Gerard Manley Hopkins: a legacy to the twentieth century

Inscape and Instress

Hopkins' youthful interest in Architecture and Art; his earlier training in sketching and the influence of Ruskin had taught him a way of observing and seeing. Central to his poetry was Inscape, a word which he himself coined to refer to the significant elements which unified and gave its subject its character and form. He made detailed notes in his journal of the essential characteristics of a subject on which he fastened his attention. In addition to determining his subject's Inscape, he aimed at grasping the essence or stress of its being, its energy, for which he coined the word Instress.

In 1872, whilst studying for the priesthood, Hopkins began to read the works of the Franciscan, Duns Scotus, and became absorbed with his Principle of Individuation which seemed to speak profoundly to his spirit; e.g. Scotus highlights the difference between the concept `a man' and `Socrates' as due to the specific nature of the individual which sets him apart from any other. To this final individualizing form, Scotus gave the name >Thisness or `Haecceitas.

The fact that Duns Scotus deeply influenced Hopkins is evident from the last verse of this poem:

Duns Scotus' Oxford

Yet ah! this air I gather and I release
He lived on; these weeds and waters, these walls are what
He haunted who of all men most sways my spirits to peace;
Of realty the rarest-veined unraveller; a not
Rivalled insight, be rival Italy or Greece;
Who fired France for Mary without spot

Theologically Duns Scotus was the first to clarify and set out the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Interestingly, The Wreck of the Deutschland, inspired by a shipwreck, was dedicated to the happy memory of five Franciscan nuns, exiles by the Falck Laws, drowned between midnight and the morning of December 7th 1875 - the vigil of the feast day of the Immaculate Conception.

But Hopkins' interest in Scotus was to cause him grave problems. By the middle of the nineteenth century, St Thomas Aquinas had become the official theologian of the Roman Catholic Church. His theology was much in vogue at the first Vatican Council (1869-70).
Pope Leo XIII named him the official guide to Catholic thinking in 1879. The Orthodoxy of Thomas Aquinas and the Jesuit Suarez, who mirrored his doctrine, was too powerful to be overcome by the inborn simplicity (or subtlety, if you like) of Scotus and his Franciscan view of nature and knowledge of God through creation to which Hopkins was so attracted. Hopkins failed to pass his Theology exam. According to Fr Joseph Rickaby he was too Scotist for his examiners. Once again the poet suffered for doing `otherwise' and manifesting significant form.

By this time also, Hopkins had endured rejection for publication of The Wreck of the Deutschland. Fr Coleridge, Editor of The Month, declined to admit it, after much hesitation, describing it as `unreadable'. Those of us who today, appreciate the depth of poetic truth and beauty in The Wreck of the Deutschland, with its remarkable innovations of technique, can imagine the profound desolation and sense of injustice and neglect the poet must have experienced when his work was rejected. Hopkins' `otherwise' was not the product of a reactionary or rebellious nature. It was the manifestation of `a unique and artistic personality' (Gardner) of which there is ample evidence in his poetry, letters, notebooks and journals.

The Sound of Rhythm's Self

Hopkins was a contemplative, a listener, and his ear was finely tuned. He was sensitive to the rhythm of speech and to the occurrence of sprung rhythms as they occurred in nursery rhymes, jingles, chants, refrains etc. He outlined his poetic theory in a letter to Robert Bridges:

I do not of course claim to have invented sprung rhythms, but only sprung rhythm ... Why do I employ sprung rhythm at all? Because it is the nearest to the rhythm of prose, that is the native and natural rhythm of speech, the least forced, the most rhetorical and emphatic of all possible rhythms, combining as it seems to me, opposite and, one would have thought, incompatible excellences markedness of rhythm — that is rhythm's self - and naturalness of expression for why, if I is forcible in prose to say `lashed rod', am I obliged to weaken this in verse, which ought to be qer, not weaker, into `lashed birth—rod' or something? My verse is less to be read than heard, as I have told you before; it is oratorical, that is the rhythm is so ...

Hopkins was engaged at all times with purging language to regain its freshness and vitality. Extracts from a letter to his brother Everard Hopkins attest the significant form of Hopkins' poetic art: 'I am sweetly soothed by your saying that you cd. make anyone understand my poem by reciting it well. This is what I always hoped, thought and said, it is my precise aim. As poetry is emphatically speech, speech purged of dross like gold in a furnace, so it must have emphatically the essential elements of speech. Now emphasis itself, stress is one of these:

Sprung rhythm makes verse stressy; it purges it to an emphasis as much brighter, livelier, more lustrous than the regular but commonplace emphasis of common rhythm as poetry in general is brighter than common speech ... The natural performance and delivery belonging properly to lyric poetry which is speech, has not been enough cultivated, and shd be. When performers were trained to do it (it needs the rarest gifts) and the audience to appreciate it, it wd be, I am persuaded a lovely art. ... Neither of course do I mean my verse to be recited only. True poetry must be studied. As Shakespeare and all great dramatists have their maximum effect on the stage but bear to be or must be studied at home before or after or both, so I shd wish it to be with my lyric poetry...

In drama the fine spoken utterance has been cultivated and a tradition established, but everything is most highly wrought and furthest developed where it is cultivated by itself, fine utterance then will not be best developed in the drama, where gesture and action generally are to play a great part too; it must be developed in recited lyric. Now hitherto this has not been done.

In a letter to Robert Bridges , Hopkins writes:

To do `The Eurydice' justice you must not slovenly read it with the eyes but with your ears as if the paper were declaiming it at you. For instance the line `she had come from a cruise training seamen' read without stress is mere Lloyds Shipping Intelligence; properly read it is quite a different story. Stress is the life of it.

Perhaps the most striking quality to Hopkins' poetry is his mastery of sound technique. To the calligrapher, letters make patterns, make words but Hopkins effectively used patterning in sound technique to energise his work and to enrich, complicate and heighten his language. He studied the sound value of words carefully and the onomatapoetic theory of the origin of language. Using this technique, Hopkins expressed the deeper realms of the spirit of man and thus attracted his reader or listener. Listen to the first line from the poem Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves:

Earnest, earthless, equal attuneable, vaulty, voluminous ... stupendous
Evening strains to be time's vast womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of all night

This may have appeared obscure to the Victorian, but to the twentieth century reader, brave enough to master the breath, it is fascinating word-play, full of energy. Those of us who have heard his poetry well read will know the truth of the foregoing statements. One becomes aware of a movement in Hopkins' poetry, which when properly heard, uplifts and leaves one strangely energized and in a different state to that which went before.

Inspiration and Trials

We know that much of Hopkins' poetry came from a lighted cave of inspiration as did the art of Michelangelo, who used his gifts as a painter and sculptor to glorify God. Hopkins was a sensitive and serious artist; sensitive to inspiration, serious about technique. In his last poem To R.B. (Robert Bridges), he writes with delicate precision and in a compact manner on the nature of Inspiration, that elusive and treasured quality most necessary in the making of a poem. He describes the process thus:

The fine delight that fathers thought-the
Spur, live and lancing like the blowpipe flame,
Breathes once and, quenched faster than it came,
Leaves yet the mind a mother of immortal song.
The last lines from this last poem, To R.B. are poignant:
Oh then, if in my lagging lines you miss,
The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation,
My winter world, that scarcely breathes that bliss
Now, yields you, with some sighs, our explanation.

Hopkins was dying. He was bequeathing his legacy, handing his pen back to his Creator. He had integrated all that he was: his humanity, wisdom, learning and artistic ability with a heavenly light and communicated it poetically with grace and inspiration. Finally, in an act of complete trust and abandon, he sent the last of his masterpieces to Robert Bridges, who became his literary executor. Hopkins had swum against the tide - like the salmon making his way upstream to purer waters to breed.

It seems that Richard Watson-Dixon, Hopkins' former master at Highgate and with whom Hopkins had corresponded regularly, was the only person who urged Hopkins to publish his work stating: As a means of serving... you cannot have a more powerful instrument than in your verse.

Hopkins's response to Dixon was characteristic:

Now if you value what I write, if I do myself much more does our Lord. And if he chooses to avail himself of what I leave at his disposal he can do so with a felicity and with a success which I could never command.

It took a careful Bridges some time after Hopkins' death to finally publish an edition of Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. The 1914-18 War had changed the relevant role of poetry to that which somehow had to articulate the trauma of that era. Perhaps now it was the time for those prophetic `dark sonnets', which speak of the broken spirit of man and his search for a deeper meaning to his life. As the First World War came to an end, in an atmosphere of the dawn of a new era, Hopkins' newly published work met with excitement and attention in poetic circles.

Victory

The battle was won, and the terrible darkness surrounding the poet's spirit had been overcome. Hopkins began to enjoy a growing readership amongst his fellow Jesuits and writers and poets such as Auden and Robert Graves. His influence on poetry has been continuous in this twentieth century and has not only been confined to writers. It has inspired artists such as Nathan Olivera to paint a collection entitled The Windhover; Bruce Oldfield, the British fashion designer who describes Hopkins as a source of inspiration, someone he would love to have to dinner! Film actress Elizabeth Taylor, in an interview with American Vogue, when asked for her favourite poem, names Gerard Manley Hopkins' The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo — a poem which asks poignantly:

How to keep — is there any any, is there none such, nowhere
known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, .... from vanishing away?

... and answers with a Golden Echo: Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, Beauty's self and Beauty's giver.

Gerard Manley Hopkins' legacy to the twentieth century is not just a literary one. Contained by the purged language and innovative technique of this master poet is the fruit of a contemplative beholder of that `Ancient Beauty', who weighed everything against his love of God and desired only to follow His will as Christ did.

Notes

• Phillips, Catherine (ed), Gerard Manley Hopkins, Selected Letters, Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 282.
• Further Studies in Hopkins, eds. Michael E. Allsopp and David Anthony Downes, New York and London: Garland Publishing Inc., 1994.
• Phillips, op. cit. p. 37.
• Phillips. op. cit. p. 48.
• Phillips, op. cit. p. 92.
• Gardner, op. cit. p. 12.
• Gardner, op. cit. p. 40.
• Phillips, op. cit. pp. 90 — 91.
• >Phillips, op. cit. pp. 216 — 221.
• Phillips, op. cit. p. 97.
• Gardner, op. cit. p. 59.
• Gardner, op. cit. p. 68.
• Roberts, Gerald, Gerard Manley Hopkins, A Literary Life, 1994, p.112.
• Phillips, op. cit. p. 163.

• Gardner, op. cit. pp. 52 — 54.