Let him easter in us; be a daystar to the dimness of us
be a crimson-cresseted east…
- a Hopkins line that lingers, so full of promise and frequently cited at this time of year. It is from
stanza 35 of The Wreck of the Deutchsland, Hopkins’ most formidable poem. ‘The dragon at the
gate’- Hopkins’ loyal friend, Robert Bridges dubbed it, because in the poet’s life-time it stood there
forbidding entrance to his more accessible work. There have been many readers for whom Hopkins is
obscure and tendentious in his use of language and not worth the work, and there have been others –
the great T.S. Eliot among them – for whom he is simply a religious and devotional poet. But
typically, Hopkins would answer - ‘But I say more. . . ’And that ‘more’ is what has attracted numerous
literary critics of all denominations. They say Hopkins is ‘immortal diamond’ not only because of the
originality of his work, but because he has succeeded in crossing the divide between art and religion,
bringing beauty back to faith and proving that it is possible to be religious and be a poet.
Born in Essex in 1844 to a refined and artistic Church of England family, Hopkins was the eldest of
nine children. A brilliant student with an original turn of mind, he read Classics at Oxford and was ‘the
star of Balliol’. While there he came under the influence of J.H. Newman (and the Tractarian
movement for the renewal of the Anglican Church). He became a Catholic and taught for some time
at Newman’s Oratory school in Birmingham. Desiring to be a priest and a Benedictine, he sought
counsel from Blessed John Henry who advised him to enter the Society of Jesus. Much has
been projected onto Newman’s advice here –‘Don’t call the Jesuit discipline hard . . . The
Benedictines would not have suited you.’ Did the Society hamper Hopkins? One critic laments:
‘Never was a squarer peg in a rounder hole’. And if he had taken another path would he have been
the Hopkins we know? And when one studies his life, it seems to me that it was from the crucible of
Jesuit training and life-style that he was to forge the flinty and adversarial character of his verse,
a style of poetry that distinguished him from the ‘parnassian’ (Hopkins’ term) Victorians. It was this
distinctive poetic brilliance that ironically took him out of his own era and into ours, so that he was to
be a significant influence on moderns such as Heaney and Kavanagh.
Clwyd Valley, North Wales
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I will limit myself to three influences on his poetry. Firstly, Hopkins was an artist and liked to sketch.
The journal writings of his Oxford years recount the influence of the great Victorian aesthete, John
Ruskin. Ruskin’s Elements of Drawing (1857) was popular with artists. All great art is praise, said
Ruskin. It begins with the ‘innocent eye’ which sees nature as it is, the natural world being the
eminent tutor of beauty. Ruskin held that ‘if an artist can paint a leaf he can paint a world.’ Hopkins’
journals show Ruskin as father to his artistic gifts. His abundant word-sketches of landscape are full of
details on trees, clouds, the effects of wind movements. These sketches were to be material for his
poems. Nature is never romanticised by allusions to his moods and feelings. It exists out there as a
field for passionate observation, replete with varieties of features, forms and selves. As we read in the
following text, unembarrassedly, he uses all his senses in handling the bluebells:
The bluebells in your hand baffle you. . . if you draw your finger through them they are lodged and
struggle / with shock of wet heads; the long stalks rub and click and flatten to a fan on one another,
making a brittle noise of a hurdle strained by leaning against; then there is the faint honey smell and
in the mouth the sweet gum when you bite them. . .
And in later years he writes:
I do not think I have seen anything more beautiful than the bluebell I have been looking at. I know the
beauty of the Lord by it.
Clwyd Valley, North Wales facing towards Snowdonia
Secondly, it is increasingly accepted that the Jesuit Spiritual Exercises further heightened and
transmuted the sensory qualities of his relation to objects of his experience. The participant in an
Ignatian Retreat relates to the Christ of the Gospels through a sensory and imaginative composition of
place and persons. The aim is to make the figure of Jesus real, so that the Lord is experienced as
looking at her and engaging her heart. And here we meet with, yet again, another Hopkins theme that
is Ignatian – the affections - the will - the heart. Hopkins, the intellectual, marvelled at how his
personal life was so much in the grips of his ‘motionable mind’ - his emotions and heart. Could heart
be the basis of all knowing and action, he wonders? Could it be ‘the Mother of being’? This seems to
be the truth that wells up in him, when in writing The Wreck, he remembers the tears he shed on
reading for the first time the report of the tragedy:
‘Ah, touched in your bower of bone,
Are you! Turned for an exquisite smart,
Have you! Make words break from me here all alone ,
Do you! - mother of being in me, heart.’
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Furthermore, Ignatian spirituality brought some modicum of ease to his personal conflict
regarding service to art and to Christ, (though the tension never did leave his obsessive personality).
Eventually, he began to write about only One Beauty, the Creator, whose ‘selving’ is a fathering forth
of the diverse beauties of creation, and whose pre-eminent selving is Christ the Lord. He embraced a
cosmic and incarnational vision where the enfleshment of the divine not only took place in the
historical Jesus but it was also God’s intent from the beginning that all creation is its multiplicity and
‘pied beauty’ the ‘selving’ of Christ.
Clwyd Valley, North Wales
Thirdly, the person who gave intellectual grounding to Hopkins’ vision was the 13th
century Fransciscan philosopher, Duns Scotus of Oxford – that ‘rarest-veined unraveller’, whom he
surreptitiously read when bored with St. Beuno’s theological programme. Of Scotus, suffice it to say
that this philosopher differed from Thomism of the time – (i) as an incarnationalist, that the Christ
event was not an afterthought of God but the divine intent from the beginning: (ii) as not adhering to
the Thomist view which gives priority to universals - the generic - in our way of knowing reality. For
example, it is because I know ‘horseness’ that I can know any horse, this horse. Scotus held that it is
only in knowing a horse in its thisness that I can truly know all things. Shades of Ruskin here! All
knowledge in the first instance is of particulars in their deepest selves, who are revelations of the
whole. Obviously a very exciting way of looking at reality and very modern in the light of what science
is telling us today about holographs and the interconnectedness of all parts of the universe. But it was
exciting for Hopkins as a poet. Drawn to truth through the appreciation of beauty, he knew that
beauty is never abstract or generic but is always this beauty and that beauty. That beauty flashes
forth as a presence addressing us and even rings out, as in the celebrated ‘Scotistic’ poem –
‘Kingfishers’:
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells:
Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying what I do is me: for that I came.
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Clwyd Valley, North Wales
But when one reads the whole of Hopkins, one realises that all is not spring-time, light and
celebration. Seamus Heaney, for whom he was a mentor, called him ‘poor Hopkins’. The Dublin –
‘Terrible Sonnets’- speak for themselves. But even his first great outpouring after a seven year
silence is as much about the storm of his personal life as it is about the wreck of the German ship.
We note the naval language mirroring the stress of his soul:
I am soft sift
In an hourglass – at the wall
Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift,
And it crowds and it combs to the fall;
While Hopkins suffers in his ‘motionable’ mind, his God is never remote or unfeeling. God too is
‘motionable’. He is the ‘mastering’ God, ‘giver of breath and bread’; ‘lightning and love’, ‘winter and
warm’, a ‘Father and fondler of hearts’, yet a ‘terror’ and ‘dark descending’. But the poet is not cowed
by God. He rises up to say: ‘I did say yes to lightning and lashed rod.’
When I read these lines I think of the schoolboy, small in stature and slight of frame, climber of trees,
and daring to challenge a headmaster for a seeming injustice, and of the young man who was
an indefatigable walker, converser and climber of the hills around Wales. What I hear him saying to
himself and all of us is this: ‘Say Yes’ because nothing can destroy your ‘selving’, not even the
Creator. And though one may feel like a ‘Jack, joke, poor potsherd’, nothing can destroy what one is
in Christ which is ‘immortal diamond’. So ‘Let Him easter in us, . . .’
Sr. Jo O’Donovan
Limerick
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