During his lifetime the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) had a readership of only a handful of his personal friends. His output was not large; the body of his mature completed verse totals just under fifty poems.

Although his work was produced during the Victorian era his collected poems were not published until 1918, some thirty years after his death. This meant that the work of an obscure contemporary of Tennyson, Browning and Arnold didn’t enter the public domain until the early poetry of Pound and Eliot was already there. It is therefore not surprising that Hopkins’s poems, regarded as ‘difficult and obscure’ even among his correspondents, should take their place alongside that of the ‘difficult and obscure’ modernists.

It is unlikely that any of Hopkins’s verse would have survived had it not been for his friend Robert Bridges (1844-1930). The two men had met while undergraduates at Oxford and had corresponded thereafter until Hopkins’s death, exchanging and commenting on each other’s poems. Although Bridges couldn’t cope with Hopkins’s originality, stating bluntly that he wouldn’t read ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ again for any money, he must have had some inkling that Hopkins’s work had merit. Bridges meticulously kept all the manuscripts Hopkins sent to him and, after the latter’s death, gradually and guardedly released some of them into publication. Bridges’s appointment as Poet Laureate in 1913 enhanced his influence and in 1916 he produced The Spirit of Man, an anthology of prose and verse which contained six poems by Hopkins. In 1918 Bridges felt that at last it was time to launch his late friend’s collected poems into the public domain.

It took a long time for Hopkins’s work to catch on. It was startlingly different from anything produced by his Victorian contemporaries or their successors. About ten years elapsed before all seven hundred and fifty copies of the 1918 edition were sold. Gradually, however, the originality and sheer verbal vitality of his poetry began to be recognised and appreciated, especially among the academic community. Today his work is widely available and critical studies of it abound. Someone once observed that analyses of his poem ‘The Windhover’ had at one stage become something of a minor industry in the United States.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, the eldest of nine children, was born into a fairly prosperous, middle-class, staunchly Anglican family and grew up in Stratford, Essex, and Hampstead. He was an intelligent child and attended Highgate School from which he won an Exhibition to read classics at Balliol College, Oxford. His life as a student began happily enough but he soon fell victim to the religious doubt that troubled many young Oxford men at that time. Much to the horror and chagrin of his parents, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church by John Henry (later Cardinal) Newman who had followed the same path some years earlier.

Hopkins was all for giving up his studies but Newman wisely advised him to return to Oxford to show that becoming a Catholic had not unsettled him. Hopkins did so and was awarded a Double First Class Honours Degree in Moderations and Greats (classics). Had he remained an Anglican he could well have embarked on an academic career. As it was, his future, to say the least, looked uncertain.

In 1867, the year of his graduation, Hopkins had reached a crossroads. In deciding what to do with the rest of his life he had to take certain facts into account. There is irrefutable evidence that Hopkins was not attracted to women but was attracted to men. He was an extremely devout Christian and there was no way he would ever have put any homosexual propensity into practice. His decision to abandon the Anglican faith was not taken lightly and he did so for what he believed were sound doctrinal reasons. But for him a life of celibacy was essential and it must have crossed his mind that becoming a Roman Catholic priest would satisfy forever any curiosity as to why he did not marry. Having decided upon that course, it was only a matter of choosing which religious Order to join.

Another factor in Hopkins’s nature was an asceticism bordering on the masochistic. He had no aversion to being mastered and was willing to surrender his personal comfort and will, indeed his very individuality, to a higher authority. For Hopkins, the stricter the external discipline the more he would be able to exercise the self-discipline needed to trammel and curb his natural desires. Although his own disposition was anything but belligerent, Hopkins had a frank admiration for the armed forces and their personnel and the idea of being a soldier of Christ would have had an undoubted appeal. He therefore chose to join the Society of Jesus, an Order known for its militant practice of Christianity and its demand for unquestioning obedience from its members. He remained a Jesuit for the rest of his life and never deviated from his absolute loyalty to the Order.

As well as for its ardent defence of the Roman Catholic faith, the Society of Jesus had always been renowned for its missionary, educational and charitable work. It was an essentially active movement. It was also thought by many to be philistine in outlook. In general the Society regarded art as an irrelevance which could easily distract its members from their spiritual duty.

In the light of this one wonders whether, and to what extent, Hopkins’s choice of religious Order discouraged his development as a poet. It is clear to us today that Hopkins’s purpose in life was to produce the poems which no-one but he could write but there was no chance that his Jesuit superiors – or probably even he – would have seen it that way.

From then on his poetry had to take pot-luck among his other demanding duties. This denial of his essential creative self, together with his many other denials, must have caused a chronic drain on his mental and physical strength which, since his constitution had never been robust, set the seal on a life of ill-health, depression and nervous exhaustion. This continued until his premature death just a few weeks short of his forty-fifth birthday. It is not surprising that at the point of his death he was repeatedly heard to exclaim ‘I am so happy. I am so happy’. This could only have been because he believed that his soul was being called by Christ, through the Cross, to perfection and that he was at last about to be released from the well-nigh unendurable burden and torment of the life he had deliberately chosen to lead.

The originality of Hopkins’s verse is well illustrated by his ode, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’. It is his longest poem and the first to be written in Hopkins’s mature style. He explained how this came about in a letter to his friend Canon Dixon: ‘I long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm which now I realised on paper.’ Note that the rhythm haunting the ear came before writing the result on paper, which is a clear indication of the priority which Hopkins gave to sound over sight in creating his poetry. He made this abundantly clear in a letter to Robert Bridges: ‘Read me with the ears, as I always wish to be read, and my verse becomes all right.’

He called this innovation ‘sprung rhythm’, ‘sprung’ in the sense of ‘abrupt’, since two stressed syllables can occur abruptly one after the other without any unstressed syllables between them. The principle behind it is quite different from that of ordinary metrical verse. In the latter the feet tend to be regular whereas in each foot of sprung rhythm there is one stressed syllable and either any number of unstressed syllables (though usually no more than four) or none at all. The result is an energetic bounding rhythm, rather like a creature of the wild adjusting its step in bounds according to the terrain it is crossing. This is exemplified well enough in the second stanza of ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’:

I did say yes
O at lightning and lashed rod;
Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess
Thy terror, O Christ, O God;
Thou knowest the walls, altar and hour and night:
The swoon of a heart that the sweep and the hurl of thee trod
Hard down with a horror of height:
And the midriff astrain with leaning of, laced with fire of stress.

Even today this seems a remarkable and unusual way of writing the English language. Imagine its effect on readers accustomed to the soporific tones of the later Wordsworth or the mellifluous cadences of Tennyson!

Coleridge asserted that poetry gives most pleasure when only generally understood. Regarding this poem, Hopkins remarked in a letter to Bridges:

Granted that it needs study and is obscure, for indeed I was not over-desirous that the meaning of all should be quite clear, at least unmistakeable, you might … have never the less read it so that lines and stanzas should be left in the memory and superficial impressions deepened, and have liked some without exhausting all.

This was another instance of Hopkins pleading for his work to be read with the ears, for its musical structure to be accepted as meaningful, leaving the mind to catch up later.

What was it that made Hopkins feel it was essential for him to write in this way? It stemmed from his belief, which was also that of the medieval theologian Duns Scotus, that every created thing, from a mere stone to a human being, was literally inimitable, a one-off, in essence quite unlike any other. It was this factor, the sheer individuality of anything, which he sought to discover in whatever he encountered, including, as in part one of ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, his own personal life experience.

Hopkins called this quality ‘inscape’. When he was moved to express this in verse he sought to choose and arrange words in a way which best re-presented his experience of that unique essence. This meant forcing language to work extremely hard in the pursuit of this aim and if the current conventions of language needed to be sacrificed to that end, so be it. The result was often the compact, hard-edged, multi-adjectival, exclamatory, battering verse which, at its most successful, miraculously achieved a lyricism and beauty all its own and rarely equalled by others.

Hopkins had an interest in music throughout his life and he set to music poems by Shakespeare, Sappho and others, including verses by his correspondents Bridges, Dixon and Patmore. Little of this, it seems, has survived. It is likely that this interest in music found its truest expression in his verse structures, for these show an unmistakable musical presence which, far from being merely ornamental, is an integral part of each poem.

Hopkins’s poem ‘Spring and Fall’ is a good example of this musicality. It also shows that sprung rhythm doesn’t always have to be intense and flamboyant.

Spring and Fall:
To a young child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! As the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Various conjectures have been made as to the identity of Margaret or whether she really existed at all. Hopkins merely commented in a letter that the poem was ‘not founded on any real incident’. For some eighteen months during 1880 to 1881 Hopkins served as priest at St. Francis Xavier’s church in Liverpool where he found his duties generally uncongenial. Occasionally, however, he was sent by train on a more welcome task to Rose Hill, the estate of a Catholic family near Lydiate in rural Lancashire. There he would stay the night and conduct Mass before breakfast on the following day. He explained in a letter to Robert Bridges how the poem ‘came to him’ on the morning of 7th September 1880 as he walked to the railway station on his return to Liverpool and he was able to send the completed poem to Bridges only three days later. Exactly what inspired the poem will probably never be known but it seems most likely that the young child Margaret never existed and was a fictional notion invented by Hopkins for the sake of the poem.

In this fifteen-line lyric the overall structure is neatly arranged, the first six lines in three rhyming couplets, and the last six also, with a rhyming triplet in between. Rhythmic unity is maintained by each line consisting of four sprung rhythm feet having four irregular stresses per line.

Hopkins, not being a North American, obviously chose the word ‘Fall’ in preference to ‘Autumn’ for its ambiguous meaning of both the descent of dying leaves and the Fall of mankind. This ambiguity is essential for understanding the poem, taking the reader into the heart of the Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis and reminding us of the opening lines of Milton’s Paradise Lost where ‘Man’s First Disobedience … Brought Death into the World, and all our woe.’

The title immediately presents a contrast between the two different and opposing conditions of spring and autumn. This also suggests, by metaphorical association, the contrasts of youth and age, innocence and experience, freshness and decay and purity and corruption.

The poem ostensibly addresses Margaret, the young child in the subtitle, though this can only be a rhetorical device since it is unlikely that any real child would have been able to grasp the significance of the poem. If we accept the fiction which the poem offers, it seems that Margaret has made it known that she is saddened by the mass death of the falling leaves. The name ‘Goldengrove’ indicates a place where trees (grove) bear dying (golden) leaves but it also meets the poem’s requirements regarding rhythm and sound. It is known that there were at least two landed properties of that name in or near areas where Hopkins had lived.

The poem begins by examining, in the first four lines, the girl’s reason for weeping. Several ideas and threads of meaning are introduced and skilfully woven together and the unusual, crabbed syntax is the result of their considerable compression. The expression of grief at the death of leaves by a child (who could well be approaching adolescence) must seem to an adult mind out of all proportion to the ostensible reason for it. The implication is that she is experiencing, albeit subliminally, a truth far more profound than the death of leaves. The phrase ‘things of man’ is used to imply maturity as distinct from childhood, experience contrasted with innocence, corruption compared with purity, autumn (Fall) as distinct from the ‘fresh thoughts’ of spring – indeed, the whole paraphernalia of the adult world and its awareness of what is euphemistically called the ‘facts of life.’

That all this should have been made available to the attentive and responsive reader in only the title and first four lines says something about the quality of the language with which we are dealing. The ability to achieve such precise suggestiveness and concentration with such musicality has been given to few writers in the history of the English language.

The Book of Genesis has it that Adam and Eve lost their perfection and immortality by activating sex and death in disobedience of God’s decree. Thereafter sex and death would be mankind’s fate forever and so Margaret, despite her present innocence, is destined to experience the Fall’s consequences also. As she approaches adulthood, (‘as the heart grows older’) she will become inured (‘come to such sights colder’) to the death of leaves because she will become conditioned to man’s fallen state and be part of the corrupted world.

In line eight the words ‘wanwood’ and leafmeal’ are examples of how Hopkins would create new words in pursuit of the precise expression of ‘inscape’. For ‘wanwood’ he was clearly after a word which would combine the qualities of ‘wan’ – dark, gloomy, discoloured, sickly, waning – with ‘wood’ – an area of trees. Similarly ‘leafmeal’, after the fashion of ‘piecemeal’, combines ‘leaves’ with ‘meal’, i.e. falling one by one and eventually crumbling into a fine texture.

The line ‘And yet you will weep and know why’ is pivotal to the poem. The implication is that the adult and mature Margaret, with her heart grown older, will certainly have plenty to weep about but, because no longer in a state of innocence and wholly involved in the process of original sin, she will be fully aware of the consequences of the Fall and therefore will ‘know why’ she weeps.

Lines ten and eleven advise the child not to concern herself with particular reasons for sorrow, such as dying leaves, because all sorrow stems from that one momentous cause which ‘Brought Death into the World, and all our woe.’ For someone of Hopkins’s beliefs, no greater deprivation for mankind than the Fall could even be imagined. Lines twelve and thirteen assert that in her present state of innocence the child Margaret would find it impossible to utter (mouth) or even think (mind) what her heart was inarticulately aware of and her spirit (ghost) had subliminally surmised.

The final couplet sums up the significance of Margaret’s sorrow. In seemingly mourning the mortality of falling leaves she is really mourning the mortality of fallen mankind, ‘the blight man was born for’. Since her spirit (ghost) has ‘guessed’ her implicated in the Fall, the girl’s mourning the death of leaves is only ostensible and she is subliminally mourning for Margaret, her own fallen self.

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