"The sonnets of desolation"
According to John 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.[19] 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".[20]
"Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord" (1889) echoes Jeremiah 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.[21] 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".
Sprung rhythm
"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.
"Pied Beauty" written 1877.[22]
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, most Middle English and Modern 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 which Beowulf is the most famous example.
Hopkins called his own rhythmic structure sprung 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" of Robinson 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 sprung rhythm can be seen as anticipating much of free verse. His work has no great affinity with either of the contemporary Pre-Raphaelite and neo-romanticism schools, although he does share their descriptive love of nature and he is often seen as a precursor to modernist poetry, or as a bridge between the two poetic eras.
Use of language
Hopkins was a supporter of linguistic purism in English. In an 1882 letter to Robert 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."[23] He took time to learn Old 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."[24]
He uses many archaic and dialect words but also coins new words. One example of this is twindles, which seems from its context in Inversnaid to mean a combination of twines and dwindles. He often creates compound adjectives, sometimes with a hyphen (such as dapple-dawn-drawn falcon) but often without, as in rolling level underneath him steady air. This use of compound adjectives, similar to the Old English use of compound nouns via kennings, concentrates his images, communicating to his readers the instress of the poet's perceptions of an inscape.
Added richness comes from Hopkins's extensive use of alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia and rhyme, 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 the Welsh language, which he had acquired while studying theology at St Beuno's near St Asaph. The poetic forms of Welsh literature and particularly cynghanedd, with its emphasis on repeating sounds, accorded with his own style and became a prominent feature of his work. 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's own concept of inscape, which was derived in part from the medieval theologian Duns 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."[25]
"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.[4]
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!
The first stanza of "The Windhover" written 30 May 1877, published 1918.[26]
During his lifetime, Hopkins published 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 then poet laureate, published a collected edition; an expanded edition, prepared by Charles Williams, appeared in 1930, and a greatly expanded edition by William Henry Gardner appeared in 1948 (eventually reaching a fourth edition, 1967, with N. H. Mackenzie).
Notable collections of Hopkins's manuscripts and publications are in Campion Hall, Oxford; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; and the Foley Library at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.[27]
Influences
Erotic
In 1970, Timothy d'Arch Smith, antiquarian bookseller, ascribed to Hopkins suppressed homoerotic impulses which he views as taking on a degree of specificity after Hopkins met Robert Bridges's distant cousin, friend, and fellow Etonian Digby Mackworth Dolben, "a Christian Uranian".[28]
In 1991, Robert Bernard Martin wrote in his biography Gerard 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."[29]: 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."[30] Martin considered it "probable that [Hopkins] would have been deeply shocked at the reality of sexual intimacy with another person."[29] 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).[31]
Gerard Manley HopkinsAnother 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."[32]: 401 Hopkins's relationship with Dolben was explored in the 2017 novel The Hopkins Conundrum.[33]
Some of Hopkins's poems, such as The Bugler's First Communion and Epithalamion, arguably embody homoerotic themes, although the second poem was arranged by Robert Bridges from extant fragments.[34] In 2006, M. M. Kaylor, argued for Hopkins's inclusion with the Uranian poets, a group whose writings derived, in many ways, from prose works of Walter Pater, Hopkins's academic coach for his Greats exams and later a lifelong friend.[35]: 182–93 [36]: 161–205 [37]: 157–187
Some critics have argued 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. 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 slanted eisegesis".[38] 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. In 2000, Julia Saville viewed the religious imagery in the poems as Hopkins's way of expressing the tension with homosexual identity and desire.[39]
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."[13] 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.[13] 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."[25]
Isolation
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, an unpublished poet striving to reconcile his artistic and religious callings.[20] The poem "To seem the stranger" was written in Ireland between 1885 and 1886 and is a poem of isolation and loneliness.[40]
