Paul Mariani’s biography penetrates the popular stereotype of Gerard Manley Hopkins to reveal the truth, complexity and imagination of the poet/priest’s religious thought. Instead of a straightforward march through the events of his life, each chapter employs a different contextual frame, from the poet’s ideas, to his work, to the nineteenth century in general. In particular, Hopkins’s experiments in prosody and imagery, which set him apart from his contemporaries, are highlighted. The author joins a number of twentieth century critics who praise Hopkins’s journals and poems as being among the most remarkable works of literature in the English language. Hopkins’s poems, although written well within the Victorian timeframe, fall, in their emphasis on the poet’s response to the world and their identification of transcendent aspects of human experience, in line with the tradition of the “high” English Romantics that preceded him and the modernist poets that followed him. In fact, Hopkins is generally accorded as a major influence on the development of modernist poetry. But the explicitly Christian tenor of his poetry sets it apart from the work of those who came before and after him.
The strength of Mariani’s biographical study begins with his treatment of the poet’s family. Born 28 July, 1844, to Manley and Catherine (Smith) Hopkins, earnest and devout Anglicans, Gerard was the first of nine children (Mariani cf. p.9). His parents were strong influences in his formative years: his father stimulated his son’s interest in the arts through his own love of poetry, but, because of Gerard’s fragility and smallness of stature, his early education remained the province of his mother and aunt.
At Highgate, a private school not far from his home, he cultivated an interest in music and painting while attending to the vigorous curriculum (p.39). The academic load was heavy for most of the boys, but Gerard took to it easily; it is not surprising that he won the Balliol College exhibition scholarship (p. 43). His prize poem, the “Escorial,” and other early writings show his acute perception and capacity for absorbing the methods of the acknowledged poets of the time. Hopkins himself became proficient to more than amateur standards of poetry, drawing, and musical composition (pp.249-50).
The search for beauty, the pursuit of art for art’s sake, might have become for Hopkins an end in itself, had it not been for another more persuasive influence, the religious revival begun by John Henry Newman, and known later as the Oxford Movement (pp. 26-28). Mariani seems to imply that Hopkins’s preoccupation with religion during his university days is most markedly expressed in his early verse writing. Hopkins’s self-searching, strengthened by the friendship and example of Newman, culminated in his departure from the Anglican Church. This conversion is important to the biographer, because it represents his subject’s growing maturity and choice of direction. Mariani sees a clear contrast between the aesthetic and the ascetic in Hopkins, colliding in his search for a religion whose authority would invest his poetry with meaning. None of Hopkins’s family followed him into the Catholic Church. However, his sister, Millicent, entered an Anglican religious community.
From Oxford Hopkins went to Edgbaston to become a teacher at the Oratory, a school Newman founded. He did not stay for long, however, because he did not have a fondness for unruly students who were not particularly enamored with Greek and Latin syntax and grammar. It was at this time that Hopkins sought Newman’s advice about his vocation to the priesthood. Hopkins felt drawn to monastic life, specifically that of the Benedictines; but Newman advised him otherwise and was convinced that the English Province of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) was where Hopkins should go. Following Newman’s advice, Hopkins applied to the Jesuits for admission. Estranging himself further from family, friends and the intellectual life of Oxford, Hopkins went on to become a priest (pp.70-71), a decision that arose from his understanding of Ignatian spirituality. This is evident from his retreat notes and all his subsequent writings, which suggest a deep desire to reach an Ignatian state of charity.
Before entering the novitiate at Manresa, the young poet resolved not to write poetry anymore. Thinking that art was somehow incompatible with religious life, he burnt his poetry (p.75), testifying to his passionate offering of his life to serve God unconditionally. The biographer stresses the magnitude of this sacrifice, considering the preponderance of notes, letters, and journal entries in which he expresses his deep desire to write.
Hopkins’s transition from Oxford to Roehampton was not easy. He was twenty-four and found himself in the company of younger, less mature men, most of whom were little more than eighteen years of age. In spite of the age difference, Hopkins was well liked by the novices. After two years, he took vows of perpetual poverty, chastity and obedience, and he was sent to study philosophy at Stonyhurst. Here a profound change took place in his thoughts when he came across the work of the Franciscan philosopher, John Duns Scotus (c.1265-1308). Scotus’s philosophy was an intellectual confirmation of what he had lived in his heart and mind for many years. Hopkins knew that he no longer was a true follower of Thomas Aquinas, but he also did not share his newfound enthusiasm for Scotus’s thought and vision with the other Jesuits.
Upon completion of his theological studies at St. Bueno’s College in June 1884, he was elected to a fellowship at the Royal University of Ireland in Dublin; his duties were to teach the students the classics for the B.A. degree. At the same time, he was placed on the faculty of the University College, in Dublin, to teach Latin and Greek. This separation from his native land, which brought Hopkins in contact with nationalistic and anti-British people, was a source of grief; by his own admission, he was a patriot who desired to forward the honor of his country. Furthermore, Hopkins was never happy as a teacher, at any level. He was to stay five years in Ireland until his death in 1889. It was not until 1918 that Robert Bridges, Hopkins’s close friend and the only one with whom he had a regular correspondence about poetic matters, published his poems, nearly thirty years after his death.
A chance remark by the rector at St. Bueno’s, expressing the wish that someone would write about the tragedy of the wrecked ship Deutschland near the estuary of the Thames in December 1875, brought his years of poetic silence to an end. Free to write poetry again, bold with the uncompromising courage of conversion, and filled with the strength of his convictions, the priest resolved his inner conflict with the poet.
“The Wreck of the Deutschland,” Hopkins’s first mature poem, demonstrates Hopkins’s unique synthesis of poetic form and religious consciousness, which mirrors the imagination’s apprehension of the natural world (65). The poem’s stanzaic shapes and structural parallelism, as well as its acoustic qualities, which the poet himself regarded as of the utmost importance, owe as much to Hebraic as to Hellenic influences. The aesthetic surface is permeated by spiritual intimations of Christ’s actions in life.
In its basic design, the “Wreck” follows the template of the Romantic ode of redemption. What sets Hopkins’s work apart, however, is that the redemption in this poem does not come about from purely human striving, as in older Romantic poets, but from the saving work of God through Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit for and in mankind. Critics have found in this and other poems the influence of such earlier figures as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Newman, out of whose thoughts on the imagination Hopkins developed his own concepts of poetic art. For Coleridge the imagination is the most powerful human faculty, and the Christian aspects of the Romantic imagination came to Hopkins directly through the mentorship of John Henry Newman. Mariani sees Hopkins as a unique Victorian poet because he turned the work of his Romantic forbears to a more spiritual task.
The thirty-five stanza ode is dedicated to the memory of five Franciscan nuns, exiled by the Falck Laws, who drowned in a shipwreck the morning of 7 December, 1875 (p.143). One of the most important aspects of the ode is the structuring of its superabundant thought patterns. Hopkins managed to balance a simple design with a wealth of detail, using extended metaphors and symbolism to express his spiritual vision. For example, in the figure of the tall nun, rising up in the midst of death and destruction to call out, “O Christ, Christ, come quickly,” the poet envisions the meeting of faith and love, signifying abandonment to the will of Jesus. Hopkins makes of the tall nun his kind of Romantic hero (p.145). The ode is ultimately about the poet’s journey to contact God.
To Hopkins a good reader is a good listener, for the sounds the words make are as important as the meanings they carry. His heightened sense of word-music is demonstrated in his technique of what he called “sprung rhythm,” a way of measuring the verse-line not through accentual-syllabic regularity (as in iambic pentameter, for instance), but purely through the number of accents, which are surrounded by a variable number of “outriding” (unaccented) syllables. The result, in his best poems, is a looser, more flowing line, which broke up metrical regularity in a way that anticipated many modernist experiments.
By, Sister Victoria Crescente |
