The Poet in Love with the Word

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Father Gerard Manley Hopkins
1844-1889

"What am I doing here?" he asked himself as he walked along the muddy roads about the village.  The ready answer was that he was studying theology at the Jesuit school at Saint Beuno's.  But that hardly satisfied.  So he often went wandering alone outdoors, for many hours, despite his small stature and his frail health.

Some people when they walk and think see only with the inward eye, lost in speculations.  Such a man was Thomas Aquinas, whose power of concentration was so intense that he seemed sometimes to forget where he was and who was beside him.  One day, at table with the lords and ladies of the court of the saintly King Louis, Thomas banged his ox's fist on the table and bellowed, "Thus are the Manicheans refuted!"

"Boy," said the King to a page nearby, "fetch Brother Thomas some ink and paper."

Father Hopkins was not like Thomas.  In fact, he was engaged in a friendly quarrel with Thomas' philosophy.  Thomas had affirmed the reality of kinds of things, universals, which we can come to know when we perceive individual things through our senses.  But John the Scot, the Subtle Doctor, argued that Thomas hadn't given sufficient status to those individual things.  They too, he said, possessed an essence unique to each creature, a thisness, as the Scot put it, straining language to the utmost to express a thought so difficult to specify and so easy to misunderstand.

"What I do is me: for this I came!"

So the priest, this devotee of Blessed Scotus, was all eye and ear as he walked, his senses awake and keen.  Mount Snowden, the highest peak in Wales, rose in the distance, but Father Hopkins didn't need to seek out the picturesque.  People who do that are like those who throng about celebrity, and miss the real, solid, and mysterious goodness and beauty of those who are near to them; the blacksmith with his hammer shooting sparks from the horseshoe against the anvil; the bugler from the army regiment, fresh-faced and still more boy than man, asking Father about the faith; the boys and girls crowning Mary with flowers….  The world was almost too rich for one heart to bear it. 

He gazed at a farm alongside the road.  There was a man working the land.  The oxen, tame, patient, sad-eyed beasts, set their hooves in the mud and strained, while the man directed the harrow behind them, turning up clods of good black earth, glossy in the sunshine.  What an odd tool that many-tined harrow was; or the hoe, or the spade, or the fork for the hay, or the sickle for reaping, or the flail for threshing and the fan for the winnowing floor.  Each of these things cried out, "Behold me!" And all trades, thought the priest, their gear and their tackle and trim.

He looked at a clump of cornflowers, those sprightly weeds, and stood stock still for a few minutes.  It was as if he were painting them — he was an artist, too, from a large and artistic family.  Or rather they were painting themselves upon his soul, with a power that came from deep within them, a power he called instress, to reveal the handiwork of God.  People don't understand what it means, he thought, when they say, "I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth."  It didn't mean that God created things long ago and had done with them.  None of the Church Fathers believed so foolish a thing.  It is God himself who creates now, veining the green stalks of the cornflowers, and causing their petals to burst out in so brave a display of dusky blue.  This was no flight of imagination.  It was the plain fact, as sweet and homely as the wet ruts that the plowman was leaving behind him in his work.

The Word of God and the Word of Man

Other priests, impatient with the rural ways of these Welsh miners and farmers, would have missed the beauty of that mud, but Father Hopkins did not.  As burdened as he was with study and teaching, he'd set himself to learn Welsh, that odd language, gruff and liquid by turns, that seemed made for the men's choirs that sang in it so well.  He traded words in Welsh with the faithful at Saint Beuno's.  He had learned to sing old Welsh songs.  He had caught the Welsh knack of playing rhymes all over the words, not just at the end.  He'd even composed a few poems of his own in Welsh.

But these Welsh words above all rang in his soul: Yn y dechreuad yr oedd y Gair, a'r Gair oedd gyd a Duw, a Duw oedd y Gair: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  And the Word, through Whom all things were made, dwelt among us in the world, to be found in the essence he, the master artist, had instilled into each thing.  Father Hopkins called it their inscape.  Some people looked for God and saw the world instead.  Hopkins saw the Word at work in and through the world; everything in the world was meant to turn his heart to Christ.  Most of all: other men, each in his marvelous unrepeatable individuality.  What did Jesus look like?  Where are the resemblances?  In that plowman at the furrows, in his sturdy wife calling him in for supper, in the child hanging from the willow branch by the cistern: Christ plays in ten thousand places.

For some years, he had given up writing poems as a distraction from his priestly vocation, but now he was working out in his mind the revival of something at the heart of all poetry.  Just as each created thing — the cornflowers, the clouds drifting like grain in the sieve, the violet of Mount Snowden in the evening sun — was a word spoken by God, so too man may speak words that honor the Word and the world that God made.  The poet's task was to see the Word of God in the world, and to impress into his words what he had seen, handling the words like mysterious things, living, containing hidden springs and light, surprising, dangerous.  The result was poetry unlike what the public were accustomed to, Father Hopkins knew; his lot was to be unread or misunderstood. 

"Rhine refused them; Thames would ruin them"

But his superior had assigned him a task.  The despisers of the Church in Germany, under Otto von Bismarck, were waging the Kulturkampf, a relentless cultural war against the faith.  Last winter, five Franciscan nuns had fled the persecution, sailing to England on the Deutschland.  A terrible snowstorm, as if in the dark providence of God, had destroyed the ship just off the Kentish knock.  The mother superior stood tall upon the deck, heartening her sisters and crying out, "Come quickly, come quickly, O Christ!"  Fifty-seven people died, including all of the sisters.  Father Hopkins was to honor these martyred women in verse.

To this task then Gerard Manley Hopkins set himself, and the first stanza, rugged, strange, filled with words bursting into meanings beyond his full control, came to him:

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,

Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh? 

Over again I feel thy finger and find thee. 

Thirty-six more stanzas he would write, pouring into them his heart and soul and mind and strength, his love for the England that still rejected the Church, the misunderstandings of his devoutly Anglican family, the trials of his vocation, the heroism of the nuns, the gallantry of the sailors, the terrible beauty of the storm, and the mercy of our God who is a consuming fire.  No poem like it had ever been written, in English or in any other language.

Father Hopkins did not live long, and all of his completed poems can fit in one modest volume.  Only a few were published during his lifetime.  Doubtless he thought that none of his work would survive.  But his friend and fellow poet Robert Bridges gathered up the poems and published them in 1918, almost twenty years after his death.  The effect was astonishing, as if a tornado had struck and swept away all of the stale survivals of Victorian verse.  Gerard Manley Hopkins became the single most influential English poet from his era, and now he ranks with George Herbert and John Donne as the three greatest writers of sacred lyric in our language. 

Even secular people acknowledge this.  And many people have been led from the study of his remarkable language to the only object of his devotion: The Christ of our Father compassionate, fetched in the storm of his strides.