Hopkins was a Jesuit priest, and a commonplace about Jesuit intent is their assurance that having the child in their control in its early years guarantees the now adult's allegiance throughout life. This disposition of special emphasis, time and attention given over to the Roman Catholic young's religious instruction and consolidation, before the relative Fall of adulthood and independent thought, is found readily in Hopkins . It explicitly informs Spring (Have, get, before it cloy, Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sow with sinning, Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,11-13), The Handsome Heart (Of heaven what boon to buy you, boy...Only...O on that path you pace Run all your race, 12-14), The Bugler's First Communion (When limber liquid youth, that to all I teach Yields tender as a pushed peach,22-23) . It is there by extension, in Binsey Poplars : All felled, felled, are all felled ; Of a fresh and following folded rank Not spared (3-5) . It is latent in The Loss of the Eurydice (Men, boldboys soon to be men...Blast bole and bloom together,14-16)--latent, firstly, because these young hearts of oak are English Protestants ; secondly, and consequently, because they are fashioned literary components in a wider symbolical correlation of foundering Eurydice with foundering English Protestant state : My people and born own nation, Fast foundering own generation...hoar-hallowed shrines unvisited...Only the breathing Temple and fleet Life...ay this crew, in Unchrist, all rolled in ruin (87-96) . The nature of Hopkins the priest as poet can be seen across this minor spectrum of poems concerning innocent youth . His change of emphases--from highly envisioned to blind spots--is reflected in the quality of rendition : from terse compacting, staccato, aposiopesis, incantatory repetition and alliteration, as registers of Hopkins' emotion and commitment, through to a more, for him, prosaic style---free-ranging, discursive, more obviously metaphysical, and, by contrast, seemingly flaccid---as register of Hopkins' lack of, or tenuous, emotional commitment to the subject in hand . In brief, his poems parade emotion or intellect, heart or mind . Emotion and heart are registered in the novelty and incongruity--both in meaning and in normal usage--of his lexical catenations, and where sound, not thought, is the primary determinant of effect : e.g. limber liquid youth ; pushed peach . Intellect and mind are registered in catenations of words that in meaning and in usage can reasonably be contiguous--e.g. Fast foundering own generation--so that thought predominates, and sound effect--here the alliterative 'f'--subserves the thought, and the reader's mind is permitted to play over oxymoronic combinations (Fast[=adhered] x founder- ; Fast[=faithful] x -er(r)ing ; foundering x generation ; found- : generation) that separately or in synthesis reinforce Hopkins'main point about a riven England in Unchrist (Eurydice,96) .
So far the suggestion would seem to be that Hopkins' poetry is simply a matter of polarities . Rather, it is like a drop of water into a still pool . The point of impact is the vigorous unalloyed core of Hopkins' emotional commitment to the subject in hand . What follows is a sequence of concentric rings, ever-widening, as Hopkins' terseness dissolves into discursiveness, ever less vigorous through interaction and merging with the dead weight of the body of water, as Hopkins' unique manipulation of lexis into verbal paintings---the various 'inscapes' ; Thou mastering me breath (Deutschland,1 :1-20) ; like shining from shook foil (God's Grandeur,2)---progressively shades in style into the deja vu : Spenserian visual contrast--hell x pity (Eurydice,117-20) ; Shakespearean functional conversion--her afterdraught gullies him too down (Eurydice,61) ; the metaphysical conceits of I am soft sift In an hourglass...(Deutschland,4) or of I am like a Slip of Comet ; the revitalisation of dead lexis and forms--Our King back, Oh upon English souls [soil] (Deutschland,35 :4) ; Marcus Hare, high [cf. M.E. 'hight', called] her captain (Eurydice,45) ; the rejuvenation, by new context, of stock devotional or Biblical phrase--Glory be to God for dappled things (Pied Beauty,1), O if we knew what we do When we delve and hew (Binsey Poplars,9-10) ; the intellectual compact of meanings, e.g. in Fast foundering own generation ; the still intellectual but looser--in syntax, sympathy, and thought--collage of this shallow and frail town How ring right out our sordid turbid time (The Sea and the Skylark,9-10), -rail and town linking with turb-[Latin,'turba', crowd, rabble] ; and, finally, way out of intensity and into the utter deja vu of the prosaic, e.g. that cheer and charm of earth's past prime (Sea and Skylark,12), or in the devotional dead letter of Rosa Mystica .
This waning out of emotion and into the varying qualitative parameters of intellect is what promotes the range, and firms out the distinctive components, of Hopkins' style . It has to be said, though, when talking of this 'range'--and especially of the 'emotional core'--that Hopkins is ever in complete command of his materiel . In the matter of 'inscapes'--e.g. I heard the lark ascend, His rash-fresh re-winded new-skeined score In crisps of curl off wild winch whirl, and pour And pelt music, till none's to spill or spend (Sea and Skylark,4-8)--although the primary effect is of sound, the second a vague recognition of synonymity and cognation, the eventual impression, when mind and dictionary are brought to bear, is that this inscape ia a unilingual Tower of Babel unbabbled into apt compositeness--an ordered whole, so ordered by Hopkins . The same applies to his use of the prosaic : the prosaicness of that cheer and charm of earth's past prime (Sea and Skylark,12) is intended to reflect the simplicity that We...have lost . Or, elsewhere, the prosaicness, simple imagery, logical syntax and discursiveness of The Nightingale are intended to reflect the light-weight mind of a country lass, Frances . Hopkins commands, but the heart enacts, in a style that reflects the degree of his sympathy with the subject in hand .
Hopkins' terse emotional constructs are fashioned from the material world he knows :darksome burn, horseback brown (Inversnaid,1), azurous hung hills (Hurrahing in Harvest,9), worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie (Spring and Fall,8) . Where his subject is out on the outermost unfolding rings, e.g. St. Thecla, distant in time, in sympathy neutral to the point of disbelief because she is apocryphal, the tone is light, the thought vapid, the lexis prosaic, the style discursive--but to a nicety of completion . Uncommitted, Hopkins is relaxed to the point of high-style hamming : eastward reach my rhymes (6), stark-precipitous air (8) . St. Thecla's claim to fame is that she ''wrote the entire Scriptures out without a blot or mistake''(E.Cobham Brewer,Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, re Penmanship), and Hopkins corresponsively writes the entire script on Thecla, down to the last words--from the spot (34)--on scriptorial virginity .
Closer to heart and spiritual home is St. Alphonsus Rodriguez, and, therefore, potentially closer to vigorous concrete epithets being used, yet the poem is replete (though not totally) with poetasting combinations : gashed flesh or galled shield, glorious day, heroic breast, fiercest fray and Could crowd career with conquest . This happens, I think, for three reasons . First, Hopkins is purposedly marking his distance from the unwarrantably acclaimed by overloading with the corresponsive--epithet as judgment--stale rhetoric of tired epic and encomia . Second, Hopkins appears to lack specific relevant material to work on and from : the note to the poem has Hopkins saying, '...a laybrother of our Order, who for 40 years acted as hall-porter to the College of Palma in Majorca : he was, it is believed, much favoured by God with heavenly lights and much persecuted by evil spirits . Thirdly, Hopkins is bodying forth schematically both Alfonso's anonymity and his job function : absent from the press of 'heroes', and now out of sight, in heaven, Alfonso watches as Hopkins closes the door on Alfonso watching the door . But on his side of unacknowledged worth--seen in the sestet--Alfonso has, as fellow anonymous, God distant and immanent, indescribable save in His ongoing Creation : works that the parentheses mark as going publicly unacknowledged, but that Hopkins marks, as the Curia marked and canonised Alfonso .
St. Alphonsus Rodriguez is an example of what in literary terminology is called an occasional poem : ''written to order on the occasion of the first feast since his canonisation proper...''(Hopkins' Note to the poem) . But I do not believe that with a serious author/artist/creator there is any such thing as 'occasional' work . The occasion--''the first feast since his canonisation'', a death, a starry night, a darksome burn at Inversnaid--is made, just as it equally could be left unmade, vehicle for some aspect of the--in this case--poet's perception . The poem may very well serve for, and coincide with, an official 'occasion', but the poet is arbiter both of the fact of the poem's creation and of its content . One notes here that Hopkins has nothing to say in the poem on Alfonso being ''much favoured by God with heavenly lights and much persecuted by evil spirits'' : perhaps out of fellow-feeling for this anonymous, Hopkins has other 'heroes' to fry .
The same may be said about any Hopkins poem, but here I wish to consider those hulking 'occasionals', the Eurydice and the Deutschland . In Hopkins' lifetime there will likely have been scores, and more likely hundreds, of occasions of ships foundering off Britain's shores, so why choose these two ? To hagiologise the Franciscan nuns, one may at first say of the Deutschland . But what of the Eurydice ? In The Penguin Atlas of World History, Vol.1, the Jesuit Order's sole purpose is set out : ''the conversion of heretics and heathens ; to this end, concerted efforts at the courts of princes as tutors and confessors ; at schools and universities...as teachers, preachers and missionaries'' . In the Eurydice, Hopkins as Jesuit poet seems to prefer elegising a lost R.C. England of the past, in contrast to recriminating the 'lost-to-Catholicism' Protestant England of the present . This disposition determines the content and tone of the poem ; discursive, involving many intellectual word-games, for the topic, Fallen England, is outwith Hopkins' 'emotional core', and this despite his English nationalism : faith or the lack of it cuts across identity with My people and born own nation (87) . It determines, too, Hopkins' selection of this 'occasion'. The ship's name, with the automatic association of a classical Eurydice lingering in the Underworld, allied to the notion of 'ship of state', provides Hopkins the occasion to categorise in allegory this crew, in Unchrist, all rolled in ruin (95-6), lingering in a heretic Underworld--(Low lie his mates now on watery bed) [58], far fallen from bygones when the heavens and English nation were accomplices in faith : That a starlight-wender of ours would say The marvellous Milk was Walsingham Way (102) .
Beyond this immediate correlation of 'factual' foundering ship and ascribed spiritual State, there is another level, in double-time focus [like Knowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman], where Hopkins locates in a specific past the cause of the present consequent State . Then, in considering the existential Marcus Hare and Sydney Fletcher, he intimates that the Robbery's hand which in the past left ruinous shrine is ongoingly, and here currently, active--a sort of ''I told you so'' that this State is beyond missionary activity, irredeemable, and can only hope for pity eternal (120), at the awful overtaking (114) . The by now customary Hopkins curious lexical combinations mask this third level, but it is there . The specific past is the Stuart period and its inter-regnum Commonwealth :
(1) Carisbrook (29), where Charles I was imprisoned before trial and execution ;
(2) One stroke felled (5-6), that fell capsize[ from Spanish 'capuzar', to sink
by the head] : Charles I's execution ;
(3) thorough England riding (25-6) : the 'thorough', historically, is the uncompromising
absolutist policy of Strafford, under Charles I, and lost his head for it ;
(4) downright (55) means 'thoroughly' ;
(5) Sidney Fletcher : an Algernon Sydney was one of the judges who condemned
Charles I to the block (Brewer,op.cit., re Sidney) ;
(6) black Boreas deadly-electric (22-3) : the grim Northern Elect, the Scottish
Presbyterians ;
(7) blue March (21) : the blue-aproned Covenanters [Ark of the...] on the march ;
(8) baldbright cloud thorough England riding (25-6) : Cavaliers and Roundheads ;
(9) For did she pride her, freighted fully, on Bounden bales or a hoard of bullion ?-
Precious passing measure, Lads and men her lade and treasure (9-12) : the
Common-wealth, and, under it, the 1651 Navigation Act, which provided that all
goods shipped to and from England were to be transported in English ships ;
(10) and, finally, the Puritan's form of address--and thou too, and thou this way (52)--
and the echo of Milton's description--'God's own people'--about the Puritans in
Hopkins' My people and born own nation, Fast foundering own generation(87-8).
Hopkins harking so back to the Stuart period is specific to his elegising a lost R.C. England, for that was when his nation was Catholic . The content, the tone , the many intellectual word-games employed to allegorise a sunken Protestant English State with which Hopkins has little sympathy--all establish that where Hopkins' emotional core is inactive through want of sympathy, the intellect plays, and plays wide and deep, apprising the 'occasion' for the occasion .
The Deutschland is another 'occasion', and another case entirely : not allegory, not detachedly intellectual, but with emotion and intellect variously in play, in degrees as Hopkins identifies with the subject at hand in situ . The result is, I think, an inorganic whole : a collage of cameos, of separate degrees of emotional commitment, speciously linked . His essences , his ground material, are five Franciscan nuns, the wreck of the Deutschland off England shores on the eve of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, the tall nun, and her call, O Christ, Christ, come quickly (24 :7) . These in dilution---dilution by Hopkins' imaginative addition of nominally or suggestively related concepts : Stigmata, Saint Francis, the Virgin Mary, rare-dear Britain (35 :6)---comprise a precipitate rather than a solution .
For example, Stanza 4 is a beautifully conceived metaphysical whole, but because of its perfection it sits there in stylistic isolation from the surrounding devotional language : Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess Thy terror, O Christ, O God (2 :3-4) ; Glow, glory in thunder (5 :3) . Granted, it thus renders the poet's / the individual's isolation under a distant God, so that he must then read God's mystery through the 'instresses' under the world's splendour and wonder (5 :6), so it is functionally isolated . But, it sits, I would suggest, in the mind while the devotional stuff flits on by, so, from Hopkins'viewpoint and intent it is, finally, counter-productive . Or again, take the transition from Stanza 6 to 7 : having mooted that God's stroke...rides time like riding a river (And here the faithful waver...), in the 7th stanza it appears to be manifest in the river, in its force and discharge . Also, the river imagery is dropped for five lines, apparently in order just to correlate It dates from day, the 7th stanza, and this commemoration of December 7th, 1875 .
After having appealed to God to Wring thy rebel, dogged in den, Man's malice, with wrecking storm (9 :3-4), Hopkins then introduces in stanza 11 not a vengeful God, but a personified Death on drum, as though there were some entity outwith God's imperium--to take the blame . By 'blame' I mean the customary questioning made of a Christian God on the occasion of an Aberfan or an 'Arbeit macht frei' and 6 million dead . By trotting in Death personified, Hopkins shows his unease with being able to convince of a caring God who works in stormy ways, his chosen five to confirm . Stanza 13 is given over to veiled allusions to the Fates, typically robed in white, as this stanza is embraced schematically in the snows (1) and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivelled snow (7) . To Lachesis assigning man's lot at birth, we have the bald facts : the haven behind, The Deutschland, on Sunday, and we have the echo of 'Lachesis' in flint-flaked, black-backed . To Clotho, spinning the thread of life, we have the haven behind (2), the wind (6), Wiry (7), and Spins (8)--each at the turn of the lines, as though formed in a skein . To Atropos, who 'cannot be turned' from cutting the thread of life at the moment of death, we have in one straight line the tolling beat, the privation, by affix and in meaning, of widow-making unchilding unfathering . This would be fine if later expanded upon, but the Fates, and Death personified, no longer figure . Indeed at St.17 :1., we find crew and passengers fighting with God's cold .
There are other examples of this type of conceptual inconsistency, and the Deutschland in sum is a collage, an endearing monster, in which Hopkins is self-cast as humble Defensor Fidei, and who, to the nun's call,Christ, Christ, come quickly, has his call, Fancy, come faster (28 :2) . Again, this is a measure of his unease : he knows and sets forth the parameters of the test the nun undergoes ; he knows too the trials he has undergone to create this poem of commemoration ; but, unsure of the merit of his calling as poet, he inserts in the poem his calling in action--and just at the point where he envisages Christ . At a few strokes and aposiopesis, the inference is communion with, and infusion by, Christ : Hopkins has justified the ways of God through Hopkins .
As Milton in Paradise Lost had difficulties in describing and conveying the perfection of Heaven, and, even more, death-struck angels who cannot die, so Hopkins has in his poetry the problem of addressing and qualifying his divine quaternion : Mary, Christ, the Paraclete, and God . In Rosa Mystica, the stock devotional language gives the poem a breath of death . In the Deutschland, in one stanza, one can find stock--suffering Christ--and novel--he scores it in scarlet himself on his own bespoken, Before-time-taken, dearest prized and priced (St.22)--devotional . Doubtless both stock and novel are vital for Hopkins, but after two millenia 'suffering Christ' is more often vital as expletive than expression of faith . By contrast, his innovations give sinew to devotion . As verbal paintings, he makes of his work a palimpsest, erasing the old . But he still has the problem of qualifying the divine, the unqualifiable . In a sense, he resolves the matter by quantifying them . In Nondum, God is made coextensive with the skies (2), the vast silence (6), th'unbroken silence...While ages and while aeons run (19-20), th'abysses infinite--the discursiveness and repetitions purposedly enacting man's long sequence of frustrations at being unable to clothe Thee, unseen King (13) . In God's Grandeur, this immensity is reduced to one word, grandeur, in line 1 . From this top end of the octave, at the bottom end of the sestet we find that the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah ! bright wings (13-14) . As conceptions they are both immense--and to a purpose . Schematically, like the ooze of oil Crushed, they crush the men [that] then now not reck his rod ; the visual 'ooze' of 'generations crushed' is have trod, have trod, have trod...seared,.bleared, smeared with toil...smudge...smell...soil--divine quantity is made poetic component . The Virgin Mary is an all too human nature--a problem that Hopkins, I think, in his terms successfully resolves, by extended Miltonic simile [in the title] turned metaphor : The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe . A happy conflation of stock and novel devotional, of emotional commitment and thought unfolded to its conclusion, the poem transforms this third of Hopkins' quaternion into an over-arching immensity : Wild air, world-mothering air, Nestling me everywhere (1-2).
Hopkins being Jesuit priest and spiritual descendant of Christ's Apostles, and Christ having lived the prototype Christian life and died to redeem mankind, it is not surprising that of the quaternion Christ is Hopkins' prototype : No better serves me now, save best ; no other Save Christ : to Christ I look, on Christ I call (Myself unholy...,13-14) . But how to qualify him, set forth his importance ? There are stock and novel devotional . There is also Hopkins' version of Christ's parable technique : the use of analogues . As Christ minds (The Lantern out of Doors,12), Hopkins minds Christ into existence, but to different degrees . The Soldier, setting forth the idea of Christ Militant, is predominantly monosyllabic, has logical syntax and an easy conversational tone . It is a simple point, a simple analogue, simply put to a demotic we who speak in terms of Our redcoats, our tars (2) . But the ascribed phrase 'it should be this' is much more than incidentally significant . It refers to Duns Scotus, and his concept of haeccitas, this-ness, meaning 'individuality at its best expression of being' . It can be seen in Gerard Manley Hopkins : Selected Prose (ed. by G. Roberts) that Hopkins was already 'inscaping' before he came upon Duns Scotus, so the Scotist concepts--like this this--merely gave supportive post-natal definition . If one looks at another Christ-analogue, The Windhover, we find 'inscape' enacted : novel devotional held to, pictured and sounded complete within, the constraints of sonnet . At the turn, he even has an entire line listing what he by this 'inscaping' turns from, eschews : the stock, bland abstracts that cannot convey 'instress' ; the relevant nouns--air, plume--that are moribund without the vitalised qualifiers, and as such could not convey 'instress' .And so they here Buckle ! AND the fire that breaks from thee then indeed . But Christ plays in ten thousand places (As kingfishers catch fire...,12), and Hopkins' work is a limited corpus . I think it a boon for the reader that Hopkins turns from Christ-analogues to inscapes that take in individualities in the manifold material world . The impetus is the fire that breaks from Christ . The effect is that sheer plod makes plough down sillion Shine (Windhover,12-13) .
With the inscapes, we are at Hopkins' heart's core, where the intellect subserves, deep-serves, the emotion . Having had the problem of how to qualify divinity directly with a genuinely felt devotion that stock devotional lexis poorly conveys, Hopkins turns to his secular, existential panorama, and Christianises a Buddhist perception of it of divinity in all things and through all these things and people . This development --perhaps one should say 'this option', for it was furthered into poems alongside options like the big occasionals sometime being pursued--liberated Hopkins from devotional, and allowed him, within the constraints of sonnet form--positive constraints, when one evaluates the hulking occasionals--to celebrate the Creation : the eagerer a-wanting Jessy or Jack There/God to aggrandise, God to Glorify (The Candle Indoors) . Just being an 'inscape sonnet' does not, however, guarantee a novel, sinewy, sounding-out, completed whole : there are some that seem less vital, and I would put it down to the intrusion of primary instead of secondary or tertiary intellect . If one compares the companion pieces, Harry Ploughman and Tom's Garland, the former is rounded and effuses 'instress', the latter less successfully so, because it includes direct primary political points . Or if one looks at Andromeda, we see by its absence the strength of Hopkins' novel qualifiers and compounding, for here the import of classical allusions--indirect components--if read aright is then to be read into a scenario of Time's[an abstract] Andromeda . It may be elusive and symbolical, but it does not convey 'instress' : it is 'inscape', but on a theme by other Classical poets . A clutch of Hopkins' poems, Carrion Comfort, No worst, there is none, and I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day are bitter, introspective, doom-laden. They have been called the 'cheerless sonnets', and have been mooted as a rendition of Jesuit Spiritual Exercises . I think they are successful, self-sufficient 'inscapes', with an allusive backdrop veiled enough not to obtrude but true enough to support the poems' themes . Carrion Comfort has Pope's Eloisa to Abelard, 155ff., Hopkins' Despair to Eloisa's' Black Melancholy, with each distanced from, hurt by, still loving, and coming to terms with a love--for Christ or Abelard-- that has lit up his/her life . This not being obtrusive, the poem is sinewy, pain-filledly emotional, superbly instressed, using the natural world--rock, tempest, chaff, grain--as material to praise and rebuke the Christ he signed up to, and that choice itself . No worst there is has Job--'Job' means 'he cries' : cf. My cries heave (5)--as prefigurant sufferer with the mind to know, question but endure under God . As in Job, 38 :1 we find God answering Job ''out of the whirlwind'', we have Hopkins in a whirlwind (13), pleading to Mary, mother of us (4) . The allusive referents to I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day are seminal Biblical examples of suffering under trial : Job and Christ . Job 3's 'darkness...blackness..let darkness..not be joined unto the days of the year...let it not come into the number of the months' informs Hopkins' fell of dark, not day, black hours we have spent this night, and where I say hours I mean years, mean life . Key moments of Christ under trial are at Gethsemane and throughout the Passion . Christ's sense of abandonment by apostles and God through that night in Gethsemane pervades Hopkins' poem, pointed up further with specific references to Christ's subsequent Passion--dark, not day...gall...scourge...blood..dull dough[Eucharist and wine transformed], even dead letters[re the INRI sign above Christ's head on the cross] . With Hopkins being priest, it is understandable that the Christian references are more marked, but they do not subdue the poem : the unalloyed emotion, the sinewyness, the instress are abidingly there, superbly worked .What we see in this clutch of sonnets is a man who for so long has been in love with life's panorama around, above and beyond him, who is now introspective, only because out of love with life, and , now looking at his haggard soul, is out of love with himself . It is corresponsive, honest rendition : a late Hopkins who, like the late Yeats, speaks from 'the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart' . For once his intellect is at the 'emotional core', and as a result, the unfolding rings are of a controlled disquieting intensity .
In summation, as I read the man, Hopkins has religious beliefs that inform everything he depicts : from unseen King to darksome burn . How the reader reacts to his poetry seems to me to turn not on Hopkins' religious beliefs, but on whether these are conveyed by pure emotion, with the result that they are mind-shakingly novel, or on whether these are conveyed by anything within that range of falling off from emotion out into pure intellect, with the result that in style they are deja vu, though in lexis and imagery still novel, still Hopkins . In one sense the answer to this depends on the reader's predilections . In another, it depends on how successful Hopkins has been, by his novel manipulation of language, in proselytising the reader to a new perspective on the Created world and on man's unique creation : a complex living language . The case is stacked against Hopkins' success, for his innovations, catenations, compounding, multiple qualifiers, and his fresh vision on the material world--all need a measure of expansiveness, especially in that they are novel, for them to take . Simply by weight of numbers, the sonnet form is Hopkins' preferred medium, best suited for his 'inscapes', because it puts logical formal constraints on the emotion that infuses the inscape to convey the instress . But the result is a contracted form resolutely containing a novel style sinewy to an intensity : novelty and intensity are not the best combination to win converts schooled in deja vu . But who cares about deja viewers ? : Christ minds (The Lantern out of Doors) .
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