8: HAVING IT OUT WITH HOPKINS.  At the age of 21 and after a childhood much given to asceticism, Gerard Manley Hopkins became a Catholic.  In England at the time, this was seen rather like simultaneously having your brain surgically removed, your social credit instantly revoked, contracting both halitosis and a wasting disease, and jumping into an empty manhole.  A good deal of that was obviously vulgar prejudice, but, truth to tell, the great problem I’ve always had with Hopkins, aside from poetic matters, is that, reading his journals and letters, getting a sense of his eccentricities, his great unhappiness, his ardent search for a set of rules to follow, his determined asceticism (on a bet, he once went without water until his tongue turned black and he collapsed) and that persistent air of mournfulness, I have had to fight the feeling that his turn to Catholicism, rather than liberating him, pushed him further down a path which confirmed him in his spiritual difficulties and quite possibly ruined his health and killed him.  

      Catholicism was indeed for Hopkins the narrow gate.  It convinced him (at least for a while) that poetry was mere self-indulgence, an obstacle to obeying the will of God, and with that in mind he burned his earlier verses (over two dozen of these survived in chance copies).  A few years later, after reading Duns Scotus, he decided that poetry was indeed a permissible pursuit, and went on to write the poems for which he is known.  But there has always lingered for me in Hopkins, in his letters and journals and lesser work at least, a sense of narrowness, of boundaries obeyed, of exclusivity.  He could never forgive the lilies for blowing, the springs for failing; there is no fleshly or intimate note.  God gets into and all over everything, like a great revered miasma.  He only wrote poetry again when he felt it was permissible.  Poetry does not wait to be permissible—it has its own imperatives--and I have always wondered to what degree the limitations Hopkins imposed on himself and on his verse led to the miseries of his later life.

       But maybe this is just complaining that Hopkins is the poet he is, and not another.  When I go back to the great poems—when, on those Welsh poetic models, the alliteration is not hammered at but chimed, the pileup of nouns and doubled adjectives fly and wheel around, where the vowels are so beautifully and musically tended—I feel the poetic urge of his silent years simmering and waiting, and there is something volcanic, finally, in the result.  Rereading “The Wreck of the Deutschland” a few days ago, I frequently had no idea what he was talking about, but the movement of the language was literally irresistible—it went on almost by itself, I could not stop reading it, and it was like a great liberating howl—poetry reasserting itself and breaking loose.  The best of the poems that follow accomplish the task so rarely done, for all we talk of it: the genuinely memorable praise of God, in the specifics of earthly things, creation: the windhover, “daylight’s dauphin,” “the rivelling snowstorm,” kingfishers and dragonflies. The best of his work was rent from him and transcends all I complain of with his smaller moments.  “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”  No poems stop, pause, regroup and surge ahead as Hopkins’s do.  They billow and dance with that great, supernal hope, past the mortality of all creation:  “He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change.”

       We must hope ourselves, after enduring the beauty of those poems known as the “terrible sonnets,” wherein Hopkins gives vent as “Time’s eunuch,” “poor Jackself,” to his loneliness and frustration, that he did, at his own advising, let himself “live to my sad self hereafter kind.”

While writing the sonnets he also wrote these lines:

                                             In a flash, at a trumpet crash,  

               I am all at once what Christ is      since he was what I am, and 

               This Jack, joke, poor potsherd      patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,  

                                                         Is immortal diamond.

     For more than fifty years the definitive edition has been The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie and published by Oxford University Press.  It includes the surviving early work, unpublished fragments, translations, and his poems in Latin and Welsh.  Gardner’s edition for Penguin Books (Poems and Prose, 1953) includes selections from the journals and letters.