Arguably Roman Catholicism taught Hopkins more than private drawing lessons, prep school, or Oxford could have about being a great deviser of major art. His celebration of the nature he observed approaches but skirts the pantheism of his Romantic predecessors. The way he saw beauty caused lines like this to break from him: “The heart rears wings … / and hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.” His former schoolteacher Richard Watson Dixon, an Anglican clergyman, tried to console Hopkins into thinking of his verses “as a means of serving … religion.” But Hopkins replied that writing poetry was “a waste of time.” Surely no other major poet has ever thought of his own work as a waste of time.
In this fallen setting, Hopkins doubted himself. Never, however, did he seem to doubt his conversion. And the self-compression and self-restraint required by his vocation, the “holding of himself back,” would become the best hammer and anvil for his genius. He became, in the judgment of others, isolated, melancholic, and idiosyncratic. Yet his letters were energetic, his journal entries vital and inventive, and his relatively few mature poems fantastically ambitious. The preeminent detail about both Hopkins and his extraordinary body of writing is surely that he foregrounded theological considerations. For him, a world without a living God would have been unthinkable.
When Hopkins was young and merely a highly strung Anglican, he felt strong loves and delights: to his mother he wrote from Oxford (1864), “Except for much work and that I can never keep my hands cool, I am almost too happy.” He went to wine parties every day and was described as “popular with classmates.” Although within two years he would leave Oxford and abandon the future he surely would have enjoyed there, he never lost his gentleman’s loyalty to the place. In 1880, fourteen years after becoming a Catholic, he wrote to his Oxford friend Mowbray Baillie, “Not to love my university would be to undo the very buttons of my being.”
And yet, for all this zest and apparent joie de vivre at the time of his conversion, when he entered the passage in his diary, resolving “No pudding on Sundays” and other little foreswearings, he demonstrated a personality apparently born with a predilection for difficulty. Indeed, his brand of quaint asceticism was popular among the post-Tractarians at Oxford. Dr. Pusey himself kept custody of the eyes. But as Hopkins made his pious resolutions, he also wrote in his diary, “Grey clouds in knops” and “Eyelids like leaves, petals, caps, tufted hats, handkerchiefs, sleeves, gloves” – like the verbal virtuoso he was unconsciously rehearsing to become.
E. H. Coleridge, grandson of the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was a religiously inclined classmate of Hopkins at Balliol. The day before Hopkins recorded his Lenten resolution to eschew pudding and so on, he wrote to young Coleridge an important credo which illuminates not only his sense of being “called,” but of being called to read the world through the lens of the Incarnation and of the sacramental view that constantly mirrors it: “I think that the trivialness of life is … done away with by the Incarnation.… Our Lord submitted not only to the pains of life, the fasting, scourging, crucifixion etc., or the insults, as the mocking, blindfolding, spitting etc., but also to the mean and trivial accidents of humanity.”
Roman Catholicism in general, and the Jesuit order in particular, offered Hopkins elements that he craved constitutionally, and then provided him with the follow-through to become the self he was meant to be – an ingenious but hidden poet, a priest exhausted by his own scrupulosity, a “Jack, joke, poor potsherd” with bleeding hemorrhoids and failing eyesight, an “immortal diamond.” He was destined to realize his purpose in the doctrines of incarnation, transubstantiation, and resurrection; in the radical ascesis of The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola; and in the Mass itself.
When, as a boy, he made his little brothers eat flowers, this action proved predictive of his lifelong mind: he said he became a Roman Catholic mostly because the Sacrament of the Altar contained the real presence of Christ, and this he had to eat. He felt every step of the way a need to instress, to take in and gulp down, the proof of God’s presence. Whether he could also express that proof as a ministry to others was uncertain. Before taking holy orders, at age twenty-four, he wrote to Baillie: “I want to write still and as a priest I very likely can do that too, not so freely as I shd. have liked, e.g., nothing or little in the verse way, but no doubt what would best serve the cause of my religion.”
Eventually, he did produce great verse, and in all of it nature and theology blend like combustible chemicals producing a sparkling solution under the influence of high heat. His entire career, poetic and spiritual, launched a campaign against cliché and blur. He chose to suppress his instinct to write poetry to serve a “higher end,” and yet he managed to produce great art.
Poems
(1864–1868)
Barnfloor and Winepress
“And he said, If the Lord do not help thee, whence shall I help thee? out of the barnfloor, or out of the winepress?”
— 2 Kings 6:27
Thou that on sin’s wages starvest,
Behold we have the joy in Harvest:
For us was gathered the first-fruits
For us was lifted from the roots,
Sheaved in cruel bands, bruised sore,
Scourged upon the threshing-floor;
Where the upper mill-stone roof’d His Head,
At morn we found the Heavenly Bread,
And on a thousand Altars laid,
Christ our Sacrifice is made.
Those whose dry plot for moisture gapes,
We shout with them that tread the grapes:
For us the Vine was fenced with thorn,
Five ways the precious branches torn;
Terrible fruit was on the tree
In the Acre of Gethsemane;
For us by Calvary’s distress
The wine was rackèd from the press;
Now in our Altar vessels stored
Is the sweet Vintage of our Lord.
In Joseph’s garden they threw by
The riv’n Vine, leafless, lifeless, dry:
On Easter morn the Tree was forth,
In forty days reach’d Heaven from earth,
Soon the whole world is overspread;
Ye weary come into the shade.
The field where He has planted us
Shall shake his boughs as Libanus,
When He hath sheaved us in His sheaf,
When He has made us bear His leaf.
We scarcely call that Banquet food,
But even our Saviour’s and our blood,
We are so grafted on His Wood.
Myself unholy, from myself unholy
Myself unholy, from myself unholy
To the sweet living of my friends I look –
Eye-greeting doves bright-counter to the rook,
Fresh brooks to salt sand-teasing waters shoaly:
And they are purer, but alas not solely
The unquestion’d readings of a blotless book.
And so my trust, confused, struck, and shook
Yields to the sultry siege of melancholy.
He