In October 1866 four Oxford undergraduates were received into the Roman Catholic church. The scandal in the university was intense. The influence of the Tractarians was bewailed. More than thirty years later, a contemporary wrote a memoir for Henry Liddon’s biographer which included reminiscence of this event: he recalled one of the undergraduates being of particular interest: a man called William Addis.
Another, Addis’s room-mate, had joined the Society of Jesus, and had returned briefly to minister in Oxford, but Coles makes no mention of him despite their having been close friends at Balliol. By the time of Coles’ writing this man had been dead for ten years, forgotten to all but a very few. However, another undergraduate contemporary, Robert Bridges, had consistently received copies of the poems he had written. In 1918, twenty-nine years after the death of their author, Bridges published these poems, and the previously anonymous Gerard Manley Hopkins became known to the world as the writer of some of the most startlingly original poetry in the English language.
Although he was born in Stratford in East London, Hopkins grew up here in your parish, worshipping in this church where his father was churchwarden, and attending Highgate school where he had the misfortune to encounter the rather brutal headmaster Dr Dyne. Hampstead was a step up for the family. I was amused to find Hopkins most distinguished biographer describing Gerard’s mother taking a walk, turning off past St John’s into the once fashionable Church Row. Gerard’s first surviving letter dates from early in 1852, just before the family moved to Oak Hill. Sadly, it relates to the birth of a younger brother, Felix, who did not survive long after the family became residents of Hampstead, and lies buried in the churchyard here. When he was twenty-one, Gerard the undergraduate wrote a fragment of verse which runs
Mothers are doubtless happier for their babes
And risen sons: yet are the childless free
From tears shed over children’s graves
So those who born in Thee
Take their peculiar thorns and natural pain
Among the lilies, and thy good domain.
Although this poem stems from a naïve and idealistic piety in which he imagines the beauty of the celibate life, the memory of his brother’s death was surely real.
There is a certain ill-fitting quality, which characterizes Hopkins. The other-worldly asceticism to which that fragment witnessed separated Hopkins from many contemporaries and led him to convert to Roman Catholicism at the beginning of his final year at Balliol, prompting his father to write in anguish, “O Gerard, my darling boy, are you indeed gone from me?” His personal awkwardness was, as far as we can tell, embraced quite lovingly by his Jesuit superiors after he joined the society, and his pastoral ministry was dedicated though of varying success. By a touching coincidence, the grave of Felix here in Hampstead is next to that of a man named Randall. Hopkins’s mature poem about the death of the farrier Felix Randal gives an intensely moving picture of priestly ministry in life and death, but biographical details and letters record an angular young curate sometimes patronizing in his attitudes to his flock. Hopkins ended up returning to his academic roots as a teacher of Classics in Dublin. He had written poetry since his teens, but struggled with that vocation alongside his Jesuit calling. His writing was little understood, and the extremity with which he crams sounds and rhythms into metrical forms which don’t quite have the room for them reflects well his whole life as a misfit of sensitive genius. Rather like a child forcing far too many toys into a box, Hopkins presses down one sound upon another until his lines explode with meaning which is as much heard as it is read.
His first major poem, The Wreck of the Deutschland, is a long, bold and complex reflection on the Christian life, based on the loss of a ship carrying Franciscan nuns escaping Bismarck’s Germany. It was turned down as unsuitable by the Jesuit magazine The Month: it was so markedly different from any other English poetry of its time that the decision is hardly surprising. The Wreck gives us, however, the first mature outpourings of the priest poet for whom verse gives word – often breathless, often halting – to the Word of God himself.
Hopkins is often called a nature poet, but this epithet needs correction. There’s no denying Hopkins’s fascination with the natural world, nor his remarkable ability to make that world sing off the printed page, but he is interested in nature not as nature, but as creation, as the pouring forth of the love of God which flashes and sparkles from every single instance of the change and motion which surrounds us.
Perhaps his most famous poem, As kingfishers catch fire, contrasts a secular view of nature with the Christian view of creation: “each mortal thing does one thing and the same, selves, goes itself, myself it speaks and spells, crying, what I do is me, for that I came.” Rather than this individualistic world, Hopkins sees another: I say more. “The just man justices, Keeps grace, that keeps all his goings graces, Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is – Christ.”
For Hopkins, as for Christian orthodoxy, creation and redemption are not to be held apart. I am redeemed because, in the incarnation, death, resurrection and – importantly- the ascension of the Lord, Christ has become my humanity, Christ has transformed my nature so that when God looks on me in my sin, what he sees is Christ in his love.
“The world is charged with the grandeur of God”, not just because it crackles with the electric spark of divine grace in creation, but because that act of creation charges, entrusts creation with the living out of the greatness of grace. Time has trodden on and on, but humanity does not reck, does not heed the guidance of his creator. Despite all this, God’s creative act is never spent, the freshness of his love poured unendingly into all that lives
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast & with ah! bright wings.
Look closely at that last line: world broods, warm breast, ah bright wings. Few modern poets are so precisely crafted: the brooding presence of the Holy Ghost is the creative breath of God’s life which brings something out of nothing, turns on its head the idea of absence and evil and wrong and draws forth life in response to the only thing which is truly creative: the love of God himself. So the bright wings reverse the initial letters of “world broods” and “warm breasts” to assure us of God’s power to transform.
The energy of particular things is for Hopkins a model for his idiosyncratic poetry, and a good example of that idiosyncrasy is the poem, That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and the Comfort of the Resurrection. The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus held that all natural things are in a state of flux until they ultimately resolve into fire. This passing world is indeed a world that is passing, being generated and corrupted, as the scholastic Aristotelians would have put it. Humanity falls into this fate as much as anything else, but if anything more bitterly, since pretensions of superiority and immortality bring us pathetically down to earth and end our grandiose claims not with a bang but with a whimper.
The crucial phrase in “As Kingfishers catch fire” is “Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is – Christ” and it is echoed strongly in this extended sonnet: I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am. It is an idea which goes back to St Paul and to the Christian Fathers. St Irenaeus, writing at the end of the Second Century, says of Christ, He became what we are that we might became what he is. By identifying himself with human nature in the incarnation Christ has enabled all human beings to share in his true life, the divine life of heaven. As Hopkins writes:
Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fáll to the resíduary worm; world’s wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and
Thís Jack, jóke, poor pótsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.
Sadly this Christian optimism was often lacking. The sonnets of desolation composed at the end of his life, as he surrenders to the appalling depression of loneliness and fruitlessness that he felt whilst teaching classics in Dublin. There are few grimmer descriptions of personal misery. TThe five or six truly “terrible sonnets” of 1885, paint pictures as dark as any in English poetry. Contrary to some widely held assumptions, Hopkins is not in these sonnets of desolation offering us anything which we can easily map on to existing traditions of Christian thought and prayer, even in the profound meditations on darkness and suffering which we find in some of those who are called mystics. We misunderstand Hopkins if we don’t see these agonized poems as first and foremost black with empty desperation. One of them speaks of “carrion comfort”, a recognition of evil present which at first lightens the scene by identification, but then eats further into us in the knowledge that this appalling portrait depicts our own experience.
The darkest of his poems were not his very last, but nevertheless Gerard Manley Hopkins died in 1889 a sad and lonely man, a largely failed parish priest, a disappointed scholar and a guilty, frustrated and unpublished poet. He had been forgotten by many – an obituary notice even misspelled his name. His final poem had been addressed to Robert Bridges. It took a full twenty-nine years for his lifelong friend finally to publish a volume of his poetry. It was strange, it sold slowly. Bridges said that Hopkins could never have been a renowned Victorian poet – the world was not ready for him. But the decades since have seen a change if ever there was one, and the agonized desolate of the Dublin sonnets has taken his place in the canon as one of our greatest, and certainly most original, religious poets. Hopkins, the immortal diamond, has had his resurrection.