Not coincidentally, it was during that moment of growing religious skepticism and spiritual anxiety that Hopkins appeared to transform and renew the tradition of Christian poetry. Consequently, he occupies a strangely influential position in the history of English-language Christian poetry. His audaciously original style not only swept away the soft and sentimental conventions of nineteenth-century religious verse, it also provided a vehicle strong enough to communicate the overwhelming power of his faith. His small body of work – hidden for years – provided most of the elements out of which modern Christian poetry would be born.
PEGGY ELLSBERG’S The Gospel in Gerard Manley Hopkins focuses on the central mystery of the author’s singularly odd career – how a talented minor Victorian poet suddenly emerged after seven years of silence as a convulsively original master of English verse. For Ellsberg, Hopkins’s conversion to Catholicism was the catalytic force, intensified by Jesuit spiritual discipline and intense theological study. Hopkins’s poetic formation, she contends, was inextricable from his priestly formation. It was no coincidence that the great explosion of his literary talent occurred as he approached ordination. His conversion had initiated an intellectual and imaginative transformation – initially invisible in the secret realms of his inner life – that produced a new poet embodied in the new priest. For both the man and the writer, the transformation was sacramental.
Although Holy Orders plays a critical role in the chronology of Hopkins’s transformation, the connections between his Catholicism and creativity do not end there. The author’s religious and imaginative conversion, Ellsberg demonstrates, depended on his vision of all the sacraments, especially the Eucharist. “For him,” Ellsberg formulates persuasively, “a consecration made from human language reversed existential randomness and estrangement.” Hopkins’s belief in transubstantiation and real presence saved him from the painful theological doubts and sentimental spiritual hungers of his Anglican contemporaries; their crepuscular nostalgia and vague longing were replaced by his dazzling raptures of light-filled grace. A brave new world filled his senses with the sacramental energy of creation where every bird, tree, branch, and blossom trembled with divine immanence.
From the start Hopkins’s literary champions have been puzzled, skeptical, confused, or even hostile toward his conversion. Catholicism was seen, even by Robert Bridges, as an intellectual impediment that the poet’s native genius somehow overcame, though not without liability. Or Hopkins’s theology was a cerebral eccentricity that generated an equally eccentric literary style. Ellsberg refutes these condescending views of the poet and the Church. She pays a great poet the respect of taking his core beliefs seriously, not in the least because they have also been both the animating ideas of European civilization and the foundational dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church, which have inspired artists for two millennia.
The Gospel in Gerard Manley Hopkins combines scholarly accuracy with critical acumen. Ellsberg’s extensive commentary on Hopkins’s verse and prose texts both elucidates his thought and provides illuminating context for the poems. Meanwhile she sustains her larger argument on the spiritual development of the author as a model Christian life of consecration, contemplation, sacrifice, and indeed sanctity. In restoring the focus on the centrality of Hopkins’s faith, Ellsberg does not simply clarify the underlying unity of his life and work. She also restores a great poet and modern saint to us, his readers.
Dana Gioia
Poet Laureate of California
PART I
Incompatible Excellences
AN INTRODUCTION
IN THE CATHOLIC CEMETERY called Glasnevin in Dublin, the Jesuit Father Hopkins was buried near Maud Gonne in the summer of 1889. A century later, in 1989, the gravekeeper at Glasnevin referred to the famous priest and poet as “the convert.” Although geographically he did not die far from the place of his birth, Gerard Manley Hopkins had traversed vast theological paradigms, revolutionized poetic language, and called down the thunder and lightning of God onto the written page.
Only after leaving the Anglican Church, to which his family was so bound, leaving Oxford University, where he was on track to spend his life, and entering the Jesuit order, known for its insistence on quasi-cadaver-level obedience, did Hopkins boldly take on the visceral Anglo-Saxon two-beat foot that runs through English speech, mix it prodigally with Welsh and Latin and French, mold his lines to Greek forms, and concoct stanza after stanza and sestet after octet of nerve-shocking genius. Arbitrary, stray, he innovated rhythmic power in his poetry. He cut sonnets at ten lines. He flatly rejected everyone’s attempts to correct him. His opinions and practices were stubborn to the verge of arrogance and compulsion; in other words, he was coherent. He did as he wished while cloaked in a mantle of obedience. The reader who arrives at the on-ramp to one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s masterpiece poems, or one of his letters or sermons or journal entries, will become the larger for having entered there.
As a Jesuit novice, age twenty-four, Hopkins made a Long Retreat with the extremely important manual called The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, composed by the Spanish/Basque priest Ignatius of Loyola in 1522–24, while the Lutheran Reformation simmered in the background. The Exercises provide essential guidance for Jesuits (and for anyone interested in directed contemplation). Hopkins would use the Exercises for the rest of his life. Perhaps the most influential moment in the Exercises occurs when the retreatant is invited to employ “compositio loci,” composition of place. Here the text instructs the person in prayer to visualize precisely and in naturalistic detail scenes from the life of Christ. Louis L. Martz, in The Poetry of Meditation (1976), characterizes “the composition of place” as essential in the religious poetry of seventeenth-century England. In Hopkins, this exercise influenced his sermons profoundly, and produced potential poetry.
Six months before he died, while on retreat at St. Stanislaus College in Tullabeg, the Jesuit novice-house in Ireland, Hopkins composed his most self-revealing material in his notes on Ignatius’s “First Principle.” St. Ignatius, founder of the Jesuit order, opened his manual of exercises with the line “homo creatus est laudare” – man is created to praise. These words had permanently affected Hopkins. They showed up in his incessant search for creative pattern that made his art form into an homage to the author of all form. Humphry House, early editor of Hopkins’s notebooks, wrote:
No single sentence better explains the motives and direction of Hopkins’s life than this: “Man is created to praise.” He believed it as wholly as a man can believe anything; and when regret or sorrow over anything in [Hopkins’] life comes to a critic’s mind, this must be remembered.1
The specific instruction of the Jesuit Exercises clearly influenced the rigorous forms Hopkins chose for his poetry.