Delphi Complete Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins Read online

  GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

  (1844–1889)

  Contents

  The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins

  BRIEF INTRODUCTION: GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

  The Poems

  LIST OF POEMS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

  LIST OF POEMS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

  LIST OF POEMS IN ORIGINAL NUMERICAL ORDER

  The Non-Fiction

  ON THE ORIGIN OF BEAUTY: A PLATONIC DIALOGUE

  SERMONS AND OTHER NON-FICTION WORKS

  The Letters

  LIST OF CORRESPONDENTS

  The Journals and Diaries

  LIST OF ENTRIES

  The Biography

  GERARD HOPKINS by Katherine Brégy

  © Delphi Classics 2013

  Version 1

  GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

  By Delphi Classics, 2013

  NOTE

  When reading poetry on an eReader, it is advisable to use a small font size, which will allow the lines of poetry to display correctly.

  The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins

  The Grove, Stratford, London; Hopkins was born at No. 87.

  A plaque in memory of Hopkins, near his birthplace

  Hopkins, 1859

  Hopkins, aged 19, 1863

  BRIEF INTRODUCTION: GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

  Gerard Manley Hopkins was born on 28 July 1844 at Stratford, Essex, now part of Greater London. He was the eldest child of Manley Hopkins and his wife Catherine, known as Kate. His father worked in marine insurance and was consul-general of Hawaii, and was also an amateur poet, publishing several volumes of verse, reviewing poetry for The Times and even writing a novel. Hopkins’ mother was similarly cultured and arranged for him to be trained in drawing, fostering her son’s ambition to become a painter – an ambition he harboured well into his university career and only abandoned for religious reasons.

  In 1852, Hopkins’ large family (he had eight siblings) moved to Oak Hill in Hampstead and, in 1854, he began boarding at Highgate School. At this time, the young Hopkins became interested in the poetry of John Keats, who had also lived at Hampstead and whose work had a profound influence on Hopkins’ first known poem, ‘The Escorial’ (1860). Hopkins was also influenced by the strong religious beliefs of his parents, adopting an ascetic lifestyle involving frequent abstentions from water and various foodstuffs. On one occasion he collapsed after attempting to go three whole weeks without water, managing only a few days before his tongue turned black. Despite these misadventures, Hopkins’ school career was successful. His early poetic endeavours earned him the Headmaster’s Poetry Prize, while his scholarship earned him the Governer’s Gold Medal for Latin verse.

  In 1863, he was admitted to Balliol College, Oxford, where he read Classics. At Balliol, he was tutored, albeit for only one term, by the influential art critic and aesthete, Walter Pater and became good friends with future poet laureate, Robert Bridges. This was a prolific period for Hopkins, in which he wrote reams of poetry, mainly influenced by the Romantics and the pre-Raphaelite circle, particularly Christina Rossetti. Those verses that survive do not exhibit the rhythmic invention of his major work, but they demonstrate his continual preoccupation with recording the look and feel of the natural world.

  It was also an emotionally fraught time, however, as he became troubled by his sexual attraction to other men, particularly to his friend, Bridge’s sixteen-year-old cousin, Digby Mackworth Dolben. There is no evidence that these intense friendships were ever consummated sexually and it would appear that Hopkins remained celibate throughout his life. Critics have argued, however, that his homoerotic impulses find expression in poems like ‘Epithalamion’, and that some of his religious poems allowed him to use the body of Christ as a means of reconciling an erotic and a Christian attitude to the beauty of the human form (both male and female).

  Despite his active social life, Hopkins’ religious asceticism intensified at Oxford. He recorded his ‘sins’ in his diary, became caught up in the high Anglican ‘Oxford movement’, endorsed Pugin’s campaign for a Gothic revival in church architecture, composed highly ascetic poetry (such as ‘The Habit of Perfection’) and even considered becoming a monk. Finally, in July 1866, he decided to convert to Roman Catholicism and was formerly accepted into the Catholic Church by John Henry Newman on 21 October 1866. His conversion meant a temporary estrangement from his Anglican family, although they soon came to accept the move.

  In 1868, following another sporadic resolution to be as religious as possible, Hopkins burnt all his poems to date and gave up poetry completely for some years. Around the same time, he decided to become a Jesuit, joining the Society of Jesus and formerly taking vows of poverty, chastity and obedience on 8 September 1870. He continued to write, however, keeping a detailed journal and composing music, having learnt the violin. He also continued his interest in drawing and sketching.

  In 1875, Hopkins took up poetry once more, writing the lengthy ‘Wreck of the Deutschland’, one of his finest and best-known pieces. The poem commemorates the death of 157 travellers on board the Deutschland, including five Franciscan nuns seeking to escape Germany’s oppressive anti-Catholicism. Hopkins completed this work after the superior of the Jesuit house, St Beuno’s, in North Wales, where Hopkins was undertaking his final studies before ordination, asked him to write a poem in memory of the event. The poem was accepted by a Jesuit paper, The Month, which then failed to print it, fostering a deep-seated sense of unworthiness in Hopkins that made him reluctant to publish his own poetry during his lifetime.

  Whilst studying and preparing for ordination, he wrote a further series of poems, entitled God’s Grandeur (1877). This collection embodies the experimentation in rhythm and metre that was to be Hopkins’ main literary legacy. In particular, Hopkins is noted for his use of what he termed ‘sprung rhythm’. Conventional poetic metre consists of a regulated number of poetic feet, which in turn regulate where syllables are stressed. By varying the number of poetic feet and the number of syllables within it, whilst ensuring that the stress is always placed on the first syllable of each foot, Hopkins created a rhythm much more akin to speech, allowing for an indeterminate number of unstressed syllables. As stressed syllables are not necessarily alternated with unstressed syllables and often occur sequentially, the result is a ‘sprung’ rhythm.

  Although Hopkins’ name is now inextricably linked with this unconventional mode of prosody, he claimed to have derived it from Old English poetry. The technique foreshadowed the free verse of modernist poetry and played a key role in Hopkins’ posthumous success with poets like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

  Another notable feature of Hopkins’ poetry is the almost overwhelming intensity of his language and imagery. Sometimes this involves effectively simple metaphorical devices, such as the comparison in ‘Heaven-Haven’ of a nun entering a monastery with a ship finding a safe harbour. Elsewhere, however, the sequential stressed syllables of sprung rhythm are used to pile up images to create dizzying contrasts, as in ‘Pied Beauty’ and ‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire’.

  A related technique is the use of compound words or phrases (i.e. the creation of a new word or phrase from two separate ones), such as rose-moles or fresh-firecoal or, more challengingly, twindles – a term used in ‘Inversnaid’ to combine twines and dwindles into a new adjective. Again, this is a feature of Germanic and Old English poetry, which Hopkins appropriated. It is also a characteristic of Welsh-language poetry. Hopkins learnt Welsh enthusiastically and the repeated sounds of the compact native Welsh cynghanedd form are traceable in his striking use of onomatopoeia, alliteration, assonance and internal rhy
me.

  Yet, Hopkins’ innovations were not only formal and stylistic – his poetry was also an attempt to reflect a new way of seeing the world. Influenced by the Scottish philosopher Duns Scotus, Hopkins coined the term inscape to describe the particular pattern, cohesion or forms of beauty that a person either discovers in the natural world or thrusts upon it as a reflection of their own inner being.

  Hopkins’ life after formal ordination in September 1877 was an unsettled one and he suffered from frequent bouts of melancholy as he travelled around the country as a priest and as a teacher and professor of Classics. A month after his ordination, he served as subminister and teacher at St Mary’s College, Chesterfield. In December 1877 he became curate of the Jesuit Church in Mount Street, London, then of St. Aloysius’ in Oxford. Whilst in the latter post, he helped to form the Oxford University Newman Society for the University’s Catholic members. Further ministering and teaching positions followed in Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow and Sheffield, where his poetry reflected, with characteristic vividness, upon the sorrows, difficulties and joys of working class life.

  In the 1880s, Hopkins finally settled at University College, Dublin, where he was Professor of Greek and Latin. Despite this new stability, Hopkins was more melancholy than ever. His English roots, eccentricity and dislike of Irish politics estranged him from his fellows — a gloom and isolation that creeps into the poems he wrote around this time. This body of work came to be known as the ‘terrible sonnets’, a reflection of the melancholia and profound depression they embody, rather than a judgement on their quality. He died of typhoid fever in 1889.

  Today, Hopkins is recognised as one of the foremost poets of his age. His talents were not publicly recognised however until his friend, Robert Bridges, to whom Hopkins had (luckily for modern readers) sent a copy of his poems, published a volume of Hopkins’ verses in 1918. It was Bridges who introduced the habitual use of Hopkins’ middle name; Hopkins himself rarely used it, but Bridges found it necessary to differentiate him from Hopkins’ nephew, Gerard. By the 1930s, more poems had appeared, together with Hopkins’ letters and journals. W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas and others all enthusiastically endorsed Hopkins’ work, whilst influential critics like I. A. Richards, William Empson and F. R. Leavis wrote of him as one of the greatest poets of the previous hundred years – a pronouncement now that few would discredit.

  Hopkins in 1886

  Plaque at Roehampton near London, where Hopkins studied to become a Jesuit

  Robert Bridges, a close friend of Hopkins and future poet laureate; Bridges was responsible for publishing Hopkins’ poems in 1918.

  An undated photograph of Hopkins as a young man

  F. R. Leavis (1895-1978), the influential literary critic of the early-to-mid-twentieth century, who became one of Hopkins’ great supporters.

  The Poems

  Highgate School, which Hopkins attended from 1854-1863

  LIST OF POEMS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

  Author’s Preface

  Editor’s Preface

  Early Poems

  For a Picture of St. Dorothea

  Heaven — Haven

  The Habit of Perfection

  The Alchemist in the City

  Let me be to Thee as the circling bird

  Poems 1876–1889

  The Wreck of the Deutschland

  Penmaen Pool

  The Silver Jubilee

  God’s Grandeur

  The Starlight Night

  Spring

  The Lantern out of Doors

  The Sea and the Skylark

  The Windhover

  Pied Beauty

  Hurrahing in Harvest

  The Caged Skylark

  In the Valley of the Elwy

  The Loss of the Eurydice

  The May Magnificat

  Binsey Poplars

  Duns Scotus’s Oxford

  Henry Purcell

  Peace

  The Bugler’s First Communion

  Morning Midday and Evening Sacrifice

  Andromeda

  The Candle Indoors

  The Handsome Heart

  At the Wedding March

  Felix Randal

  Brothers

  Spring and Fall

  Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves

  Inversnaid

  As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme

  Ribblesdale

  The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo

  The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe

  To what serves Mortal Beauty?

  The Soldier

  Carrion Comfort

  No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief

  Tom’s Garland

  Harry Ploughman

  To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life

  I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day

  Patience, hard thing! the hard thing but to pray

  My own heart let me have more have pity on; let

  That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection

  St. Alphonsus Rodriguez

  Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend

  To R. B.

  Unfinished Poems and Fragments

  Summa

  What being in rank-old nature should earlier have that breath been

  On the Portrait of Two Beautiful Young People

  The Sea took pity: it interposed with doom

  Ash-boughs

  Hope holds to Christ the mind’s own mirror out

  St. Winefred’s Well

  What shall I do for the land that bred me

  The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less

  Cheery Beggar

  Denis, whose motionable, alert, most vaulting wit

  The furl of fresh-leaved dogrose down

  The Woodlark

  Moonrise

  Repeat that, repeat

  On a piece of music

  The child is father to the man

  The shepherd’s brow, fronting forked lightning, owns

  To his Watch

  Strike, churl; hurl, cheerless wind, then; heltering hail

  Epithalamion

  Thee, God, I come from, to thee go

  To him who ever thought with love of me

  Author’s Preface

  Our generation already is overpast,

  And they lov’d legacy, Gerard, hath lain

  Coy in my home; as once thy heart was fain

  Of shelter, when God’s terror held thee fast

  In life’s wild wood at Beauty and Sorrow aghast;

  Thy sainted sense trammel’d in ghostly pain,

  Thy rare ill-broker’d talent in disdain:

  Yet love of Christ will win man’s love at last.

  Hell wars without; but, dear, the while my hands

  Gather’d thy book, I heard, this wintry day,

  Thy spirit thank me, in his young delight

  Stepping again upon the yellow sands.

  Go forth: amidst our chaffinch flock display

  Thy plumage of far wonder and heavenward flight!

  Chilswell, Jan. 1918.

  THE POEMS in this book 1 are written some in Running Rhythm, the common rhythm in English use, some in Sprung Rhythm, and some in a mixture of the two. And those in the common rhythm are some counterpointed, some not.

  Common English rhythm, called Running Rhythm above, is measured by feet of either two or three syllables and (putting aside the imperfect feet at the beginning and end of lines and also some unusual measures, in which feet seem to be paired together and double or composite feet to arise) never more or less.

  Every foot has one principal stress or accent, and this or the syllable it falls on may be called the Stress of the foot and the other part, the one or two unaccented syllables, the Slack. Feet (and the rhythms made out of them) in which the stress comes first are called Falling Feet and Falling Rhythms, feet and rhythm in which the slack comes first are called Rising Feet and Rhythms, and if t
he stress is between two slacks there will be Rocking Feet and Rhythms. These distinctions are real and true to nature; but for purposes of scanning it is a great convenience to follow the example of music and take the stress always first, as the accent or the chief account always comes first in a musical bar. If this is done there will be in common English verse only two possible feet — the so-called accentual Trochee and Dactyl, and correspondingly only two possible uniform rhythms, the so-called Trochaic and Dactylic. But they may be mixed and then what the Greeks called a Logaoedic Rhythm arises. These are the facts and according to these the scanning of ordinary regularly-written English verse is very simple indeed and to bring in other principles is here unnecessary.

  But because verse written strictly in these feet and by these principles will become same and tame the poets have brought in licences and departures from rule to give variety, and especially when the natural rhythm is rising, as in the common ten-syllable or five-foot verse, rhymed or blank. These irregularities are chiefly Reversed Feet and Reversed or Counterpoint Rhythm, which two things are two steps or degrees of licence in the same kind. By a reversed foot I mean the putting the stress where, to judge by the rest of the measure, the slack should be and the slack where the stress, and this is done freely at the beginning of a line and, in the course of a line, after a pause; only scarcely ever in the second foot or place and never in the last, unless when the poet designs some extraordinary effect; for these places are characteristic and sensitive and cannot well be touched. But the reversal of the first foot and of some middle foot after a strong pause is a thing so natural that our poets have generally done it, from Chaucer down, without remark and it commonly passes unnoticed and cannot be said to amount to a formal change of rhythm, but rather is that irregularity which all natural growth and motion shews. If however the reversal is repeated in two feet running, especially so as to include the sensitive second foot, it must be due either to great want of ear or else is a calculated effect, the superinducing or mounting of a new rhythm upon the old; and since the new or mounted rhythm is actualy heard and at the same time the mind naturally supplies the natural or standard foregoing rhythm, for we do not forget what the rhythm is that by rights we should be hearing, two rhythms are in some manner running at once and we have something answerable to counterpoint in music, which is two or more strains of tune going on together, and this is Counterpoint Rhythm. Of this kind of verse Milton is the great master and the choruses of Samson Agonistes are written throughout in it — but with the disadvantage that he does not let the reader clearly know what the ground-rhythm is meant to be and so they have struck most readers as merely irregular. And in fact if you counterpoint throughout, since one only of the counter rhythms is actually heard, the other is really destroyed or cannot come to exist, and what is written is one rhythm only and probably Sprung Rhythm, of which I now speak.