Gerard Manley Hopkins
In this Sunday’s Washington Post, Michael Dirda praises the new biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins by Paul Mariani.
There have been several previous biographies of Hopkins, including a fine one by Robert Bernard Martin, an eminent scholar of Victorian poetry. But Mariani’s possesses three great strengths: 1) Mariani has lived with Hopkins’s poetry his entire life, ever since writing a commentary on the poems as his first book; 2) over the past 40 years, he has produced biographies of American poets who might be loosely viewed as the “sons of Gerard”: Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, John Berryman and Robert Lowell; and 3) Mariani is a believing Catholic, with consequent sympathy and insight into Hopkins’s religious convictions and experiences. In several ways, then, this is a spiritual biography, intensely focused on the poet’s inner life, coupled with close analyses of his major poems.
Dirda devotes a good deal of the review to introducing the reader to Hopkins and to poems that broke with contemporary habits and pointed toward the future of poetry. Poems “meant to be recited, not read”–something easier said than done, however, given the “sprung rhythm” in which he often wrote. The best teacher, qua teacher, I had in 20+ years of education, Fr. David Rea, was a master at it. I can still see and hear him walking up and down the aisles at Cathedral College, reading with passion one or another of Hopkins’ poems.
Dirda concludes:
Hopkins once wrote, “I am soft sift/In an hourglass — at the wall/Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift,/And it crowds and it combs to the fall.” This is, of course, the human condition, prey to the tyranny of time. But Hopkins also knew that he had been saved from oblivion or worse by God’s gift of His only begotten son. While one may or may not believe this, there can be no doubt that Hopkins himself will be read and loved as long as poetry matters.
Fond as I am of Hopkin’s personal religious poems, those in which he wrestles with himself and God, I think I prefer the poems about mysterious communion with others, like The Bugler’s First Communion, and this one:
The Lantern out of Doors
Sometimes a lantern moves along the night,
That interests our eyes. And who goes there?
I think; where from and bound, I wonder, where,
With, all down darkness wide, his wading light?
Men go by me whom either beauty bright
In mould or mind or what not else makes rare:
They rain against our much-thick and marsh air
Rich beams, till death or distance buys them quite.
Death or distance soon consumes them: wind
What most I may eye after, be in at the end
I cannot, and out of sight is out of mind.
Christ minds: Christ’s interest, what to avow or amend
There, éyes them, heart wánts, care haúnts, foot fóllows kínd,
Their ránsom, théir rescue, ánd first, fást, last friénd.
Contrary to what many readers initially believe about the mystic’s
feelings for the world, relationships, and human love, the true
mystic is enthralled by the diversity and beauty, the unfailing
harmony and interconnectedness of the entire creation. All this is
the work of Wisdom (“the Word”) by whom they were created. Everyone
and every living thing are clothed with the image of Wisdom as we see
in the “The Spiritual Canticle”* poem where the lovesick bride
questions the created world:
“O woods and thickets,
planted by the hand of the Beloved!
O green meadow,
coated, bright with flowers,
tell me, has he passed you?” *
Creatures then respond:
“Pouring out a thousand graces,
he passed these groves in haste;
And having looked at them,
with his image alone,
clothed them in beauty” *
The commentary explains:
“Only the hand of God, her Beloved, was able to create this diversity
and grandeur…This reflection on creatures, this observing that
they are things made by the very hand of God, her Beloved, strongly
awakens the soul to love [God]. *
~ Sr. Constance Fitzgerald, OCD, “Carmel and Contemplation -
Transformation in Wisdom”
* “The Spiritual Canticle” of St. John of the Cross
“Poetry, for me, has always been bound up with this unease, fueled by contingency toward forms that will transcend it, as involved with silence as it is with sound. I don’t have much sympathy for the Arnoldian notion of poetry replacing religion. It seems not simply quaint but dangerous to make that assumption, even implicitly, perhaps especially implicitly. I do think, though, that poetry is how religious feeling has survived in me. Partly this is because I have at times experienced in the writing of a poem some access to a power that feels greater than I am, and it seems reductive, even somehow a deep betrayal, to attribute that power merely to the unconscious or to the dynamism of language itself. But also, if I look back on the poems I’ve written in the past two decades, it almost seems as if the one constant is God. Or, rather, His absence…”
~ Christian Wiman
http://www.theamericanscholar.org/su07/abyss-wiman.html
“It is necessary to have had a revelation of reality through joy,in
order to find reality through suffering.”
~ Simone Weil
“I would qualify Weil’s statement somewhat, then, by saying that
reality, be it of this world or another, is not something one finds
and then retains for good. It must be newly discovered daily, and
newly lost.”
~ Christian Wiman
I sadly admit that I am not much of a reader of poetry. Even still, Hopkins’ poem about St Alphonsus Rodriguez has always struck me as uncommonly beautiful in both sentiment and expression. I sometimes think of it as St. Therese’s “Little Way” captured in two stanzas:
In Honour Of St. Alphonsus Rodriguez
Honour is flashed off exploit, so we say;
And those strokes once that gashed flesh or galled shield
Should tongue that time now, trumpet now that field,
And, on the fighter, forge his glorious day.
On Christ they do and on the martyr may;
But be the war within, the brand we wield
Unseen, the heroic breast not outward-steeled,
Earth hears no hurtle then from fiercest fray.
Yet God (that hews mountain and continent,
Earth, all, out; who, with trickling increment,
Veins violets and tall trees makes more and more)
Could crowd career with conquest while there went
Those years and years by of world without event
That in Majorca Alfonso watched the door.
By trickling increments makes more and more? Could Hopkins have been aware of fractalsin nature? Don’t laugh. I just happen to be watching a Nova program about fractals, and it seems that the great Japanese printmaker Hokusai was well aware of fractals in nature too.