They Need Each Other

I once wrote off poetry out of frustration at its meaningless pretensions. But Christianity and poetry need each other, because poetry gives a mode of seeing and Christianity gives an object to be seen. But the need is asymmetrical: Without poetry, the Christian might fail to see how the world relates to God; without God, poetry might fail to see that the world exists at all.

Gabriel Torretta, OP 

A 'Locked and Inseparable Combination'

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)

Trivial Accidents

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.

Where’s the Foil?

…“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

Italian Jesuit Priest Kidnapped In Syria Executed By Al-Qaeda Rebels… | Weasel Zippers

Italian Jesuit Priest Kidnapped In Syria Executed By Al-Qaeda Rebels… | Weasel Zippers

'In Life's Wild Wood'

Yo amo a las plantas por la raíz y no por la flor. ~ César Vallejo

OUR generation already is overpast,

And thy lovd legacy, Gerard, hath lain
Coy in my home ; as once thy heart was fain
Of shelter, then God's terror held thee fast
In life's wild wood at Beauty and Sorrow aghast ;
Thy sainted sense trammel’d in ghostly pain,
Thy rare ill-broker d talent in disdain :
Yet love of Christ will win man's love at last.

Hell wars without ; but, dear, the while my hands
Gather ‘d thy book, I heard, this wintry day,
Thy spirit thank me, in his young delight
Stepping again upon the yellow sands.
Go forth : amidst our chaffinch flock display
Thy plumage of far wonder and heavenward flight ! 
Chilswell, Jan. 1918.             ~Robert Bridges, Preface, Poems of GMH 
In verse commemorating Lorca's death, Roy Campbell wrote, 
Not only did he lose his life
By shots assassinated:
But with a hammer and a knife
Was after that -- translated.^[48] 
Hopkins has faced the same ‘translation’ nightmares as Lorca. 
Angle of Vision
But, John, have you seen the world, said he,
Trains and tramcars and sixty-seaters,
Cities in lands across the sea --
Giotto's tower and the dome of St. Peter's?
No, but I've seen the arc of the earth,
From the Birsay shore, like the edge of a planet,
And the lifeboat plunge through the Pentland Firth
To a cosmic tide with the men that man it.   ~Robert Rendall, Shore Poems (1957).

no one will look into your eyes
because you have died forever…
Nobody knows you. No. But I sing of you.
For posterity I sing of your profile and grace.
Of the signal maturity of your understanding.  ~Lorca, Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias 

Mariani finds Hopkins in these last years of his life dwelling “on his own bouts of near madness, melancholy, darkness, despair, even thoughts of suicide.” So Hopkins writes: 
I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse. 

Hopkins’s bleak, brooding, and beleaguered final years in Ireland have been exquisitely captured in the black-and-white photographs of Michael Flecky, S.J., a professor of photography and fine arts at Creighton University, and recently published in the book HOPKINS IN IRELAND: PICTURES AND WORDS (Creighton University Press, 2008). Drawing on letters, poems, and spiritual journals, the pictures are of country places Hopkins visited during retreats and vacations, the Dublin landscape he encountered, the monastery, college, and seminary grounds he walked, and the Jesuit community and university buildings where he lived and died. The elegiac sequence of pictures is paired with excerpts from the writings of Hopkins and his commentators to offer a visual illumination of his poetic and spiritual life.
Hopkins died on June 8, 1889, just six weeks short of his 45th birthday. He was diagnosed with typhus, but Mariani suspects it was complicated by Crohn’s disease, a sickness unnamed until 1932. Hopkins’s last words, repeated over and over, were an affirmation—or a plea to himself: “I am so happy. I am so happy.” He died unheralded and unpublished, and it was not until 1918 that Oxford University Press published an edition of 750 copies of the poems edited and introduced by his old friend, England’s then poet laureate, Robert Bridges.
A decade before his death, however, Hopkins ruminated on the question of fame in an exchange of correspondence with his friend, fellow poet, and Anglican cleric Richard Watson Dixon. “Fame,” Hopkins wrote, “is a thing which lies in the award of a random, reckless, incompetent, and unjust judge, the public, the multitude. The only just judge, the only just literary critic is Christ, who prizes, is proud of, and admires, more than any man, more than the receiver himself can, the gifts of his own making.”
Nearly a century later, John Berryman, a poet as singular as Hopkins, would appropriate Hopkins in one his last poems, a poem of his own religious conversion: 
Father Hopkins said the only true literary critic is Christ. Let me lie down exhausted, content with that.
“To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life”: in this line, Hopkins could have been speaking of the treatment he has received from his biographers.
The grandeur of God both sustains him and consumes him:
[T]his way of seeing into the heart of things would eventually cost him everything, for it would mean giving himself over to this new reality, deeper and more satisfying than anything he had ever felt, an unbearable lightness everywhere about us, and only the insulation of self-preoccupation keeping the self from feeling its staggering, terrifying sweetness and tenderness...           –Review of Mariani’s Biography of Hopkins 
    Ev'n sweeter yet their grace notes... Walter de la Mare, ‘The Rapids’, The Burning-Glass 
Rain drying on the slates shines sometimes.
A builder is repairing someone's leaking roof.
He kneels upright to rest his back.
His trowel catches the light and becomes precious.  ~Douglas Dunn, Roofs on Terry Street
How cold it is!’
And on the roof-tiles a savage bird will cry.  -César Vallejo 
¡Dejadme entrar! ¡Vengo helada      
por paredes y cristales!                     
¡Abrir tejados y pechos                    
donde pueda calentarme!                  
¡Tengo frío! Mis cenizas                   
de soñolientos metales                      
buscan la cresta del fuego                 
por los montes y las calles.           ~Federico Garcia Lorca, from Soliloquy of the Moon 

WHEN the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,  

"He was a man who used to notice such things"?

If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink,
The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,
"To him this must have been a familiar sight."

If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
One may say, "He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm,
But he could do little for them; and now he is gone."

If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand. at the door,
Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees,
Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,
"He was one who had an eye for such mysteries"?

And will any say when my bell of quittance¹ is heard in the gloom,             
And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its out-rollings,
Till they rise again, as they were a new bell's boom,
"He hears it not now, but used to notice such things"?  ~Thomas Hardy, ‘Afterward’ 

[1] Church bell tolling for the dead  
Mass at Dawn 

I dropped my sail and dried my dripping seines
Where the white quay is chequered by cool planes
In whose great branches, always out of sight,
The nightingales are singing day and night.
Though all was grey beneath the moon’s grey beam,
My boat in her new paint shone like a bride,
And silver in my baskets shone the bream:
My arms were tired and I was heavy-eyed,
But when with food and drink, at morning-light,
The children met me at the water-side,
Never was wine so red or bread so white.         ~Roy Campbell
There are cooler nights in the mountain now, Fall’s messenger of change, but there have been dramatic upheavals hidden in the nether springs. September slips in under the August sun. The Sabbath rises quietly. 
Come! Descend
And offer me drink
Of stinging, falling tears
Assuage the thirst of my burning lips
Come! I thirst!              ~©Feast of the Transfiguration

Pied Beauty

Glory
 be to God for dappled things--
   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
       For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
   Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough;
       And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                                     Praise Him.

I Grasp God’s Garment in the Void

I Grasp God’s Garment in the Void
Excerpt:
...Levertov, Dana Greene says, saw herself as a pilgrim in exile or living on the borderland. This was in part because of her parents: her mother was Welsh, her father a Hassidic Jew from Russia who converted to Christianity. Dana says that, although Levertov announced early in life that she was an agnostic, she was influenced by her father’s Hassidic roots and inspired by a copy of Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim that he gave her. As a result, she saw divine sparks of God everywhere and talked about poems as temples and herself as a poet priest. She saw a deep connection between prayer and poetry, noting that they run on parallel tracks and grow out of solitude and quiet.
Note how her poem “Suspended” functions as a kind of prayer:
SUSPENDED
I had grasped God’s garment in the void
But my hand slipped...

Christ the Poet

“The Child Christ lives on from generation to generation in the poets, very often the frailest of [mortals], but [mortals]  whose frailty is redeemed by a child’s unworldliness, by a child’s delight in loveliness, by the spirit of wonder.

Christ was a poet, and all through his life the Child remains perfect in him. It was the poet, the unworldly poet, who was king of the invisible kingdom; the priests and rulers could not understand that. The poets understand it, and they, too, are kings of the invisible kingdom, vassal kings of the Lord of Love, and their crowns are crowns of thorns indeed.”–Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God

An Excerpt from Caryll Houselander: Essential Writings, selected with commentary by Wendy M. Wright

Supremacy and Survival: The English Reformation: Hopkins' "Binsey Poplars" Manuscript

Supremacy and Survival: The English Reformation: Hopkins' "Binsey Poplars" Manuscript
Excerpt:
Binsey Poplars' was written in response to the felling of trees running alongside the Thames in Binsey, a village on the west side of the city of Oxford. Hopkins had been an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, and was a curate at St Aloysius Church in the city at the time he wrote the poem. The trees were replanted after the poem was first published in 1918 (the poem seems to anticipate the ravages of the Great War), and there was an outcry when they were felled again in 2004. The poem formed part of the successful campaign to replant the trees. The poem has a very particular local meaning but speaks to a much broader audience in its plaintive evocation of spiritual desolation through the destruction of nature.

MY aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.
O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew—
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being só slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc únselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.

sono io

sono io (--never io sono)                 

                                A wreck of whale bones..      ~Elizabeth Bishop   

                       "You'll sometimes find that one or two
                        Are all you really need
                        To let the wind come whistling through -
                        But HERE there'll be a lot to do!"
                         I faintly gasped "Indeed!       ~Lewis Carroll, Phantasmagoria

 

How many lemons do you need? He said.
Three, no four.  I said.  The size of these!
Two, then, will do.
We’ll talk now of Emily. . . 
(...what is it you feel? I can’t feel that.”) 
We are lucky to have Alice with us, too
Bees buzzing near— ripping paper bread
Three, no four.  I said.  The heft of these!
Two, then, will do.

We’ll talk now of Federico... 
(The bell-rope that gathers God at dawn 
Dispatches me as though I dropped down the knell...) 
We are lucky to have Roberto with us, too
Black and brown bag sacks falling behind
Three, no four. I said.  The drag of these!
Two, then, will do.

We’ll talk now of Elizabeth.  .. . 
(...where Threadneedle-street abuts upon Bishopsgate...) 
We are lucky to have Deborah...or did...too
World maps, compasses, flagging banners
Three, no four, I said.  The whirr of these!
Two, then, will do.

We’ll talk now of Vladimir..  ...  .. 
(“…spoke of the vagaries of photographic portraiture, as he sees them..) 
 We are lucky to have Pierre with us, as well
Frayed cuffs and frangible residue of ashes
Three, no four, I said.  The tone of these!
Two, then, will do.

We’ll talk now of Elliot... 
("Memory is a wilful dog. It won't be summoned or dismissed but it cannot survive without you.")  
We are lucky to have Mészöly with us, as well
Three, no four, I said.  The trapping of these!
Two, then, will do.

We’ll talk now of  Elie... 
(“As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw flame.”) 
We are lucky to have Radnóti with us, as well 
Where all the ladders begin knee deep in mire
Three, no four, I said.    The fire of these!
Two, then, will do.    

We’ll talk now of John... 
(`Not this, nor that, nor that, but faith’...) 
We are lucky to have Gerard with us, as well
Biting desert Socorros and little brass bells
three, no four, I said.  The wild plumb of these!
Two, then, will do.   ~4/20/13

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…