“The Widow of an Insight”: Poetry and the Ministry

                       Physician, heal thyself.  Luke 4:23

        Because its speaker cannot bear or transmit Christ the Word, “To Seem the Stranger” enacts, intimately, Hokins’s failure in ministry; since the “woman clothed with the sun” is an allegoricaly type of the Catholic Church as well as of the Virgin, it broaches this theme from a broadly institutional, as well as personal, perspective.  Yet although the poem is the only one of the “terrible sonnets” to engage this theme directly, the concern is common to them all.  “Carrion Comfort” can speak about Hopkins’s past conversion and reception into the priesthood, but it cannot actually perform a priestly function in the present.  Though Hopkins may complain, in To Seem the Stranger,” that England does not hear him, he himself makes no effort to breach the silence.  None of these poems postulates, as part of its rhetorical form, an individual human audience, much less a society or congregation whom the speaker serves as priest though his poetic capacity; their isolated self-enclosure is too absolute to permit those priestly and ritual gestures towards an implied audience through which he had previously fulfilled his ministry.  The poems thus render the disintegration of the Christian community and, in microcosmic form, the dissolution of the visible Catholic Church.  Although commentators have attended exclusively to Hopkins’s relationship with God, and sometimes to its breakdown, the collapse of his connection to the religious community---no less significant than the more obvious but more private disaster---is also enacted in these poems.  It is frankly a spectacle of some pathos to consider this impotence in his public institutional capacity as the concluding episode, if only in the poetry, of a man who had repudiated the Anglicanism of his family and nation, converted to Catholicism, entered the most demanding of its orders, and striven, often under adverse conditions, to serve adequately in a social role for which he was not temperamentally suited.  The separation between the priest and his community that the “terrible sonnets” mirrors is the earthly correlative, within the process of daily religious life, of Hopkins’s inability to sustain his communication with Christ.” ~Daniel Harris, Inspirations Unbidden, Chapt. 4

[ In 1877 Hopkins “failed his final theology exam because of Scotus’ theology which meant he would not move up in the Society.]

    Although he burnt most of his poetry when he became a Jesuit and frequently insisted that the practice of poetry was opposed to his true vocation as a priest,⁴ he was equally convinced of his religious duty not to stifle the poetic talent given him by God:

                           

Art and its fame do not really matter, spiritually they are nothing, virtue is the only good; but it is only by bringing in the infinite that to a just judgment they can be made to look inifinitesimal or small or less than vastly great; and in this ordinary view of them I apply to the, and it is the true rule for dealing with them what Christ our Lord said of virtue, Let your light shine before men that they may see your good works (say, of art) and glorify your Father in heaven (that is, acknowledge that they have an absolute excellence in them and are steps in a scale of infinite inexhaustible excellence). ⁵

When, writing to Dixon, he called Christ “the only just judge, the only just literary critic,”⁶ he was implicitly characterizing Christ as the arch-poet {Yes.} and thus justifying both his own work and his creative role by a theory of Christian imitation.  Indeed, so high a premium did he place upon his poetic activity as the satisfying of Christ’s desire that, in the midst of his jaded summer of 1885, he could write with desperate fervor to Bridges, “if I could but produce work I should not mind its being buried, silenced, and going no further; but it kills me…

⁹ Hopkins, Letters to Bridges, p.66; see also Hopkins, Correspondence of Hopkins and Dixon: “You see then what is against me, but since, as Solomon says, there is a time for everything, there is nothing that does not some day come to be, it may be that the time will come for my verses” (p. 95).

Jailed for $280: The Return of Debtors' Prisons - Yahoo! Finance

Jailed for $280: The Return of Debtors' Prisons - Yahoo! Finance
Excerpt
How did breast cancer survivor Lisa Lindsay end up behind bars? She didn't pay a medical bill -- one the Herrin, Ill., teaching assistant was told she didn't owe. "She got a $280 medical bill in error and was told she didn't have to pay it," The Associated Press reports. "But the bill was turned over to a collection agency, and eventually state troopers showed up at her home and took her to jail in handcuffs."

Although the U.S. abolished debtors' prisons in the 1830s, more than a third of U.S. states allow the police to haul people in who don't pay all manner of debts, from bills for health care services to credit card and auto loans. In parts of Illinois, debt collectors commonly use publicly funded courts, sheriff's deputies, and country jails to pressure people who owe even small amounts to pay up, according to the AP.

[In case you didn't receive a true historical education of the U.S.---very common today---most of those who first came to our shores were 'debtors' forced into prison by unjust laws, greedy thieves and crazy leaders.  It is unbelievable that we now 'worship' in a terrible frenzy of 'prestige-idol-"belonging" ' idiocy the very monsters we first fled from.  And who are the rich?  Owners of our idolatrous image-makers: Soros, Hollywood, 'stars' of all kinds [the present-day "saints"], foreign bankers and oil tycoons [not from Texas but Malaysia and Saudi Arabia...et cetera....ad nauseum]

Nothing new under the sun.
BTW:  How come we never hear about Benedict XV's [that's the correct number] encyclical on 'usury'?

The Mariology of Gerard Manley Hopkins's The Wreck of the Deutschland ||Gerard Manley Hopkins Archive

Gerard Manley Hopkins Archive

The Mariology of Gerard Manley Hopkins's The Wreck of the Deutschland

Aleksandra Kedzierska Marie Curie University, Lublin, Poland

The unique achievement of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) has long been recognized. One of the most outstanding English poets of the late nineteenth century, he made poetry read like a prayer, offering a profound insight into the world of the spirit, into the mystery of the Word "instressed" and "stressed" by word(s). For years now, critics have been concerned with exploring numerous aspects of the poet's dogmatic Christianity (Leavis, 85), yet although they often emphasize the Christocentric character of his work, only a few seem to realize how crucial, and in fact indispensable, for his poetry and the religious quest it offers to the privileged reader (cf. Delli-Carpini, viii) is Hopkins's preoccupation with the Marian theme, represented in every major phase of his poetic life.

Hence, this study, a fragment of a greater whole (concerned with the portrayal of the Virgin in Hopkins's works), will concentrate on "The Wreck of the Deutschland" (henceforth "The Wreck"), the first great poem of his maturity (Sprinker, 96) in which, defying the sentimental descriptiveness, song-like rhythms and easy rhymes of his preconversion poems, Hopkins turns to inscaping the central spiritual mysteries of his faith. Not only does he effectively demonstrate "a miraculous birth" of Christ in the Bethlehem of the human soul, but, at the same time he manages to render Mary's unique role in the Incarnation which, Hopkins seems to believe, takes place again and again, whenever the "heart right" lovingly utters the name of the Saviour.

In "Nondum", one of Hopkins's late Protestant poems, he so complained about the cross of his spiritual aridity and God's indifference he was made to bear:

. . . And Thou art silent, whilst Thy world
Contends about with many creeds
And hosts confront with flags unfurled
And zeal is flushed and pity bleeds
And truth is heard, with tears impearled,
A moaning voice among the reeds.

My hand upon my lips I lay;
The breast's desponding sob I quell;
I move along life's tomb-decked way
And listened to the passing bell
Summoning men from speechless day
To death's more silent, darker spell.

Hopkins' 'Singularity'|| 'the mind...cliffs of fall'

His ‘Singularity’

…Hopkins himself writes of the ‘mind[‘s]…cliffs of fall’, of the ‘heart in hiding’, and of an ‘underthought, conveyed chiefly in…metaphors…[and] only half realized by the poet.’⁴

Robert Martin talks of the ‘chaos of [the]…unconscious within…an exigent verse form’;… puts much stress on the telegraphic communications that made possible The Times’s day-by-day on-the-spot reports of the disaster…The Wreck, declares Ong, is a ‘telegraphically conditioned poem’.⁷

1888…letter to Bridges…”The effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise.  So it must be on every original artist to some degree, on me to a marked degree.”  Then he reaffirms his “singularity.”¹  …well after Hopkins’ death, Bridges writes the poet’s mother: “Gerard had a notion of starting music, as everything else, on new lines.”²  

On New Lines
…Indebtedness, imitation, influence - the terms may or may not be interchangeable, and their relationship to originality is a troublesome question that I hope I may be pardoned for setting aside, at least for now. If we take influence, however, in its broadest sense, as a verb meaning generally `to affect,' there can be little doubt that Hopkins influenced or affected [Ivor] Gurney's writing. Consider, for example, the following unpublished poem. It was written late in 1922 in a private asylum to which Gurney was committed prior to being transferred to the City of London Mental Hospital. Like many of his asylum writings, the poem is an appeal for release from conditions that Gurney, who prided himself on being a composer, a soldier, and a `war poet,' felt that he did not deserve. It belongs to a group of poems that Moore has likened to Hopkins's `terrible sonnets' .

Much has he not desired, and has courteous

Been to poor men; dug, laved his body of mornings.

Run, leapt; noway deserving these present scornings -

Will one not save? A soldier who has faced death,

Cries for the justice of freedom, and not thus

To wear his life in pain - to waste his breath.

~from ‘influence of Hopkins on Ivor Gurney’ article

‘A Boiler Factory in Full Swing’

… sounding, he said, like "a boiler factory in full swing because of the stone walls"… is second volume of poetry, War's Embers, appeared in May 1919 to mixed reviews. He continued to compose, producing a large number of songs, instrumental pieces, chamber music and two works for orchestra, War Elegy (1920) and A Gloucestershire Rhapsody (1919–1921). His music was being performed and published. However by 1922, his condition had deteriorated to the point where his family had him declared insane. He spent the last 15 years of his life in mental hospitals, first for a short period at Barnwood House in Gloucester, and then at the City of London Mental Hospital, Dartford, where he was diagnosed as suffering from "delusional insanity (systematised)".[7] Gurney wrote prolifically during the asylum years, producing some eight collections of verse. He also continued to compose music, but to a far lesser degree. By the 1930s Gurney wrote little of anything, although he was described by Scott as being "so sane in his insanity"….

"My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."  ~Great War poet, Wilfred Owen

In his poem, What’s in Time, written when memory brought forth an unbroken flow of truthfulness and clarity about his past, he describes his “strange coming to personality”, “the mother leaving”,  the “insurrection and desire to be one’s own and free”, “The birth of creation in the heart, the touch of poetry”, and the “raining steel and furious red fire” of war.(Footnote *1)
    These memories hint at only a fraction of the complex circumstances, behavioral traits, hereditary factors and events that shaped Gurney’s life and finally led him to waste away from an untreated, misdiagnosed and misunderstood mental illness that slowly consumed his genius.”

[I am reminded here of the banner displayed above a California freeway by a young student which read, “What if Emily Dickinson had been prescribed and taken Prozac?”

There is so much we do not consider about the victims of trauma and soul-wounds.]

_________________________________________

“Shell Shock”|| Ivor Gurney

The asylum

                         “Evil flowed black like a tide of darkness over me”

Although his beloved friend Margaret Hunt died in March 1919 and his father in May, Gurney seems to have kept his usual cycle of depression at bay that spring.(*39)  He was productive but still not anchored firmly in any one place, either physically or emotionally.  In October he complained of “nerves and an inability to think or write at all clearly” but he managed to stay ahead of his depression and by 1920 was enjoying the most productive and financially-secure period of his life.  However, it was not to last.  He was restless, his behavior became unpredictable and inappropriate, and he could not hold a job. 

He took to wandering between Gloucester and London, often walking the 120-mile distance, sleeping in barns and earning a little money singing folksongs in country inns.  In London, he slept on the embankment, and was picked up several times by the police, once suspected of being a spy.  His friends tried to help but Gurney was losing control of his life and was heading for a severe breakdown.
    By September 1922, “evil flowed black like a tide of darkness” over Gurney. The emotional storms that had swirled around him all his life intensified.  He was beginning to suffer from hallucinations and claimed he was being tormented by “tricks of electricity”.  He had become violent and suicidal.  Ronald Gurney, feeling he had no other choice, had his brother declared insane and committed to an asylum in Gloucester.
    Gurney’s initial response to his imprisonment was to escape because he was afraid that he would go “quietly mad”.  He had already experienced the trauma of being in asylum-like conditions when he was hospitalized at Lord Derby’s War Hospital in Warrington for two months after his 1918 breakdown.(*40)  His first escape was dramatic. He hurled a clock through a window and scaled a high wall, but he cut himself so badly on the glass that he had to give himself up after only a few hours of freedom.  That was in October.  He escaped again in November.  By December, his doctors had decided it would be best for Gurney to be moved away from Gloucester.  They called on Marion Scott to make the arrangements to have him transferred to the City of London Mental Hospital at Dartford.  As he had done in Gloucester, he escaped but was quickly recaptured. “I am treated like a lunatic,” he complained to Scott.
    The responsibility for Gurney’s care ultimately fell to Marion Scott who became his legal guardian for the remainder of his life.  As time passed, Scott found Gurney so “agonizingly sane in his insanity” that he felt “every thread of the suffering all the time”, certainly an indication that he was lucid and functional on most of the occasions when Marion went to visit him or took him out on day trips.(*41)
    Gurney’s behavior in the asylum was more delusional than it had been on the outside and he complained of “a twisting of the inside” and pain in his head so bad that he felt he would be better off dead.   His actions were violent and threatening, his words obscene and sexual.
    He wrote dozens of letters to the police and others appealing to them to rescue him.  The letters were never posted.  He suffered from insomnia and was given medications to help him sleep.  He endured a bout of “scurvy”, which, if the diagnosis was correct, indicates that his eating habits and nutrition remained poor despite the availability of regular meals…"

Malaria

[In our time it is known that quinine-based medicines can cause hallucinations and severe sensory/mind disruptions.]

But worse than his natural illnesses was a “treatment” thrust upon him without his consent and one that made him very ill.
    In July 1923, Marion Scott was informed that Ronald Gurney had given hospital authorities permission to inoculate Ivor with a “mild form of Malaria” in a misguided effort to quell his psychological symptoms.  At the time, Malarial treatments were experimental and were sometimes used on men still suffering from the effects of war.  However, injections of malaria were more commonly used to treat syphilis.  It was a dangerous and barbaric treatment that produced potentially fatal fevers and hallucinations.  Individuals who experience high fevers can also suffer brain damage.  Gurney was already hallucinating enough without having more hallucinations induced.  According to his medical records, he was ill with malaria for at least a month enduring “daily paroxysms of malaria fever” for part of that time.  By November 5, Gurney’s physical health was “much improved but the malaria has had no beneficial effect mentally”.(*42)
    Marion Scott believed that Dartford was “the best place for him”, but it appears that Gurney was just another patient to the doctors and attendants.  While his medical records tell the story of a man in decline, virtually no mention is made of how Gurney, the artist, was filling his time.   “...said to have been a capable composer, and approved poet”, noted one doctor almost as an aside while another reference reveals that Gurney “continues to write music”.  “He...busies himself with private matters,” observed another doctor.
    What those “private matters” were seemed to have been of little or no interest to his doctors or hospital authorities but for Gurney they were his salvation — he had continued to write both music and poetry.   As he had done when he was a child, he simply removed himself as best he could from the unpleasant situation…

The last years
“Gone out every bright thing from my mind”

    Although he had more difficulty sustaining his musical voice, Gurney had more to say in his poems and he said it with greater honesty, conviction and freedom during his asylum years than at any other time.  He laid himself bare.  Many of his asylum poems are autobiographical and reveal a depth of experience, despair, anger, loss, disappointment and self-loathing that is absent from his earlier work.  However, some of these poems are also infused with tenderness, longing, beauty, a richness of language and sparkling images that suggest nothing about his life trapped “between four walls” of an asylum cell.
    The year 1925 was a remarkably productive one for Ivor Gurney.  His medical notes reveal that he was suffering from headaches and other physical complaints, depression and delusions and was “no better mentally”, yet he managed to write at least nine collections of poetry and compose some 50 songs and a few instrumental pieces.  The music is generally of no interest and meanders off into incoherence while the poetry is uneven in quality.  However, during this manic outburst and another episode in 1926, Gurney wrote some of his finest poems: Epitaph on a Young Child, The Silent One, The Coppice, Hell’s Prayer, The Love Song, The Poets of My County, I Would Not Rest, The Sea Marge, The Dancers, December Evening.
    Today, studies and analyses of Gurney’s complete poetic achievement refer to the “impatience of his language”, “the queer contortions and omissions which become part of his manner”, how he “telescoped his thoughts so much that they are sometimes very difficult to unravel”, his “new, idiosyncratic mode of expression”, his “imagined world” that “deals with parallels and comparisons”, or how he “began many a poem [that] winds into another, and possibly yet more...”  ~Pamela Blevins, ‘New Perspectives on Ivor Gurney’s Mental Illness’,2000

“I go among the Fields and catch a glimpse of a stoat or a fieldmouse peeping out of the withered grass---the creature hath a purpose and its eyes are bright with it---‘(LJK, II, 80).29  But for Keats, both the deliberative man and the peeping fieldmouse have a purpose that defines but does not adequately explain the ‘mystery’ of their existence: ‘ I go amongst the buildings of a city and I see a Man hurrying along---to what?’  In spite of the ‘instinctive course’ of the ‘veriest human animal’ he nonetheless feels himself to be ‘writing at random---straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness.’  It is the extensive sympathy of the human heart that can alone explain ‘the burden of the mystery’: ‘The Creature has a purpose and his eyes are bright with it. [remember euphrasy…] But then as Wordsworth says, ‘we have all one human heart”’ (LJK, II, 80).”  

~ Porscha Fermanis, ‘John Keats and the ideas of the Enlightenment’, p.132

…………………………….

Being: it is not a thing to scatter here, there, and everywhere through all the world. . .~Fr. Gerard Hopkins, SJ

Drawing Closer To The Heart Of The Lord: Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Pied Beauty « Paying Attention To The Sky

Drawing Closer To The Heart Of The Lord: Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Pied Beauty « Paying Attention To The Sky
Excerpt:
This is not the first time I have introduced this poem on Paying Attention To The Sky, but I shall do it again to showcase Anthony Esolen’s prodigious talents of interpretation. I first studied the poem back in a lit class in college and counted syllables and stress, marveling at the intricacies of structure and form of the sonnet. Elsewhere I have related how this poem can easily become a prayer — a cool summer morning following several days in the nineties — you can memorize this and recite it on the way to bus stop. You’ll be surprised how many more counter, original, spare, strange things you’ll notice on the way to work.
“God is Love”
WE ARE USED TO hearing the biblical verse, “God is love” (1 John 4:8), and nodding knowingly to ourselves. “Ah yes,”...............

Image ◊ Web Exclusive Features ◊ A Web Exclusive Interview with Paul Mariani

Image ◊ Web Exclusive Features ◊ A Web Exclusive Interview with Paul Mariani
Excerpt:
 Image interview with Paul Mariani 
....an excerpt from Paul Mariani’s...biography of nineteenth-century British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. We recently sat down with Paul to ask him a few questions about his project...

“Holy Thursday” — William Blake | biblioklept

“Holy Thursday” — William Blake | biblioklept

As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Analysis

As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Analysis  
'As Kingfishers Catch Fire'. . . analysis of Imagery  
Desmond Egan Poet, Artistic Director...
Excerpt:
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
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 speak and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for thatI came.

Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is -
Chríst - for Christ play in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

It starts with a confident assumption: the simile of the first line is based on a comparison of... 

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