which he burned his early poems, in the belief that writing poetry was not consistent with his new, austere vocation.

If an intention to become a Jesuit, however, is based not on a desire to serve, but on a desire to escape, peace, if it comes at all, will likely come “to brood and sit,” as Hopkins wrote in a poem from 1879.  Hopkins did not have a talent for teaching or for parish work.  (In one of his sermons, for instance, he spoke of the Church as an enormous cow with seven teats, each one being a sacrament.  Hopkins would never have used such a silly image in his poetry; that he did so in a sermon is an indication of his futile attempts to reach working-class Catholics).

Hopkins’s asceticism turned out to be an indelible prickly pear.  He was overworked doing tasks that did not bring joy,  Kindly disposed Jesuit superiors didn’t know what to do with him, which explains his frequent transfers, none of which worked out  His last position, that of professor of classics in Ireland, was his most prestigious employment; regarding his emotional well-being, however, it was disastrous.  His increasing isolation and sense of alienation at the end of his life resulted in despair, as his Terrible Sonnets testify  Why, he wrote to God in one of his last sonnets,

Does/ Disappointment all my endeavors end?/Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend/How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost, /Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust/Do in spare hours more than I that spend/ Sir, life upon thy cause…”

He wasn't out of the swing of the sea as his nunself had hoped; he was drowning instead. Despair resulted in a severe distortion of his self-image, even of his worth as a poet, as this line from his last poem, attests:

Sweet fire the sire of the muse, my soul needs this;

I want the one rapture of an inspiration.

Posterity hardly agrees with this pathological self-assessment.  Too bad for Hopkins that his poetry received so little recognition during his lifetime!  

The tragedy of Hopkins’s final years reveals the importance of self-acceptance, the importance of friendship, the folly of viewing one’s sexual orientation as sinful, and the importance of doing what you love and receiving at least some recognition for one’s efforts.  A hard fact for the faithful is illustrated here: if these factors are absent in one’s life, it is unlikely that one’s God will remove them.  Whitman was lucky enough to recognize the importance of these factors and the wisdom to practice them. 

Both men, as is the case of all poets, had rich inner lives.  An inner life, however, without sustenance from the outer world, withers as surely as a plant does when transported from a spring garden to a dark basement. Hopkins might have indeed been correct in his judgement that both poets were, as it were, soulmates.  Whitman’s choice to celebrate life, in contrast to Hopkins’s attempt to escape it, however, hardly makes the American poet “a very great scoundrel.”  

                                  *

This concludes the last of my five essays on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins.  The titles of the previous four are as follows: 1. Ten Unforgettable poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Part l; 2. Ten Unforgettable Poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Part ll; 3. St. Alphonsus Rodriguez, alias Gerard Manley Hopkins; and the penultimate essay, Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Present Absence of God.  All the essays, including this one, can be located on the internet by googling the title in question along with my name. 

I hope this "labor of love" has been of some interest to you.  Comments welcome!