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Poetry Off the Shelf: 100 Years of Hopkins

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Curtis Fox: This is poetry off the shelf from the Poetry Foundation. I'm Curtis Fox. This week, 100 Years of Hopkins. Gerard Manley Hopkins died in 1889 at the age of 44. Very few of his contemporaries knew that he would one day be considered one of the greatest poets of the 19th century and of the 20th century. His first book didn't come out until 1918, 100 years ago. To talk about the enduring appeal of Gerard Manley Hopkins and to read a few of his poems, I'm joined by Paul Mariani. Paul is a poet who has written several literary biographies, including Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life. He joins me from WFCR in Amherst. Hi, Paul.

Paul Mariani: Hi. How are you doing?

Curtis Fox: I'm good. I got a little bit of a cold, and I understand you do too, but we'll get through this. So, you've written biographies of Hart Crane, Robert Lowell, John Berryman and William Carlos Williams—all Americans, all 20th-century Americans. So, what was it about Hopkins that moved you back into the 19th century to write about his life?

Paul Mariani: OK. By the way, the most recent biography is Wallace Stevens.

Curtis Fox: OK. Oh. And Wallace Stevens. I forgot to mention him, too.

Paul Mariani: Yeah, but why Hopkins? I was going to school up in the Bronx in New York, a school called Manhattan College. When I was a senior, the professor, Dr. Paul Cortissoz, gave each one of us a poet that we had to speak about. I was given W.B. Yeats, and my fraternity brother, who was Irish, was given Hopkins. So he said, "I'll give you two beers and we'll make a switch, OK?" So I said, "it's a deal." I really loved Hopkins. As soon as I started reading "The Wreck of the Deutschland," just the opening of it:

Thou mastering me

God! giver of breath and bread;

World's strand, sway of the sea;

Lord of living and dead;

I mean, that just hit me so hard. I said, this is the guy for me. And it's been a love story ever since that time.

Curtis Fox: I see. So, as I mentioned, his first book wasn't published until long, long after his death in 1918. I know it's a pretty involved story about why he wasn't published until then, but I'm wondering if you can give us a brief version. Why wasn't a book of Hopkins’ poetry published until 1918?

Paul Mariani: Good question. What happened was, here he dies in 1889, on the cusp of his 45th birthday. He had tried several times to publish, but the work was so experimental for the Victorians, that no one would publish it. And the Jesuits themselves—and he was a Jesuit priest—they wouldn't publish his work. So what happened is he would simply send out manuscripts to his closest friends. Among them was Robert Bridges, another Victorian poet. We don't read much of Bridges anymore, but he became the poet laureate after Hopkins's death. Now, what happened was when Hopkins died in Dublin, Bridges said, "please look, you're going to find manuscripts. Please turn them over. They haven't been published, but they're very important." So he kept them from 1889. He would send them out and nothing much would happen. But after he became poet laureate in the last year of World War I, he finally published a book of Hopkins poetry. Now, 1918, right? People like Hart Crane read the poetry, and they say, "this guy is daring, this guy is brilliant." And people like W.H. Auden, people like Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, T.S. Eliot, David Jones, Yeats, James Joyce, John Berryman, Auden, Thomas Merton, Seamus Heaney—etcetera, I could go on—they realized, this guy is extraordinary.

Curtis Fox: I'm going to ask you, I was going to ask you what's extraordinary about him, but I think the best way to do that is to just turn to one of his poems. And I'm wondering if I can get you to read and maybe introduce "God's Grandeur," which is one of his most famous poems. What would be good to know about this poem before we hear it?

Paul Mariani: So here's a poem that he writes in February—actually, he dated it February the 23rd, 1877, from Saint Bueno's, Wales, where he's finishing up his studies in theology. Later that year, in September, he would be ordained a Jesuit priest. I mean, it's an announcement. It's an announcement not only to the beauty of the world, it's an announcement to his own poetry.

Curtis Fox: Well, let's hear it. Here's "God's Grandeur" by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Paul Mariani:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Curtis Fox: That was "God's Grandeur" by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Now, Paul, I can't think of a more powerful description of our world in the age of climate collapse and ecological degradation than these lines: "Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell." But Hopkins almost certainly did not think of this as an ecological poem. What was he critiquing in this poem?

Paul Mariani: Well, you know, he was looking, you know—trained as a Jesuit, he’s looking at God's creation, the way God had created the world. And then what we human beings had done to it. So really ... I know the word ecological is early, but that's what he's doing. He's looking at the world, and how can we be doing this to it. And yet, what? God is like a mother who watches over us, who watches over us like a dove over her bent nest and gives us—gifts us—every single day, refreshing us in spite of what we've done to the world.

Curtis Fox: Yeah, there's those lines and the turn of the sun in the last six lines: "And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things."

Now, that's incredibly comforting. And for us to hear those lines, I think, in our era especially.

Paul Mariani: Yes. And there it is. What are you seeing is, as dark as things get, there's the light coming up in the east. The first inklings of a new day, a new start, a new dawning. And you get this—literally—an image of a dove over its young, it's protecting them. And then suddenly the sun breaks like bright wings, like a Pentecostal moment.

Curtis Fox: You know, he has a very romantic view of nature in this poem, but it's religiously charged in a way that other romantic poets like Wordsworth and Keats perhaps weren't. It's explicitly religious.

Paul Mariani: Yes. This is the training that he had, you know, with all those years of training as a Jesuit, both in philosophy and then in theology. And then preaching in various—particularly in the working-class cities like Manchester and then teaching in Dublin. He's got his feet on the ground. He's doing this kind of work every day. And he's seen … I mean, he's seen the strip mining, and the coal mining in the north of London. He's seen this smog. He's seen this spittle on the streets. He's seen it all. And yet, in spite of that, there's this underlying beauty. Yeah.

Curtis Fox: Hmm. Let's hear another poem. It's one of his so-called "dark sonnets" that begins, "No worst, there is none." Can you tell us a bit about this poem and then read it for us?

Paul Mariani: Yes. Now we've jumped from 1877. And now it's the summer of 1885, probably August. We don't know because this one is not dated, and he never showed these poems, these extraordinarily dark poems, to anyone. He didn't even show them to Bridges. Bridges discovered them just in draft after Hopkins's death. But this is a period of real—what they call the dark night of the soul, a period of depression for Hopkins, who was now, in a sense, isolated. He was the only English Jesuit in all of Ireland at that time. And it was a period of strong Irish nationalism, as you can understand. He was isolated from his family. He was isolated from all of his English friends. And he's just got a small room. And there he is, you know, grading paper after paper after paper. Any teacher can tell you about that. And out of these, come a series of what Canon Dixon, a friend of his, called the "terrible sonnets." "Terrible" in the sense of looking into the face of a dark God, the dark eyes of God. And this is one of the most powerful. And it owes a great deal, by the way, for those who love Shakespeare. They'll hear Lear, King Lear, you know, lines like Edgar: "And worse I may be yet: the worst is not so long as we can say, 'This is the worst.'" And it's like Hopkins almost picks up from Edgar's speech and says, "you know what? There is a worst. This is what it feels like."

Curtis Fox: Why don't you give it a read?

Paul Mariani: OK.

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,

More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.

Comforter, where, where is your comforting?

Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?

My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief

Woe, wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old anvil wince and sing —

Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling-

ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief."'

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small

Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,

Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all

Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

Curtis Fox: You know, it's incredible that it's a sonnet, because it lasts so long, this poem. Most sonnets, people, especially Shakespearean sonnets, you read them and you kind of trip through them rather quickly. But a Hopkins sonnet seems to go on and on because of the twists and turns of the language and the repetitions throughout. What do you make of that?

Paul Mariani: Curtis, I think that's spot on, what you just said. That's absolutely true. There's a deep dramatic sense here. There's the language, there's that stress rhythm where you get, you know, back-to-back, you'll get these strong stresses. There's another thing too. There's an awful lot of internal chiming. You know, lines like "steep," "deep," "creep," that kind of thing, "sleep"—which he picked up, particularly from the Welsh. He had learned Welsh when he was in Wales for those three years of theology. And this internal chiming, you hear it in Dylan Thomas, for example, or R.S. Thomas, or others. And all of this just expands the lines.

Curtis Fox: So long as he has those five stresses in there per line, he's fine with however many syllables.

Paul Mariani: That's correct, that's correct. All that matters, he says, is the number of stresses. And he experimented with that. Some of the poems go on for eight stresses per line. And they're also not only that, Curtis, but a poem, one of the late poems, "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire," is actually chanted. It's sung according to plain chant. So this guy is always experimenting, right up to the end.

Curtis Fox: Now, for a religious poet like Hopkins, this is a pretty despairing poem. "Comforter, where, where is your comforting? Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?" So, what do you make of that? How does that fit into the religious context of his world?

Paul Mariani: One of the things that Ignatius of Loyola, who is the founder of the Jesuits, what he tells us in his own meditations, when you do the Examen, when you do the spiritual exercises, which Hopkins did many times, one of the things that Ignatius said is, "If you are in a period of distress, a period of darkness, you stay there. You realize it. You don't try to say, 'Oh, it's not me, It's not really happening.' It is happening. And you realize it, and you stay there until the light comes, until something comes to comfort you." Now, this is one of the darkest ones. But if you look through all of them, you'll see that he's coming out the other side in the poems that follow this one.

Curtis Fox: You give a wonderful biographical introduction of the context of this poem. But what in the poem itself is afflicting the poet? What does the poem tell us that has caused this outburst in this mood?

Paul Mariani: How shall I put this? It's not like you can say, "OK, listen, things are not going right right now because of the weather, and things are not going…" No, this is the literal condition of someone in that state of depression. It's that world. And if you say to someone who's depressed, "well, why don't you just snap out of it" or something like that, what are they going to tell you? "I can't, this is where I am." And if you've been there, you'll know the kind of thing that I'm talking about. And this is why I think he comes back to one of the darkest of the plays of Shakespeare, which is [King] Lear. You've got both that sense, you know, where Gloucester thinks he's going to fall off the cliff. You've got that here. "O the mind, mind has mountains." And you also have that sense of "No worse, there is none."

Curtis Fox: Right. That's a wonderful turn in the sonnet when, again, the last six lines. "O the mind, mind has mountains." So, in the first eight lines, he's sort of blaming the world. The world itself, his world’s sorrow. And in the second part of the poem, he pinpoints the source of his trouble—is his own mind.

Paul Mariani: Yes. Exactly. And if you've never been there, he says, you can hold it cheap. "If you've never hung from the side of a mountain like that just by your fingernails. But that's where I am."

Curtis Fox: It's a terrifying poem.

Paul Mariani: Yes, it is. And it's supposed to be. Yeah.

Curtis Fox: Yeah. And it gives us no comfort, other than the fact that it was made and so beautifully made. But it gives us no comfort, unlike many of his other poems. Paul, I want to get you to read one more poem. It's perhaps his most famous poem. Another sonnet called "The Windhover" about a falcon. Can you talk about this one and read it for us?

Paul Mariani: Sure. I mean, what about the mimesis of this? You know, how does he literally capture the actual movements of the windhover that he's watching? You see the beauty of the bird, you see it as [he] watches it. And it's very much in that romantic tradition. And then he turns it in on himself and sees something even more beautiful than—let's put it this way, you've got the majesty of the life of Christ for Hopkins, the teacher. But how does it end? It ends with him being turned over and crucified. And what Hopkins says in the poem is that if you want to find the deepest beauty, it was in the full sacrifice of the self on the cross. And that's what I've got to be ready to do, to turn myself over completely for whatever is out there.

Curtis Fox: Well, let's hear this poem. This is perhaps his most famous poem. It's "The Windhover." Go ahead and give it a read.

Paul Mariani:

"The Windhover"

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-

dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

Curtis Fox: That was "The Windhover" by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and a great read. Paul, Hopkins is obviously a great poet. But there were other great 19th century poets writing in English, but he seems to be a touchstone for so many contemporary poets to this day, say, unlike Robert Browning or even Wordsworth. Why do you think he is still so present and meaningful to contemporary poets?

Paul Mariani: The man speaks directly to you. There's a deep authenticity about what he says. There's also a deep humility in what he gives us. It's the force. It's the dramatic force of the lines. And it's, for me, from a religious perspective, he goes as deep as any religious mind, including Merton or you name it, that I can find. Which is one of the reasons, or perhaps the main reason that I keep coming back to him. It's also the sense of, how do I get both the bric-a-brac, the everyday stuff in the poetry, as well as the elevation, the lifting of the spirit as high as we can go.

Curtis Fox: Mmhmm. And he goes about as high as any poet has ever gone in English. And as low as any poet has ever gone in English. I think that's fair to say.

Paul Mariani: Yes, that's very well put. As high and as low. He's got it all. Yes.

Curtis Fox: Thanks, Paul.

Paul Mariani: Sure.

Curtis Fox: Paul Mariani is the author of Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life. You could read about 20 poems by Hopkins and a brief bio of him on our website. We love getting emails with your comments and suggestions. Email us at [email protected]. The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintet. For Poetry Off the Shelf, I'm Curtis Fox. Thanks for listening.