Gerard Manley Hopkins:
'uniting avocation and vocation'
When GM Hopkins (1844-1889) began training to become a Jesuit, he
burnt all the poems he had written up to then. But the urge to write
proved too strong to resist, and before long he was composing poetry
again. However, he never sought publication and he died unknown to the
Victorian reading public. Hopkins saw his poetry as a means of praising
God, ancillary to his priestly vocation. As such, he sought a
truthfulness of expression that led to his developing radical notions of
poetic perception and correspondingly radical innovations in prosody and
style.
In regard to perception, Hopkins identified the principles of what he
called "inscape" amd "instress." The first refers to the quiddity, or
uniquely identifying quality, of things, particularly natural objects,
and the second the dynamism whereby this inscape is communicated to, and
realised by, the beholder. His journals abound with descriptions of such
observations, eg. "I do not think I have ever seen anything more
beautiful than the bluebell I have been looking at. I know the beauty of
our Lord by it. Its inscape is mixed of strength and grace, like an ash
tree." (He goes on describing the impression at length.)
|
Gerard
Manley Hopkins |
For the rhythm of his poetry Hopkins developed, from pre-Chaucerian
Anglo-Saxon verse (such as "Beowulf"), a metrical form that he called
"sprung rhythm". This avoided the conventional forms in which stressed
and unstressed syllables alternated regularly. Instead, it was
determined by stresses that could be followed by one or more syllables
or none at all, according to the sense. Thus the third line of "Binzsley
Poplars" reads, "All felled, felled, are all felled ;", with five
stresses falling on the syllables "all" and "fell" and the virtual
absence of unstressed syllables echoing the tragic falling of the trees
one by one.
As respects style, Hopkins submitted the elements of language to the
expressive demands of inscape and instress, adjusting diction, imagery,
grammar, syntax etc. to this end. This is strikingly apparent in the
opening of "The Windhover": "I caught this morning morning's minion,
king- Dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding..." The
abundant alliteration and assonance (also derived from Anglo Saxon
poetry), the elliptical omission of "sight of" after "caught", the
hyphenated compounding of adjectives, the placement of the participial
phrase "rolling etc." before rather than after the qualified noun "air",
all combine to capture the powerful impact made on the poet by his
sighting of the kestrel, enabling us too to share in the admission, "My
heart in hiding Stirred for a bird, - the achieve of, the mastery of the
thing!".
Not surprisingly, natural beauty features a lot in Hopkins' poetry.
This prompted TS Eliot to make what was probably his worst critical
misjudgment by referring to Hopkins as a nature poet who had little else
to offer. His so-called nature poetry is far from being thematically
one-dimensional. Apart from demonstrating how the creation declares the
glory of the Creator, it reflects intensely relevant social and
metaphysical concerns. For example, "God's Grandeur" laments that while
"the world is charged with the grandeur of God", man's indifference to
God causes "all (to be) seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And (to) wear man's smudge and share man's smell." Yet the poem ends
with the conviction that "There lives the dearest freshness deep down
things."-surely a welcome reassurance in our modern context of
earth-wide pollution. Again, in "Spring and Fall", the poet conveys to
the child, who represents us all, that her sorrow at the autumnal
denuding of the woods is a presentiment of her own transience. Beginning
"Margaret, are you grieving Over Goldengrove unleaving?" the poem
continues, "Now no matter child, the name: Sorrow's springs are the
same", and ends "It is the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you
mourn for."
More than anything else, though, Hopkins' poetry reflects the
delicate balance between the twin urges of creativity and self-denial in
the soul that is possessed of both imagination and spirituality, as most
of us hope we possess. When achieved this balance gives rise to a deep
joy, but when it fails it causes deep suffering. In Hopkins' particular
experience his dual calling as priest and poet sharpened his sense of
the need for such balance. In fact, the study of his poetry reveals his
sustained effort to do what Robert Frost said in one of his poems: "My
object in living is to unite My avocation and my vocation As my two eyes
make one in sight." When Hopkins succeeds in this quest he sees his life
of renunciation to be as beautiful as, if not more so than, natural
splendour. Thus, after extolling the "brute beauty" of the windhover, he
reflects that "sheer plod makes plough down sillion Shine, and
blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash
gold-vermilion."
However, the two eyes do not always make one in sight, and Hopkins'
finest poems show him straining, even failing, to achieve this balance.
"Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves" is a technical tour de force which
terrifyingly evokes the claustrophobic effect of evening darkening into
"hearse-of-all" night. The "veined variety" of twilight (which holds the
balance between day and night) gives way to the "bleak" silhouettes of
nightfall where everything is reduced to "black, white" as creativity
surrenders to abnegation. Was Hopkins here echoing Blake's words,
"Priests in black gowns Are walking their rounds, And binding with
briars My joys and desires."?
Then come the posthumous "terrible sonnets and a couple of others. A
sampling must suffice to indicate how these half-dozen poems plumb the
depths of despair in a way that no other poetry in English does, other
than Shakespeare's in "King Lear."
"That night, that year Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling
with (my God!) my God." "I cast for comfort I can no more get By groping
round my comfortless..." "Why do sinners' ways prosper? And why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end...? Birds build - but not I build;
no, but strain, Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes."
However often we read these sonnets, we are struck, in the words of
one of Eliot's poems, by "The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing." Ultimately, Hopkins is to be seen as a
tragic poet. Though unsung in his time he is, as Leavis calls him, the
greatest of the Victorian poets and, as is now generally acknowledged,
one of the greatest innovators of poetic technique and one of the
greatest influences in modern poetry.
|