A tribute to Gerard Manley Hopkins, the great English poet
and Jesuit priest, who died in Dublin. The poem is set at Christmastime, when
Dublin is a “ghost town,” a phrase with a double meaning that B. explores. It’s
deserted on one hand, but it’s also the abode of the literary ghosts that he reflects
on, including Joyce, Swift and Yeats. He broods on where they died and where
they were buried. Hopkins was born in England, but he was a Catholic priest,
assigned later in his life to teach and minister in Ireland. He didn’t like
Dublin and was tormented by gloom and melancholy there, partially because he
suffered from bipolar disorder. When he died, B. wonders if he was taken away
to his own lovely land “out of this hole unclear, / barbaric & green”—a fairly
uncharitable characterization of Ireland, seems to me—or if he was buried in
Ireland. (He was buried in Ireland.) In spite of his melancholia and
depression, and his feeling that he had failed both as a priest and as a poet,
there is a sense of awed recognition of the spiritual presence of God in nature
in Hopkins’s work, and that makes me admire his faith and the spiritual vision
of his ecstatic poems. I’m familiar with “Pied Beauty” and “The Windhover”—two
iconic standards of English poetry. “The Windhover” has always struck me as a
remarkable poem in the way its cup overflows, as if the language and the form
of the poem aren’t enough to contain its ecstatic vision of the divinity
radiating from a creature in nature. This poem presented me with an alternative
to the relentless post-modern sense of irony I was born into in the twentieth
century, and which I felt long before I was able to name it or understand it. Glory
be to God for unbridled earnestness, in other words. The poem avoids being
ridiculous because it doubles down on its earnest sincerity almost on every
line, until it practically explodes off the page, and it makes no apology. It’s
a poem of courage in transcendental faith. Here is one of Hopkins’s sonnets I’m just now
encountering:
As Kingfishers Catch Fire
As kingfishers catch fire,
dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked
string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out
broad its name;
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 Whát I dó is me: for that I
came.
I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his
goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye
he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten
thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes
not his
To the Father through the features
of men's faces.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Well, I’ve voiced the same sentiment before! in my assertion
that we experience the divine when we look in someone else’s eyes and understand
that they’re looking right back. When we look at a jewelwing damselfly and
understand for the first time that it is exquisite and miraculous, and that its
beauty has something of the divine animating it. Whether in the contemplation
of nature or in the interpersonal give-and-take of human relationships, the road
to transcendence, and yes, salvation, has to begin in leaving behind oneself,
in escaping the dank but familiar cell of the ego and venturing toward the
wide-open and frightening risk of empathy. That empathy extends just as much to
nature as it does to other persons. I intend to explore Hopkins further.
B., I suspect, might just find Hopkins totally baffling,
though the fact that the poem is addressed to him means at least that he’s
fascinated. One way to read the entire Dream Songs project is as an attempt for
the poet to find or work his way out of the prison of his ego. Addiction throws
up an insurmountable barrier, and he probably was never temperamentally suited
to the task anyway, but it’s a thought. I’ve come to reject on one hand and pity
on the other what it was that Berryman accomplished from a spiritual and
existential point of view, and I do it from the same standpoint that Hopkins
looks to have so naturally inhabited. But it matters that B. kept him in mind.
One might even go so far as to say that Hopkins stood for what B. yearned for
but knew he could never reach. B. says he couldn’t tell one damn butterfly from
another. Hopkins—I would just bet—knew the butterflies.
Thanks for the Hopkins introduction, B and Karl!
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