Kevin Heller

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Kevin Heller

In the following essay excerpt, Heller gives an interpretation of Hopkins’s ‘‘Pied Beauty,’’ in which attention is given to the prayer form of the poem and how the ‘‘pied’’ poetic elements reflect the topic.

Through the use of various poetic devices in ‘‘Pied Beauty,’’ Gerard Manley Hopkins causes the words of his poem to take on meaning beyond their dictionary definitions. By alluding to common prayers and manipulating both sound effect and stanza form. Hopkins makes his poem itself an example of pied beauty: it is pied, ordered and beautiful, and is an imitation of the creative act of God written to praise him in the form of a poem-prayer.

With the opening line, ‘‘Glory be to God [ . . . ]’’ (1), Hopkins alludes to the ‘‘Glory Be’’— ‘‘Glory be to the Father, and to the son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.’’ By beginning ‘‘Pied Beauty’’ with those words, Hopkins forces the reader to recall the entire prayer and asks the reader to consider his poem a prayer. The ‘‘Glory Be’’ itself is unclear just what, exactly, about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is deserving of glory, but Hopkins provides an answer: the pied beauty of so many of God’s creations is what causes God to be deserving of glory. In ‘‘Pied Beauty,’’ God deserves glory for having created such beautiful things out of nothing, and humans have no idea what magnificent creation God will place on the earth in the future, just as the ‘‘Glory Be’’ discusses the past, present, and future.

The last line of Hopkins’s poem, ‘‘Praise him’’ (11), is significant, just as the last line of the ‘‘Glory Be’’ is ‘‘Amen.’’ Granted, ‘‘amen’’ does not mean ‘‘praise him,’’ but rather ‘‘certainly’’ or ‘‘truly.’’ Hopkins implies, however, that ‘‘Praise him’’ and ‘‘Amen’’ should be equated, and the context makes sense: Hopkins believes ‘‘Certainly’’ or ‘‘Truly’’ one should ‘‘Praise him.’’ Readers can imagine listening to ‘‘Pied Beauty’’ being read (as it was intended to be read) aloud and nodding in assent to the last line. They might even be tempted to call out ‘‘Amen’’ or ‘‘Praise him.’’

The sounds that Hopkins’s audience hears are brilliantly construed sentences and words that illustrate just why God deserves glory for his myriad creations: By combining words in such a new, unique, and beautiful manner, just as God created so many things in the world, Hopkins creates pied sounds—and both God’s and Hopkins’s creations are beautiful in their pied nature: God creates ‘‘brinded cows’’ the ‘‘couple-colour’’ (2) of the sky, and Hopkins creates beautiful sounds, such as, ‘‘Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings’’ (4). This phrase alliterates with f four times and contains six sprung rhythm feet—three single stresses, and three trochees—just as three separate God created natural things are discussed. Further. Hopkins highlights the pied nature of the three things, because the reader cannot easily distinguish between the subject noun and the modifier in the sets ‘‘fresh-firecoal,’’ ‘‘chestnut-falls,’’ and ‘‘finches’ wings.’’ One word does not modify the other, but both work in conjunction to heighten the pied nature of their pairings. God creates ‘‘rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim’’ (3)—a line rich in imagery and sound. Hopkins creates a fraction of a line. ‘‘who knows how?’’ (8) in which the letter o is pronounced differently—in a pied fashion—in three separate words: these words utilize w’s and h’s to make the pattern ‘‘whwhw.’’ Hopkins combines things in ways that do not at first seem to go together. But both God and...

(This entire section contains 835 words.)

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Hopkins give their creations order, and within that order is beauty. Or within that beauty is order. In the line ‘‘With swift, slow; sweet sour; adazzle, dim’’ (9), Hopkins uses fourw’s and four s’s, two a’s, two d’s, and two z’s, creating the pattern ‘‘ababababcdceed’’ (fourteen letters, just as a sonnet is fourteen lines) and Hopkins uses a modified form of the sonnet in ‘‘Pied Beauty.’’

A ten-and-a-half-line poem is not standard; it is ‘‘counter, original, spare, strange’’ (7). But the beauty of the form comes from its complexity and ingenuity within the boundaries of order: A typical sonnet could be eight and six lines, but Hopkins writes ‘‘Pied Beauty’’ in six and four and half lines—exactly proportionate to a regular fourteen-line sonnet (8/6 and 6/4.5; 8 X 4.5= 36 and 6 X 6= 36). The form of ‘‘Pied Beauty’’ is Hopkins’s way of praising God through imitation: Hopkins created something pied and beautiful—the ten-and-a-half line sonnet— while maintaining order.

Whereas a prose version of the points Hopkins makes may be lucid, the effect that allusion, sound effect, and stanza have in ‘‘Pied Beauty’’ cannot possibly be captured in anything but poetry. Hopkins’s poem and God’s creations are both deserving of glory for their creativity and brilliance, but God created Hopkins: possibly an example of pied beauty himself.

Source: Kevin Heller, ‘‘Hopkins’s ‘Pied Beauty,’’’ in Explicator, Vol. 59, No. 4, Summer 2001, pp. 191–92.

Claire Robinson

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Claire Robinson

Claire Robinson has an M.A. in English. She is a writer and editor and a former teacher of English literature and creative writing. In the following essay, she examines how Hopkins uses the poetic techniques of the oral traditions of Anglo-Saxon and traditional Welsh poetry to express his meaning in “Pied Beauty.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins’s experimentation with the poetic techniques of Anglo-Saxon and Welsh poetry was entirely geared to his intention that his poems be read aloud with the ear, not on the page with the eye. In a letter of August 21, 1877 to Robert Bridges (cited in Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works), he writes, “My verse is less to be read than heard . . . it is oratorical, that is the rhythm is so.” In another letter to Bridges in 1886 (cited by Paul L. Mariani in A Commentary on the Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins), enclosing his sonnet, “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves,” he writes:

[CALLOUT]
Regular rhythm tends to soothe and lull readers with its incantatory effect, whereas irregular rhythm such as Hopkins uses wakes them up and shocks them into something approaching a state of astonishment, awe, or wonder.

Of this long sonnet above all remember what applies to all my verse, that it is, as living art should be, made for performance and that its performance is not reading with the eye but loud, leisurely, poetical (not rhetorical) recitation, with long rests, long dwells on the rhyme and other marked syllables, and so on.

One of the tools that Hopkins took from the Anglo-Saxon and Welsh oral traditions was alliteration, the repetition of initial consonant sounds in neighboring words, sometimes called consonant-chiming. For example, every line of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf contains three alliterations. The Welsh-language poetic genre called cynghanedd (meaning harmony), a traditional form dating from ancient times and continuing into the present day, relies heavily on alliteration and internal rhyme (in which two or more words in the same line rhyme). Hopkins was studying the Welsh language and literature in the years prior to writing “Pied Beauty.”

In “Pied Beauty,” Hopkins includes such alliterative phrases as “skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow,” where the initial letter “c” is repeated three times, and “Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls,” where the alliteration lies in the letter “f.” The effect of alliteration is similar to rhyme in that it sets up an expectation of repetition that is later satisfied, thereby carrying the listener through the poem. (For one who recites, the alliteration is an aid to memory.) It also has a musical, incantatory effect similar to that of metrical rhythm, due to the repetition of sounds. Often, Hopkins reinforces the chiming effect of the alliteration by making the alliterations fall on strongly stressed syllables, in the Anglo-Saxon style. This point is illustrated in all the above examples.

Hopkins’s use of compound words is another conscious borrowing from the Anglo-Saxon tradition. Beowulf is laden with such constructions, called kennings (literally, knowings). A king is called a ring-giver (a king rewards his warriors with gifts of rings), a burial mound is an earth-hall, and a ship is a sea-rider. Such descriptions lend a concrete and picturesque quality to the object described; they pull it from the realm of the abstract into the more directly felt world of the senses, turning an idea into an object. For example, Hopkins’s “couple-colour” conjures up a concrete image of a pair, perhaps a pair of people, while the word two and the prefix bi-, which have the same meaning, completely fail to stir the senses. The expression “Fresh-firecoal” invokes the familiar image of a burning coal breaking open and glowing red, but it is lent a new twist by the addition of “Fresh-,” an adjective that connotes both newness and vitality.

The Anglo-Saxon language abounds in words describing the concrete and tangible world, as opposed to the often more abstract and cerebral Latin- and Greek-derived words that entered the English language with the Norman conquest of 1066. Anglo-Saxon-derived words are also usually shorter than Latin- or Greek-derived words, creating a more forceful sound effect. Hopkins’s poetry is laden with words with Anglo-Saxon roots, which he prefers to those with Latin or Greek roots. Everyday speech has far more Anglo-Saxon-derived words than does formal speech or writing, and Hopkins wanted to approximate normal speech in his poetry. He also used many dialect and archaic words that hark back to the Anglo-Saxon past. An example from “Pied Beauty” is “brinded,” an archaic and dialect word meaning striped or streaked, which is derived from the Anglo-Saxon bernen or brinnen, to burn.

The most important influence of Anglo-Saxon verse on Hopkins’s poetry lay in its metrical system. Hopkins’s sprung rhythm is based on a metrical style that was common in Anglo-Saxon poetry such as Beowulf and William Langland’s Piers Plowman. This metrical style has a set number of strong stresses per line. Each line is divided into two half-lines; there are two strong stresses per half-line and alliteration only occurs on stressed syllables. Each line can contain any number of syllables. “Pied Beauty” has four or five strong stresses per line, and many of the strong stresses alliterate also. For example, in the line, “Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches wings,” three of the four strong stresses fall on the syllables beginning with the letter “f” the other strong stress falls on “chest-.”

The Anglo-Saxon and sprung meters are different from the traditional meter of English verse written after the Norman invasion of 1066. The Norman style, which became the traditional English style, counts both stresses and syllables, rather than just stresses. It contains a regular number of syllables per foot, with the stress generally falling in the same place within each foot except when the rhythm is deliberately changed for emphasis. In his “Author’s Preface” to the 1918 edition of his poetry, reproduced in Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works, Hopkins called such traditional meter “Running Rhythm.” He noted that while he himself made use of it, if strictly adhered to, it made verse become “same and tame.”

Hopkins favored sprung rhythm because he believed it was the rhythm of common speech. It may be added that this rhythm is uniquely well-suited to Hopkins’s declamatory, ecstatic, and enthusiastic style in general, and to the hymn of praise “Pied Beauty” in particular. Hopkins noted in a letter of April 2, 1877, to Robert Bridges (cited in Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works) that sprung rhythm was “the most rhetorical and emphatic of all possible rhythms.” Robert Lowell, in his essay “Hopkins’ Sanctity,” in Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Critical Symposium by the Kenyon Critics, notes the perfect correspondence between Hopkins’s rhythmical style and his personality: “Hopkins’ rhythms even when he is not writing sprung-rhythm have the effect of a hyperthyroid injection. As we know from the letters and personal anecdotes, he lived in a state of exhilaration.”

Hopkins’s sprung rhythm draws its power from the tension between the regular rhythms of poetry, which were usual in the poetry of his time, and his deliberately disturbed rhythms, which he called counterpointed rhythm. Regular rhythm tends to soothe and lull readers with its incantatory effect, whereas irregular rhythm such as Hopkins uses wakes them up and shocks them into something approaching a state of astonishment, awe, or wonder. An example is the first stanza of “Pied Beauty,” in which Hopkins employs emphatic and sometimes staccato rhythms that load each line with a sense of exhilaration. In the second stanza, the shift in focus from outward creation to inward reflection is reflected in a slowing down of the rhythm and tempo. This is reinforced by the longer vowel sounds of line 7; it is impossible to read it as quickly as the first stanza. Line 9, with its list of opposite qualities, speeds up, as is usual with a list, but then the tempo slows markedly in the momentous lines 10 and 11: “He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: / Praise him.” The combination of a number of strongly stressed long vowel sounds and the four consecutive strong stresses falling on the final four words forces the reader to slow down.

The changes in rhythm and tempo between the lively first stanza and the more ponderous second perfectly reflect the meaning. The first stanza is quick and lively and expresses the variety of God’s creation; the second is slower and more reflective and expresses both the poet’s wondering introspection. The final one-and-a-half lines are slowest and grandest of all, and express the unchanging nature of God.

Hopkins never used innovative poetic techniques for their own sake. Rather, he used them to express and deepen the meaning of his poems. His theories of sprung rhythm and his study of the Anglo-Saxon and Welsh traditions have proved taxing for students of literature to research and understand. What matters is the end result: verse that shimmers with a sensual passion for life and its creator. This can only be fully realized by reading his poetry aloud, which is where the study of Hopkins’s verse should begin and end.

Source: Claire Robinson, Critical Essay on “Pied Beauty,” in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2007.

John Ferns

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John Ferns

In the following essay, Ferns gives a critical analysis of Hopkins’s work.

While Gerard Manley Hopkins’s importance as a Victorian poet is well established, his significance as a Victorian prose writer is not as fully recognized. This is, perhaps, because his prose did not appear in single works, like John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, or Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance, published in his lifetime but is found in such varied forms as essays, notes, sermons, and letters which were not collected and published until well after his death. Nevertheless, Hopkins is demonstrably one of the great writers of Victorian prose just as he is one of the era’s great poets. He deserves consideration alongside such acknowledged masters of Victorian prose as Arnold, Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, and John Stuart Mill. As a literary critic, for example, Hopkins is surely the most important and perceptive critic of English poetry between Arnold and T. S. Eliot and an important link in the critical tradition they represent. His achievement in prose is intimately related to his achievement in poetry. In fact, the two achievements are really one; in his prose as well as in his poetry there is the same ‘‘strain of address’’ (as Hopkins called it), the same enthusiasm, feeling, love, inspiration, and sincerity—a unity of purpose confirmed in his Catholic faith and reaching back from Aquinas to Aristotle through Christ, whom Hopkins regarded as the best judge of literary ventures as well as of human lives.

Hopkins was born at Stratford, Essex, on 28 July 1844 to Manley and Kate Smith Hopkins. He was the eldest of their eight children who survived childhood. Manley Hopkins was a prosperous marine insurance adjuster and a minor poet. Gerard attended Highgate Grammar School (1854-1862) where he became an excellent student of Greek and Latin. He won an Exhibition scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1863.

In July 1866 Hopkins decided to become a Roman Catholic. He was received into the Catholic Church by John Henry Newman in October 1866. In 1867 he graduated with a double- first class degree in classics. The following year he decided to enter the Society of Jesus, and as a consequence of this decision he burned his early poetry, inadvertently overlooking some working drafts. His nine years of Jesuit training took place at various Jesuit houses throughout Britain, in particular Roehampton, Stonyhurst, and St. Beuno’s. In 1877 Hopkins was ordained a priest and during the next seven years carried out pastoral duties that included preaching and teaching in London, Oxford, Bedford Leigh, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Stonyhurst. The poverty and distressing social conditions that he witnessed in these industrial towns caused him to express deep concern in his letters to Robert Bridges and others.

He was appointed professor of Greek at Royal UniversityCollege, Dublin, in 1884, a position he held until his early death from typhoid fever on 8 June 1889. The poetry which he began to write again late in 1875 and which he shared only with his family and a few friends, such as Robert Bridges, Richard Watson Dixon, and Coventry Patmore, was eventually published in an edition prepared by Bridges in 1918, nearly thirty years after Hopkins’s death. The earliest extant letters, diary entries, and notebooks date from his later school days and earliest undergraduate years at Oxford University. The volume The Notebooks and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1937), edited by Humphry House in the 1930s and enlarged with the help of Graham Storey as The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1959) in the 1950s, contains, as well as early diaries and journals, undergraduate essays on a range of subjects. Besides book lists, the volume includes etymological notes and Lenten self-admonitions. Its focal point is an extended journal mainly of nature observations but also of spiritual experiences that Hopkins kept from 1866 to 1875.

The chief influence on the technique of Hopkins’s detailed nature observations was likely the art critic John Ruskin, who in volume one of his Modern Painters (1843) advised that ‘‘Every landscape painter should know the specific characters of every object he has to represent, rock, flower, or cloud.’’ Together with this was the classical-Arnoldian wish which Hopkins shared to represent the object ‘‘as in itself it really is.’’ These notes, then, written during an extended period of self-elected poetic silence become, at times, almost prose poems in their impassioned contemplation of nature—for example, bluebells, described by Hopkins in May 1871: ‘‘This day and May 11 the bluebells in the little wood between the College and the highroad and in one of the Hurst Green cloughs. In the little wood/ opposite the light/they stood in blackish spreads or sheddings like the spots on a snake. The heads are then like thongs and solemn in grain and grape-colour. But in the clough/through the light/they come in falls of sky-colour washing the brows and slacks of the ground with veinblue, thickening at the double, vertical themselves and the young grass and brake fern combed vertical, but the brake stuck the upright of all this with light winged transoms. It was a lovely sight.—’’

This dense and detailed prose—which it took the greater selectivity of the beautiful sonnets of six years later, such as ‘‘Pied Beauty’’ and ‘‘Hurrahing in Harvest,’’ to turn into poetry—is a prose that hardly knows what prose is. It is prose that lacks the discipline of writing for an audience, other than oneself. Much later, Hopkins was to complain to his friend and fellow poet Coventry Patmore about Patmore’s and John Henry Newman’s prose. The comments that follow he would no doubt have been willing to apply to his own early prose. To Patmore in October 1887 he wrote a passage that gives a good sense of what Hopkins thought successful prose should be: ‘‘It is that when I read yr. prose and when I read Newman’s and some other modern writers’ the same impression is borne in on me: no matter how beautiful the thought, nor, taken singly, with what happiness expressed, you do not know what writing prose is. At bottom what you do and what Cardinal Newman does is to think aloud, to think with pen to paper. In this process there are certain advantages; they may outweigh those of a perfect technic; but at any rate they exclude that; they exclude the belonging technic, the belonging rhetoric the own proper eloquence of written prose. Each thought is told off singly and there follows a pause and this breaks the continuity, the contentio, the strain of address, which writing should usually have.’’

Hopkins goes on to argue that the beauty and eloquence of good prose cannot come wholly from the thought expressed. He offers Edmund Burke as an example of a prose writer who colorlessly transmitted his thought in prose. However, because Burke was an orator his writing emerged from an oratorical tradition and thus possessed the ‘‘strain of address’’ that Hopkins believed necessary to successful prose. John Henry Newman, Hopkins believes, does not follow the common tradition of English prose. He seems, Hopkins suggests, to write from the assumption that Edward Gibbon was the last master of traditional English prose as well as from the point of view that, since Gibbon cannot be emulated, it is best to ‘‘begin all over again from the language of conversation, of common life.’’ Hopkins, then, tells Patmore that he (Patmore) writes prose from a conviction that the style of prose must be different from the style of poetry. But, Hopkins argues, prose style must be a ‘‘positive thing and not the absence of verse forms; . . . pointedly expressed thoughts are single hits and give no continuity of style.’’ In Hopkins’s view, good prose must always possess ‘‘continuity of style’’ and ‘‘strain of address.’’ What Hopkins had discovered between 1871, when he wrote the bluebell passage, and 1887 was that to make his prose successful he needed to write with an audience in mind. Perhaps the bluebell passage shows ‘‘strain of address’’ and ‘‘continuity of style’’ but it does not possess them to the degree that the letter to Patmore does. Nevertheless, the journal of 1866-1875 does contain examples of moving prose when, for instance, Hopkins expresses the simple certainty of his religious belief. If Augustan prose lost the ability to express religion, Hopkins marvelously recovers that capacity for Victorian prose in the following passage from his journal for 8 October 1874, which possesses both ‘‘strain of address’’ and ‘‘continuity of style’’ even though Hopkins continues, here, to serve as his own audience. He had visited St. Winefred’s well at Holywell with his Jesuit colleague Barraud, and there is a significant movement in the passage from natural observation to something approaching religious rapture: ‘‘Bright and beautiful day. Crests of snow could be seen on the mountains. Barraud and I walked over to Holywell and bathed at the well and returned very joyously. The sight of the water in the well as clear as glass, greenish like beryl or aquamarine, trembling at the surface with the force of the springs, and shaping out the five foils of the well quite drew and held my eyes to it.Within a month or six weeks from this (I think Fr di Pietro said) a young man from Liverpool, Arthur Kent (?), was cured of rupture in the water. The strong unfailing flow of the water and the chain of cures from year to year all these centuries took hold of my mind with wonder at the bounty of God in one of His saints, the sensible thing so naturally and gracefully uttering the spiritual reason of its being (which is all in true keeping with the story of St. Winefred’s death and recovery) and the spring in place leading back the thoughts by its spring in time to its spring in eternity: even now the stress and buoyance and abundance of water is before my eyes.’’

The passage begins, like many of his earlier nature observations, in notes rather than with continuous prose: ‘‘Bright and beautiful day. Crests of snow could be seen on the mountains.’’ The images are more sharply differentiated than are those in the bluebell passage, but essentially Hopkins uses the same method of recording observation. What distinguishes this passage from the earlier one and leads to increasing ‘‘strain of address’’ and ‘‘continuity of style’’ is the consideration of the miraculous cure. Hopkins’s reflection, then, deepens and, as he would in the poetry he was shortly to recommence writing, he moves from a sense of the natural to a perception of the divine. ‘‘The Windhover’’ and ‘‘Hurrahing in Harvest’’ provide analogies from the poetry to what is happening here. The prose style in the journal passage is affected and changes from the fragmentariness of the nature observation of ‘‘Bright and beautiful day’’ to the continuity of the long, concluding, perfectly clear and moving sentence. What impresses is the wonder of Hopkins’s simple faith, the realization that despite the fact that he lived in an age of doubt he believed in miracles. As F. R. Leavis observed in the second annual Hopkins Lecture, published by the Hopkins Society in 1971, ‘‘Hopkins, in a wholly unpejorative sense, was simple. There is nothing equivocal in his verse, and in the letters we see the simplicity as that of a man of high intelligence, fine human perception, irresistible charm and complete integrity.’’

Once Hopkins was ordained a priest at St. Beuno’s Seminary, North Wales, in the fall of 1877, he had to assume priestly duties, one of which was preaching. His preaching, in London, Oxford, and eventually in Bedford Leigh and Liverpool, as well as the poetry he had recommenced writing in 1875, helped to extend the flexibility and range of his developing prose style. We should note, in this connection, that the sprung rhythm which he introduced into his poetry was, in his own words, ‘‘the nearest to the rhythm of prose, that is the native and natural rhythm of speech, the least forced, the most rhetorical and emphatic of all possible rhythms, combining, as it seems to me, opposite and, one wd. have thought, incompatible excellences, markedness of rhythm—that is rhythm’s self— and naturalness of expression.’’ For surely in recovering the alliterative rhythms of medieval verse in such poems as The Wreck of the Deutschland (1876), Hopkins was also recovering the rhythms of early English prose, with its two-beat phrases held together by stress patterns within and between phrases, its dependence on rhythm more than syntax to determine meaning, and its stringing together of main clauses connected by and and but. Just as Hopkins’s poetry was influenced by Old and Middle English alliterative verse, his prose was influenced by early English prose. Understanding Hopkins’s relationship to medieval prose and verse traditions helps to lead us to the heart of Hopkins’s literary achievement. He brought poetry closer to the rhythm of prose. What he failed to achieve in prose as a preacher, he succeeded in presenting as a poet in such works as The Wreck of the Deutschland. But as his poetry and prose matured they came together in such a manner that in his later years Hopkins expressed similar thoughts in similar ways in both his meditation notes and in his sonnets of desolation.

The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, unpublished until 1959, contains both his less successful sermons and his deeply moving meditations. Though Hopkins was not thought by his Jesuit superiors or, apparently, by his audience to be a successful preacher, his sermons were clearly very carefully prepared. They demonstrate all the expected oratorical features such as repetition and accumulation, and Hopkins obviously took great care in his sermons to suit his matter to the capacity of his hearers. His painstaking preparation is perhaps clearest in his sermons delivered to his largely working-class parishioners at Bedford Leigh in Lancashire. The following passage from a sermon delivered on 23 November 1879 shows that by that date Hopkins was completely aware of the importance of ‘‘strain of address’’ and ‘‘continuity of style.’’ His sermon oratory is also carefully shaped, though it is not Hopkins’s best prose. He is speaking of Christ: ‘‘I leave it to you, brethren, then to picture him, in whom the fulness of the godhead dwelt bodily, in his bearing how majestic, how strong and yet how lovely and lissome in his limbs, in his look how earnest, grave but kind. In his Passion all this strength was spent, this lissomness crippled, this beauty wrecked, this majesty beaten down. But now it is more than all restored, and for myself I make no secret I look forward with eager desire to seeing the matchless beauty of Christ’s body in the heavenly light. . . .’’

Despite his sensitive handling of repetition and accumulation here, Hopkins would not be remembered as a prose writer for prose like this. Its alliteration is a little too self-conscious and the passage exudes, in places, an air of almost Pre-Raphaelite or decadent loveliness.

It is in the three published volumes of his letters—to Robert Bridges, to his former schoolmaster Richard Watson Dixon, and to others, including his parents and his Oxford friend Alexander Baillie—that Hopkins’s claim to importance as a writer of Victorian prose lies. And the claim must be made in this way: Hopkins’s prose is of interest because it is important literary criticism which also illuminates the creative practice of a major English poet. The letters, moreover, reveal a sense of the discovery and lively development of fresh thought.

One important aspect of Hopkins’s contribution to literary criticism in the letters is his striking out against Tennyson’s Parnassian style in the hope of restoring a language of inspiration to English poetry. Hopkins’s essential critique of Tennyson occurs in an early letter to his friend Baillie, written in September 1864 when Hopkins was twenty years old. He announces somewhat melodramatically to his friend, ‘‘Do you know, a horrible thing has happened to me. I have begun to doubt Tennyson.’’ The reason for doubt is that Tennyson writes too much ‘‘Parnassian,’’ which Hopkins differentiates from the language of inspiration in the following way: ‘‘I think then the language of verse may be divided into three kinds. The first and highest is poetry proper, the language of inspiration. The word inspiration need cause no difficulty. I mean by it a mood of great, abnormal in fact, mental acuteness, either energetic or receptive, according as the thoughts which arise in it seem generated by a stress and action of the brain, or to strike into it unasked. . . . the poetry of inspiration can only be written in this mood of mind, even if it only last a minute, by poets themselves.’’

Hopkins’s best prose is inspired writing as is his best poetry. The sense of intense concentration on the object that Hopkins himself speaks of as contentio or ‘‘strain of address’’ is perceptible in Hopkins’s prose especially when he feels the force of divine inspiration, as he does in the 1874 journal account of the visit to Holywell and as he does in a later letter to Dixon discussing Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode. Parnassian, in contrast to the language of inspiration, is the ‘‘second kind’’ of poetic language that Hopkins argues can ‘‘only be spoken by poets but it is not in the highest sense poetry. . . . It is spoken on and from the level of a poet’s mind, not, as in the other case, when inspiration which is the gift of genius, raises him above himself.’’ He goes on to offer an analysis of a passage from Enoch Arden to establish his point that Tennyson palls because he writes too much Parnassian. Hopkins’s own return in his poetry from the mellifluous, Latinate diction of Tennyson to a more Germanic, Anglo-Saxon diction in the writing of The Wreck of the Deutschland involves an important shift in the language of English poetry which is also reflected in Hopkins’s prose. When Hopkins counters Bridges’s dislike of Dryden in a letter of November 1887, he describes Dryden’s language in a way that characterizes his own poetry and prose, ‘‘he is the most masculine of our poets; his style and his rhythms lay the strongest stress of all our literature on the naked the and sinew of the English language, the praise that with certain qualification one would give in Greek to Demosthenes, to be the greatest master of bare Greek. . . .’’

Hopkins was remarkably faithful, throughout his life as a critic, to his early judgment of Tennyson. He simply came to believe more and more fully that inspiration, whether in poetry or prose, came from God. A later judgment of Tennyson, in a letter to Dixon written in February or March 1879, shows the continuity in Hopkins’s critical thought and is, as well, a representative example of his mature critical prose.The following passage shows a comprehensive grasp of Tennyson’s canon to 1879 and a maturity of critical judgment: ‘‘You call Tennyson ‘a great outsider’; you mean, I think, to the soul of poetry. I feel what you mean, though it grieves me to hear himdepreciated, as of late year has often been done. Come what may he will be one of our greatest poets. To me his poetry appears ‘chryselephantine’; always of precious mental material and each verse a work of art, no botchy places, not only so but no half wrought or low-toned ones, no drab, no brown-holland; but the form, though fine, not the perfect artist’s form, not equal to the material.’’

Hopkins goes on to argue that Tennyson is at his best when inspired by personal feeling as in In Memoriam which Hopkins considers a divine work. Also, he admires Tennyson the pure rhymer and simple imaginer of ‘‘The Lady of Shalott,’’ ‘‘Sir Galahad,’’ ‘‘The Dream of Fair Women,’’ and ‘‘The Palace of Art.’’ However, Hopkins thinks that the want of perfect form in Tennyson’s imagination comes out in his longer works—Idylls of the King, for example, which Hopkins considers ‘‘unreal in motive and incorrect. He shd. have called them Charades from the Middle Ages. . . .’’ Galahad, in one of the later Idylls, Hopkins considers ‘‘a fantastic charade playing trumpery Galahad, merely playing the fool over Christian heroism.’’ Although Hopkins finds the individual scenes from the Idylls triumphs of language and ‘‘of bright picturesque,’’ the overall effect is that of a charade and not as dramatically convincing as the plays on Drury Lane. Tennyson’s opinions are neither original nor independent in Hopkins’s view and often sink into vulgarity. ‘‘Locksley Hall,’’ Maud, Aylmer’s Field, and The Princess are ‘‘ungentlemanly rows,’’ though Tennyson, Hopkins notes, lacks the real rakishness and rascality of Goethe or Burns. For Hopkins, Tennyson is at his worst in such rhetorical pieces as ‘‘The Lord of Burleigh’’ and ‘‘Lady Clare Vere de Vere.’’ He concludes, however, by reaffirming his admiration for Tennyson—‘‘a glorious poet and all he does is chryselephantine.’’

Hopkins’s assessment of Tennyson is typical of his critical prose in that it is both generous and critical, his language is colloquial (‘‘no botchy places . . . no drab, no brown-holland’’), and he provides a criticism of Tennyson that the common reader can grasp. Even the dubious criticism of Maud and The Princess as ‘‘ungentlemanly rows’’ gains point when we understand that Hopkins was making a moral rather than a merely social judgment. Hopkins thought that the perfect gentleman was Christ. In an 1879 letter to Bridges he makes a further comment on Tennyson and an account of truly gentlemanly qualities he believes that the best poetry should possess: ‘‘Tennyson: his gift of utterance is truly golden, but go further home and you come to thoughts commonplace and wanting in nobility (it seems hard to say it but I think you know what I mean).’’ Then, speaking of Bridges’s poetry he observes, ‘‘Since I must not flatter or exaggerate I do not claim that you have such a volume of imagery as Tennyson, Swinburne, or Morris, though the feeling for beauty you have seems to me pure and exquisite; but in point of character, of sincerity or earnestness, of manliness, of tenderness, of humour, melancholy, human feeling’’ are those of true gentlemanliness that, for Hopkins, characterize the best literature.

Another excellent example of Hopkins’s critical prose is found in his letter of 23 October 1886 to Dixon when he defends Wordsworth’s 1807 Immortality Ode against Dixon’s indifference to the poem. In the latter part of the letter, Hopkins speaks of Wordsworth and Plato: ‘‘human nature in these men saw something, got a shock; wavers in opinion, looking back, whether there was anything in it or no; but is in a tremble ever since. Now what Wordsworthians mean is, what would seem to be the growing mind of the English speaking world and may perhaps come to be that of the world at large/is that in Wordsworth when he wrote that ode human nature got another of those shocks, and the tremble from it is spreading. This opinion I do strongly share; I am, ever since I knew the ode, in that tremble. You know what happened to crazy Blake, himself a most poetically electrical subject both active and passive, at his first hearing: when the reader came to ‘The pansy at my feet’ he fell into a hysterical excitement. Now commonsense forbid we should take on like these unstrung hysterical creatures: still it was proof of the power of the shock.’’

Hopkins continues by arguing that the ode is better than anything else by Wordsworth. Wordsworth was an imperfect artist capable of deep insight in some instances and little in others, but the subject matter of the ode is ‘‘of the highest, his insight was at its very deepest, and hence to my mind the extreme value of the poem.’’ Wordsworth’s poetic execution, in Hopkins’s view, rises to the occasion of his subject. His rhymes are ‘‘musically interlaced,’’ his rhythms successful. Wordsworth’s diction throughout the ode Hopkins considers ‘‘charged and steeped in beauty and yearning.’’ Hopkins’s oratorical and rhetorical style in the letter and the strain of his address reach their height in his final comment: ‘‘For my part I shd. think St. George and St. Thomas Canterbury wore roses in heaven for England’s sake on the day that ode, not without their intercession, was penned. . . .’’ Again we have the sense of an enthusiastic critical intelligence, alive in its admiration of Wordsworth’s ode. As in his criticism of Tennyson, Hopkins shows the acute critic’s capacity to go directly to the heart of his subject. Whereas Tennyson is suspect in his inability to sustain inspiration, Wordsworth provides an inspired insight into the nature of immortality. Such significant perceptions, written from moral conviction and expressed with point, place Hopkins in the English critical tradition that includes Johnson, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Arnold, and culminates in the literary criticism of T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis. In both the passages on Tennyson and Wordsworth, Hopkins’s moral and religious convictions, his ‘‘strain of address,’’ and his capacity to sustain an argument or perception, his ‘‘continuity of style,’’ are evident as they are, too, throughout his nature, sermon, and meditation writing. In addition to the commentaries on Tennyson and Wordsworth, Hopkins, in his letters, offers equally perceptive critical discussions of Milton, Browning, Barnes, and others. We see throughout the letters the delicacy, the fineness of Hopkins’s sensibility, the warmth of his friendship, and the strength of his moral intelligence.

Two further aspects of Hopkins’s prose deserve to be considered. His seriousness is frequently leavened by a sense of humor which helps to give freshness and vitality to his writing. His April 1871 letter describing to his sister Kate his response to a smallpox vaccination is spontaneous and amusing: ‘‘We were all vaccinated the other day. The next day a young Portuguese came up to me and said ‘Oh misther ’Opkins, do you feel the cows in yewer arm?’ I told him I felt the horns coming through. I do I am sure. I cannot remember now whether one ought to say the calf of the arm or the calf of the leg. My shoulder is like a shoulder of beef. I dare not speak above a whisper for fear of bellowing— there now, I am going to say I am obliged to speak low for fear of lowing. I dream at night that I have only two of my legs in bed. I think there is a split coming in both my slippers. Yesterday I could not think why it was that I would wander about a wet grass-plot: I see now. I chew my pen a great deal. The long and short of it is that my left forequarter is swollen and painful (I meant to have written arm but I could not).’’ In a letter to Bridges of 2 August 1871 his awareness of prose style is revealed in amusing parodies of Carlyle, written in imitation of Carlyle’s ‘‘most ineffacious-strenuous heaven-protestations, caterwaul, and Cassandrawailings.’’ Writing to Bridges from Ireland in August 1884, he records an amusing incident: ‘‘I must tell you a humourous touch of Irish Malvolio or Bully Bottom, so distinctively Irish that I cannot rank it: it amuses me in bed. A Tipperary lad, one of our people, lately from his noviceship, was at the wicket and another bowling to him. He thought there was no one within hearing, but from behind the wicket he was overheard after a good stroke to cry out ’Arrah, sweet myself!’’’ And in the same year, in a letter to his sister, he produces a marvelous parodic transcription of Irish speech: ‘‘And now, Miss Hopkins darlin yell chartably exkees me writin more in the rale Irish be raison Iwas never rared to ut and thats why I do be slow with my pinmanship, bad luck to ut (saving your respects), and for ivery word I delineate I disremember two, and thats how ut is with me.’’

For Hopkins, however, the other side of this humor is the sense of melancholy present in the early letters and ever increasing through the last five years of his life, which he spent as professor of Greek at what is now University College, Dublin. The following paragraph from his retreat notes written at St. Stanilaus’ College, Beaumont, on 1 January 1889 is surely the seed for one of his last sonnets of desolation, ‘‘Thou Art Indeed Just Lord’’: ‘‘I was continuing this train of thought this evening when I began to enter on that course of loathing and hopelessness which I have so often felt before, which made me fear madness and led me to give up the practice of meditation except, as now, in retreat and here it is again. I could therefore do no more than repeat Justus es, Domine, et rectum judicium tuum and the like, and then being tired I nodded and woke with a start.What is my wretched life? Five wasted years almost have passed in Ireland. I am ashamed of the little I have done, of my waste of time, although my helplessness and weakness is such that I could scarcely do otherwise. And yet the Wise Man warns us against excusing ourselves in that fashion. I cannot then be excused; but what is life without aim, without spur, without help? All my undertakings miscarry: I am like a straining eunuch. I wish then for death: yet if I died now I should die imperfect, no master of myself, and that is the worst failure of all.O my God, look down on me.’’ In this disturbing passage one perceives the anguish that animates Hopkins’s need to write. His final auditor is God.

Hopkins’s prose underwent considerable and rapid development during his short career. From brief nature observations he moved to religious meditations on the divine origins of nature. After his ordination, he turned his developing awareness of the possibilities of prose to the writing of sermons. Throughout his life he was a lively and, when his religious duties allowed, prolific letter writer. His letters, with their moral intelligence, critical estimates of English poetry, and sensitivity to the dynamism and to the spiritual and physical poverty of his times, establish him as an important writer of Victorian prose. As a literary critic he has been unduly neglected, though it is perhaps not surprising that Hopkins’s prose has been slower to gain acceptance than his poetry. It did not begin to be published until nearly twenty years after the first collection of his poetry appeared. However, the prose has been used by most critics of Hopkins’s poetry because in expressing the drama of his inner life it provides the best introduction we have to that poetry. W. H. Gardner, in his two-volume Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) (1944, 1949), and F. R. Leavis, in The Common Pursuit (1952), are two critics who have realized the importance of Hopkins’s prose particularly in relation to his poetry. Nevertheless, full-length studies of Hopkins as a Victorian prose writer and literary critic remain to be written.

Source: John Ferns, ‘‘Gerard Manley Hopkins,’’ in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 57, Victorian Prose Writers After 1867, edited by William B. Thesing, Gale Research, 1987, pp. 130–38.

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