The Great Welsh Poems Hopkins' next poem was "The Wreck of the Deutschland," where his metaphor-magic grew in quantum leaps. (With time limited, I treat just the narrative of the wreck, stanzas 12-17, the first part Hopkins wrote.) Here, God is a British sailor who "reeves in" drowning people - i.e., God passes a rope through, or around, passengers and crew and hauls them up to heaven. The sea is "flint-flake" (hard and black as flint but soft as flakes), the snow is "Wiry and white-fiery" (the light, white, cold snowflakes are as solid, thin, and piercing as wires, and as red and burning as fire). Magic indeed. A pun on the word "shrouds" sets up a new metaphor: passengers and crew who sought safety by climbing up the boat's rigging (called "shrouds") were soon washed into the sea - -the "shrouds" (rigging) becoming "shrouds" (burial clothes). Two startling metaphors complete the narrative: a nun calls on God like a "lioness" (a pious nun like a lioness?) and a short metaphor-chain calls the breaking waves "cobbled foam-fleece" - as hard, cold, and grey as cobblestones, as delicate and white as foam, as soft and curly as the warming wool of sheep.

The four-item "chain" incongruously links waves, cobblestones, foam, and sheep. Hopkins' eleven Welsh sonnets offer similar feats of magic. I look at just two, "The Starlight Night" and "The Windhover." In Hopkins' celebration of the sky at night, stars are first "fire-folk sitting in the air," then towns, then castles, then diamond-mines, then elves' eyes, then grey lawns, then beams of wind, then white poplars, then scared doves, then blossoming trees in May, then yellow willows in March, then a wooden barn with bright peep-holes, then windows into heaven - -a 14-item metaphor - chain that amazes. "The Windhover," in turn, has a metaphor-chain of 21 items that recreate the kestrel's triumph over adversity. Beginning with the bird, the metaphor-chain improbably links together predator/ darling/prince/dawn-follower/horseman/walker/horse-trainer/wing-rippler/swing-master/skate-heel/hurler/ glider/wind-conqueror/armor-wearer/struggler/fire-maker/ knight-on-horseback/plough/ embers... And if the epigraph "to Christ our Lord," added nearly seven years later, is read as part of the poem, it adds a 22nd item, ... /Christ.

However the poem is read, it's quite a trick of metaphor-magic to turn a hungry bird looking for breakfast into, among much else, a prince, a horseman, a knight, a plough, a fire's embers, and maybe Christ himself.

The Middle Poems After being ordained a priest, Hopkins left his beloved Wales in October 1877, to work in parishes and schools in London, Oxford, Glasgow, and the North of England. I offer just two examples of his metaphor-making in those years. In "The Loss of the Eurydice," his second shipwreck poems, two metaphors are almost whimsical. The first, describing the storm nearing the Eurydice, sees a white squallcloud as a bald head: the cloud is "baldbright."

Then Hopkins adds another metaphor: it is "A beetling baldbright cloud," and since "beetling" means "ramming or hammering with a heavy instrument," the soft cloud becomes a hard hammer. Then comes a third metaphor: the cloud is also "Riding." The result is a four-item metaphor chain: cloud/baldhead/ramming/riding. The other whimsy is lighter and playful: the squall brings a "rivelling snowstorm" - and since "rivelling" is a dialect version of "shriveling," the phrase means "snow so cold it makes people shrink." Magical Hopkins: wit in a highly serious poem! I pass from the first to the last of Hopkins' Middle Poems, "The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we breathe." As the title tells us, the main metaphor compares the Virgin Mary to the very air we humans breathe.

This is a striking, original metaphor in itself, but more astonishing is the poem's metaphor-chain, with 25 items: Mary/air/ nurse/meal/goddess/glory-transmitter/web/robe/protector/ almoner/alms/mother-of-graces/Nazareth-maker/Bethlehem-maker/blue-heaven/sunbeam-transmitter/breather/bath/fire-quencher/daystar/light-sifter/stirrer/speaker/archipelago/ hugging-mother. Surely this is inventive magic.

The Irish Poems During Hopkins' Dublin years, his mood and physical condition oscillated between joy and depression, yet his metaphor-making remained magical, even in his Terrible Sonnets.

England was once "wife" to this celibate priest's creativity, then self-loathing makes him call out, "I am gall, I am heartburn." In anguish he can even be comic: in "No worst" he listens to his own moans and realizes that he sounds like a herd of lowing cows: "My cries heave, herds-long." Recovered from depression, Hopkins penned two poems about manual laborers, "Harry Ploughman" and "Tom's Garland," each with unusual metaphors. His better-known poem "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire" plays with the ridiculous in a whimsical metaphor-chain: bright windswept clouds are, in sequence, puffball mushrooms, tufts of wool, tossed pillows, children chasing each other, loud and boisterous partygoers, bright roving gangs, and an orderly marching army! Hopkins' last four sonnets complete his metaphor-play. God creates with a pounding axe and trickling liquid. Then Hopkins is a courtroom barrister protesting before a God-judge who may be unjust. Then Satan and his fallen angels, though bodiless, "groan" as they're cast into hell, and Hopkins imagines his own puny self-importance by seeing his face reflected, upside-down and tiny, in a spoon from the table. His last poem "To R.B." presents this priest's creative process in terms of a man and a woman, the man impregnating the woman (he's a "blowpipe flame") and the woman "wears, bears, cares [for]" the child in her womb, and even "combs" the baby's - -or fetus's? -- hair!

This is almost his last metaphor and it is, I think, at once magical, comical, and heartbreaking as he expresses his inability ever again to write poetry - -and does it in a perfect sonnet. * * * * Hopkins had a creative life of 180 poems: masterful performances by a master metaphor-maker who can stand with Shakespeare and Donne. Many metaphors were fresh and quirky, and his metaphor chains grew longer as he grew older.

Such a strange and inventive creative imagination surely, and honorably, should win for him the name "magician."

Fancy in Hopkins Poetry
Hopeful Hopkins
Hopkins and Dolben
DAncer Isadora Duncan and Gerard Manley Hopkins
Hopkins and Water Imagery
Hopkins The Dark Sonnets
Gerard Manley Hopkins Magic Metaphor Maker
A Scottish View of Hopkins Poetry
John Henry Newman and Translation
Gerard Manley Hopkins Archive 2008

Note: Joseph Feeney SJ Book Published: The Playfulness of Gerard Manley Hopkins (The Nineteenth Century) by Joseph J. Feeney and SJ Published Ashgate April 24, 2008.