Discuss Gerard Manley Hopkins' role as a religious poet.

Hopkins didn't set out to be a modern poet. During his lifetime, his writing was seen by no more than a handful of people, most notably Robert Bridges. Yet the relatively isolated existence that Hopkins led as a Jesuit priest meant that he was able to devise his own highly unique way of writing poetry, one that was largely immune to the prevailing aesthetic standards. In that sense, one could describe Hopkins as a modern poet ahead of his time. In terms of poetic diction, meter, and rhythm, he broke free from the constraints of Victorian poetry and pointed towards a much freer, more experimental style that only really took hold after the First World War, more than a quarter of a century after Hopkins's death. As already mentioned, there are a number of modern features to Hopkins's poetry, but you might like to concentrate on the unusual words that he uses, many of which, ironically, are archaic, derived from Anglo-Saxon. By delving deep into the past, Hopkins was effecting a radical change in English poetic diction. The old words had a certain directness and vigor to them which made them especially useful to Hopkins in his depictions of nature in such works as "The Windhover," for example. The finely-wrought and elaborate Latinate style so beloved of contemporaries such as Tennyson and Browning was decisively rejected by Hopkins in favor of an earthier language, which sought to re-establish a connection between man and God's creation, lost in the midst of rapid industrialization and environmental destruction.

To serve as examples of Hopkins's poems of extreme emotions are "Carrion Comfort" and "No Worst There is None" written while Hopkins was Professor of Greek at Universitiy College at Dublin where he became overwhelmed with his responsibilities. His poetry as "confessionals" and deeply personal reflections are certainly modernist in theme.  Such a poem as "I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, not Day" expresses Hopkins inner turmoil over his homosexuality:

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day,/What hourse, O what black hourse we have spent/This night!....And my lament/is cries coutless, cries like dead letters sent/To dearest him that lives alas! away/I am gall, I am heartburn.  God's most deep decree/Bitter would have me taste!my taste was me....

To write about such a topic was taboo, certainly, in the Victorian Age.

Drawn to Catholicism in 1866, Gerard Manley Hopkins burned the poetry he had written, declaring it too worldly.  In a letter to his poet friend, Robert Bridges, Hopkins wrote, "I am a eunuch, but it is for the kingdom of God's sake."  After he became a Jesuit priest, Hopkins did not compose poetry although he had not forsaken his two vocations. Finally, in 1875, when he told his superior how moved he was by the wreck of the Deutschland, a ship that carried exiled Franciscan nuns from Germany who were all drowned, his superior expressed the hope that someone would write a poem about this disaster. So, it was this poem that joined, for Hopkins, God's love with God's wrath as in Part I, stanza 9:

Be adored among men,
God, three-numbered form;
Wring thy rebel, dogged in den,
Man's malice, with wrecking and storm.
Beyond syaing sweet, past telling of tongue,
Thou are lightning and love, I found it, a winter and warm;
Father and fondler of heart thou has wrung;
Hast thy dark descending and most art merciful then.

Clearly, religion is not a refuge for Hopkins in his poetry.  In his "Terrible Sonnets," for instance, Hopkins exposes his misery.  But, many of his poems juxtapose anguish with rapture as in his poem, "God's Grandeur":

The world is charged with the grandeur of God....
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed.  Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod:
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
...And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Hopkins perceives God reaching out to help humanity; from  the original condition of man in which he became divided from God, the Holy Spirit now imbues man with offers of communion. Nature, too, is tied to this connection of man with God. For, Hopkins perceives divinity in nature, and in order to describe this view of the divine in nature, Hopkins uses that which he calls "inscape," a central organizing principle that is its identity. Human beings are capable of recognizing the inscapes of other people and of objects. When people experience the spirit of an object, they experience “instress,” which can be described as a feeling of communion with the “soul” of the object.  With inscape, one may feel the momentary union with God through Christ in the contemplation of natural objects:

Glory be to God for dappled things--
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;....
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

How does Gerard Manley Hopkins reflect his religious beliefs in his poetry?

Having converted to Catholicism in 1866 while at Oxford University, John Manley Hopkins studied under the great Cardinal John Henry Newman at a Jesuit school in Birmingham, England.  After his conversion, Hopkins supposedly burned all his poems, but "most of them must have been reproduced later" (enotes).

One poem which certainly illustrates the religious fervour of Hopkins is his "Pied Beauty" in which he praises the ever-changing delights of nature.  For, his first and last lines attribute creation of this beauty to God: 

Glory be to God for dappled things--.... 
He fathers forth whose beauty is past change:
                  Praise him.

Hopkins intended his poetry to have the sound of speech rather than the rhythmn patterns of traditional verse.  This technique of his is termed "sprung rhythm." This is also evident in another poem with religious overtones, "God's Grandeur," a Petrachan sonnet that describes a world that resists human corruption because it has been "charged with the grandeur of God," having the Holy Spirit "bent" over the world, protecting it.