The International Hopkins Summer School July 2005

The Trail of Hopkins: His Influence on One Writer Today

Margaret D. Smith, July 2005

Thank you all for being here, at this conference, demonstrating that Gerard Manley Hopkins is alive and well in the hearts of people the whole world over. And thanks especially to those of you who, year after year, organize this remarkable Summer School, not out of a sense of duty or hope for great financial reward, but because you love to celebrate the life and creative genius of this man.

The title of my paper ‘The Trail of Hopkins,' means two things.

In one sense, the Trail of Hopkins refers to the path that led me to study the poet G. M. Hopkins in the first place, a path that in turn led me to start writing, in 1989, a cycle of 44 sonnets that in 1992 became a book, A Holy Struggle, and later a screenplay.

In another sense, the Trail of Hopkins refers to the 12-day journey that poet-photographer Luci Shaw and I took in 1991 through England, Wales and Ireland, to find the places where Hopkins lived, studied, preached and wrote his poetry. I want to show you photographs of the places we visited on our journey and give you a taste of what Hopkins was writing while living there.

With this two-pronged Trail of Hopkins—my early path to Hopkins (through time) and that 12-day path I took with a friend (through space)—I want to demonstrate the strong influence of Hopkins on a very minor American poet living more than a century later and half a world distant, someone who can never feel quite finished with delving into the genius of Hopkins, then pouring that influence into her own writing.

Introduction

Hopkins is the poetic ancestor of virtually every English-speaking poet of the past century. Dylan Thomas, e.e. cummings, C.S. Lewis, Galway Kinnell, Mary Oliver … Desmond Egan—all could refer to Hopkins as their great-great uncle. In the 1870s, Hopkins's contemporaries were still writing black-crepe-draped, drumbeaten Victorian verse, as in William Morris's characteristic piece,

Of heaven or hell I have no power to sing,
I cannot ease the burden of your fears,
Or make quick-coming death a little thing,
Or bring again the pleasure of past years.

----------------------------------- The Earthly Paradise: Apology

During the same decade as this deathful prose, Hopkins was making use of every syllable to create the sound and rhythm of the very thing he was writing about. A horseshoe, forged by the blacksmith, became a “bright and battering sandal!” A moon, he wrote, was “dwindled and thinned to the fringe of a finger-nail.”

Trail One: the path to writing the book

The first time I was introduced to Hopkins's poems, I was fifteen. It was seven years after I had started to pen my own verse. Two of Hopkins's poems made it into our textbook: “God's Grandeur” and “Pied Beauty.” Our teacher sincerely apologized for making us learn about the crazy priest-poet who wrote poems that didn't make any sense. We spent two class hours on Hopkins, during which time I learned that he had burned his poems and fell in love—I mean that I fell in love, with his words.

And though the last lights off the black West went,
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs,
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Right there in tenth-grade English class, I could sense the grandeur of God. Beauty could be “fickle, freckled,” like clouds and cows and finches' wings, but God's beauty was “past change.”

In a literature class in college a few years later, I once again met up with Hopkins and discovered with joy that he had written a poem that began, “Margaret, are you grieving over Goldengrove unleaving?” In the margin, next to his line “Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie,” I wrote, “I have no idea what he means, but I feel what he means.” The fact that he had written my name made it seem that he had written the poem for me, so I took it upon myself to find out more about this poet who could affect me profoundly, not quite rationally.

For a while I could find nothing but biographical notes beside his poems in anthologies, notes that implied he was a demented priest whose work was quirky at best. But in the late 1980s, I met a friend who gave me the next key: a small book of Hopkins's letters, journals and notes. I had already studied his poems, but these casual observations of his, these personal effects, gave me insight into the man Hopkins: witty, lonely, diligent, possibly manic-depressive, often petty, always brilliant. I also noticed that the tone of his journals was calm, personal and to the point. When he visited a London convent in order to decide whether to become a Jesuit, he wrote, simply, “To the chapel of poor clares, where I made my decision ‘if it is better,' but now nothing is decided.” A few months later, he did decide and wrote, minimally: “Resolved to become a religious.” A few days later, to describe his poem bonfire, he wrote, simply: “Slaughter of the innocents.” I loved it. The most important moments in his life were given the least amount of space in his journal, as though everything else—the rush of emotions, second guesses, conversations with others—were unspoken.

This was the key I needed. At least, it certainly looked like a key, but to what door? I jotted notes to myself: “Write book about Hopkins.” “Something about Hopkins's poetry vs. silence.” One day in 1989, in order to better understand why Hopkins had burned his poems, I wrote one sonnet, “Slaughter of the innocents.” By writing a poem in Hopkins's journal voice, I was able to get under the surface and find why he burned them. I wrote, in his voice, this beginning of a sonnet:

I have no use for poems. They keep my heart
more occupied with pleated rhyme than God
(forgive me). Jesuits denounce the part
of life that most enthralls. And so, the rod
swings heavier than the pen. The sword wins.
A stroke of the blade, ten fall. No loss
is great compared to this: my self begins
again, alone, with God.

After completing that sonnet, I thought I was done. But a few weeks later, I wrote another, to understand why Hopkins had visited a convent, the chapel of the Poor Clares, to decide whether or not to become a priest. That sonnet became the seed of a plan, to create a muse in his life, a novice who encourages him to pray and to keep writing, who lets him understand finally that poetry is a form of prayer. Knowing that a novice of the Poor Clares was forever cloistered, I wrote about a fairy woman who could not exist in real life. Over time, I called the muse Grace, which happened to be a favorite poem word of the real Hopkins. In one celebrated sonnet, he wrote: “ I say more: the just man justices; Keeps grace : that keeps all his goings graces .” Only later did I find out that Grace was also the name of his favorite little sister.

Each time I sat down at my writing desk, another Hopkins sonnet came out. This was not normal. I had decided, upon my discovery that a cycle of sonnets was emerging, that I would read no Hopkins biographies, only the autobiography of his journal and letters, to get a strong feel for his own story, his tone and style. I was particularly interested in finding where Hopkins wrote a poem based on an earlier journal entry. In one poem he wrote, “Look, look up at the stars! Look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!” In the journal entry that preceded the poem, he wrote, "As we drove home the stars came out thick: I leant back to look at them and my heart opening more than usual praised our Lord to and in whom all that beauty comes home.” I wrote the sonnets in a style that I hoped would echo his journal voice, not copy his poetic voice.

I had a story by the tail, but I would not know the storyline myself until all 44 sonnets tumbled out over the next few months. Since the sonnets came out in no particular order, it became a jigsaw puzzle to fit them together. The sonnets developed into a narrative based on Hopkins's writing life, with his unspoken thoughts coming to the forefront. The book begins with his thoughts of becoming a Jesuit—dying to self, dying to poetry— and ends with the high-wire tension of daily experiencing his own writing as God-taken and God-given-back, a birth and a death at once. It became the core of the book A Holy Struggle: Unspoken Thoughts of Hopkins.

The story is not over. I have since written a screenplay on Hopkins's life in Wales, and I hope to find a European producer—not one from Hollywood! — Someone who knows how to show the unspoken needs of a priestly poet, the tension of an undeclared love.

Trail two: the path through Britain and Ireland

Hopkins's influence on my writing sparked my 1991 journey through England, Wales and Ireland with Luci Shaw. We set out on a trail of more than a dozen cities and towns in which Hopkins lived. I compiled our journals, photos and research in the notebook portion of  A Holy Struggle,  which was published the following year.

For that research trip, we had only the return addresses that Hopkins had written down. We would look in his book of letters for the town, street name and number … and knock on the door. In this way, we often found people who gave us reams of information about the time Hopkins spent in that place, including the gentleman, Richard O'Rourke, who took us on a whirlwind Monasterevan tour, having to leave his chemist shop in the middle of the day to do so.

Most of the photographs taken for the book were not intended to be records of the actual places Hopkins lived; they were images that were meant to sit alongside the sonnets and harmonize with them: a bluebell, a church steeple, a chestnut leaf, a stone doorway. So the photos you will see in this presentation are not Luci Shaw's but photos borrowed from the Internet, so you can see some of the actual places where Hopkins visited.

Search the Online Gerard Manley Hopkins Archive
Overview of the Hopkins Archive
Hopkins in Ireland
Hopkins and Kildare

Annual International Gerard Manley Hopkins Summer School