Gerard Manley Hopkins
1.His poetry
It is a unique figure in the history of English poetry.
His work was not generally available until 1918 when his friend Bridges
published a slim volume of poems collected from his letters and manuscripts.
But for Bridges, it is likely that this fine poetry, which has exercised a
great influence on later poets, would never have been known. Hopkins, a
converted in his twenty-second year to Catholicism, is not only the first
really great religious poet in English since Milton, but also, he was the
creator of an original poetic medium, so much his own that a major modern
critic has doubted whether it can ever be used by another writer. No (modern)
poet has been the centre of more controversy or the cause of more
misunderstanding.
In 1875, when his long training as a Jesuit was reaching
its end, he broke his self-imposed silence with The Wreck of the
"Deutschland", a great ode occasioned by the sinking in a storm of the
"Deutschland", which had on board five nuns, refugees from religious
persecution. The poem is wider in scope than the title suggests. It contains
the crystallised religious experience of his seven years' poetic silence, and
has considerable autobiographical significance.
In its eight-line stanzas the typical Hopkins technique is seen for the first time.
Sprung-rhythm, counterpoint-rhythm, alliteration, assonance, internal rhythm,
coinages and unorthodox syntax give to the poem a revolutionary appearance,
which led the editor of the Jesuit organ to refuse to print it after originally
accepting it. But, if it is difficult in thought and unconventional in
technique, it is full of brilliant passages and has an artistic and emotional
unity of the highest order.
Hopkins continued to write poetry until the end of his life,
though his output was very small. From 1875 onward his writing was exclusively religious,
and the ecstatic enjoyment of nature, found in the sonnets of his early
maturity is a sacramental experience. Nature is a manifestation of the beauty
of God, a call to praise. Through his period of priesthood a growing concern
with man is perceptible. The evils of the industrial system he saw as man's
falling-off from God, his rejection of the grace won for him by Christ. Felix
Randal is typical of his warm sympathy with men and his concern with their
souls. But the deepest and most intensely personal of his poems belong to his Dublin period (1884-1885).
In their passionate, direct simplicity they stand apart from most of Hopkins' work, and they
have been described as his greatest poems. His defiant refusal to capitulate to
this despair is to be seen in Carrion Comfort.
Features of his poetry
a) His love of nature
A sensuous love of nature, based on
minute observation, is found in most of Hopkins
poems especially before 1878. His early struggle to reconcile his obvious
enjoyment of natural beauty with the ascetic life, the Jesuit resolved in his
sacramental view of natural beauty. His great delight lay in the discovery of
the inscape, or inner pattern, which gave to each thing its distinctive
beauty. His feelings at the perception of this inscape he described by
the term instress.
b) His Use of Language
One of Hopkins' most obvious idiosyncrasies is in
his choice and use of language. He believed that poetry called for a language
distinct from that of prose, a language rich in suggestion both to the senses
and the intellect. His vocabulary is drawn from many sources, archaic,
colloquial, and dialect words all being used. He had a particular fondness for
composed epithets such as "drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple-cherry" and for
evocative coinages. A full appreciation of a word may well demand of the reader
knowledge of its derivation. At times the result is obscurity and this is
increased by his deliberate distortion of normal syntax, either to compel the
reader's attention, or to give to key words the stress they deserve. But,
whatever the difficulties arising from vocabulary, syntax, or compression of
thought, Hopkins
is always precise in his use of words and his poetry has the muscular vitality
of expression of the true Shakespearean tradition.
c)
His Rhythmic
Patterns
Hopkins' most important experiment is with sprung rhythm, which
appeared first in The Wreck of the "Deutschland" and is based on the
irregular verse of Samson Agonistes. The basic principle of this attempt
to break away from strictly conventional patterns is that each foot contains
one stress, possibly, but not necessarily, followed by any number of unstressed
syllables. Hopkins
felt it to be "The least forced, the most rhetorical
and emphatic of all possible rhythms."
Counterpoint rhythm is the use in two consecutive feet of a reversal of the predominant
rhythm of a line. Every rhythmic effect in Hopkins is a result of careful and deliberate
workmanship, and so important did he consider a true understanding of his
intentions that his manuscripts make use of some twenty symbols, rather like
those of a musical score. Unfortunately, he was not consistent in the use of
these symbols, and, to avoid confusion, Bridges omitted from the 1918 edition
all but the most vital.
After The Wreck of the "Deutschland" he devoted much time to
typically individual modifications of the sonnet form, which he used with the
greatest freedom. A brief summary can do no more than indicate the nature of Hopkins' experiments, but it is important to add that the full import
of rhythm in his poetry can only be gathered if it is read aloud after close
and delicately sensitive study of its orchestration.
d)
His imagery
It is remarkable for its richness.
His appreciation of nature, his reading of the great English poets, particularly
Shakespeare, and of the Bible are evident.
Often he shows that blend of the emotional and intellectual which
distinguishes the poetry of the 17th century metaphysicals. But,
however their sources and affinities, the images of his poetry are distinctively
his own - always precise and vitally illuminating, usually briefly expressed,
and often suggesting more than one possible interpretation.
The Wreck of the "Deutchland" (1875-1876)
On 4th of December 1875 a transatlantic steamship left Bremen in Germany
carrying emigrants for New York.
Driven off course by bad weather, The Deutchland foundered in the treacherous
shoals of the outermost reaches of the Thames
estuary. Rescue did not come for 30 hours by which time many had drowned. "Five
German Nuns . clasped hands and were drowned together, the chief sister, a
gaunt woman 6 ft. high, calling out loudly and often, "Oh Christ, come quickly!
till the end came", as the Times reported.
These events occasioned the most ambitious of G..M.
Hopkins' completed poems and the first composition of his poetic maturity
written to break a self-imposed abstention which had lasted since he had joined
the Jesuits seven years earlier. But they are not the poem's whole subject, for
as Hopkins
wrote "The "Deutschland" would be more generally interesting if those were more
wreck and less discourse I know, but still it is an ode and not primarily a
narrative." The poem's business in the true condition of the ode,
is that of lyrical meditation or reflection on a large issue.
Part the First of the poem says nothing of the shipwreck, instead
dealing autobiographically with Hopkins'
own relations with God and describing an unspecified spiritual experience
which, though harrowing, was ultimately comforting. In emphasising that God is
both destructive and merciful - "Thou are lighting and love, I found it, a
winter and warm" - Hopkins set forth the attitude which is to govern his
response to the shipwreck, too. Likewise the difficult passage from stanzas 6
to 8 though open to much theological debate about Duns Scotus' theory of the
Incarnation, finally seems to stress God's perpetual presence in the world,
something which the drowning nun will also call upon. In these respects the
poem is a theodicy attempting to justify God's ways. The attempt was pressing
for Hopkins as
a fervid patriot, for his co-religionists had been left to die by the people of
his own country
Death speaks the first words of Part the
Second, for Hopkins does not intend it to have the last. The
description of the shipwreck which follows offers scope for some of Hopkins' most exuberant linguistic effects. From
stanza 17, the entire second half of the poem concerns itself either with the
meaning of the tall nun's words and actions, or with the thoughts which they provoke
in the poet. For him in turn "words break" forth suggesting that both nun and
poet are faintly echoing in their own way the all-creating Word of God.
Just as the tall nun is praised for her power to "read" and "word" correctly
the meaning concealed in the "unshapable shock night", so, too, Hopkins reads and
interprets using words which denote signs, such as "cipher", "mark", "stigma",
"signal", "token", "lettering".
The poem is concerned with the construction of
meaning; its subject is not so much the wreck but the meaning of the wreck, and
that meaning is not waiting, fixed and unproblematic, within the story of the
wreck, but has to be sought, and produced by interpretation.
Some controversy in recent years has centered
on stanza 28, following Elisabeth Schneider's suggestion that Hopkins is here claiming a miracle,
that Christ actually appeared on earth in response to the nun's cry.
Rather it seems the latter part of the poem deals with fervent hopes and
wishes, not with facts, nor with claims about any particular actions of Christ.
The significant verbs near the end are in the imperative, not the indicative:
"Let him ride . in his triumph"; " Let him easter in
us," expressing Hopkins' wish to see Christ reborn in people's hearts
and actively ruling his kingdom there. But this and much else remains open to
debate.
This was the poem in which Hopkins first put
into practice his theories on Sprung Rhythm, the essence of which is to break
free from the tyranny of "alternating" rhythm by counting stresses in a line,
as he put it quoting from stanza 2 "why, if it is forcible in prose to say
lashed: rod, am I obliged to weaken this in verse, which ought to be stronger,
not weaker, into lashed birch-rod or something?" But the poem also displays as
many other radical techniques as he could cram in, such as cynghanedd
(consonant-chime, following strict rules from Welsh models); an elaborate
stanzaic pattern; rhymes which wrap across line-breaks; and syntax which is
often muscle-bond. All of this leads to a verbal texture, which is intense,
energetic, and rich, as he could make it, even if the plain sense sometimes
gets the worst of it.
"The Wreck of the Deutschland" is a decadent
work in the sense that form and language, at least at first sight, seem to
outweigh content and meaning. In the end, though, particularly in the more
theological passages, the poem's meanings are far from simple, single, or easy.
The paradox is that such an acutely aesthetic sensibility as Hopkins' was also wedded to the idea that there were
indeed absolute meanings and supreme truths crying out to be expressed.
Needless to say, it was all too much for
contemporary taste. The poem was rejected from publication; like much of Hopkins' work it did not appear until 1918; and it
did not attract wide attention until the rise of the New Critics, to whom it
seemed modern rather than Victorian, and to whose moral and analytical
assumptions it proved particularly apt.
