GM Hopkins:His influence on John Berryman
Gerry Murray, poet - critic, Chicago,USA
Introduction
Countervailing views of the most apt positioning of Gerard Manley Hopkins in the English-American poetic tradition often serve as fodder for both academic and amateur debate. There is, of course, the prevailing double-edged question: Should Hopkins be considered a major minor poet?... or a minor major poet? One supposes this is more than literary hair-splitting. And certainly Hopkins' admirers should quickly assume the high ground that sees this nineteenth-century Jesuit as a major talent with a minor but enduring and ever challenging output.
Positioning Hopkins in the Western Canon
Yet properly locating and then assessing Hopkins apparently remains a tenuous exercise at best. In the predominant American critic Harold Bloom's
The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, for instance - a controversial but compelling opus designed to delineate the `Western Literary Tradition' - Hopkins is mentioned in the text but once, and then only in an obtuse reference to Walt Whitman's influence on him .
Moreover, in an attempt to recommend readings from and for the so-called `ages', Bloom lumps Hopkins in with such late nineteenth century figures as Arthur Hugh Clough, George Meredith, Francis Thompson, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Lionel Johnson, Robert Bridges, G.K. Chesterton, Coventry Patmore, John Davidson, Ernest Dowson and William Morris - notables all, but hardly sensational and immortal company.
Naturally, there also is the commonplace instinct to simply appreciate Hopkins as a latter-day Romantic, given his predilections towards nature and the natural beauty of living things.
Similarly, an obvious case can be made for Hopkins's standing in a long line of religious poets, who essentially envision the poem as prayer. In the recent This Book of Starres by James Boyd White, for example, Hopkins is concretely linked with the seventeenth century religious poet George Herbert. Surely Izaak Walton's biographical sketch of Herbert could easily pass for a fond remembrance of Hopkins:
| Thus he lived, and thus he died like a saint, unspotted of the world, full of alms-deeds, full of humility and all the examples of a virtuous life . |
More significantly, Paul Dean's review of The Book of Starres in The New Criterion notes that Hopkins clearly echoes Herbert's poem `Employment' (`All things are busie; onely I neither bring hony with the bees,/ Nor flowres to make that, nor the husbandrie/ to water these') with his powerful `Thou art indeed just, Lord'. Dean continues `Hopkins was engaged in "wrestling with (my God!) my God": so is Herbert, and for much the same reasons.
Like Hopkins, he was a proud, fastidious man of high culture, with a distinguished university career, who felt the call to priesthood a something to which he was compelled to submit, rather than something he embraced joyfully: like Hopkins also, he had to direct an iron willpower against itself, in order to make it bend to an unignorable summons' .
One cannot in any way dismiss Hopkins's stature as a prominent religious poet. Still that niche alone neither fully nor adequately addresses Hopkins's presence in the Tradition.
Hopkins as Father of Modern English-American Poetry
Over the past 25-30 years, many colleges and universities in North America have offered courses in Modern English-American poetry that begin with Hopkins. The idea here has been that he really belongs in pioneering ways to the Twentieth Century, in fact he might truly be our first English-speaking modern poet. Surely Hopkins's unique notions about poetic essences in terms of `inscape' and `instress', as well as his technical considerations in the name of `sprung rhythm' anticipate some critical issues of modern and even contemporary verse. Today, there can be little doubt that - to one degree or another - Hopkins's poetry and prose has informed verse in the twentieth century.
One problem in properly locating Hopkins stems from the fact that he was both a solitary and a `delayed' literary figure. With the exception of varying degrees of friendship with Robert Bridges, Digby Mackworth Dolben, R.W. Dixon and Coventry Patmore, he wrote his few but often magnificent verses in an artistic vacuum. Further, the bulk of Hopkins's work wasn't published until some 30 years after his death, thus making it difficult to guage accurately the lineage of his impact, his progressive influence on certain poets who followed him. In contrast, one thinks of another early, obvious modernist, Ezra Pound, whose line of successors is too easily identified.
Hopkins as Touchstone
However one perceives and categorizes him, Hopkins somehow remains a poetic touchstone. In the memoir Poets in Their Youth by Eileen Simpson, ex-wife of American poet John Berryman, there is charming reference to Berryman and poetic cohort Robert Lowell reciting Hopkins's poems - somewhat drunkenly - as they cleared dishes after literary dinners on summer nights vacationing in Maine .
Moreover, a new book by critic Denis Donoghue, Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls, contends that, among others, (such as Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Aiken, Hart Crane, Stevens and Borges), Hopkins was a literary heir to the hedonistic Walter Pater; perhaps not so surprising a claim, as Pater did teach Hopkins at Balliol College, Oxford. To be sure, Hopkins's name does make most litanies of modern writing's greats and near-greats. But are these largely knee-jerk considerations?
Another recent sighting of Hopkins comes in the form of a new sonnet by American poet Maxine Kumin titled `Almost Spring, Driving Home, Reciting Hopkins' :
A devout but highly imaginative Jesuit,
Untermeyer says in my yellowed
college omnibus of modern poets,
perhaps intending an oxymoron, but is it?
Shook foil, sharp rivers start to flow.
Landscape plotted and pieced, gray-blue, snow-pocked
begins to show its margins. Speeding back
down the interstate into my own hills
I see them fickle, freckled, mounded fully
and softened by millenia into pillows.
The priest's sprung metronome tick-tocks,
repeating how old winter is. It asks
each mile, snow fog battening the valleys,
what is all this juice and all this joy? |
Here Kumin's slight, occasional poem recalls snatches of Hopkins's brilliant linguistic turns as she drives through the late winter-early spring vistas of New England. Isn't there a delightful difference between the Hopkins lines used here and Kumin's relatively weak vision and prosaic lines in this poem? The opening lines poke fun at anthologist Louis Untermeyer's 50-year-old and conventional assessment of Hopkins as `a devout but highly imaginative Jesuit'. Now, that's a bit of an insult as well, presuming it seems that one can't be both a Jesuit and imaginative. But more important, the fact is that that somewhat tried and tired perception remains much the standard appreciation of Hopkins in North America and likely elsewhere.
None of this is to deny the condition of Hopkins's presence in the modernist canon. But rather the deeper, sharper question should be about influence: Was Hopkins something of an isolated, wondrous but inexplicable moment, a fabulous abberation... or are there any notable traces or shades of Hopkins in American or English poets of modern or recent vintage?
The Berryman Connection
What about John Berryman? Berryman, the decidedly maniacal, wild-bearded, hell-bent, rule-breaking, alcoholic, womanizing and suicidal poet who rose to prominence in the `fifties and `sixties, seems at first glance a curious candidate for artistic connection with the sincere and introspective Hopkins. Yet he definitely demonstrates a strong allegiance.
Berryman was an integral part of that generation of bright but ill-fated American poets that included Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz and Theodore Roethke, all sadly dead. In many ways, it now appears that Berryman's achievement will prove the most lasting crown of that period. One of the hallmarks of the Berryman-Lowell et al generation is that they tended to pursue strong academic roots, being largely elite university teachers. Berryman himself taught at no fewer than ten colleges and universities and in preparation for this livelihood was widely known to have read deeply in Yeats, Rilke, Eliot, Whitman, Keats, Baudelaire, Shakespeare and, of course, Hopkins.
Of these influences, Yeats appears to be foremost, especially for the Irish poet's metrics. Next, as a would-be believer in Eliot's `Impersonality of the Poet', Berryman was evaluating ways and means of establishing his presence in poems without necessarily speaking in the first person. This would prove valuable in his early long-poem `Homage to Mistress Bradstreet' and more so in his 400-page masterwork `The Dream Songs'.
And then comes Hopkins. In 1943, in a letter to friend Florence Campbell, Berryman lamented what he felt were the shortcomings of John Pick's Gerard Manley Hopkins. To understand Hopkins, Berryman wrote, one had to understand the literary canon, for no `account of Hopkins' literary thought which ignores his elaborate and profound comment upon Shakespeare, upon Milton, upon Keats was worth our attention'.
What Berryman had noted in reading Hopkins were the contrarieties, the particular mixture of `vigour and fatigue, confidence and despair, the elegant and the blunt, the bright and the dry' . This wasn't only a comment on the complexities of Hopkins's diction, but on the effects of language as created by the abruptness of juxtaposition and the sometimes violent dislocation of phrasing. Indeed, throughout his career, Berryman displayed interest in abrupt syntactic shifts, lessons one can safely presume were taken from Hopkins.
In composing his first long-poem, `Homage to Mistress Bradstreet', a work reflective of Colonial America, it is apparent that Berryman used Hopkins's `The Wreck of the Deutschland' as a syntactic model. Here is the beginning of Berryman's `Bradstreet', which the poet considered an `intolerably painful, exalted creation':
(1)
The Governor your husband lived so long
moved you not, restless, waiting for him? Still,
you were a patient woman --
I seem to see you pause here still:
Sylvester, Quarles, in moments odd you poured
before a fire at, bright eyes on the Lord,
all the children still.
`Simon...' Simon will listen while you read a Song.
(2)
Outside the New World winters in grand style
white air lashing high thro' the virgin stands
foxes down foxes sigh.... |
Its stateliness in rhetoric and diction can underlie the sort of work that Berryman seemed to want at the time; but the real point was the need for stylistic dissonance, a going beyond the decorum and ceremony of earlier traditions. Berryman's stanza graphs his abrupt shifts in thought: ranging accentually 5-5-3-4-5-5-3-6. There is plenty of play in the stanza, with rhyme varying frequently. Berryman takes a stanzaic form and spreads it metrically wider, but with balance as much in mind as tension.
Even when the narrative runs over into a new stanza, the aural memory of the eighth line rhyming with the first keeps the reader in mind of the stanza's integrity. A similar technical device is used to give a sense of wholeness to the 57 sections, whereby the word still is the rhyming word in both the first and last stanzas. The last stanza is as follows:
(57)
O all your ages at the mercy of my loves
together lie at once, forever or
so long as I happen.
In the rain of pain and departure, still
Love has no body and presides the su,
and elfs from silence melody. I run.
Hover, utter, still,
a sourcing whom my lost candle like the firefly loves. |
According to critic Carol Frost, `"The Wreck of the Deutschland" in its disruption of syntax and fluctuating accents mimes the vehemence and near chaos that Berryman is also writing about, miming them, one might say, and holding them at bay. To express adequately the complexity of the poet's and Mistress Bradstreet's situation and their character, at once anguished, violent, stoic, rebellious, and tender, Berryman takes his favourite eight-line stanza and buffets it with rhythmic and syntactic variations similar to Hopkins's. The basis for the meters in both the Hopkins and Berryman stanza is accentual. In Hopkins it is quite strict, according to his own lights; in Berryman, loose - but still present .' Both stanzas have a six-foot last line - a near giveaway that the basis for the stanzaic form in `Homage' is the `Deutschland' stanza:
Thou mastering me
God! giver of breath and bread;
World's strand, sway of the sea;
Lord of living and dead
Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh,
And after it almost unmade, what with dread,
Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?
Over again I feel thy finger and find thee. |
In many ways, Berryman's `Homage' was largely prologue to the work for which he is best known, `The Dream Songs'. He began `The Dream Songs' cycle in 1955, eventually resulting in 385 segments, each composed of three six-line stanzas, somewhat randomly rhymed and inevitably herky-jerky and unpredictable in rhythm and line length. Originally comprised of two collections - 77 Dream Songs, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1965 and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, which won the US National Book Award for Poetry in 1969 - `The Dream Songs' can now be viewed as one huge, continuous poem, Berryman's own special way of tackling the issue of a modern epic poem. He resolved the problem of the long-poem not T.S. Eliot's way in `Four Quartets', not W.C. Williams's way in `Paterson', not Ezra Pound's way in `The Cantos' nor Hart Crane's way in `The Bridge'.
Berryman's answer was to conceive a diary - a dream diary. And in this extensive `dream diary', readers come to meet - not necessarily know - the characters `Henry' and `Mr Bones'. Here's how Berryman attempts to distance himself from the dominating voice(s) of the poem:
| `The poem then, whatever its wide cast of characters, is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry, a white American in early middle age, sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second; he has a friend, never named, who addresses him as Mr Bones and variants thereof' . |
On the surface, any linkage between Hopkins and Berryman seems strange. On the one hand, there is Hopkins - Jesuit priest, Classics scholar, largely unknown by readers and critics during his lifetime, dutiful, frail, an outsider, possibly homosexual, dead of consumption at age 44. Conversely, Berryman was the sodden, sexually obsessed poet who became as famous as America allows its poets to be and who in 1972 committed suicide by leaping from a bridge into the faculty parking lot at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis (he apparently planned to kill himself by symbolically jumping into the Mississippi River, which divides the United States east and west, but alas badly misjudged his last leap of faith or faithlessness).
Yet there is connection here. For one thing, both Hopkins and Berryman were converts to Roman Catholicism, and both strove mightily to fulfil their religious convictions - Hopkins as priest-teacher, Berryman as the willing but out-of-control alcoholic pilgrim. Both also spent some of the last years of their lives in Ireland. Hopkins, of course, living and dying at University College in Dublin. While in Ireland, Hopkins wrote most of the group of poems that came to be known as `the Terrible Sonnets', which give a breath-taking portrait of the poet in spiritual doubt and despair - some of his finest but most painful poetry, a selection of which follows :
No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
* * * * * *
I am in Ireland now; now I am at a third
Remove. Not but in all removes I can
Kind love both give and get. Only what word
Wisest my heart breeds dark heaven's baffling ban
Bars or hell's spell thwarts. This to hoard unheard,
Heard unheeded, leaves me a lonely began.
* * * * * *
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! |
In several of `The Dream Songs' , Berryman thematically echoes some of the emotional baggage that Hopkins struggled with in `the Terrible Sonnets':
(370)
I will stay
in my monastery until my death
& the fate my actions have so hardly earned.
The horizon is all cloud.
Leaves on leaves on leaves of books I've turned
and I know nothing, Henry said aloud,
with his ultimate breath.
(371)
Sluggish, depressed, & with no mail to cheer,
he lies in Ireland's rain's bogged down, aware
of definite mental pain.
He hasn't a friend for a thousand miles to the west
and only two in London, he counted and guessed:
ladies he might see again. |
Unlike Hopkins, Berryman at times seems to complain for the sake of complaint. Over all, Berryman's time in Ireland was hardly dreadful compared to the depths Hopkins seemed to reach, but Ireland did prove productive for both. Hopkins's `Terrible Sonnets' and at least a dozen segments of `The Dream Songs' occur in Ireland, as evidenced by this sampling of lines indicative of Berryman's witty, off-handed, gritty later style:
(292)
The Irish sky is raining, the Irish winds are high,
the Irish sun comes back & forth, and I
in my Irish pub
past puberty and into pub-erty
have sent my Irish wife and child downtown,
I lapse like an Irish clown.
(321)
O land of Connolly & Pearse, what have
ever you done to deserve these tragic masters?
You come & go
free: nothing happens. Nelson's Pillar blows
but the busses still go there: nothing is changed,
for all these disasters O
We fought our freedom out a long while ago
I can't see that it matters, we can't help you
land of ruined abbeys,
discredited Saints and brainless senators,
roofless castles, enemies of Joyce & Swift,
enemies of Synge,
enemies of Yeats & O'Casey, hold your foul ground
your filthy cousins will come around to you,
barely able to read,
friends of Patrick Kavanagh's & Austin Clarke's
those masters who can both read & write,
in the high Irish style |
It's clear that Berryman never loses his American perspective, however much he immerses himself in things Irish.
(290)
Why is Ireland the wettest place on earth
year-round, beating Calcutta in the moonsoon
& the tropical rain-forest.
Clearly the sun has made an exception for Ireland,
the sun growled & shone elsewhere: Iowa,
detestable State.
(308)
`An Instructions to Critics'
The women of Kilkenny weep when the team loses,
they don't see the match but they cry. Mad bettors everywhere,
the sign `Turf Accountant',
men slipping in & out. People are all the same,
the seaman argued: Henry feels the Spanish & Irish
and Bengalis are thoroughly odd.
Americans, whom I prefer, are hopelessly normal.
The Japanese are barely comprehensible & formal,
formal Henry found |
And so on. Berryman is largely tongue-in-cheek with the observations above, or his fondness for noting that `Your first day in Dublin is always your worst' or that `The Irish have the thickest ankles in the world/ & the best complexions'. But underlying this cynical playfulness is the serious debt Berryman owes the model of Hopkins. Indeed, Berryman pays his own kind of homage in #337 of `The Dream Songs', a segment that has come to be known as `Father Hopkins':
Father Hopkins, teaching elementary Greek
whilst his mind climbed the clouds, also died here.
O faith in all he lost.
Swift wandered mad through his rooms & could not speak.
A milkman sane died, the one one, I fear.
His name was gone almost.
Hopkins's credits, while the Holy Ghost
rooted for Hopkins, hit the Milky Way.
This is a ghost town.
It's Xmas. Henry, can you reach the post?
Yeats did not die here - died in France, they say,
brought back by a warship & put down.
Joyce died overseas also but Hopkins died here:
where did they plant him, after the last exam?
To his own lovely land
did they rush him back, out of this hole unclear,
barbaric and green, or did they growl `God's damn'
the lousy Jesuit, canned. |
The empathetic consideration of Hopkins (and unkind view of the treatment Hopkins presumably received in Ireland) is typical of Berryman's contention that the greater the poet the less the understanding and appreciation. Poor us, poor them. So be it.
In the end, the apparently divergent but similar cases of Hopkins and Berryman rest not only on issues of poetic themes, theory or practice, but how each poet ultimately embraced his own spirit of originality. The hard kick of `what's new' is what finally distinguishes both Hopkins and Berryman.
In both large and small ways, Hopkins unerringly and alone pursued his visionary paths towards God, along the way creating new ways to articulate the journey. And in many ways, Berryman - one of America's greatest poetic originals - was deeply and seriously informed by the serious, sensitive Hopkins.
Berryman largely acknowledged the Hopkins influence. One can only have fun speculating how Hopkins might have viewed what he partly wrought in the unconventional, uncanny Berryman.
Notes
Bloom, Harold, The Western Canon, Harcourt Brace, 1994, p.281.
Boyd White, James, This Book of Starres, University of Michigan Press, 1994, p.101.
Deane, Paul, review of This Book of Starres, in The New Criterion, May 1995, p.55.
Simpson, Eileen, Poets in Their Youth, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982, p.77.
Donoghue, Denis, Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls, Knopf, 1995, p.65.
Kumin, Maxine `Almost Spring, Driving Home, Reciting Hopkins', Poetry, May 1995.
Frost, Carol, `Berryman at Thirty-Eight: An Aesthetic Biography', New England Review, December 1994, pp.40-41.
ibid. pp.44-45.
Berryman, John, `Introduction', The Dream Songs, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974, p.vi.
All Hopkins poems quoted here are from The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 4th edition, ed. W.H. Gardner and N.H. MacKenzie, Oxford, 1967.
All Berryman poems quoted here are from The Dream Songs by John Berryman, The Noonday Press, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974.
Hopkins and Hart Crane
Louis MacNeice and Hopkins
Christina Rossetti and Hopkins
