For some reason – perhaps just the way people talk about him – I have never, as far as I can remember, read Hopkins’s poems. Reading them now is something else I have to thank Mauriac for
First a nice piece of serendipity, connection, or just 6 degrees of separation. In the middle of talking about the poet, Mauriac suddenly remarks that he has just realised that his translator is called Gerard Hopkins – maybe there is a connection. The translator has added a footnote to say that he is the poet’s nephew
The two things which people say about Hopkins which have kept me away are first that the language is difficult & secondly that they are religious in a deeply theological (Jesuit) sense, ‘unfathomable even to the majority of Anglo-Saxon readers’
The first poem which I read, about a nun taking the veil, could hardly have been shorter or seemed more simple. My immediate reaction, because of the miserable weather we are having, a crass Me too!
Heaven-Haven
I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp & sided hail
And a few lilies blow.
And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea
The emphasis on shelter from a harsh world, without mentioning the difficulty of vocation (especially the vow of obedience), is instructive
Hopkins was very alive to the beauties of nature & I wonder if this was cause or effect of his horrified reaction to the shock cities of the Industrial Revolution
His language is strange, new minted, but right – not hard to understand, comprehensible, as in the way he captures perfectly the bird riding the currents of the air:
The Windhover
I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
That perfectly describes catching sight of one of the beauties of nature (& man-made things, for some of us), of the kind which makes you catch your breath, then feel as if you dare hardly breathe again
[Compare & contrast: The kestrel, or wind-hover, has a peculiar mode of hanging in the air in one place, his wings all the time being briskly agitated - Gilbert White: The Natural History of Selborne]
But Hopkins was over-sensitive, seemed to lack a skin
His intense observation included a keen awareness of colour:
Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted & pieced – fold, fallow & plough;
And all trades, their gear & tackle & trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange,
With swift, slow, sweet, sour, adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise Him
A world suffused with Colour means a world suffused with Light, & that, for Hopkins, I guess, means God
He is, for all his pain, optimistic about the future, confident in the resilience of Nature, for all Man’s depredations:
from God’s Grandeur
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs
So far I have tackled only the shorter poems. I look forward to tackling the longer ones, hoping that they will repay the effort just as much s Donne does
Related post: Serendipity proves I exist in a world
Link: Hopkins, Gerard Manley. 1918. Poems
