Gerard Manley Hopkins

The Critical Heritage

Gerald Roberts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415134538
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136173325
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and little published documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects. The Collected Critical Heritage set will be available as a set of 68 volumes and the series will also be available in mini sets selected by period (in slipcase boxes) and as individual volumes.

Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Second edition, edited, with an introduction, by Charles Williams, London, 1930

44. Charles Williams, Introduction, Poems of Hopkins

1930, pp. x–xvi

This new edition contained a further sixteen (relatively unimportant) poems. Charles Williams (1886–1945) worked for the Oxford University Press, but also did much writing and lecturing. He was a devout Anglican, whose books and personality seem to have had a profound effect on a number of people, including W.H. Auden. (His obituary in the Dictionary of National Biography was written by Gerard W.S. Hopkins, a nephew of the poet.) Williams’s more sympathetic tone, compared with Bridges’s Preface which continued to be printed, reflects the change in attitude of the poetry-reading public since 1918.

A good deal of attention has been paid to Gerard Hopkins’s prosody, to his sprung-rhythms and logaoedic, his paeons and outrides; not so much has been spent on those habits, especially alliteration, to which English verse is more accustomed. Yet the alliteration so largely present in his poems is significant; especially if it be compared with that of another notable Victorian, Swinburne. It is of course a habit prevalent in all poets, but in general it is unintentionally disguised; the inexpert reader will not easily believe how much of it is in Shakespeare. But there have never been two poets who employed it more than Hopkins and Swinburne; and the astonishing thing about Swinburne is not its presence but its uselessness, as the admirable thing about Hopkins is not its presence but its use. In verse after verse words beginning with the same letter hurry to Swinburne’s demand; and all that can really be felt about them is that they do begin with the same letter. There is thought in Swinburne—more than it has of late been the fashion to admit—but the diction does not help it. The two things run almost parallel, so separate are they; they often divide at the opening of a poem, and when they come together it is by chance. The result is that Swinburne’s alliteration will not usually stand close examination. Even the famous ‘now folded in the flowerless fields of heaven’ leaves the reader with the feeling that ‘flowerless’ which might—there—have been so remarkable an epithet, was as a matter of fact an accidental one. He was the child of the English vocabulary.

But Gerard Hopkins was not the child of vocabulary but of passion. And the unity of his passion is seen if we consider his alliteration: ‘nor soul helps flesh more there than flesh helps soul.’ The first stanza of the first poem, after the early ones, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, may serve as an example. It is enough to suggest here that the curious reader might separate such almost inevitable ‘poetic’ alliterations as ‘Lord of the living’ from those in which the intense apprehension of the subject provides two or more necessary words almost at the same time. ‘Thou hast bound bones… fastened me flesh.’ It is as if the imagination, seeking for expression, had found both verb and substantive at one rush, had begun almost to say them at once, and had separated them only because the intellect had reduced the original unity into divided but related sounds. A line like ‘And cast by conscience out, spendsavour salt’ (‘The Candle Indoors’) is one in which that intellect goes speeding to sound the full scope of the imaginative apprehension, and yet all the while to keep as close to its source as possible. It is true we cannot make haste when we are reading him, but that is what helps to make him difficult. The very race of the words and lines hurries on our emotion; our minds are left behind, not, as in Swinburne, because they have to suspend their labour until it is wanted, but because they cannot work at a quick enough rate. ‘Cast by conscience out’ is not a phrase; it is a word. So is ‘spendsavour salt’. Each is thought and spoken all at once; and this is largely (as it seems) the cause and (as it is) the effect of their alliteration. They are like words of which we remember the derivations; they present their unity and their elements at once.

The work of the intellect is in the choice of the words. One may compare again ‘Maiden and mistress of the months and years’ with ‘Why tears! is it? tears; such a melting, a madrigal start’ (‘Wreck of the Deutschland’). Madrigal is the last word expected, but it is justly chosen. So in ‘Stigma, signal, cinquefoil token’, ‘lettering of the lamb’s fleece’, ‘the gnarls of the nails’, and many another. For all the art of the impulse and rush, ‘the roll, the rise, the carol, the creation,’ it is very evident that the original impulse was to most careful labour as well as to apparent carelessness. The manuscripts confirm this by their numerous alterations, deletions, and alternative readings; they are what we might expect to find in the work-book of a good poet.

Of the same nature are his interior rhymes—as in ‘The Lantern Out of Doors’, ‘heart wants, care haunts’, ‘first, fast, last friend’, or the three last lines of the next poem; and his mere repetitions—’and hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him’, ‘lay wrestling with (my God!) my God’. Alliteration, repetition, interior rhyme, all do the same work: first, they persuade us of the existence of a vital and surprising poetic energy; second, they suspend our attention from any rest until the whole thing, whatever it may be, is said. Just as phrases which in other poets would be comfortably fashioned clauses are in him complex and compressed words, so poems which in others would have their rising and falling, their moments of importance and unimportance, are in him allowed no chance of having anything of the sort. They proceed, they ascend, they lift us (breathlessly and dazedly clinging) with them, and when at last they rest and we loose hold and totter away we are sometimes too concerned with our own bruises to understand exactly what the experience has been.

It is arguable that this is not the greatest kind of poetry; but it is also arguable that the greatest kind of poetry might easily arise out of this. Robert Bridges has said that he was, at the end, abandoning his theories. But his theories were only ways of explaining to himself his own poetic energy, and if he were abandoning them it was because that energy needed to spend no more time on explanation, because, that is, it was becoming perfectly adequate to its business, ‘without superfluousness, without defect’. While it was capable of producing lines like ‘Or to-fro tender trambeams truckle at the eye’, it may very well have felt that it ought to do a certain amount of explanation, though it did not (as it could not) explain that. It is perfectly possible to smile at the line, but hardly possible to laugh; or only sympathetically, as at the wilder images of the metaphysicals, the extremer rhetoric of Marlowe, the more sedate elegances of Pope, the more prosaic moralities of the Victorians, or the more morbid pedestrianisms of Thomas Hardy. Such things are the accidents of genius seriously engaged upon its own business, and not so apt as the observer to see how funny it looks.

The poet to whom we should most relate Gerard Hopkins, however, is perhaps none of these—not even the Metaphysicals nor the other Victorians—but Milton. The simultaneous consciousness of a controlled universe, and yet of division, conflict, and crises within that universe, is hardly so poignantly expressed in any other English poets than those two. Neither of them is primarily a mystic in his poetry, though Gerard Hopkins might easily have become one, or rather mysticism might very well have appeared in it. But such poems as ‘The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we breathe’ hardly suffice to mark his verse with that infrequent seal, any more than the ‘Hound of Heaven’ alone would seal Francis Thompson’s. Both poets are on the verge of mystical vision; neither actually seems to express it. But if the sense of division and pain, of summons and effort, make mysticism, then Hopkins was a mystic, but then also Milton was. The suffering in ‘Thou art indeed just, Lord’ is related to the suffering of Milton’s Samson Agonistes, though Milton, under the influence of an austerer religious tradition, refused to ‘contend’ with God as Gerard Hopkins was free to do. Both their imaginations, nevertheless, felt the universe as divided both within them and without them; both realized single control in the universe; and both of them fashioned demands upon themselves and upon others out of what they held to be the nature of that control. This was the nature of their intellect.

Gerard Hopkins’s experience of this is expressed largely in continual shocks of strength and beauty. Strength and beauty are in all of the more assured poets; it is therefore on the word ‘shocks’ that emphasis must be laid. Any poet when he is not at his greatest is preparing us for his greatest; it is by that approach to him that we can discern the elements which go to make up the unity of his achievements. We can find in this poet’s work the two elements which have been mentioned: (a) a passionate emotion which seems to try and utter all its words in one, (b) a passionate intellect which is striving at once to recognize and explain both the singleness and division of the accepted universe. But to these must be added a passionate sense of the details of the world without* and the world within, a passionate consciousness of all kinds of experience. ‘The Bugler’s First Communion’ is unsurpassed in its sense of the beauty of adolescence, as ‘A Handsome Answer’¹ or ‘Brothers’ of the beauty of childhood or ‘Spring and Fall’ of its sadness, the ‘Windhover’ or the ‘Starlight Night’ of the beauty of Nature, or certain of the sonnets of the extreme places of despair.

Yet perhaps, in the poems as we have them, the most recurrent vision seems to be that of some young and naked innocence existing dangerously poised among surrounding dangers—’the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!’ Had he lived, those dangers and that poise might have been more fully analysed and expressed. As it is, his intellect, startled at the sight, breaks now into joy, now into inquiry, now into a terror of fearful expectation, but always into song. Other poets have sung about their intellectual exaltations; in none has the intellect itself been more the song than in Gerard Hopkins. In this he was unique among the Victorians, but not because he was different from them in kind—as they indeed were not different in kind from us or from their predecessors—only because his purely poetic energy was so much greater.

His poetic tricks, his mannerisms, his explorations in the technique of verse, are not in the earlier poems and they are disappearing from the later. Had he lived, those tricks might have seemed to us no more than the incidental excitements of a developing genius. Since he did not live they will probably always occupy a disproportionate part of the attention given him. But that that attention must increase is already certain: poets will return to him as to a source not a channel of poetry; he is one who revivifies, not merely delights, equivalent genius. Much of his verse is described in that last line which in ‘Felix Randal’ brings in the outer world with such an overmastering noise of triumph over the spiritual meditation of the other lines; he himself at his poetry’s ‘grim forge, powerful amidst peers’ fettled for the great gray drayhorse of the world ‘his bright and battering sandal’. Some of his poems are precisely bright and battering sandals. But some again are like another line—’some candle clear burns somewhere I come by’. He is ‘barbarous in beauty’. But he is also ‘sweet’s sweeter ending’. This again is the result of and the testimony to his poetic energy. He is integral to the beauty and storm without as to the beauty and storm within. But it will take a good deal of patience in us before we are integral to his own.

Notes

* He is usually so exact in his outward detail that one slip which is certain to be remarked sooner or later by a student of such things may as well be noted here. It will be observed that the stranger in the most lovely ‘Epithalamion’—admirable fellow!-—in preparing to bathe, takes off his boots last.

1 Actually ‘The Handsome Heart: at a Gracious Answer’.

45. M[orton] D[auwen] Z[abel], ‘Poetry as Experiment and Unity’, Poetry

December 1930, pp. 152–61

Morton Dauwen Zabel (1901–64) was Professor of English at Chicago and associate editor of Poetry. He wrote again on Hopkins in the number for July 1935.

This is a review of Poems, 2nd edn, A Vision of the Mermaids and Lahey.

… To describe this poetry [Poems, 2nd edn] is to discover a counsel of idealism for poets. In it is arrested, with almost unrivaled intensity, the essence of the highest creative passion. Disclosed by the phrases of these sonnets and lyrics is a spiritual entity which has already begun, however fugitively, to impress the imaginative thought of our time. Hopkins’ labors were wholly divorced from the commercial and personal influences of the literary market, and from the politics of esthetic schools. He wrote under no stimulus of clerical or public approbation. If an enthusiasm for experiment colors, sometimes indecisively, most of his mature works, it is free from exhibitionism, any threat of which is instantly nullified by the persuasive humility of his ascetic avowals. His interest in novelty is nowhere betrayed as speciou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• General Editor’s Preface
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chronology of Hopkins’s Life
• Principal Publishing Dates up to I94O
• Note on the Text
• Comments 1877–1918
• Poems of Hopkins (1918)
• Poems, 2nd edn (1930)
• Letters of Hopkins to Bridges and Correspondence of Hopkins and Dixon (1935)
• Note-Books and Papers (1937)
• Bibliography
• Select Index