Books: Poet’s Poet

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS — Eleanor Ruggles—Norton ($3.50).

In the winter of 1875 the sailing ship Deutschland foundered in a storm in the Thames estuary. All her crew and five Franciscan nuns, exiles from Germany, went down with her. Far away in the Welsh mountains, 31-year-old Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit novice, was shocked by the catastrophe into writing his first poem in seven years. He sent The Wreck of the Deutschland to his young friend, Poet Robert Bridges, who carefully pasted the epic into an album. There it remained for 40 years, until publication of Hopkins’ collected works brought the long-dead Jesuit acclaim as one of the most remarkable poets of his era.

Readers of this biography, timed for the centenary of Hopkins’ birth, will find it not so much a critical study of Hopkins the poet as an illuminating study of a man who virtually killed himself trying to reconcile the functions of priest and poet. Hopkins, one of the most influential ancestors of modern poetry, was a poet’s poet. Few of his contemporaries saw his work; few would have appreciated it. In an era dominated by such orthodox craftsmen as Tennyson and Wordsworth, Hopkins’ innovations were baffling even to his few admirers—”veins of pure gold imbedded in masses of unpracticable quartz,” according to Coventry Patmore. Hopkins introduced new rhythms, perceptible to the ear but dizzying to the eye. He coined words (“inscape,” “instress,” “scapish”); isolated prepositions (“What life half lifts the latch of, What hell stalks towards the snatch of”); left out connectives (“Save my hero, O Hero [that] savest”). Though sensory details delighted him (“skies of couple color, as a brinded cow”), his principal passion was the relation of man and nature to God.

Intensely distrustful of emotionalism and romancing, Hopkins called Swin burne’s verses about children “blethery bathos”; and when William Butler Yeats wrote an allegory about a man and a sphinx conversing on a rock in the sea, Hopkins asked coldly: “How did they get there? What did they eat?”

“Tuncks Is a Good Name.” Manley Hopkins, Gerard’s father, not only wrote books giving Advice and Instructions to the Master Mariner in Situations of Doubt, Difficulty, and Danger; he was also consul general in London for the then-independent Hawaiian Islands. Sons Arthur and Everard contributed drawings to Punch; Lionel, British Consul in Chefoo, collected “ancient incised bones.”

So no one was surprised when pious Gerard, the eldest brother, became so filled with “gnawing self-doubt” and the need to test his strength that he abstained from liquids until his tongue turned black. Sometimes he lay in bed, “filled with mortification . . . contemplating the ugli ness of the name Hopkins”—a loathing from which he never recovered. “Tuncks is a good name,” the youth wrote in his diary; “Gerard Manley Tuncks.”

In 1863 Hopkins went to Oxford. Fellow undergraduates were poring over Charles Darwin’s recently published Origin of Species; others were taking sides in the clashing rivalries of the Oxford Movement (“the drive for a return to primitive Christian tradition within the Anglican Church”). To the horror of his Anglican parents, Gerard Hopkins became Jesuit.

The young convert was sensitive and self-willed. But Jesuit Founder Ignatius Loyola had laid down an unbreakable rule of Jesuit conduct: “I must let myself be led and moved as a lump of wax lets itself be kneaded.” Novice Hopkins burned most of his poems (“they wd. interfere with my . . . vocation,” he told Robert Bridges), entered Roehampton Novitiate, where some overzealous novices mortified their proud flesh by lashing themselves with knotted cords and clamping sharp steel garters on their legs.

“Sprung Rhythm.” For seven years Hopkins taught in Jesuit schools, studied Welsh, took notes on everything he saw. In his passion for austerity he refused to write a line of poetry—”poetry,” he explained to Bridges, “is an art that tends only indirectly to the glory of God.” But when the Deutschland shattered his resolve, the long-frustrated poet burst out with a series of poems, mostly written in a “sprung rhythm” of his own devising,* all glorifying the work of God:

Glory be to God for dappled things . . .

All things counter, original, spare, strange ;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beatify is past change:

Praise him.

The Jesuits sent Hopkins to the squalid Liverpool slums as parish priest. “Vice and horrors nearly killed him,” and the lush style of his sermons flabbergasted his congregation: “Now, brethren,” he would cry, in his sermon on Eve’s Fall, “Fancy, as you may, that rich tree all laden with its shining fragrant fruit and swaying down from one of its boughs, as the pythons and great snakes of the East do now, waiting for their prey to pass and then to crush it, swaying like a long spray of vine or the bine of a great creeper, not terrible but beauteous, lissome, marked with quaint streaks and eyes or flushed with rainbow colors, the Old Serpent.” When he compared the Mother Church “to a milch cow whose seven teats are like the seven sacraments,” his horrified superiors decided to censor his sermons.

When Bridges mentioned Walt Whitman, the Jesuit admitted: “I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like my own than any other man’s living. As he is a very great scoundrel, this is not a pleasant confession.”

Fits of Sadness. Whenever he turned to poetry his qualms of conscience harrowed him. But his efforts to escape from writing made him a nervous wreck.

He tried to lose himself in abstruse studies, experimented in new rhythms in music. His eccentricities aroused concern. To illustrate the death of the Trojan Hector, who was dragged around the walls of Troy by Achilles, Hopkins seized a pupil by the ankles, dragged him briskly around the room. In Ireland he begged a plowman to teach him how to plow a crooked furrow. He took to practical jokes; when one of them came off he would say: “I could not have believed. . . life had this pleasure to bestow.” But he told Bridges: “I think that my fits of sadness, though they do not affect my judgment, resemble madness.” He wrote: O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed . . . People told him he still looked young. “They should see my heart and vitals,” replied Father Hopkins, “all shaggy with the whitest hair.” In the summer of 1889 he died of typhoid fever. He was 44.

* “To speak shortly,” said Hopkins, “[sprung rhythm] consists in scanning by accents or stresses alone, without any account of the number of syllables. . .one stress makes one foot.”

Off hér once skéined stained véined variety/upon, áll on twó spools; párt, pen, páck

Now her áll in twó flocks, twó folds-black, white;/ right, wrong;

“Not for any money would I read it a second time,” exclaimed the baffled Bridges when he read the “sprung rhythm” of The Wreck of the Deutschland.