Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

BY: John Dear

CREATED: September 7, 2010

Gerard Manley Hopkins

(1844-1889)

            Gerard Manley Hopkins lived a quiet, hidden life as a Jesuit priest and high school teacher in England and Ireland until his death in 1889. Four decades later, his first collection of poetry was published, and by the centenary of his death, Hopkins was ranked as one of the greatest poets of the nineteenth century, maybe of all time. Like his contemporaries Emily Dickinson and Vincent Van Gogh, Hopkins became world famous only after his death. His witness to the presence of Christ in creation through his complex, fascinating poetry lives on and continues to inspire countless readers.

            How did he do it? We don’t know. Hopkins was born on July 28, 1844, in Stratford, England. A sensitive, solitary young man with a curious intellect, he attended Oxford University, where he studied literature and dabbled in poetry. There he met the recent Catholic convert John Henry Newman. Under Newman’s guidance, Hopkins converted to Roman Catholicism, much to the chagrin of his family and friends. They were shocked even more when he entered the Jesuit novitiate and promptly renounced poetry forever so he could give his life entirely to God.

            A few years later, on December 7, 1875, a passenger ship sank off the coast of England. Everyone drowned, including five Franciscan nuns who were on their way to America. The local Jesuit superior said in passing that someone ought to write a poem about the tragedy. Hopkins took that comment as a sign from God to resume his poetry. “The Wreck of the Deutschland” is considered by some scholars to be his masterpiece:

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,

They doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?

Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.

With his famous conclusion, “Let him easter in us,” Hopkins took up poetry again to point to Christ in the world. Although his poems were never published during his lifetime, they matured with themes of nature, weather, flowers, sky, earth, and the divine, to the point that some suggest he reinvented poetry and the English language. In the years that followed, as he worked in parishes and high schools from Liverpool to Dublin, Hopkins wrote of green landscapes and the spiritual landscape within, which he called “inscape.” His poems celebrated earth and life, the natural and the spiritual world:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God….

….nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

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

In an autumn harvest, Hopkins saw the coming of Christ:

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,

Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Savior;

And, eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a

Rapturous loves’ greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder

Majestic--as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet!--

These things, these things were here and but the beholder

Wanting; which two when they once meet,

The heart rears wings bold and bolder

And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.

Pondering the Holy Spirit led him to write a hymn to peace:

When will you ever, Peace, wild wood dove, shy wings shut,

Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?

When, when, Peace, will you, Peace?….

While secretly writing poems, Hopkins carried on the drudgery of parish and school work. He was friendly, gentle, and perhaps a bit eccentric, but his classes and homilies were considered boring. He landed in Dublin, where he suffered countless hours correcting hundreds of high school papers and attendance sheets. He fell into depression, and the cold and damp air made him sick. “My go is gone,” he wrote sadly. In a series of dark sonnets, he explained his despair, as on St. Patrick’s Day 1885, when he wrote:

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend

With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.

Why do sinners’ ways prosper? And why must

Disappointment all I endeavor end?

Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,

How would thou word, I wonder, than thou dost

Defeat, thwart me? ……

Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

            Even though Hopkins suspected his poems were good, he was resigned to failure. He sustained himself by pondering “the failure” of Christ, as he wrote in a letter: “Above all Christ our Lord: his career was cut short and whereas he would have wished to succeed by success, nevertheless he was doomed to succeed by failure. His plans were baffled, his hopes dashed, and his work was done by being broken off undone. However much he understood all this, he found it an intolerable grief to submit to it. He left the example: it is very strengthening, but except in that sense, it is not consoling” [Bernard Bergonzi, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Collier Books, NY, 1977, 146].

            In 1889, Gerard Manley Hopkins came down with typhoid. When the fever worsened, his parents were sent for. On Saturday, June 8, 1889, they prayed with him as he died quietly. His last words were his best: “I’m so happy, I’m so happy, I’m so happy.” A day after his death, a relative walked by his bedroom and saw a Jesuit throwing hundreds of papers into a roaring fireplace. We will never know what great poems were lost in that flame.

            There are many angles by which we can approach Hopkins and his poetic witness. He always seems fresh and original. Surely he was one of the first environmentalists. His Jesuit mission to “find God in all things” led him to embrace the “wild” world, a phrase that appears frequently his work. “What would the world be, once bereft of wet and of wildness?” he asks in “Inversnaid.” “Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.” He grieved the coming of the industrial age with its smokestacks and factories, because he knew it meant death for “the wild,”  and saw its deadly impact on his disenfranchised parishioners. He did not think factories meant the growth of “civilization,” but the destruction of creation and our humanity.

            In this icon, dedicated to Jesuit poet Daniel Berrigan, Hopkins turns his back on the industrial age and contemplates instead the kingfisher, the Holy Spirit coming upon him and creation. In doing so, he sees the presence of God, learns to recognize Christ in the face of others, and discovers his own true vocation--to be himself.

            As we ponder the icon and the poem, we, too, discover Christ and our true selves:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves--goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings grace;

Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is--

Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

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This is an excerpt from “You Will Be My Witnesses” by John Dear, with icons by William Hart McNichols (available from Orbis Books). For further information, see:

www.fatherjohndear.org