The reactions of Hopkins’s parents and friends to his conversion were predictably negative. The poet’s father, Manley Hopkins, wrote to Canon Liddon:
Save him from throwing a pure life and a somewhat unusual intellect away in the cold limbo which Rome assigns her English converts. The deepness of our distress, the shattering of our hopes & the foreseen estrangement which must happen, are my excuse for writing to you so freely & so pressingly; but even these motives do not weigh with us in comparison of our pity for our dear son.5
This sentiment persisted among Hopkins’s associates for the rest of his life. A year after Hopkins died, Charles Luxmoore wrote to Arthur Hopkins: “Humanly speaking he made a grievous mistake in joining the Jesuits.”
There were other Catholic converts, of course, including five undergraduates in Hopkins’s class at Oxford. And there were other nature lovers, and other poets, like the Rossettis, drawn to a purer pre-Reformation past. But Hopkins eventually short-circuited all trends with his intrusive genius. You could say that he unintentionally spearheaded modernity in poetry. His closest friend, Bridges, buried Hopkins’s work for thirty years, and then presented it to a readership not quite ready; only after the second edition of the Poems came out in 1930, after Modernism and Imagism and free verse, did Hopkins’s confounding and game-changing contribution take off. It strutted the unabashed two-beat foot of common speech (“rash smart sloggering brine”) and Anglo-Saxonate kennings (wanwood, betweenpie, leafmeal). His new style reached all the way back, and all the way forward.
Hopkins’s legacy contains nagging contradictions: a master religious poet in the category of Donne and Herbert, he abandoned tradition by architecting wild verbal experiments. And then, he constantly protested his indifference to critical opinion and thus to poetic fame: he wrote to Robert Bridges, “You are my audience and I plan to convert you.” When accused of outwriting the wits of even this audience, he refused to give an inch: “I cannot think of altering anything. Why shd. I?” It seems, though, that while perhaps indifferent to fame, he certainly intended to broadcast something he kept seeing – that constant, recurrent presence of God. What indeed could anybody say?
By the end of his life, though he did not know he would soon die of typhoid (caused by antiquated plumbing in the Jesuit residence at 86 Stephen’s Green, Dublin), Hopkins complained in aggrieved sonnets, “Soul self, come poor Jackself, I do advise / You, jaded, let be” and “Birds build, but not I build; no, but strain / Time’s eunuch and not breed one work that wakes.” He felt far-flung, flattened, a failure. He was not destined to live long enough to reverse this feeling. If only he could have known that eventually Christians and literary critics alike would be ecstatic to claim him as their own: “Somewhat to their surprise … the public are being told by the best critics … that an English Jesuit who died over forty years ago must be regarded as one of England’s greatest poets.”6 Ultimately readers would find in Hopkins’s words a refreshing, liberating way of receiving and holding the body of God.
IN THE NEXT SECTION of this volume, “Christ Calls,” some of Hopkins’s early written material – poems, journal entries, and letters – will point the way to his later achievement. The poems express delirious idealism about religious life (“Heaven-Haven”), an early reflection on the sacramental possibilities of bread and wine (“Barnfloor and Winepress”), a sonnet written when he was twenty-one (“Myself Unholy”). His perceived unholiness also appears in scrupulously kept confessional notes, which include lists of sins such as oversleeping, talking too much, and looking at anatomical drawings in The Lancet. His scrupulosity was extreme, and it seems certain that Hopkins was a controlled, lifelong celibate.
The self-restraint he exerted from the time he decided on a religious vocation (1868) meant that he wrote no poetry for seven years; that same self-restraint created an ambitious, tempestuous, dramatic, iconoclastic, debut masterpiece in “The Wreck of the Deutschland” (1875–76), which he actually wrote under obedience. We will read this poem in Part III, “Reckoning with the Wreck.”
In 1872, three years before he determined that he was permitted to write poetry, Hopkins discovered the medieval Franciscan Duns Scotus’s commentary on Lombard’s Sentences (1250). Although his appropriation of Scotus (1266–1308) alienated his Jesuit examiners in the theologate (who preferred the teachings of the “Angelic Doctor,” Thomas Aquinas), Hopkins acquired both inspiration and consolation from Scotus’s special take on the well-worn medieval dialectic concerning universals and particulars. Hopkins’s sonnet “Duns Scotus’ Oxford” claims that the Franciscan “of all men most sways my spirit to peace.” For Scotus, individual things always resulted from a process he called “contraction,” by which universals contracted down into haecceitas, the “thisness” of particular concrete things. So affirmed by Scotus, Hopkins will write “Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: / Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, / Crying What I do is me: for that I came.” Here Hopkins reveals what I consider his most significant contribution to the arts of living morally and of writing uniquely: the concept of “selving.” He cobbles it from an arcane point in Scotus’s commentary, runs with it, and from it springs the real originality of Hopkins’s opus. His idea of selving blends with a Victorian taste for precise detail. I believe that his discovery of Scotus enabled him to write the poems of the late 1870s, and determined how he would write them. We will read his nature poems in Part IV, “What I Do Is Me.”
The final section, “Wrestling with God,” will include writing from the last five years of his life (1884–89). Happiest as an undergraduate at “Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd, rook-racked” Oxford (1864–67), and then again during the theologate at St. Beuno’s “on a pastoral forehead” in Wales (1874–77), Hopkins proved ill-suited to working long, humble hours as a priest and academic examiner in the industrial slums to which his vocation sent him. Liverpool, Chesterfield, London, Glasgow, finally Dublin: the absence of larks and cuckoos compounded by his own apparent lack of talent in transacting his priestly assignments drained him. For most of his clerical career, he complained of extreme exhaustion and its handmaiden, depression. He described himself as “harried” and “fagged” and “gallied up and down.” None of us likes to do what we are not good at doing. Hopkins’s claim that his religious vocation “selved” him must have been often challenged. Still, even in despondency, he never quit but rather conducted an extremely robust if solitary conversation with the universe.
PART II
Christ Calls
HERE IS THE GENERAL NARRATIVE of Hopkins’s religious conversion: born in England in 1844 into high culture and wealth, he would have been expected to pursue noble leisure and to worship as a conventional Anglican. That he was oppositional to authority as a schoolboy (sassing his headmaster) and strange as a child (forcing his little brothers to eat flowers) foretold a personality prone to real originality. His early practice of intense self-examination, of carefully recording in his commonplace book his slightest sins, prophesied his later moral scrupulosity. Leslie Higgins, general editor of the new Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, writes:
Hopkins was 20 and 21 during that “self-wrung, selfstrung” year between Lent 1865 and Lent 1866, yet many of the “sins” seem strikingly adolescent: looking up provocative words in the dictionary; noting keenly the bodies of other people; fixating on genitalia