Poets and Poems

Gerard Manley Hopkins

'today Hopkins is regarded as one of poetry's great innovators'

Gerard Manley Hopkins was born in July 1844, the eldest of the nine children of Manley Hopkins and his wife Catherine Smith. He was educated at Highgate Boarding School in London, where he won a scholarship to Oxford University, graduating from there in 1867 with a double first in Classics. While at university he was influenced by the writings of John Henry (later Cardinal) Newman and converted to catholicism; after graduating he taught for a short time at Newman's Oratory in Birmingham.

At Oxford he at first socialised freely, but then turned towards asceticism, as expressed in the poem 'The Habit of Perfection' written in 1866. He began a life-long and important friendship with Robert Bridges*, a future Poet Laureate.

Having decided to become a priest, in 1867 he entered a Jesuit novitiate near London. There followed several years of study and religious formation, three of which were spent in St Beuno's in Wales (1874-1877). He loved Wales and learnt the Welsh language and its cadence influenced his poetry. While there he wrote some of his best loved poems, having resolved the conflict** he had felt between his art and his vocation. Today Hopkins is regarded as one of poetry's great innovators. He thought deeply about his art and used language and rhythm in a way that was distinctly different from his predecessors.

Following his ordination in 1877 he served first as assistant in a number of parishes and then for three years as parish priest in the slums of Manchester, Liverpool and finally Glasgow. After teaching Greek and Latin in Catholic colleges in Sheffield and Lancashire, he moved to Ireland in 1884 to become Professor of Greek and Latin at University College, Dublin. Lacking in sympathy towards the prevailing mood of Irish Nationalism in the university, he felt isolated and unhappy and fell into a deep depression. He wrote in a letter to Bridges 'what does anything at all matter'. England and God's presence seemed distant. The six so-called 'Sonnets of Desolation'*** are believed to have been written at this time, where in one he cries out 'Comforter, where, where, is your comforting.' He had long battled with depression, yet on his deathbed his last words were "I am so happy, so happy. I have loved life."

Gerald Manley Hopkins died of typhoid fever on 8 June 1889, having suffered ill health for several years. He is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery in Finglas Road, Dublin, near the Botanical Gardens. There is a memorial stone to him in the Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey in London that was unveiled in 1975. The inscription reads 'Immortal Diamond'.

* Bridges influenced Hopkins poetry and more importantly expedited its posthumous acclaim, publishing the complete works in 1918, almost thirty years after Hopkins early death. In 1865 he introduced Hopkins to Digby Dolben, a distant cousin of Bridges. Hopkins was much taken with the seventeen year-old youth. His private journal recorded imperfectly suppressed erotic thoughts about him; and it would seem that his high-Anglican confessor forbade him to have any further contact except by letter. Dolben's untimely death by drowning in 1867 affected him deeply. Although almost certainly homosexual, there is no evidence that Hopkins ever had a physical relationship.
** It was his study of the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus that resolved the conflict Hopkins felt between his writing and his religious life. Scotus allowed for intuitive knowledge in the first perception of an object, as distinct from conceptual knowledge. Art is rooted in such immediacy rather than in abstraction; so it of necessity relates to the individuality of the poet. And it was this expression of his individuality that Hopkins had previous thought to be inconsistent with his religious calling. What Hopkin's called 'inscape' was in part derived from Scotus. It has to do with the essence and uniqueness of every physical thing; but an essence that reaches out and relates to the wider world, including the observer, as the falcon does to the wind and to the poet in 'The Windhover', his most famous poem and the one he thought his best.
*** The quotation is from the harrowing poem 'No Worst, There is None'. The other five dark sonnets are 'To Seem the Stranger', 'I Wake and Feel', 'Patience', 'Carrion Comfort' and 'My Own Heart' (a lovely poem in spite of its darkness).

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 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 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: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.