Hopkins and 'Meaning Motion'

                 “If you can paint one leaf you can paint the world.” ~John Ruskin
“It was the Lord’s design he made apparent—
These bands, and blocks of azure, umber, gilt,
Set in their flexing contours, solid flow
That has composed itself in its own frame:
Red garnet neighbouring mica, silver white;
A slice of agate like an inland sea…”
~ Clive Wilmer,“Minerals from the Collection of John Ruskin” (Selected Poems, 1995)

Why Hopkins Matters.  How Hopkins Matters.

…what useful intimations might emerge if we were to consider locating the signifying “essence” of the poetry as much in what it does as in what it says?  If in referring to authors’ “poetics” we mean to denote not their distinctive ideas or their stylistic fingerprints but, rather, their characteristic practices or creativity (poesis: “making”),what might we conclude in the case of Hopkins?

As my paper’s title indicates, I am proposing here that the distinctiveness of the Hopkins aesthetic strategy and practice is its extraordinary dynamism. This poetry’s core business, the meaning of Father Gerard Hopkins’ rather surprisingly being in business at all as a poet, might be called . . . busy-ness. Action, movement, and change.

…It is much more customary, of course, to associate or identify Hopkins primarily with his “signature” principles of inscape and instress. Stylistics and religious thematics aside, the poetry has been most throughly explored and valued as perceptual and conceptual expressions of the divine principles of abidingness that materially shape and spiritually sustain the created world. The often complex significance of those recurrent motifs of discreet individuating form (Scotist haecceitas) and latent vital pressure are commonly understood to constitute the meaning discerned by Hopkins in the visible world… for Hopkins, “meaning” is a verb, not a condition of being. It is something that happens.

Something that explodes. Ethos is praxis. Nothing in this world of things “means” unless and until it is seen to move, to go into action, to differ, differentiate itself, almost in the Derridean sense of active différance, beyond merely being different. Hopkins consistently subordinates even inscape and instress to this vision of a created universe that displays and fulfils in actions (not in form or being) the meaning and intention (in-tension) of its Creator.

…Their life is in their own action. It means to mean what it says and does, and it means it by performing it. If there are “themes” in Hopkins, it is in the musical rather than rhetorical sense of the term: a pattern or figure of notes, often irregular, yet always a mimetic movement occurring in time, and existing only in performance. As we shall see, it is no coincidence that Hopkins does turn several times to musical analogies in naming the expressive “meaning” of distinctive behaviours, both artistic and natural, that declare, rehearse, celebrate, and interrogate the dynamism of the ever-changing, everfleeting universe of things. Stress is the life of it, and verbs are the sweep and the hurl of it…

                                                                             I

Let us begin with the phrase quoted in my title – “meaning motion,” from the notoriously dense and difficult poem “Henry Purcell.” This sonnet does virtually articulate, and perform, the Hopkinsean poetics. Ostensibly a tribute to the distinctive musical genius of our poet’s favourite composer, it ends by equating the effect of hearing the music’s thrusting, thronging rehearsal to the effect of seeing the sudden wuthering open of a great bird’s wings. This startling display of colossal plumage “fans fresh our wits with wonder.” It is explicitly “meaning motion.” Action declares or produces meaning, knowledge, recognition, or at least excites our awareness of it. Likewise for the quintessence of Purcell’s music – the poet insists that its “forg’d feature” is exhibited and experienced not in theme or melody or familiar sweetness but in performance, in self-expressive action.

In this sense the Purcell poem is not primarily “about” the inscape or instress of the music or of the mind of the composer. Inscape is a created thing’s distinctive form or pattern or law of being – its “forgèd feature.” Instress is the vital indwelling pressure – the “archespecial spirit” – sustaining that self, sake, make, or form. There is in both inscape and instress, then, something latent, static, kinetic. The Purcell poem clearly suggests that each of these conditions of natural being – forged inscape and vital instress – assumes or displays its “meaning” only if and when it goes into action, fulfilling itself in motion, change, performance, and is seen to do so.

But the Purcell sonnet does more than this, and does more than justify in God’s eyes and for God’s purposes the exercise of merely natural artistic genius on merely natural subjects. By distinguishing an artist’s expression of “abrupt self” from “all . . . sweet notes not his,” Hopkins also accounts for his own special kind of poetry. We have here, scarcely veiled, the underlying principle both of his own poetry’s idiosyncrasies (his “quaint moonmarks”), and also of his warrant for writing at all.

~ Michael D. Moore, “Meaning Motion”: Reclaiming the Dynamic Poetics of Hopkins

Wilfrid Laurier University. Excerpt: pp.1-3
Henry Purcell

HAVE, fair fallen, O fair, fair have fallen, so dear          

To me, so arch-especial a spirit as heaves in Henry Purcell,      

An age is now since passed, since parted; with the reversal       

Of the outward sentence low lays him, listed to a heresy, here.  

Not mood in him nor meaning, proud fire or sacred fear,

Or love or pity or all that sweet notes not his might nursle:         

It is the forgèd feature finds me; it is the rehearsal          

Of own, of abrupt self there so thrusts on, so throngs the ear.    

Let him Oh! with his air of angels then lift me, lay me! only I’ll   

Have an eye to the sakes of him, quaint moonmarks, to his pelted plumage under

Wings: so some great stormfowl, whenever he has walked his while      

The thunder-purple seabeach plumèd purple-of-thunder,          

If a wuthering of his palmy snow-pinions scatter a colossal smile           

Off him, but meaning motion fans fresh our wits with wonder.

Augustine, Hopkins and Christ's Act of Self-Sacrifice

Augustine quotes the passage from Philippians 2.6-8, the basis for Hopkins' belief in the Great Sacrifice, which, years later in 1883, he paraphrased for his friend Robert Bridges: Christ "thought it nevertheless no snatching-matter for him to be equal with God, but annihilated himself, taking the form of a servant."(4)…

On the verse from John 5.17: "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work," Hopkins writes: "[Jesus] defends the work done on the Sabbath day. After the seventh day of creation God never ceases to work. Saint Augustine quotes the Jews, as wiser than the Arians" (p. 94)…

O the mind, mind has mountains

For example, the church father first compares John to a mountain from which we glimpse the whole landscape and seascape of revelation. John and the other prophets point the way to God: "This they were able to do, the great minds of the mountains, who have been called mountains, whom the light of divine justice pre-eminently illuminates" (II, 3, p. 14). "O the mind, mind has mountains," the poet exclaimed in his 1885 (?) Dublin sonnet, "No worst, there is none" (157, l. 9). No visionary, he could only gape at these "no-man-fathomed" mountains and crouch in his darkness. He experienced the cost of sacrifice himself and felt emptied out in his isolation.

Augustine next explicates the text: "He was in the world, and the world was made by Him" (John 1.10), explaining that the Word made flesh was in the world as "an Artificer governing what He has made." He continues: "God, infused into the world, fashions it; being everywhere present He fashions, and withdraweth not Himself elsewhere, nor doth He, as it were, handle from without, the matter which He fashions. By the presence of His majesty He maketh what He maketh; His presence governs what He made" (II, 10, pp. 16-17). This physical immanence of Christ in space and time is an essential part of Hopkins' faith, expressed at the time of his conversion and throughout his life. In The Deutschland (1875-76), Christ is the "Ground of being and granite of it: past all / Grasp God " (101, ll. 254-255). In his last retreat notes of 1889, he writes: "All that happens in Christendom and so in the whole world affected, marked, as a great seal, and like any other historical event, and in fact more than any other event, by the Incarnation; at any rate by Christ's life and death, whom we by faith hold to be God made Man." (5)

"Christ is in every sense God and in every sense man," Hopkins wrote Bridges in 1883, "and the interest is in the locked and inseparable combination, or rather it is in the person in whom the combination has its place." The events of Christ's life are called mysteries, "the mysteries being always the same, that the child in the manger is God, the culprit on the gallows God, and so on" (p. 188). Augustine often returns to the same paradoxes; one famous passage from a Christmas sermon is typical:

Man's Maker was made man, that He, Ruler of the stars, might nurse at His mother's breasts; that the Bread might be hungry, the Fountain thirst, the Light sleep, the Way be tired from the journey; that the Truth might be accused by false witnesses, the Judge of the living and the dead be judged by a mortal judge, Justice be sentenced by the unjust, the Teacher be beaten with whips, the Vine be crowned with thorns, the Foundation be suspended on wood; that Strength might be weak, that He who makes well might be wounded, that Life might die. (6)

The incarnational theme of "The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe," for example, echoes the Augustinian imagery in "God's infinity / Dwindled to infancy" that "Men here may draw like breath / More Christ and baffle death" (151, ll. 18-19, 66-67). Years earlier in 1866, before his conversion to Roman Catholicism, Hopkins wrote to his friend E. H. Coleridge of the mystery Augustine so eloquently described:

It is one adorable point of the incredible condescension of the Incarnation (the greatness of which no saint can have ever hoped to realise) that our Lord submitted not only to the pains of life, the fasting, scourging, crucifixion etc. or the insults, as the mocking, blindfolding, spitting etc, but also to the mean and trivial accidents of humanity.

The Ambiguous Buckle in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “The Windhover”

Aileen Liu 10

…“The Windhover” is drawn from Hopkins’ knowledge of Robert Southwell’s A Hundred  Meditations on the Love of God, which contains an image of “Christ as a hawk in flight”

(181) and an image of the “sprinkled out…flames of fire” (187).

~James Finn Cotter, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Saint Augustine
  Mount St. Mary College, Newburgh, New York

A Painting For Spring By My Favorite Jesuit | Why I Am Catholic

A Painting For Spring By My Favorite Jesuit | Why I Am Catholic
Excerpt:
Sure, it’s a day early, but Spring was about three weeks early where I live this year. What’s been your experience? So I’m in the mood to share a painting for the season, created by the fellow who has become my favorite Jesuit priest. Remember Wu Li, SJ?.........

Penmaen Pool

Penmaen Pool 

For the Visitors’ Book at the Inn 

Who long for rest, who look for pleasure 

Away from counter, court, or school 

O where live well your lease of leisure 

 But here at, here at Penmaen Pool? 

You’ll dare the Alp? you’ll dart the skiff?— 

Each sport has here its tackle and tool: 

Come, plant the staff by Cadair cliff; 

Come, swing the sculls on Penmaen Pool. 

What’s yonder?—Grizzled Dyphwys dim: 

The triple-hummocked Giant’s stool, 

Hoar messmate, hobs and nobs with him 

To halve the bowl of Penmaen Pool. 

 And all the landscape under survey, 

At tranquil turns, by nature’s rule, 

Rides repeated topsyturvy 

 In frank, in fairy Penmaen Pool. 

And Charles’s Wain, the wondrous seven, 

And sheep-flock clouds like worlds of wool, 

For all they shine so, high in heaven, 

Shew brighter shaken in Penmaen Pool. 

The Mawddach, how she trips! though throttled 

If floodtide teeming thrills her full, 

And mazy sands all water-wattled 

Waylay her at ebb, past Penmaen Pool. 

But what’s to see in stormy weather, 

When grey showers gather and gusts are cool?— 

Why, raindrop-roundels looped together 

That lace the face of Penmaen Pool. 

Then even in weariest wintry hour 

Of New Year’s month or surly Yule 

Furred snows, charged tuft above tuft, tower 

From darksome darksome Penmaen Pool. 

And ever, if bound here hardest home, 

You’ve parlour-pastime left and (who’ll 

Not honour it?) ale like goldy foam 

That frocks an oar in Penmaen Pool. 

Then come who pine for peace or pleasure 

Away from counter, court, or school, 

Spend here your measure of time and treasure 

And taste the treats of Penmaen Pool.

Did You Know

A Precious Gift

Deer's Cry||St. Patrick's Breastplate

Going, Going...........Gone

 h/t Anecdotal Evidence:

GOING, GOING by Philip Larkin. (January 1972)

I thought it would last my time -
The sense that, beyond the town,
There would always be fields and farms,
Where the village louts could climb
Such trees as were not cut down;
I knew there'd be false alarms
In the papers about old streets
And split level shopping, but some
Have always been left so far;
And when the old part retreats
As the bleak high-risers come
We can always escape in the car.
Things are tougher than we are, just
As earth will always respond
However we mess it about;
Chuck filth in the sea, if you must:
The tides will be clean beyond.
- But what do I feel now? Doubt?
Or age, simply? The crowd
Is young in the M1 cafe;
Their kids are screaming for more -
More houses, more parking allowed,
More caravan sites, more pay.
On the Business Page, a score
Of spectacled grins approve
Some takeover bid that entails
Five per cent profit (and ten
Per cent more in the estuaries): move
Your works to the unspoilt dales
(Grey area grants)! And when
You try to get near the sea
In summer . . .
        It seems, just now,
To be happening so very fast;
Despite all the land left free
For the first time I feel somehow
That it isn't going to last,
That before I snuff it, the whole
Boiling will be bricked in
Except for the tourist parts -
First slum of Europe: a role
It won't be hard to win,
With a cast of crooks and tarts.
And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There'll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.
Most things are never meant.
This won't be, most likely; but greeds
And garbage are too thick-strewn
To be swept up now, or invent
Excuses that make them all needs.
I just think it will happen, soon.

The Terrible Sonnets, the Dark Night and Depression

Excerpt from:

THE ‘TERRIBLE SONNETS’ OF GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

AND THE SPIRITUALITY OF DEPRESSION  ~Hilary E. Pearson

Depression is a very lonely disease. Sufferers are unable to see beyond the blackness enclosing them, even if they are surrounded by loving friends and by a supportive family. It is difficult for them to talk to people who do not share their experience, and difficult for those others to understand how they feel. Although there is evidence that depression has been experienced since the earliest times, it was only in the twentieth century that it began to be studied systematically and that its symptoms were classified for diagnostic purposes. Even today diagnosis is not easy.

…The ‘Sonnets of Desolation’ or ‘Terrible Sonnets’ of Gerard Manley Hopkins are a group of untitled poems probably written during 1885- 1886. Unusually, these poems were not sent by Hopkins to his friend Robert Bridges, but were found after his death. There are six poems, usually referred to by their opening words as: ‘To Seem the Stranger’, ‘I Wake and Feel’, ‘No Worst’, ‘Carrion Comfort’, ‘Patience, Hard Thing’

and ‘My Own Heart’. Not all commentators believe that Hopkins was suffering from depression when he wrote them, but the evidence seems strong that he was.

…For many years I was plagued with depression related to hormonal disturbances. At times it was so bad I could barely function three weeks out of four, although throughout much of this period I was living the intense life of a litigation lawyer. When I was depressed, I found Hopkins’ poems, particularly these poems, to be a source of comfort. He described vividly how I felt.

Was Hopkins Depressed?

The Circumstances of Writing the ‘Terrible Sonnets’

At the time when Hopkins wrote these poems he was feeling very isolated. His sense of alienation is expressed in ‘To Seem the Stranger’:

To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life

Among strangers. Father and mother dear,

Brothers and sisters are in Christ not near

And he my peace, my parting and my strife.

England, whose honour O all my heart woos, wife

To my creating thought, would neither hear

Me, were I pleading, plead nor do I: I weary

of idle a being but by where wars are rife.

I am in Ireland now; now I am at a thírd

Remove. Not but in all removes I can

Kind love both give and get. Only what word

Wisest my heart breeds dark heaven’s baffling ban

Bars or hell’s spell thwarts. This to hoard unheard,

Hear unheeded, leaves me a lonely began.

This is a threefold alienation.

First, Hopkins is alienated from his family by his conversion to Catholicism. Then he is alienated spiritually from his beloved country, since England had failed to make the return to the Catholic Church for which he longed.²  His move to Ireland in 1884 added physical separation from England, the ‘third/Remove’ of the poem.

The appointment of the English Hopkins to the Classics Fellowship at the new Royal University caused a political row. Desire for Home Rule was growing and Hopkins, an English patriot, was not sympathetic to this movement, so he was alienated from his Irish coreligionists. His work was not congenial: the Royal University had inadequate facilities and most of the students were uninterested in learning. He had to spend a great deal of time marking examination papers which were generally of a low standard, and he felt that this burden kept him from creative activities. He was not a successful teacher and did not get on with most of his colleagues.

Hopkins’ General Psychological Health

Most of the evidence about Hopkins’ health while he was in Dublin comes from his letters to his closest friend, the poet Robert Bridges. From the very beginning he complains about weakness, sometimes showing desperation, as in the outburst ‘AND WHAT DOES ANYTHING AT ALL MATTER?’ About the time the poems were composed he wrote to Bridges, ‘I think that my fits of sadness, although they do not affect my judgment, resemble madness’.³

In ‘No Worst’ he presents a vivid image of the depressive’s terror of falling over the edge into insanity:

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

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

May who ne’er hung there ….

This was not the first time that he had experienced such feelings. Throughout his life his temperament had been sensitive and highly strung. In 1873 he recorded the effect of a strenuous journey:

In fact, being quite unwell I was quite downcast: nature in all her parcels and faculties gaped and fell apart, fatiscebat, like a clod cleaving and holding only by strings of root. But this must often be.⁴

…Hopkins’ letters and journals that each period of teaching in his life was accompanied by tiredness, lack of energy and inability to complete anything he took up, although until the Dublin post none of his teaching jobs had been by any reasonable measure onerous.

Some secular commentators regard Hopkins’ Jesuit vocation as the sole cause of his mental problems. This view seems to be based more on prejudice than evidence…

…There are other clues to Hopkins’ state of mind in the ‘Terrible Sonnets’ themselves. The opening of ‘I Wake and Feel’ is a vivid description of the sleep disorder characteristic of depression: lying awake for hours with tormented thoughts, finally falling asleep to be haunted by disturbing dreams, then waking in darkness to find the torment still there.

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.

What hours, O what black hours we have spent

This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!

And more must, in longer light’s delay.

Here Hopkins is describing his own experience—‘With witness I speak

this’—and it is not the experience of just one night.

The beginning of ‘Carrion Comfort’ may represent Hopkins’struggle with a temptation to utter despair…

Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;

Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man

In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;

Can something, hope, wish day come, not chose not to be.

It is remarkable how often Hopkins manages to use ‘not’ in these four lines; they are a cry of desperate refusal to surrender to the darkness pressing in on him…(There was)… ‘disintegration of an appropriate and healthy sense of self ’.¹¹

Depression and the ‘Dark Night’

Issues for Depressed Christians

Anyone who suffers from depression tends to think that they are abnormal. Depressed Christians are liable to think that their experience is a sign that there is something wrong with them spiritually, for surely depression is not a ‘normal’ part of the Christian experience. Aren’t we supposed to ‘rejoice always’? The belief that this is an abnormal experience leads to feelings of guilt and self-loathing.

Sufferers feel that they are losing their faith…a serious sin, adding to their guilt and self-hatred.

Dorothy Rowe has found in her work with the depressed that those with a religious belief suffer at the hands of both Freudian psychiatrists, who believe that religious beliefs are evidence of neurosis,…and Christian ministers, who can only provide platitudes about God’s forgiveness.²²…Some Churches make this worse by treating depression as evidence of sin, or even of ‘demonic possession’.

Christians suffer especially greatly when their depression seems to arise from a life situation which was freely chosen in response to what they were convinced was God’s calling. Does this mean that they were mistaken? How could walking in God’s will for them result in such suffering?

   [Most Christians struggle against the damning, prevalent societal ignorance and persecution but those suffering from depression attract even worse virulent and mocking attacks.]

The ultimate weapon against desolation is patience.

  [ However, the sufferer finds even the need for ‘patience’ a veritable war zone when forced to live in the midst of such cruel attacks.  No one was with Jesus in the darkness of Gesthemani, in the abuse heaped upon him by the Sanhedrin or the soldiers, and especially not in the midst of the maddening crowd on His way to the Cross.  Mary, His Mother, and John along with the other Marys were there though at the Crucifixion.]

There is a strong tradition throughout Christianity which regards ‘darkness’ as necessary to spiritual growth.²⁴

A developed description of this tradition is found in the writings of John of the Cross. He emerged from the terrible experience of imprisonment and ill-treatment by his own order with profoundly spiritual lyric poems. He later wrote detailed theological commentaries on these poems. He teaches that the soul’s movement towards God requires a painful stripping away.

This process begins with ‘active’ purification, requiring ascetic human effort, but this alone is not enough. The ‘passive dark night’ is God’s purifying activity, getting at the roots of sin and ‘immeasurably more terrible and costly than the active night alone’.²⁵

John understood that, experientially, what we now call depression could not be distinguished from the passive ‘dark night’. He gave three signs for distinguishing between the dark night and dryness from other causes, including ‘bad humours’ (The Dark Night, 1.9).

First, there is no satisfaction from anything, physical or spiritual. Second, there is consciousness of dryness and a ‘painful care’ towards God. As these are not sufficient to distinguish some psychological states, he adds a third sign: inability to meditate imaginatively. Denys Turner discusses the relationship in John’s thinking between depression and the ‘dark night’, concluding that they can only be distinguished in their outcomes and causes.²⁶

When the passive dark night has passed the self is transformed; when depression lifts the

previous state of selfhood is restored. The ‘dark night’ is caused by God; depression is caused by some physical or psychological imbalance.

Of course, God can use depression as part of the dark night experience: the differentiating test is the outcome…

How Can the ‘Terrible Sonnets’ Help Those Suffering Depression?

Spiritual Help

There are many definitions of spirituality, but they have in common an emphasis on experience and practice in the search for God. For many people suffering from depression, who often have low self-esteem, spirituality depends on their answers to questions about whether they have any relation to God at all, whether God has interest in them and whether they can do anything to reach out to him. Hopkins gives the

sufferer from depression help in finding answers to these questions.
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“...However, I have a saying: until you deal with the core of your being and the injuries that wrote on the slate of your soul, behavior modification is like putting "frosting on shit." Pain is a breaking of the shell. It is a sign that the physician within us wants to heal us. If those around us cannot understand that, they have a problem, not us. If you have even one close friend to "let it all out" with, you are blessed. ♥
Sometimes the one you need to tell is a counselor...”   ~Ruth, We Are One

========

Through the Human Heart

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil. It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn