A Tiny Harp Indeed

Breathing, we go blind
to what exists—whole universes!—
right here, next to us.

Christopher Ricks reminded us nearly forty years ago in Keats and Embarrassment, John “always made an awkward bow”...

…But what of…Gerard Hopkins?  Is it not an appallment for heaven and earth that so little is being done for him?  Here is a writer emancipated from time and tradition.  Here is a Prophet, a Martyr, and an Apostle who is at the same time a Poet….[and a Priest]…

[5. Unsigned review of Bregy’s The Poet’s Chantry, Month  October 1912, p.439]

….

Fr. George O’Neill, SJ (1863-1947), was Professor of English Language at University College, Dublin….his later comments were more favorable (see no. 24).  Studies…

…Father Hopkins’ is a tiny harp indeed, and one which was very rarely handled with deftness.  It seems strange that judging ears should be excited to any rapture by what she gives us to hear of its notes.  To us most of her specimens of this writer seem curiously cacophonous…

Pope Francis I, SJ

Our Lady's Tears: Mary at the Foot of the Cross

Our Lady's Tears: Mary at the Foot of the Cross

*Little Adam, holy martyr of the Altar in Iraq, pray for us.*

Day Bright

Day bright. Sea calm, with little walking wavelets edged with fine eyebrow crispings, and later nothing but a netting or chain-work on the surface, and even that went, so that the smoothness was marbly and perfect and, between the just-corded near sides of the waves rising like fishes' backs and breaking with darker blue the pale blue of the general field, in the very sleek hollows came out golden
crumbs of reflections from the chalk cliffs.  *from his journal

'Dragonet'|| Watermarks

Dragonet

I listen to money singing.  It's like looking down
   From long french windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
   In the evening sun.  It is intensely sad.  ~Philip Larkin, High Windows (1974). 

“What to read in war time is a great question, I mean in the way of fiction...” ~on the binding of periodicals

The Wreck of the Deutschland

The inscription on the gravestone reads:

"Pray for the Souls of Barbara Hultenschmidt ,Henrica Fassbender (not found), Norberta Reinkober, Aurea Badziura and Brigitta Damhorst.

Franciscan Nuns from Germany who were Drowned near Harwich in the wreck of the Deutschland Dec 7th 1875. Four of whom were interred here Decr. 13th. RIP"

The sinking of SS Deutschland (1866) in December 1875 was one of the great Victorian maritime disasters

The German liner became stranded on the Kentish Knock while en route from Bremen for Southampton and New York with passengers, emigrants, and general cargo. It happened in severe fog and snowstorms, which also prevented her signals of distress from being seen. Amongst those who died were five Franciscan nuns. The nuns had been expelled from Germany under Bismarck`s Kulturkampf laws. En route to fulfil their vocation, they perished in the tragedy.

Of the five, only four of the bodies were discovered. The fifth remained undiscovered. The four were buried in St Patrick's Cemetery, Leytonstone...

This incident inspired the poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89). 'The Wreck of the Deutschland'

The poem is dedicated to

"the happy memory of five Franciscan Nuns exiles by the Falk Laws drowned between midnight and morning of Dec. 7th. 1875"

On that night when the nuns were on board the ship, Hopkins recalls that he was in Wales in one of the Jesuit houses.

The reference to Gertrude is to St Gertrude the Great, the subject of yesterday`s talk by Pope Benedict XVI.

It would appear that Hopkins thought (wrongly) that St Gertrude of Halfta and Luther were born in the same town. Hopkins contrasts the two traditions in Germany: Lutheranism and Catholicism

It would appear that in the turbulent scenes, the leader of the nuns was seen standing and heard calling ‘O Christ, Christ, come quickly’

In the poem Hopkins teases out what the nun may have meant and the influence of St Gertrude of Halfta is evident.

"20

She was first of a five and came

Of a coifèd sisterhood.

(O Deutschland, double a desperate name! 155

O world wide of its good!

But Gertrude, lily, and Luther, are two of a town,

Christ’s lily and beast of the waste wood:

From life’s dawn it is drawn down,

Abel is Cain’s brother and breasts they have sucked the same.) 160

21

Loathed for a love men knew in them,

Banned by the land of their birth,

Rhine refused them. Thames would ruin them;

Surf, snow, river and earth

Gnashed: but thou art above, thou Orion of light; 165

Thy unchancelling poising palms were weighing the worth,

Thou martyr-master: in thy sight

Storm flakes were scroll-leaved flowers, lily showers—sweet heaven was astrew in them.

Five! the finding and sake

And cipher of suffering Christ. 170

Mark, the mark is of man’s make

And the word of it Sacrificed.

But he scores it in scarlet himself on his own bespoken,

Before-time-taken, dearest prizèd and priced—

Stigma, signal, cinquefoil token 175

For lettering of the lamb’s fleece, ruddying of the rose-flake.

23

Joy fall to thee, father Francis,

Drawn to the Life that died;

With the gnarls of the nails in thee, niche of the lance, his

Lovescape crucified 180

And seal of his seraph-arrival! and these thy daughters

And five-livèd and leavèd favour and pride,

Are sisterly sealed in wild waters,

To bathe in his fall-gold mercies, to breathe in his all-fire glances.

24

Away in the loveable west, 185

On a pastoral forehead of Wales,

I was under a roof here, I was at rest,

And they the prey of the gales;

She to the black-about air, to the breaker, the thickly

Falling flakes, to the throng that catches and quails 190

Was calling ‘O Christ, Christ, come quickly’:

The cross to her she calls Christ to her, christens her wild-worst Best.

~from postings, Perry Lorenzo

In wind’s burly and beat of endragonèd seas

                                     

      This is a series which begins with "Breathe, arch and orginal Breath," which is an invocation of the Muse of the Holy Spirit--rather like the opening of Milton's Paradise Lost which develops the imagery from the opening of Genesis whre the Spirit of God hovered over the waters------a series which begins with the Holy Spirit and ends with an image of the waters as a Dragon, which of course reminds us of the drama of the Apocalypse as well as the Babylonian creation-myth of Marduk slaying Tiamut or Jehovah slaying Leviathan, underlying the original Genesis account as well. These stanzas, obviously, run the full sweep of God's affair with the world, from Creation to Apocalypse, particularly climaxing in:

"Other, I gather, in measure her mind's

Burden, in wind's burly and beat of endragoned seas."
Addendum:

....When at last he saw fit to introduce Hopkins’s singular poetry to the world, some 30 years after his friend’s death, Bridges opened the volume with “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” “like a great dragon,” he wrote, “folded in the gate to forbid all entrance.” Entrance would be gained, however...

Newman's vision is of a soul who desires purgation in order to be made worthy & capable of the vision of God: it is a beautiful vision. It roots our relationship with God, even our relationship through death on such a celebration as All Souls Day, in Love, in Eros even, indeed in our longing and desire for God, a longing God has put in us. Thus Purgatory, for Newman, as for Dante, is Love.
Of course, Edward Elgar famously set this all to exquisite music:
Soul
I go before my Judge. Ah! ….
Angel
…. Praise to His Name!
The eager spirit has darted from my hold,
And, with the intemperate energy of love,
Flies to the dear feet of Emmanuel;
But, ere it reach them, the keen sanctity,
Which with its effluence, like a glory, clothes
And circles round the Crucified, has seized,
And scorch'd, and shrivell'd it; and now it lies
Passive and still before the awful Throne.
O happy, suffering soul! for it is safe,
Consumed, yet quicken'd, by the glance of God.
Soul
Take me away, and in the lowest deep
There let me be,
And there in hope the lone night-watches keep,
Told out for me.
There, motionless and happy in my pain,
Lone, not forlorn,—
There will I sing my sad perpetual strain,
Until the morn.
There will I sing, and soothe my stricken breast,
Which ne'er can cease
To throb, and pine, and languish, till possest
Of its Sole Peace.
There will I sing my absent Lord and Love:—
Take me away,
That sooner I may rise, and go above,
And see Him in the truth of everlasting day.
--from John Henry Cardinal Newman, The Dream of Gerontius

 

SHIRT OF FLAME: WE PAVED PARADISE

SHIRT OF FLAME: WE PAVED PARADISE
Excerpt:
July 13
I know now too what a tinkling brook is.

Supremacy and Survival: The English Reformation: For Blessed John Henry Newman's Feast Day

Supremacy and Survival: The English Reformation: For Blessed John Henry Newman's Feast Day

Notes for paper on Hopkins

Notes for paper on Hopkins
Excerpt:

The Dialogue

      1.  …basically I look at some of the possible choices made by a selection of nineteenth-century writers to the challenge of faith in what was a radically changing and challenging society. I include writers who continue to maintain their faith throughout their lives such as John Henry Newman and Christina Rossetti, writers who make some kind of accommodation between faith and doubt, such as the deism of Thomas Carlyle or the religious humanism of George Eliot; and writers who completely lose their faith, as in the case of Algernon Swinburne and Thomas Hardy.

       2.  …students will be surprised how the personal journeys of faith made by those Victorian man and women writers can connect with roads travelled by 21^st century Christians. Their texts may influence the students’ faith negatively or positively but as Holmes argues, ‘the educated Christian must be at home in the world of ideas and people.’¹

       3.  Our aim is to create educated Christians with self-knowledge and with reasons for belief. We have a responsibility to influence our students to become critical thinkers, and that sometimes means taking risks.

      4.  Gerard Manley Hopkins, the poet in question, will be the main focus of my paper. I have always included his poetry because in it he explores a unique and compelling journey from faith through deep despair and doubt back to faith again.² Hopkins was a man of his time. As a Victorian, he expressed the spirit of his age, which involved an unusually strong sense of self-consciousness. Note Matthew Arnold in his preface to his poems of 1853 where he ‘informed his readers that “the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced” ’.³

       5.  For many Victorians, like John Stuart Mill, Thomas Hardy and Charles Darwin, along with that internal dialogue had come ‘“doubts” [and] “discouragement” ’and the loss of their Christian faith.⁴ But Hopkins chose to remain a Christian despite an acute awareness of the reasons for disbelief so haunting his contemporaries. His final faith position does however seem to have been a more tentative, somewhat modified version of his earlier youthful faith, which was so full of exuberance and celebration. I feel that very honesty about the possibility of change and development in faith makes him a helpful model for students to study.

      6.  Hopkins had a highly attuned sense of self:

And this is much more true when we consider the mind; when I consider my selfbeing, my consciousness and feeling of myself, that taste of myself, of I and me above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnut-leaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to another man.²⁷

d.  Poetry is the sacrament of flesh, word, and spirit charged by their interpenetration with each other. When his resistance broke, Hopkins’ highest gift was released.³⁸

     1.  So the poem ends with a ‘moving request for some kind of fertility of spirit…Christ, the maker of the universe, is asked to bring [him] renewal’.³⁹

     2.  Hopkins and the Psalms: …and as Merton reflected in Bread in the Wilderness…

This expression of a man approaching the edge of the abyss and finally returning with hope to the reality of himself and his relationship with God has valuable parallels with other literature including the biblical. There is a fruitful correspondence between Hopkins’s experiences and those expressed in the Psalms.40 Walter Brueggemann, in his book Spirituality of the Psalms, talks of them in terms of psalms of orientation, disorientation and new orientation… Finally there are the psalms of new orientation which ‘bear witness to the surprising gift of new life when none had been expected…

     3.  Hopkins’s final sonnets also cannot recapture the purity and simplicity of the faith he once embraced. But at a point when he had lost hope, he was able to believe that new life was emerging and that his Lord would ‘send [his] roots rain’. This spiritual movement, more accurately a spiral than a circle, from orientation through disorientation to new orientation, is very appropriate for Hopkins’s own journey. The key for him, as for the psalmist, is that ‘everything must be brought to speech, and everything brought to speech must be addressed to God, who is the final reference for all of life’.⁴⁸ In that renewed conversation with God, he has managed to accept ‘God’s grace [that] gives man the power to transcend himself, to rise to a higher pitch of self’. Hopkins describes this perfectly in the paradox he uses in his poem ‘On the Portrait of Two Beautiful Young People’: ‘The selfless self of self, most strange, most still’.⁴⁹

      4.  To see how Hopkins emerges from his doubt into a new faith is equally significant since it offers reassurance to those who feel they may have to deny their early faith because it no longer answers all their questions. Faith changes, develops, and in line with Fowler’s Stages of Faith, may be able to hold more questions in tension in its later stages than in its earlier ‘first naïveté’.51 Hopkins’s penultimate poem – with the marvellously grand title, ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection’ – closes with words which reveal the new orientation he has attained.

     5.  They reveal a man who can still speak words of glorious and powerful faith:

Enough! The Resurrection,

A heart’s clarion! Away grief’s gasping, joyless days, dejection.

Across my foundering deck shone

A beacon, an eternal beam. Flesh fade, and mortal trash

Fall to the residuary worm; world’s wildfire leave but ash;

In a flash, in a trumpet crash, …

~ from Penny Mahon, THE SEARCH FOR INTEGRATION: A STUDY OF THE FAITH JOURNEY IN THE POETRY OF GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS -Newbold College, England

 

Supremacy and Survival: The English Reformation: Henry Purcell, RIP

Supremacy and Survival: The English Reformation: Henry Purcell, RIP
Excerpt:
Gerard Manley Hopkins praised Purcell in verse:
The poet wishes well to the divine genius of Purcell and praises him that, whereas other musicians have given utterance to the moods of man’s mind, he has, beyond that, uttered in notes the very make and species of man as created both in him and in all men generally. 
HAVE, fair fallen, O fair, fair have fallen, so dear
To me, so arch-especial a spirit as heaves in Henry Purcell,...

Earth, Sweet Earth

  Excerpt:

Earth, Sweet Earth   [July 2,12 post]

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), Ribblesdale:

Earth, sweet Earth, sweet landscape, with leavés throng
And louchéd low grass, heaven that dost appeal
To, with no tongue to plead, no heart to feel;
That canst but only be, but dost that long—

Thou canst but be, but that thou well dost; strong  
Thy plea with him who dealt, nay does now deal,
Thy lovely dale down thus and thus bids reel
Thy river, and o’er gives all to rack or wrong.

And what is Earth’s eye, tongue, or heart else, where
Else, but in dear and dogged man?—Ah, the heir  
To his own selfbent so bound, so tied to his turn,
To thriftless reave both our rich round world bare
And none reck of world after, this bids wear
Earth brows of such care, care and dear concern.

Hopkins, letter to Richard Watson Dixon (June 25, 1883): "In the sonnet enclosed 'louched' is a coinage of mine and is to mean much the same as slouched, slouching. And I mean 'throng' for an adjective as we use it here in Lancashire."
..................