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Gerard Manley Hopkins | |
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| Orders | |
| Ordination | September 1877 |
| Personal details | |
| Born | (1844-07-28)28 July 1844 Stratford, Essex, England |
| Died | 8 June 1889(1889-06-08) (aged 44) Dublin, Ireland |
| Buried | Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, Ireland |
| Denomination | Catholic Church |
| Occupation |
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| Education | Highgate School |
| Alma mater | Heythrop College, London Balliol College, Oxford |
Gerard Manley HopkinsSJ (28 July 1844 – 8 June 1889) was an English poet andJesuit priest, whose posthumous fame places him among the leading English poets. Hisprosody – notably his concept ofsprung rhythm – established him as an innovator, as did his praise of God through vivid use ofimagery and nature.
Only after his death didRobert Bridges publish a few of Hopkins's mature poems in anthologies, hoping to prepare for wider acceptance of his style. By 1930 Hopkins's work was seen as one of the most original literary advances of his century. It intrigued such leading 20th-century poets asT. S. Eliot,Dylan Thomas,W. H. Auden,Stephen Spender andCecil Day-Lewis.
Gerard Manley Hopkins was born inStratford,Essex[1] (now inGreater London), as the eldest of probably nine children to Manley and Catherine Hopkins, née Smith.[2] He was christened at theAnglican church ofSt John's, Stratford. His father founded a marine insurance firm and at one time served as Hawaiianconsul-general in London. He was also for a timechurchwarden atSt John-at-Hampstead. His grandfather was the physician John Simm Smith, a university colleague ofJohn Keats, and close friend of the eccentric philanthropistAnn Thwaytes. One of his uncles wasCharles Gordon Hopkins, a politician of theHawaiian Kingdom, and he was a first cousin of the writer, historian and suffragetteIsabel Giberne Sieveking.[3]
As a poet, Hopkins's father published works includingA Philosopher's Stone and Other Poems (1843),Pietas Metrica (1849), andSpicelegium Poeticum, A Gathering of Verses by Manley Hopkins (1892). He reviewed poetry forThe Times and wrote one novel. Catherine (Smith) Hopkins was the daughter of a London physician, particularly fond of music and of reading, especiallyGerman philosophy, literature and the novels ofDickens. Both parents were deeply religioushigh-church Anglicans. Catherine's sister, Maria Smith Giberne, taught her nephew Gerard to sketch. The interest was supported by his uncle, Edward Smith, his great-uncleRichard James Lane, a professional artist, and other family members.[1] Hopkins's initial ambition was to be a painter – he would continue to sketch throughout his life and was inspired as an adult by the work ofJohn Ruskin and thePre-Raphaelites.[1][4]
Hopkins became a skilled draughtsman. He found his early training in visual art supported his later work as a poet.[1] His siblings drew a lot of inspiration from literature, religion, and the arts. In 1878, Milicent (1849–1946) enrolled in an Anglican sisterhood. Kate (1856–1933) would help Hopkins publish the first edition of his poetry. Hopkins's youngest sister Grace (1857–1945) set many of his poems to music.Lionel (1854–1952) became a world-famous expert on archaic and colloquial Chinese. Arthur (1848–1930) and Everard (1860–1928) were highly successful artists. Cyril (1846–1932) would join his father's insurance firm.[4]
Manley Hopkins moved his family to Hampstead in 1852, near whereJohn Keats had lived 30 years before and close to the green spaces ofHampstead Heath. When he was ten years old, Gerard was sent to board atHighgate School (1854–1863).[1] While studying Keats's poetry, he wrote "The Escorial" (1860), his earliest extant poem. Here he practised early attempts at asceticism. He once argued that most people drank more liquids than they really needed and bet that he could go without drinking for a week. He persisted until his tongue was black and he collapsed at drill. On another occasion, he abstained from salt for a week.[4][5] Among his teachers at Highgate wasRichard Watson Dixon, who became an enduring friend and correspondent. Of the older pupils Hopkins recalls in his boarding house, the poetPhilip Stanhope Worsley won theNewdigate Prize.[6]
Hopkins studied classics atBalliol College, Oxford (1863–1867).[7] He began his time in Oxford as a keen socialite and prolific poet but seems to have alarmed himself with resulting changes in his behaviour. There he forged a lifelong friendship withRobert Bridges (laterPoet Laureate of the United Kingdom), which would be important to his development as a poet and in establishing his posthumous acclaim.[7] Hopkins was deeply impressed with the work ofChristina Rossetti, who became one of his great contemporary influences. The two met in 1864.[8] During this time he studied with the writer and criticWalter Pater, who tutored him in 1866 and remained a friend until Hopkins left Oxford for the second time in October 1879.[9]
In a journal entry of 6 November 1865, Hopkins declared an ascetic intention for his life and work: "On this day by God's grace I resolved to give up all beauty until I had His leave for it."[10] On 18 January 1866, Hopkins composed his most ascetic poem,The Habit of Perfection. On 23 January, he included poetry in a list of things to be given up forLent. In July, he decided to become a Roman Catholic and travelled to Birmingham in September to consult the leader of the Oxford converts,John Henry Newman.[8] Newman received him into theRoman Catholic Church on 21 October 1866.
The decision to convert estranged Hopkins from his family and from a number of acquaintances. After graduating in 1867, he was provided by Newman with a teaching post at the Oratory in Birmingham. While there he began to study the violin. On 5 May 1868 Hopkins firmly "resolved to be a religious." Less than a week later, he made a bonfire of his poetry and gave it up almost entirely for seven years. He also felt a call to enter the ministry and decided to become aJesuit. He paused first to visitSwitzerland, which officially forbade Jesuits to enter.[4][11]
In September 1868, Hopkins began his Jesuit novitiate atManresa House,Roehampton, under the guidance ofAlfred Weld. Two years later he moved to St Mary's Hall,Stonyhurst, for philosophical studies, taking vows of poverty, chastity and obedience on 8 September 1870.[12] He felt that his interest in poetry had stopped him devoting himself wholly to religion. However, on readingDuns Scotus in 1872, he saw how the two need not conflict.[13] He continued to write a detailed prose journal in 1868–1875. Unable to suppress a desire to describe the natural world, he also wrote music, sketched, and for church occasions, wrote "verses", as he called them. He later wrote sermons and other religious pieces.
In 1874, Hopkins returned to Manresa House to teach classics. While studying in the Jesuit house of theological studies,St Beuno's College, nearSt Asaph inWales, he was asked by his religious superior to write a poem to commemorate the foundering of a German ship in a storm. So in 1875 he took up poetry once more to write a lengthy piece, "The Wreck of the Deutschland", inspired by theDeutschland incident, a maritime disaster in which 157 people died, including fiveFranciscan nuns who had been leaving Germany due to harshanti-Catholic laws (seeKulturkampf). The work displays both the religious concerns and some of the unusualmetre and rhythms of his subsequent poetry not present in his few remaining early works. It not only depicts the dramatic events and heroic deeds but tells of him reconciling the terrible events with God's higher purpose. The poem was accepted but not printed by a Jesuit publication. This rejection fed his ambivalence about his poetry, most of which remained unpublished until after his death.
Hopkins chose the austere and restrictive life of a Jesuit and was gloomy at times. His biographerRobert Bernard Martin notes that "the life expectancy of a man becoming a novice at twenty-one was twenty-three more years rather than the forty years of males of the same age in the general population."[14] The brilliant student who had left Oxford with first-class honours failed his final theology exam. This almost certainly meant that despite his ordination in 1877, Hopkins would not progress in the order. In 1877 he wroteGod's Grandeur, an array of sonnets that included "The Starlight Night". He finished "The Windhover" only a few months before his ordination. His life as a Jesuit trainee, though rigorous, isolated and sometimes unpleasant, at least had some stability; the uncertain and varied work after ordination was even harder on his sensibilities. In October 1877, not long after completing "The Sea and the Skylark" and only a month after his ordination, Hopkins took up duties as sub-minister and teacher atMount St Mary's College near Sheffield. In July 1878 he became curate at the Jesuit church inMount Street, London, and in December that ofSt Aloysius's Church, Oxford, then moving to Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow.[4] While ministering in Oxford, he became a founding member ofThe Newman Society, established in 1878 for Catholic members of theUniversity of Oxford. He taught Greek and Latin atMount St Mary's College, Sheffield, andStonyhurst College, Lancashire.
In the late 1880s Hopkins metMatthew Russell of theIrish Monthly, who introduced him toKatharine Tynan andW. B. Yeats.[15]
In 1884, Hopkins became a professor of Greek and Latin atUniversity College Dublin.[16] His English roots and disagreement with the Irish politics of the time, along with his small stature (5 ft 2 in or 1.57 m), unprepossessing nature and personal oddities, reduced his effectiveness as a teacher. This and his isolation in Ireland deepened a gloom that was reflected in his poems of the time, such as "I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, not Day". They came to be known as the "terrible sonnets", not for their quality but according to Hopkins's friend Canon Richard Watson Dixon, because they reached the "terrible crystal", meaning they crystallised the melancholic dejection that plagued the latter part of Hopkins's life.
Several influences led to a melancholic state and restricted his poetic inspiration in his last five years.[17] His workload was heavy. He disliked living in Dublin, away from England and friends. He was disappointed at how far Dublin had fallen from its Georgian elegance of the previous century.[18] His general health suffered and his eyesight began to fail.[citation needed] He felt confined and dejected.[citation needed] As a devout Jesuit, he found himself in an artistic dilemma.[citation needed] To subdue an egotism that he felt would violate the humility required by his religious position, he decided never to publish his poems but Hopkins realised that any true poet requires an audience for criticism and encouragement.[citation needed] This conflict between his religious obligations and his poetic talent made him feel he had failed at both.[citation needed]
After several years' ill health and bouts ofdiarrhoea, Hopkins died oftyphoid fever in 1889 at the age of 44 years and was buried inGlasnevin Cemetery,[19] after a funeral inSt Francis Xavier Church inGardiner Street, located in GeorgianDublin. He is thought to have suffered throughout his life from what today might be labelledbipolar disorder or chronicunipolar depression and battled a deep sense of melancholic anguish. However, his last words on his deathbed were, "I am so happy, I am so happy".[5]
According toJohn Bayley, "All his life Hopkins was haunted by the sense of personal bankruptcy and impotence, the straining of 'time's eunuch' with no more to 'spend' ...", a sense of inadequacy, graphically expressed in his last sonnets.[20] Toward the end of his life, Hopkins suffered several long bouts of depression. His "terrible sonnets" struggle with problems of religious doubt. He described them to Bridges as "[t]he thin gleanings of a long weary while".[21]
"Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord" (1889) echoesJeremiah 12:1 in asking why the wicked prosper. It reflects the exasperation of a faithful servant who feels he has been neglected, and is addressed to a divine person ("Sir") capable of hearing the complaint, but seemingly unwilling to listen.[22] Hopkins uses parched roots as a metaphor for despair.
The image of the poet's estrangement from God figures in "I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day", in which he describes lying awake before dawn, likening his prayers to "dead letters sent To dearest him that lives alas! away." The opening line recalls Lamentations 3:2: "He hath led me, and brought me into darkness, but not into light."
"No Worst, There is None" and "Carrion Comfort" are also counted among the "terrible sonnets".
"Pied Beauty"
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
Much of Hopkins's historical importance has to do with the changes he brought to the form of poetry, which ran contrary to conventional ideas of metre. Prior to Hopkins, mostMiddle English andModern English poetry was based on a rhythmic structure inherited from the Norman side of English literary heritage. This structure is based on repeating "feet" of two or three syllables, with the stressed syllable falling in the same place on each repetition. Hopkins called this structure "running rhythm", and although he wrote some of his early verse in running rhythm, he became fascinated with the older rhythmic structure of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, of whichBeowulf is the most famous example.
Hopkins called his own rhythmic structuresprung rhythm. Sprung rhythm is structured around feet with a variable number of syllables, generally between one and four syllables per foot, with the stress always falling on the first syllable in a foot. It is similar to the "rolling stresses" ofRobinson Jeffers, another poet who rejected conventional metre. Hopkins saw sprung rhythm as a way to escape the constraints of running rhythm, which he said inevitably pushed poetry written in it to become "same and tame". In this way, Hopkins's sprung rhythm can be seen as anticipating much offree verse. His work has no great affinity with either of the contemporaryPre-Raphaelite andneo-romanticism schools, although he does share their descriptive love of nature and he is often seen as a precursor tomodernist poetry, or as a bridge between the two poetic eras.
Hopkins was a supporter oflinguistic purism in English. In an 1882 letter toRobert Bridges, Hopkins writes: "It makes one weep to think what English might have been; for in spite of all that Shakespeare and Milton have done... no beauty in a language can make up for want of purity."[24] He took time to learnOld English, which became a major influence on his writing. In the same letter to Bridges he calls Old English "a vastly superior thing to what we have now."[25]
He uses many archaic and dialect words but also coins new words. One example of this istwindles, which seems from its context inInversnaid to mean a combination oftwines anddwindles. He often creates compound adjectives, sometimes with a hyphen (such asdapple-dawn-drawn falcon) but often without, as inrolling level underneath him steady air. This use of compound adjectives, similar to the Old English use of compound nouns viakennings, concentrates his images, communicating to his readers theinstress of the poet's perceptions of aninscape.
Added richness comes from Hopkins's extensive use ofalliteration,assonance,onomatopoeia andrhyme, both at the end of lines and internally as in:
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Hopkins was influenced by theWelsh language, which he had acquired while studying theology atSt Beuno's nearSt Asaph. The poetic forms ofWelsh literature and particularlycynghanedd, with its emphasis on repeating sounds, accorded with his own style and became a prominent feature of his work.[26] This reliance on similar-sounding words with close or differing senses means that his poems are best understood if read aloud. An important element in his work is Hopkins' own concept ofinscape, which was derived in part from the medieval theologianDuns Scotus. Anthony Domestico explains,
Inscape, for Hopkins, is the charged essence, the absolute singularity that gives each created thing its being; instress is both the energy that holds the inscape together and the process by which this inscape is perceived by an observer. We instress the inscape of a tulip, Hopkins would say, when we appreciate the particular delicacy of its petals, when we are enraptured by its specific, inimitable shade of pink."[27]
"The Windhover" aims to depict not the bird in general, but instead one instance and its relation to the breeze. This is just one interpretation of Hopkins's most famous poem, one which he felt was his best.[5]
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!
During his lifetime, Hopkins published a few poems. It was only through the efforts of Robert Bridges that his works were seen. Despite Hopkins burning all his poems on entering the Jesuit novitiate, he had already sent some to Bridges, who with some other friends, was one of the few people to see many of them for some years. After Hopkins's death they were distributed to a wider audience, mostly fellow poets, and in 1918 Bridges, by thenpoet laureate, published a collected edition; an expanded edition, prepared byCharles Williams, appeared in 1930, and a greatly expanded edition byWilliam Henry Gardner appeared in 1948 (eventually reaching a fourth edition, 1967, with N. H. Mackenzie).
Notable collections of Hopkins's manuscripts and publications are inCampion Hall, Oxford; theBodleian Library,Oxford; and the Foley Library atGonzaga University inSpokane, Washington.[29]
In 1970, Timothy d'Arch Smith, an antiquarian bookseller, ascribed to Hopkins suppressed homoerotic impulses which he views as taking on a degree of specificity after Hopkins metRobert Bridges's distant cousin, friend, and fellow EtonianDigby Mackworth Dolben, "a ChristianUranian".[30]
In 1991,Robert Bernard Martin wrote in his biographyGerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life, that when Hopkins first met Dolben, on Dolben's 17th birthday in Oxford in February 1865, it "was, quite simply, the most momentous emotional event of [his] undergraduate years, probably of his entire life."[31]: 110 According to Robert Martin, "Hopkins was completely taken with Dolben, who was nearly four years his junior, and his private journal for confessions the following year proves how absorbed he was in imperfectly suppressed erotic thoughts of him."[32] Martin considered it "probable that [Hopkins] would have been deeply shocked at the reality of sexual intimacy with another person."[31]Hopkins had composed two poems about Dolben, "Where art thou friend" and "The Beginning of the End". Robert Bridges, who edited the first edition of Dolben's poems as well as Hopkins's, cautioned that the second poem "must never be printed", though Bridges himself included it in the first edition (1918).[33]
Another indication of the nature of his feelings for Dolben is that Hopkins's high Anglican confessor seems to have forbidden him to have any contact with Dolben except by letter. Hopkins never saw Dolben again, and any continuation of their relationship was abruptly ended by Dolben's drowning two years later in June 1867. Hopkins's feeling for Dolben seems to have cooled by that time, but he was nonetheless greatly affected by his death. "Ironically, fate may have bestowed more through Dolben's death than it could ever have bestowed through longer life ... [for] many of Hopkins's best poems – impregnated with an elegiac longing for Dolben, his lost beloved and his muse – were the result."[34]: 401 Hopkins's relationship with Dolben was explored in the 2017 novelThe Hopkins Conundrum.[35]
Some of Hopkins's poems, such asThe Bugler's First Communion andEpithalamion, arguably embody homoerotic themes, although the second poem was arranged by Robert Bridges from extant fragments.[36] In 2006, M. M. Kaylor, argued for Hopkins's inclusion with theUranian poets, a group whose writings derived, in many ways, from prose works ofWalter Pater, Hopkins's academic coach for his Greats exams and later a lifelong friend.[37]: 182–193 [38]: 161–205 [39]: 157–187
Some critics[who?] have argued[when?] that homoerotic readings are either highly tendentious or that they can be classified under the broader category of "homosociality", over the gender, sexual-specific "homosexual" term.[citation needed] Hopkins's journal writings, they argue, offer a clear admiration for feminised beauty. In 2000, Justus George Lawler criticised Robert Martin's biography by suggesting that Martin "cannot see the heterosexual beam... for the homosexual biographical mote in his own eye... it amounts to a slantedeisegesis".[40] The poems that elicit homoerotic readings can be read not merely as exercises in sublimation but as powerful renditions of religious conviction, a conviction that caused strain in his family and even led him to burn some poems that he felt were unnecessarily self-centred.[citation needed] In 2000, Julia Saville viewed the religious imagery in the poems as Hopkins's way of expressing the tension with homosexual identity and desire.[41][page needed]
Christopher Ricks noted that Hopkins engaged in a number of penitential practices, "but all of these self-inflictions were not self-inflictions to him, and they are his business – or are his understanding of what it was for him to be about his Father's business."[14] Ricks takes issue with Martin's apparent lack of appreciation of the importance of the role of Hopkins's religious commitment to his writing, and cautions against assigning a priority of influence to any sexual instincts over other factors such as Hopkins's estrangement from his family.[14] In 2009, biographer Paul Mariani found in Hopkins poems "an irreconcilable tension – on the one hand, the selflessness demanded by Jesuit discipline; on the other, the seeming self-indulgence of poetic creation."[27]
Hopkins spent the last five years of his life as a classics professor at University College Dublin. Hopkins's isolation in 1885 was multiple: a Jesuit distanced from his Anglican family and his homeland, an Englishman teaching in Dublin during a time of political strife, and an unpublished poet striving to reconcile his artistic and religious callings.[21] The poem "To seem the stranger" was written in Ireland between 1885 and 1886 and is a poem of isolation and loneliness.[42]
Ricks called Hopkins "the most original poet of the Victorian age."[14] Hopkins is considered as influential asT. S. Eliot in initiating the modernist movement in poetry.[43] His experiments with elliptical phrasing, double meanings and quirky conversational rhythms turned out to be liberating to poets such asW. H. Auden andDylan Thomas.[44] Hopkins also had a direct influence on the Ghanaian poet and novelistKojo Laing, whose poem "No needle in the sky" has been called an intercultural translation of Hopkins's "The Windhover".[45] The American authorRon Hansen held the Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ, Professorship in English atSanta Clara University; his novelExiles dramatises Hopkins' composition ofThe Wreck of the Deutschland.[46]
The Gerard Manley Hopkins Building in University College Dublin is named after him.
Well-known works by Hopkins include:
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Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins public domain audiobook atLibriVox: solo recordings of his collected poems: recordings of individual short poems| International | |
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