19th GM Hopkins International Summer School
Monasterevin, July, 2006

Seán P. Kealy, C.S.Sp.
Duquesne University, Pittsburg, USA

For so many years my reflections on poetry, influenced by my classical studies in U.C.D., would begin with John Henry Newman's comment in his Grammar of Assent (ch. 4. pt.2 #4, pp. 78-79):

In more recent years, perhaps due to my more analytical American experience, I now tend to apply the lens of vision in my approach to poetry. Thus I love to tell my students the story about the expert in time management, who, when speaking to a group of business people and with an illustration which they would never forget, challenged them to examine their vision of life.

He began by placing an empty glass jar on the table in front of him. Then he produced about 12 fist-sized rocks and carefully placed them one at a time in the jar. When the jar was full and there seemed to be no more room inside, he asked his audience: “Is the jar full?” and everyone agreed “yes”. “Really” he replied as he reached under the table to lift up a bucket of gravel. Next he proceeded to dump in some gravel pebbles and to shake the jar so that the pieces could work themselves down into the spaces between the bigger rocks. Then he asked once more: “Is the jar full?” By this time the audience was more cautious. “Probably not”, some of them answered. “Correct”, he replied, as he reached down for a bucket of sand. This, he proceeded to pour into the jar to fill the spaces between the rocks and the gravel. Once more he put the question: “Is the jar full now?”. No, they answered! “Correct” he again replied, as he reached down to life up a pitcher of beer, which he proceeded to pour until the jar was full to the brim. Then he looked at the audience and challenged them: “What is the point of this illustration?” There were many answers. One student replied that no matter how full your schedule is, there is always room to fit in more. Another cheerful student proclaimed that no matter how busy your life is, there is always room for beer. No, again said the expert, none of these is the main point. The truth, which this illustration teaches us about life's vision, is that unless you put in the big rocks first you will never have room for them at all. Then the urgent takes over from the important in life. If you put the sand into the jar first, there is no room for the pebbles or the rocks. Likewise if you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are really important.

My conviction is that there are three “rocks” which are essential to a healthy vision: 1) Your kind of God; 2) God's World and 3) Your Mission. I wondered how Gerard Manley Hopkins would measure up to such an examination.

1) Hopkins's Kind of God : Everyone believes in some kind of God even in a world full of polytheists and many gods. We quickly find our God in answer to such questions as “What do you wake up thinking about in the morning?” What do you spend your money on? What pictures do I see if I enter your room?” I think that most would agree that Hopkins's poetry shows that he was intoxicated, even obsessed, with God as he ranged from his sublime hymning of the grandeur of God to his own Job - like struggle with the darkness of Gethsemane in Carrion Comfort written “after long silence” in May 1885 (LB219). In 1877, his outstanding year as a poet, his sonnets speak continually of God in praise or petition. Virginia Ridley Ellis ( Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Language of Mystery , University of Missouri Press, 1991, p. 10) provides an incisive analysis when she comments: “In content, however, the early poems not only cumulatively reflect the continuing though groping search for God but also specifically dramatize two aspects of that search that will remain central in later poems; the attempt to reconcile intense sensuous response to natural beauty with a need for the divine principle of order that creates and justifys beauty, and the attempt to balance acknowledgment of a “shrouded” God with the hope and thirst for total sight. Some day to gaze on thee face to face in light”. Hopkins's search was for an “incomprehensible certainty”, a certainty that remains mystery.

Recently I came across J. Hillis Miller's The Disappearance of God (Harvard University Press – 1963). He found that post-medieval literature recorded among other things the gradual withdrawal of God from the world, with people living without God in the world but “above our heads, up there in a different world” (Hölderlin). Yet all believed in God. Miller found that by the nineteenth century the beginning place for a writer was the isolation and destitution of an Arnold or the early Hopkins. Each of the five writers, he expounds, DeQuincey, Browning, Bront?, Arnold, Hopkins, his five Victorian writers, attempted in their writing to bring God back to earth as a benign force in nature and in the human community.

Curiously, major Christian poets like Hopkins and Alice Meynell wrote very few direct references to Jesus in their work. For Hopkins there are some exceptions such as the untitled work which Hopkins never sent to any of his friends, “As kingfishers catch fire” where:

However, Hopkins's poetry is Christocentric, as when he described Christ in a sermon at Bedford Leigh (Sunday evening, November 23, 1879) “our hero, a hero all the world wants”. The tendency of the Jesuits was to focus primarily on the Second Person of the Trinity. His first prayer-poems as a Catholic were his translations of Jesu dulcis memoria and Veni sancte spiritus . What Robert Bridges called “A prayer that Protestants might use” is Trinitarian through and through in its three parts of praise, contrition and thanksgiving. One should remember that it was belief in the real : presence in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar which led Hopkins into the Catholic Church and molded the rest of his spiritual, intellectual and emotional life (see Lichtmann, Poetry as Prayer , p. 26).

In a sermon dated November 23rd , 1879, he described Christ: “Poor was his station, laborious his life, bitter his ending: through poverty, through labour, through crucifixion his majesty of nature more shines” (SD 37). One can also note that the Incarnate Christ is the undercurrent in his most ambitious work, The Wreck of the Deutschland , (incidentally his father was an insurance adjustor for shipwrecks). There his God has been described by Paul L. Mariani as the Alpha and Omega of his poem (Ellis p. 119) leading to the ancient view of Christ Victor in its final movement. In this unique tour de force , this fierce and radical poem “sound all the central themes of redemptive suffering; humanity's relation to God and nature; God's mysterious nature and acts; his purposeful and powerful presence, whether recognized or not; the nature of heroism, inner and outer; and the concept and necessity of somehow “wording” great mysteries” (Ellis p. 65). There he explored the interplay between an omnipotent but self-limiting God, the powers and limits of nature and human beings ranging from the courageous to the terrified. Further his respect for mystery and complexity was balanced (according to Ellis p. 49) by an equal respect for clarity and formulation in a world charged in all its dimensions with the energy and eloquence of Christ and God. It begins with an almost joyful prayer: “Thou mastering me/God! Giver of breath and bread” (words carved over the sculpture of the Re-creation of Man by E. Gill at Geneva) and ends with a five-verse prayer to Jesus which begs Christ to burn (to flame) and to return as Our king back, Oh, upon English souls ”. Here he first uses sprung rhythm in a substantial way – it consists in scanning by accents or stresses alone with no account of the number of syllables.

Hopkins had seen sprung rhythm as a way of escape from the ‘ same and tame ' constraints of running rhythm, for he had become fascinated with the ancient rhythmic structure of Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon tradition. I think especially of the great prayerful meditative poems God's Grandeur , The Starlight Night , As King Fishers Catch Fire , Pied Beauty , Hurrahing in Harvest , That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and Of The Comfort of the Resurrection . Such poems, according to The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (p. 790), were “marked by great intensity of feeling, freedom in rhythm and individual use of words, and have exercised much influence on more recent poets”.

Sacrifice of Praise to God : Hopkins's poetry shows a deep pastoral care for people and imagined the basic personal relationship between a person and their Redeemer as sacrificial. For Hopkins praise seems almost inseparable from sacrifice. The Jesuit training taught him that a person was created to praise, reverence and especially to serve God as our Lord. He seems to agree with (the then somewhat obscure) Scotus (from whom he learned about haecceitas , thisness) that the Incarnation was not merely a response to the Fall. Rather it was created as a place for Christ to live out his sacrifice of praise to the Father, configuring by his passion the suffering of martyrdom or shipwreck. According to Donald Mackenzie, Hopkins's poetry of sacrifice:

Hopkins, whom some would describe as the finest poet in English after Shakespeare and Yeats, was a lonely genius who was unknown as a poet during his life, except to two or three friends. His works were never published during his own lifetime apart from a few private magazines. He died at the age of 46, weighed down by overwork having reached the conclusion that he would never accomplish any significant literary work of value: “there is no likelihood of my ever doing anything to last” – see his Ribblesdale where he describes how the pursuit of wealth leads to the destruction of the beautiful rivers and countryside, which has “no tongue to plead, no heart to feel”. His poems were edited in 1918 by his Oxford friend Robert Bridges who was by then Poet Laureate. From 1877 to 1881 he had moved through seven different posts from London to Oxford to Liverpool and Glasgow. No wonder he told his friend Bridges that he was like “Fortune's football awaiting another kick of her foot”. Even his friend the poet laureate Robert Bridges seems to have little understood his originality.

In 1877, he wrote God's Grandeur, during his (happiest) St. Beuno days, the same year in which he wrote eleven sonnets on his love of nature and God, his moral interests and his Jesuit spirituality. In God's Grandeur, whose opening simple declarative sentence remained unchanged in all the extant drafts, as if to say I have expressed the heart of things, he hymned God's brooding presence in our world and gave the most compelling modern image of the Biblical “ruah” as perhaps no one before he wrote this sonnet. His portrayal of the Holy Ghost at rest yet is never spent but re-creating the earth, was poignant and simply unforgettable: “Because the Holy Ghost over the bent/World broods with warm breast and with oh/bright wings”. It recalled Newman's sense of the regenerating Holy Spirit in “the dearest freshness deep down things”. Incidentally “grandeur” (a word which “flames out”) found in Shakespeare's Henry The Fifth (Act 5, Scene 2) and Edgar Allan Poe and John Stuart Mills “solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur , is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations which are not only good for the individual …” in Principles of Political Economy, 1848, Vol. 2, p. 311) but not in the King James Bible, was famously applied to Rome by J.C. Stobart (1938) and to his view of life in Darwin's well-known last paragraph where he first mentioned the word Evolution: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that while this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved” ( The Origin of Species , 1859, p. 115). I am not saying that Hopkins even read Darwin, just that his ideas were widely discussed and well-known to a scholar like Hopkins who saw the Holy Spirit redeeming the bent world from industrial (and even Darwinian) chaos and purposelessness. For Hopkins ‘grandeur' lies not in a person's perception but remains with God. Hopkins's own comment on the final point of the poem in a letter to Bridges (1883) is the best explanation: “All things therefore are charged with love, are charged with God and if we know how to touch them, give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him” (SD195). The first half is an extraordinarily dense evocation of God's energy and power like electricity in nature which comes back at the end in the brooding activity of the Holy Ghost in nature which is “neverspent”. For Hopkins, who loved the landscape around St. Beuno's in Wales, there were traces of the divine in all things even in the curve of the earth which is bent (marred and spoiled through the Fall). But Hopkins, who had worked in Liverpool and Chesterfield was shocked at the pain of human creation, ‘written in blood' as he wrote to Bridges, the poverty and squalor of the human landscape and the wanton destruction of nature. He found the “dearest freshness” shining through nature despite the human disobedience, which damages the natural world through industry and trade.

2) Hopkins's World : Hopkins achievement was not just to restore (sprung) rhythm to poetry and bring it closer to the natural rhythm of prose and the every day speech of people, who do not speak in iambic pentameters. As Maria R. Lichtmann ( The Contemplative Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Princeton University Press, 1989 p. 3) described him and his way of overcoming Romanticism: “A student of Scripture all his life, Hopkins emulated Scripture's predominant form of parallelism as the major strategy of his poetics. For him, parallelism struck deep into the souls of readers and hearers, tapping into preconscious rhythms and bringing about a healing response, one he was to refer to as contemplation. By its very nature, parallelism communicated a kind of religious emotion, the biblical awe of contemplation he was to call “instress”: “as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music and design in painting, so design, pattern or what I am in the habit of calling ‘inscape' is what I above all aim at in poetry” ( Letters to Bridges , p. 66). With this heightened language he was, according to David Porter (‘ Over the Bent World' ) Paternoster Publishing, Cambria, 1999 p. 65) “in the business of un-making appearances, of forcing the reader to look at familiar things as if they were quite new, and then making us look twice at what we would normally look past”. He grasped language, grammar and syntax and with passion shaped them to suit his purposes. I suspect he would delight in the modern preoccupation with the mystery of the known rather than the nineteenth century concern with the unknown. He might even enjoy the comment of the Pittsburgh wit that the shortest distance in Pittsburgh between two points is always under construction. He concluded in That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection with a hymn to the ordinary plodding person: “This Jack, joke, poor, potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond?” Who else could entitle a Poem The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe? (Stonyhurst, May, 1883). Ulick O'Connor ( Word Magic , Currach Press, Blackrock, 2005 p. 134) put it so well: “Like Picasso in painting and Stravinsky in music, he saw the world at an angle different to anything that had gone before and the tilt he gave to reality reveals a new landscape to the reader which was not immediately recognized”. His aim was to look beneath appearances, into the heart of the matter, so as to see the very hand of God. In 1868 he used “inscape”, which he developed from the word “landscape” to describe the individual mysterious essence or uniqueness of a thing and its distinctive shape which painters try to capture on canvas. It is not unlike Joyce's “epiphany” the sudden revelation of “the whatness of a thing”. A second word which he developed is “instress” for the inner force which sustains a thing and the inner drive to express itself or be understood.

In 1875 during his theological studies at St. Beuno's, he immortalized The Wreck of the Deutschland and taught us to see such a disaster as never before – he would write another long shipwreck poem at St. Mary's (1877-78), The Loss of the Eurydice, a Catholic poem of salvation, resurrection and praise, where he prayed for 300 young sailors drowned near the Isle of Wight. He wrote “… I was affected by the account and happened to say so to my rector, he said he wished someone would write a poem on the subject” ( Correspondence , p. 14). In the first part of The Wreck of the Deutschland he vividly paints his own religious struggle (conversion or decision to become a Jesuit?). In the second part he describes the shipwreck of the naval disaster on the Thames estuary where 157 people died including five Franciscan nuns who worked with the poor but who were leaving Germany because of harsh anti-Catholic decrees. His central question in both parts: “Is the shipwreck then a harvest?” (St. 31). His experience especially in the second stanza is the numinous overpowering of God so ably described by Rudolf Otto in The Idea of the Holy (Oxford University Press, 1950 p. 19 ff). He is convinced that creative grace is present even in the blackest moments of our lives. It has been said that the best preparation for understanding this poem is to meditate for a fortnight on the Passion of Christ. He clearly has problems of reconciling the awful events with some higher purpose of his sovereign God. He pictures one nun's vision of Christ and even prays for the redemption of “rare-dear” Britain. His poem written at the suggestion of his Jesuit superior was accepted but not printed in a Jesuit publication (The Jesuit journal The Month found it too difficult for their readers and would only publish it if he omitted the metrical marks) and this added fuel to his problems with his poetry.

3) Hopkins Mission : After his conversion and entry into the Jesuits, Hopkins had to struggle to change his vision and direction, to adapt and internalize values and practices which his previous upbringing and education would have largely rejected. Nevertheless, according to Donald Mackenzie, we now see Hopkins, a pioneer of the 20 th -century as: “deeply mid-Victorian in his Ruskinian attention to detail, whether in nature or church architecture; his passion for amateur philology; his recoil from industrialism; his romanticizing of soldiers”. In fact Hopkins was long considered a minor Victorian poet inferior to Arnold, Browning and Tennyson.

Hopkins had entered a Jesuit society which according to von Balthasar ( The Glory of the Lord , p. 370) had not produced a convincing poet since Spee, Balde and Bidermann. When his friend Canon Dixon continually urged him to publish something or at least not to oppose their publication by Dixon, he replied with a categorical NO. His vocation put before him “a standard so high that a higher can be found nowhere else”. He could write in 1879 “I cannot in conscience spend time on poetry” (LB 66). Further in 1878 “the only just judge, the only just literary critic, is Christ” (LD 8). He explained that the Society of Jesus placed no emphasis on the aesthetic. Now faith was his life and art was at best the instrument of his faith. According to Ellis (p. XV) he seems to have suspected that “his specifically devotional Catholic poems were not his best”. Ellis claims that her readings do not agree with the opinion that “poetic language and linguistic processes displaced God as his central subject” (Ibid). Central to his Christian faith was that a falling is also a rising and an ending also a beginning. Yet, as von Balthasar remarked, Hopkins continually urged his friends Bridges, Dixon and Patmore to publish and not to shun fame “but to consider that the poet represented a spiritual power in the nation and the world and must seek such power for moral reasons” (von Balthasar, p. 371). For St. Ignatius genius attracted fame but that seemed to be dangerous. Hopkins quotes examples to “show that brilliancy does not suit us, that we cultivate the commonplace outwardly and wish the beauty of the king's daughter, the soul to be from within” (Ibid). Thus Hopkins noted that Campion could have been a great poet but it did not interest him. Suarez, our greatest theologian, was without originality or brilliancy. A Cardinal said of Ignatius during his process of canonization that he had never noticed any higher qualities in Ignatius than many another good priest. For Hopkins much the same could be said of Aloysius, Stanislaus and Berchmans. No wonder before becoming a Jesuit, Hopkins had renounced his poetry in a sacrifice offered to God and had actually burnt his early poems. (May 1868) - in fact, he sent corrected copies of his finest poems to his friend Bridges for safe keeping. He wrote no other poems unless asked by his superiors until 1875.

According to my friend John Geary, who kindly sent me a paper Donne and Hopkins which he had recently presented at the University of Toronto:

Five Years in Ireland !

Hopkins's discovery of Scotus on the Sentences in the Baddely library gave him a philosophical basis for his concept of inscape. Curiously it led to his failing his oral exams at the end of his third year of theology because his Jesuit examiners were strict Thomists. As a result he had to leave Wales and never achieved the status of a fully professed Jesuit but that of a “spiritual co-adjutor”. This did not jeopardize his ordination but prevented him from important offices in the Order and quite likely led to his appointment to Ireland. Can we say of Hopkins, who became something of a recluse in Dublin, that he lived life to the full, loved, learned and left a legacy? (see my reflections in What Is Your Vision ? In Doctrine & Life , October, 2005, pp. 45-48). Many might agree with Ellis who concludes that in Hopkins's work in general “there is in fact something lacking in the way of human empathy”, at its best his flame “seems a hard and gemlike one, lacking the living warmth that would result from a deep involvement with ordinary humanity, a deep understanding of it” (p. 175). The Victorian Dublin slums were in fact unique among all the slums produced in the Western world in the nineteenth century. They were not a product of the industrial revolution. On the contrary they were the product of a policy of de-industrialization between 1800 and 1850.

Hopkins left behind him an extraordinary legacy of poetry from the naïve and innocent Heaven-Haven (July, 1864):

to poems like The Windhover , to Christ Our Lord , a study of an individual bird and its relation to the breeze, which he called his best poem, where he triumphants the glory which a human could achieve through lowly drudgery and high sacrifice, to No Worst his study in depression:

to the exuberant Pied Beauty , one of his most discussed poems (F.J. Hillis, The Disappearance of God , Harvard U. Press, 1975), which was written in 1877, the year of his ordination and his annus mirabilis as a poet, as some called it. That year he had celebrated God and nature in eleven sonnets which were some of his most glorious poems. In the Pied Beauty, the first stanza stresses the very thisness of being. But in the second stanza, he performs a cosmic sweep of creation with all its ambiguities and contrarieties” (Lichtmann, p. 78). In God's “fathering” of creation and nature he challenges us to include the swift and the slow, the sweet and the sour, the dazzled and the dim; in fact, all life's contradictions and conflicts.

Hopkins spent the final five years of his life in Ireland (1885-1889), a land he little appreciated. There he was distressed at the Irish question. He died of typhoid in 1889, aged 44, in a small room overlooking St. Stephen's Green, Dublin. He was aware about the “Irish Row” over the appointment of an Englishman. He called Dublin “a joyless place”. St. Stephen's Green, in fact, was more of a dumping ground than a park at the time. His last words were significantly “I am so happy, I am so happy”. There is no doubt that people like Hopkins, Donne and Thomas Browne used their deep faith as a bulwark against the darkness. Poetry according to Robert Frost was: “A momentary stay against confusion”. Yet the confusion for them was not momentary but enduring.

Hopkins had become in 1884 a professor of Greek literature at the struggling University College Dublin, inaugurated by Newman in 1854, and placed under Jesuit management in 1883: “His Englishness and his disagreement with the Irish politics of the time, as well as his small stature (5'2”), unprepossessing nature and his own personal oddities meant that he was not a particularly effective teacher” (Wikipedia). This was the time, despite some warm friendships, he lived like a recluse and composed his “terrible sonnets”, among the most moving treatments of spiritual suffering in English poetry, such as I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark or the poignant Dublin prayer No worst, there is none (Comforter, where, where is your comforting?/Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?). For Lichtmann (p. 200) the terrible sonnets “begin the process of self-healing by confronting and embracing the negative in himself”. Imagine him beginning his lectures in Ireland and telling his bored students: “Anything I am going to lecture on this term will not be on for the examination”. We are told that he realized he was not a natural teacher, as he agonized over correcting the exams (which occurred five or six times a year and sometimes included 600 exam papers at a time from all over Ireland) and even split the numbers to be exact. Significantly, in what he described as his “wasted years”, he wrote To seem the Stranger :

Nevertheless Hopkins moved on and moments of happiness broke through the permanent depression which threatened to engulf him and he began to explore Ireland during the generous University holidays. He began again to find his voice in poems like That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and Harry Ploughman and Tom's Garland on unemployment, a poem which baffled Bridges.

Hopkins could write in 1887 of having, as a patriotic Englishman, resented an Ireland which struggled for Home Rule: “Yesterday Archbishop Walsh had a letter in the Freeman enclosing a subscription to the defense of Dillon and the other traversers on trial for preaching the Plan of Campaign and saying that the jury was packed and a fair trial impossible. The latter was his contribution to the cause of concord and civil order. Today Archbishop Croke has one proposing to pay no taxes. One Archbishop backs robbery, the other rebellion; the people in good faith believe and will follow them. You will see, it is the beginning of the end: Home Rule or separation is near. Let them come; anything is better than the attempt to rule a people who own no principle of civil obedience at all, not only to the existing government but to none at all. I should be glad to see Ireland happy, even though it involved the fall of England, if that could come without shame and guilt . But Ireland will not be happy: a people without a principle of allegiance cannot be; moreover this movement has throughout been promoted by crime”. He did meet with W.B. Yeats but considered him too uncertain (aged 21) to be impressive. He also wrote in the same year his searingly honest “ Justus quidem tu es, Domine ?” with its blunt question straight from Jeremiah: “and why must/disappointment all I endeavor end?”

Yet the Comforter could surpise him and he could also round off the self-tormenting terrible sonnets (which significantly do not contain the word fear) with a vision of comfort, in My own heart (1885): “let joy size/At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile/'s not wrung, see you; unforeseentimes rather – as skies/between mountains – lights a lovely mile”. I like MacKenzie's comment ( Reader's Guide , p. 173): “What emerges in poem after poem is his refusal to give way to his depression, or to believe that God is dead; just as in letter after letter during the same period we find his astonishing mind busying itself with some recondite inquiry or exhilarated by some new insight. Even in the darkest hour he orientates himself towards the dawn”. Like Ezechiel in one of his early poems or like The Man of LaMancha , in every period of his life he “went forth to compass mysteries” (77). Ellis comments that all his planned scholarly beginnings of the 1880's (works on Homer, or Greek lyric art, on Irish dialect, on St. Patrick's Confessions, on Roman Rituals, on Pindar and the Dorian measure, Egyptian studies, endless etymological studies), issued in nothing but fragments and perhaps reflect the almost frenetic attempts of a still versatile but tired mind to drive itself to energy …” (p. 277).

Let me quote once again John Geary who is uneasy at overpainting the view of Hopkins drawn solely from the terrible sonnets even though Hopkins speaks of poems coming “like inspiration, unbidden and against my will” and two “written in blood” (Abbott pp. 219-21). He concludes that the depths involved do not describe the full picture of these last years: “He once recounted to Bridges a description of himself lying in bed at night during the period when the Terrible Sonnets were written, laughing at the memory of an incident which had occurred that day on the cricket pitch, when a young Irishman was heard to congratulate himself on a particularly well-executed batting stroke: “Arah, sweet myself”. I find it impossible to reconcile little vignettes like that, combined with his musical, classical, dramatic interests, with the Terrible Sonnets as univocal expressions of a man on the edge of despair” (pp. 13-14). Even the completely despairing “Thou are indeed just, Lord” written some three months before his death, comes as Ellis points out (p. 155) “back to God the only possible center and source of his life” with his prayerful acknowledgment of God's sovereignty: “Mine, O thou Lord of Life, send my roots rain”.

As Michael Downey remarked in his preface to Maria Lichtmann's Poetry of Prayer , (p. xii) a contemplative eye sees Hopkins: “as a priest and poet whose most priestly act was his poetry; as one who was marginal even in his own religious community; as a soul “doomed to succeed by failure” above all, he was one gifted with the graced affliction of seeing and saying in a way that others could not appreciate or comprehend in his own lifetime. But his words continue to give life and strength beyond his own time and place”.

Perhaps in his own words he best describes his vision in The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo, (Stonyhurst, October 13, 1982 )

Read other Lectures from 19th Hopkins International Summer School

Gerard Manley Hopkins and Hart Crane

Hopkins and Walker Percy

Flannery O'Connor and Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

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