Inversnaid

Excerpt from Advanced Poetry journal site:

Inversnaid

This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

This was the first Hopkins poem I ever encountered, and I still find it delicious. The addition of accents combined with the ancient-seeming vocabulary makes this poem seem like it is from another vThe accents draw attention to words that are already of interest because of the “f” alliteration. The rhyme scheme is tight, but avoids being sing-song. According to the OED, “twindle” is a verb coined by Hopkins—likely a communion of “twist” and “dwindle.” The language in the poem mirrors the motions of the burn (another word for a spring or brook), until the final stanza when the poem slows down to appeal to the reader on nature’s behalf.

I had a nightmare...

[Roehampton] Sept. 18---At the Kensington Museum.---also of Michael Angelo’s paintings at the Vatican: the might, with which I was more deeply struck than ever before, though this was in the dark side of the courts and I could not see well…a masterly realism…: there is the simplifying and strong emphasizing of anatomy of Rubens….in Raphael…Velasquez, but here force came together from both sides---

   I had a nightmare that night.  I thought something or someone leapt onto me and held me quite fast: this I think woke me, so that after this I shall have had the use of reason.  This first start is, I think, a nervous collapse of the same sort when one is very tired and holding oneself at stress not to sleep yet/…..only on a greater scale and with a loss of muscular control reaching more or less deep; this one to the chest and not further…the seat of themós.  …It made me think of how the souls in hell would be imprisoned in their bodies as in prisons and of what St. Theresa wrote of the ‘the little press in the wall’ where she felt herself to be in her vision.  ~Hopkins, ‘Journal’, pp.218-219

St. Faustina and Sr. Marie of St. Peter both spoke of the same experience.

=================

There have been quite a few treatises I have studied on the 'inner' experiences of Hopkins, all of which have a particular flavor, slant and most of the time, bias.  The last post which aligned Hopkins with Lacan has been weighing on my thoughts.  Lacan himself had difficulty with Freud's 'drive'.  There is so much more to God's creation, man and woman,...created in His Image. Then, I remembered something I had read:

The Religious Affiliation of Luis Buñuel

Surrealism and Communism were also driving influences for Buñuel during much of his life; both movements functioned essentially as his religion at various times. Along with celebrated painter Salvador Dali, Buñuel the filmmaker was considered a leader of the Surrealist movement. Ironically, while Buñuel grew up as a devout Catholic and left Catholicism as a young man, Salvador Dali became a devout convert to Catholicism later in life.

From: John Baxter, Buñuel, Carroll & Graf Publishers: New York City (1994),…

Like Hopkins Buñuel had a penchant for asceticism.  He had been schooled by Spanish Jesuits…. “Physically and spiritually Buñuel lived always in exile, fleeing from a Spain and a Church which, nevertheless, as his films made obvious, lurked always at his shoulder.”

'Luis, it's curious,' [Serge]Silberman said. 'You were born in Zaragoza, you're Catholic; you were brought up by the Jesuits. Me, I was born on the border of Poland and Russia; I was brought up by lay Jews, and yet look at us; we understand one another.'

There is considerable material in Buñuel 's autobiography about his support of Communism, which he eventually rejected. Here is one excerpt, from My Last Sigh: The Autobiography of Luis Buñuel, page 166:

I remained sympathetic to the Communist party until the end of the 1950s, when I finally had to confront my revulsion. Fanaticism of any kind has always repelled me, and Marxism was no exception; it was like any other religion that claims to have found the truth. In the 1930s, for instance, Marxist doctrine permitted no mention of the unconscious mind or of the numerous and profound psychological forces in the individual. Everything could be explained, they said, by socioeconomic mechanisms, a notion that seemed perfectly derisory to me. A doctrine like that leaves out at least half of the human being.

I could say this of the poets Lorca and Campbell and Hopkins: 

…Born in the black aurora of disaster,
Can look a common soldier in the face:
I find a comrade where I sought a master :
For daily, while the stinking crocodiles
Glide from the mangroves on the swampy shore,
He shares my awning on the dhow, he smiles,
And tells me that he lived it all before.
Through fire and shipwreck, pestilence and loss,
Led by the ignis fatuus of duty
To a dog’s death — yet of his sorrows king —
He shouldered high his voluntary Cross,
Wrestled his hardships into forms of beauty,
And taught his gorgon destinies to sing. ~Roy Campbell, Luis de Camões

 

Musings on 'The Wreck...'

Victorians in theory: from Derrida to Browning By John Schad p.146   notes... 

[Where Hopkins was, there Lacan will be]

             ‘The whole of history’, writes Marx in 1844, ‘is a preparation, a development, for “man” to become the object of sensuous consciousness’ [And you wonder why he is liked?] (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in Karl Marx: Early Writings…The conceit of the conscious body, I am suggesting, is latent in the writings of the early Marx.  As Terry Eagleton has recently argued, Marxism is very much part of the modern attempt ‘to…think everything through again…from the standpoint of the body’ (The Ideology of the Aesthetic [Oxford: Blackwell, 1990]---a claim that again finds support from the …MS…when Marx asserts that ‘the suppression of private property is…the complete emancipation of all human senses’ (351)… Freud, Gesammelte Werke (London: Imago, 1940), 15.86; Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 33/34; Hopkins, ‘The Lantern out of Doors’.

            Hopkins writes, in a letter to Robert Bridges, “I have little reason to be Red:  it was the red Commune that murdered five of our fathers lately’…

            As Jesus says: “You will know them by their fruits.”  The lanterns outside the doors are false.

            And here is further evidence of the twists in the captivity of the ‘dimensions of alienation’:

            God’s Sleep

               The task [of interpreting the unconscious] is made no easier by the fact that we are at the mercy of a thread woven with allusions, quotations, puns, and equivocations.  (Lacan)

            It seems true…that you can trace your dreams to something or other in your waking life…But the connection may be capricious, almost punning: I remember in one case to have detected a real pun but what it was I forget.  (Hopkins)3

            …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

            …Given the poet’s ‘aspirations to anonymity’,5 we might take from ‘Andromeda’ the formula ‘no one dreams’ as an epigram for Hopkins.   p.116

            p.117   That, in effect, is what several critics have done.  Daniel Harris remarks that the terrible sonnets ‘verge…towards nightmare’; Robert Martin talks of the ‘chaos of [the]…unconscious within…an exigent verse form’; and Hillis Miller observes that, ‘as in the opium dreams of De Quincey, Hopkins’ time of desolation is elastic’.6  In his work on The Wreck of the Deutschland Walter Ong also lays, or breaks, the ground for our discussion.  …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

            …One critic who certainly prompts us to read The Wreck as a dream-text is David Shaw, who points out moments in which it is ‘as if [the poet]…were suffering from…aphasia’10---at times a similarity-disorder (‘where, where was a, where was a place?’), at other times a continguity-disorder (‘the Master/Ipse, the only one, Christ, King, Head’).  According to Lacan, these disorders constitute---as metaphor and metonymy, respectively---characteristic features of the unconscious.11  In The Wreck, the unconscious most obviously surfaces through the biblical story of Christ asleep in the midst of a terrible storm:

               If the unconscious, namely Christ’s, is in some sense crucial to the sea-storm, might it not also have to do with the poem’s aphasic storm of metaphor and metonymy?....an encounter with ‘the dark side of the bay of thy blessing’ (st. 12)?  Does the poem confront not only ‘the storm of his strides’ (st.33) but the storm of his dreams?

               To represent God, albeit in Christ, as unconscious is to make a radical departure from traditional…For the Victorians, however, it was possible, in the wake of Romanticism’s privileging of the irrational, to imagine a quite different God.  [Thus the socialistic -atheistic desire to reduce God to a mere projection of a man’s unconscious, which Joseph Campbell has carried to the extreme.]

A Letter and a Handkerchief: 'Here is a fragment of a line I remember....'

A Letter: Hopkins: To Bridges: Stonyhurst College, Blackburn.  Oct. 18, 1882   p.254

Dearest Bridges, ---I have read of Whitman’s (1) ‘Pete’ in the library…(2) two pieces in the Athenaeum or Academy, one on the Man-of-War Bird, the other beginning ‘Spirit that formed this scene’; (3) short extracts in a review by Saintsbury in the Academy:….

   This, though very little, is quite enough to give a strong impression of his marked and original manner and way of thought and in particular his rhythm.  It might be enough, I shall not deny, to originate or, much more, influence another’s style: they say the French trace their whole modern school of landscape to a single piece of Constable’s* exhibited at the Salon early this century. 

[*Notes: Constable.  ‘The Hay Wain,’ ‘A View near London’, and ‘The Lock on the Stour’ were exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1824. (p.395)]

   The question then is only about the fact.  But first I may as well say what I should not otherwise have said, that I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like my own than any other man’s living.  As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession…

   …The pieces of his I read were mostly in an irregular rhythmic prose: that is what they are thought be meant for and what they seemed to me to be.  Here is a fragment of a line I remember: ‘or a handkerchief designedly dropped’.*  This is in a dactylic rhythm---or let us say anapestic…[*or a handkerchief.  See Saintsbury’s review (L I, note P). (p.395)]

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, sword and 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 wear-
y of idle a being but by where wars are rife.

And I am in Ireland now; now I am at a third
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,
Heard unheeded, leaves me a lonely began.
[ibid.p.166]

Inscaping the Heart

from Hopkins: Inscaping the Heart

(the Terrible Sonnets)

In 1884, in the lonely began of Dublin Hopkins underwent a spiritual crisis far more stormy and wrecking than the one he had experienced as an Oxford student. Recorded in the terrible sonnets, the rendering of the experience of the dark night of the soul owes some of its frightening power to the depiction of the heart. Being mastered again, tested in its acceptance of Thy terror, O Christ, O God, the heart finds itself enveloped by the darkness of confusion blurring the difference between heaven and hell. Although, as made clear in To seem the stranger (1885), it was viewed as the main source of wisdom and creativity, now all the heart's attempts miscarrry, stifled by hell's spell or baffled by the ominously dark heavens. Under the siege of such enemies the heart closes itself to them and in this remove of its own doing, deprived of any outside help, it must cope with its fears and resentment completely alone.
The torment intensifies in I wake and feel (1885), where, the dis-incarnate (cf. Harris, 55), despairing poet, enters into a relation with his own heart. On the one hand he perceives it as part of the space of the self into which he has plunged and through which he gropes. On the other hand, the heart appears to him a separate entity, a companion - perhaps the Sacred Heart of Jesus - (cf. Goggin, 93) independent enough to explore the horrors of darkness going its own ways.

Estranged from the self-torturing poet, though still retaining its role of an addressee, the heart becomes the witness of Hopkins's negative metamorphosis. Like a rebel, dogged in a den, having forgotten that every dark descending is of God's doing, the man, alienated from his heart, and therefore no longer truly human, can perceive and interpret reality only in a fragmented, defective way Burning with its gall, poisoned by the sin of pride, the heart becomes an impenetrable border which not only does not allow for any divine intervention, but also prevents Hopkins from meeting and communicating with his truest self.

Patience, hard thing (1885) provides another insight into the man's natural heart which emerges as a peculiar cemetary of hopes, whose ruins are masked by Patience. Allied with the elective rather than affective will, the heart's very special inhabitant eventualy causes the war within which, fought between the man's instinctive and religious selves, brings about his spiritual maturity. The fight's painful intensity is effectively rendered by the sound of grating and it is to this accompaniment that the man's rebellious wills are bent, thus completing the process of reforging of the heart. Now the wisdom instilled through dear bruising will teach man to accept God on God's terms.

Complete again, wiser for another toss he has taken, filled with patience and hope, the poet can finally instruct his heart:

My own heart let me more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable, not live this tormented mind
xWith this tormented mind tormenting yet. (102)

After the promise of God's smile and the clear skies Betweenpie mountains, the darkness sets anew in Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves (1886), where the disintegration of the dismembered and disremembered world is additionally marked by the split between the poet and his heart. This separation, enhanced by the heart's double status (the poems' speaker and its addressee) is further emphasized by the multiple use of our.

Heart, you round me right
With:

Our evening is over us; our night whelms, whelms, and will end us.(97)

However, despite their physical alienation, the man and the heart seem to experience a unique sense of togetherness, spiritually bound by the dark truth to the earth's dapple being at its end. Of the two remaining witnesses of the catastrophe, it is the heart that emerges as a moral authority, and taking its last chance to rebuke and warn, it spells ... Our tale, O our oracle -- demonstrating that everything in man's life oscillates round the fundamental choice between good and evil. Listening to the heart's whisper, accepting the rebuke he feels to be rightly given, the man clings to the oracle-stirred hope: that even in the face of the imminent end of all creation, the choice of the white spool can save man from the doom of a rack and its eternal torment.

The epitome of Hopkins's priestly conscience, concerned, like his sacramental poems first and foremost with the fate of the world, the heart fulfills its duty to the last. Its didactic preoccupations become evident in On the Portrait of Two Beautiful People (1886), where the priestly heart's eye grieves, discovering how easily man's beauty can be corrupted by sin if it is not entrusted to Christ. Pained by this truth, by the self-torture inflicted when his heart strains beyond his ken, and almost ready to give up, father Hopkins realizes how fundamental for his vocation it is to bear my burning witness... / Against the wild and wanton work of men. If it were deprived of the passionate intensity which keeps it burning, the heart would prove worthless as light for all the world it was chosen to become...

Carrion Comfort

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 choose not to be.

But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me

Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan

With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,

O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?

   Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.

Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,

Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.

Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród

Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year

Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

Source: Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985)
Posted by poetryfoundation.org

O the mind, mind has mountains...

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,

More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.

Comforter, where, where is your comforting?

Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?

My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief

Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing —

Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked ‘No ling-

ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief’.

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

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

May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small

Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,

Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all

Life death does end and each day dies with sleep   [ibid.p.167]

On the Terrible Sonnets

Hopkin’s “terrible sonnets” of 1885, the bitter fruit of his pained years in Dublin, culminate his sporadic career as a poet.  These six sonnets have attracted more attention than any of his other works except The Wreck of the Deutschland (1875-1876) and “The Windhover” (1877).  In all their brevity, they command a respect accorded greatness that can scarcely be claimed of any comparably small group of poems in Victorian or modern British literature.  It must therefore seem odd, if not perverse, to write of them….as failures.  An explanation is in order.

…Hopkins saw in these poems the fragmentation of his capacity to represent his Christian vision adequately; he took their radical shift in imaginative procedure, as measured against his earlier work, to be the mark of his decline.  As he wrote frankly to his lifelong friend Robert Bridges, the poems came to him “like inspirations unbidden and against my will.”  Hopkins oxymoronic simile, loaded with nuance, is not only a religious confession but the implied statement of an aesthetic position.  Although he derived his phrase from Shelley (“To a Skylark,” stanza 8), he here winced at Shelley’s delight in the spontaneity of “hymns unbidden.”  By “unbidden,” Hopkins meant “unwanted.”  The six sonnets did not manifest that penetrating delineation, that inscaping of Christ in nature which had formerly been his joy; nor did they serve a communal function by implicitly ministering to an imagined congregation.  The poems verged towards nightmare:

....He must have had some sense of their poetic merit, whatever their spiritual worth; for he subjected them neither to neglect nor to burning (as he had most of the poetry written prior to his conversion) but to extensive revision.  And he had the courage to revise with an eye for literary excellence, not conformity with religious convention.  If one or two muddled images mar the poems (notably in “Patience”). they are the minute but significant indications that the spiritual crisis which promped the poems left its mark upon his craftsmanship.  But there is precious little here that evinces any diminution in power of conception, diversity in technical skill, or emotional range in delineating the soul’s operations.  Indeed, the “terrible sonnets” show a sudden and darkly brilliant heightening in Hopkins’s scope and linguistic incisiveness.  It is an irony in his tragic life that the “inspirations unbidden” he could not entirely accept have generally achieved a fame far greater than the poems of which he approved....

~

The ‘terrible sonnets’---“Carrion Comfort,” “No Worst, There Is None,” “To Seem the Stranger,” “I Wake and Feel,” “Patience,” and “My Own Heart” 1---are unique in Hopkins’s canon; it is both rare and provocative to find so abrupt an alteration as these poems represent.   

Inspirations Unbidden: The “Terrible Sonnets” of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Daniel A. Harris, Univ. CA Press, 1982

Preface:xiii-xv

 

Counterpointed

Excerpts from letter:

To Richard Watson Dixon
111 Mount Street, Grosvenor Square, W.                                   Oct. 5 1878.

But I wrote a shorter piece on the Eurydice, also in ‘sprung rhythm’, as I call it, but simpler, shorter, and without marks, and offered the Month that too, but they did not like it either. Also I have written some sonnets and a few other little things; some in sprung rhythm, with various other experiments—as ‘outriding feet’, that is parts of which do not count in the scanning (such as you find in Shakspere’s later plays, but as a licence, whereas mine are rather calculated effects); others in the ordinary scanning counterpointed (this is counterpoint: ‘Hóme to his móther’s hóuse prívate retúrned’ and ‘Bút to vánquish by wísdom héllish wíles’ etc); others, one or two, in common uncounterpointed rhythm. But even the impulse to write is wanting, for I have no thought of publishing.
I should add that Milton is the great standard in the use of counterpoint. In Paradise Lost and Regained, in the last more freely, it being an advance in his art, he employs counterpoint more or less everywhere, markedly now and then; but the choruses of Samson Agonistes are in my judgment counterpointed throughout; that is, each line (or nearly so) has two different coexisting scansions. But when you reach that point the secondary or ‘mounted rhythm’, which is necessarily a sprung rhythm, overpowers the original or conventional one and then this becomes superfluous and may be got rid of; by taking that last step you reach simple sprung rhythm. Milton must have known this but had reasons for not taking it.   ~Hopkins, from A New Sacramental Poetry

The Handsome Heart

from American Poetry Review, September / October 2009

I think then no one can admire the beauty of the body more than I do, and it is of course a comfort to find beauty in a friend or a friend in beauty. But this kind of beauty is dangerous. Then comes the beauty of the mind, such as genius, and this is greater than the beauty of the body and not to call dangerous. And more beautiful than the beauty of the mind is the beauty of the character, the "handsome heart."

—Gerard Manley Hopkins,
in a letter to Robert Bridges, October 25, 1879

 I.  What happens when a poet goes silent?...

It is impossible to imagine Gerard Manley Hopkins forging his sensual works without the anvil of his silences. His silences took three forms.  First, the permanent longing that haunts the poems is unequivocally connected to the hands of a Jesuit who kept a vow of celibacy...

Second, the engines of Hopkins's sonnets run on the elected muteness of his decision not to write for seven years in his early priesthood. In an early letter to Robert Bridges, his closest friend, he writes, "What I had written I burnt before I became a Jesuit and resolved to write no more, as not belonging to my profession, unless it were the wish of my superiors; so for seven years I wrote nothing but two or three little presentation pieces." In 1875, when he finally allowed himself to write poems, at the bequest of his rector, he wrote his early masterpiece "The Wreck of The Deutschland." This early refusal launched the rest of his writing days, which lasted the next fourteen years. The writing,  electric, ecstatic, was shared with few...

Third, he chose to remain unpublished. AIthough he sought to publish "The Wreck of The Deutschland" through a Jesuit publication anonymously, the poem was eventually rejected. After that, he discouraged nearly all publications unless approved by his Jesuit superiors. But this deliberate muzzling created a foolproof endgame, so that as long as he lived he blocked his poems from the world, for he must have known his obscure, intimate spiritual contraptions were unlikely to pass under Jesuit noses without complaint. The cloister of silence he built around his poems contributed to their eccentric, private grace and this rages still through the anthologies. It was not that Hopkins stopped writing, it was that he stopped communicating: the more his lips closed, the more his poems opened. That he did not live to see himself appreciated remains a bittersweet insight. ...

Hopkins wrote to Bridges, who was constantly chiding him for his obscurity, "Take breath and read [my poems] with the ears, as I always wish to be read, and my verse becomes alright."

h/t Poetry Daily Prose Feature: Spencer Review

The Soldier

Yes. Why do we áll, séeing of a soldier, bless him? bléss
Our redcoats, our tars? Both these being, the greater part,
But frail clay, nay but foul clay. Hére it is: the heart,
Since, proud, it calls the calling manly, gives a guess
That, hopes that, mákesbelieve, the men must be no less;
It fancies, feigns, deems, déars the artist after his art;
And fain will find as sterling all as all is smart,
And scarlet wéar the spirit of war thére express.

Mark Christ our King. He knows war, served this soldiering through;
He of all can handle a rope best. There he bides in bliss
Now, and séeing somewhére some mán do all that man can do,
For love he léans forth, needs his neck must fall on, kiss,
And cry 'O Christ-done deed! So God-made-flesh does too:
Were I come o'er again' cries Christ 'it should be this'. 
[ibid.p.168]

...the buds are slow...

To Oxford

As Devonshire letters, earlier in the year

Than we in the East dare look for buds, disclose

Smells that are sweeter-memoriéd than the rose,

And presséd violets in the folds appear,

So it is with my friends, I note, to hear

News from Belleisle, even such a sweetness blows^o

(I know, knowing not) across from those

Meadows to them inexplicably dear.

‘As when a soul laments, which hath been blest’---^o

And undivulgéd love does overflow.

~Fr. Hopkins

…disabling cold,

And hunting winds and the long-lying snow.

Is it a wonder if the buds are slow?

Or where is strength to make the leaf unfold?

Chilling remembrance of my days of old

Afflicts no less, what yet I hope may blow,

That seed which the good sower once did sow,

So loading with obstruction that threshold ^o

~Fr. Hopkins, from ‘See How Spring Opens’

=============

Ah no!..............

I know of the bored and bitten rocks

Not so far outward in the sea:…..

~Fr. Hopkins, from ‘Continuation of R. Garnett’s Nix’

[ibid. pp.68-69]

31. The grain of God. « Catholic Ponderer

31. The grain of God. « Catholic Ponderer
Excerpt:

31.

Well, she has thee for the pain, for the
Patience; but pity of the rest of them!
Heart, go and bleed at a bitterer vein for the
Comfortless unconfessed of them―
No not uncomforted: lovely-felicitous Providence
Finger of a tender of, O of a feathery delicacy, the breast of the
Maiden could obey so, be a bell to, ring of it, and
Startle the poor sheep back! is the shipwrack then a harvest, does tempest carry the grain for thee?

The Wreck of the Deutschland
...I picture father Hopkins leaning forward, and in a tranquil low voice say: “Well, here’s how it is”.

And then he pities all those unconfessed souls, the ones outside of Christs compassion… And there he stops himself. No man is out of Christ’s compassion. There is nothing Christ would love more than having these souls convert their ways and come to him.

Then father Hopkins paints the image of a bird, of feathery delicacy, named Providence: Perhaps, he asks, this was the final way God could reach some of those – until then – lost souls? The path that leads the sheep back to the herd. The dove that lead Noah to land? The nun as a summoning bell.

Let Providence gather the lost so that they convert their ways and give their souls to Christ. Let the tempest reap their souls.

Perhaps the storm was the only grain that could help them grow closer to God?...

Parnassian

. I think then the language of verse may be divided into three kinds. The first and highest is poetry proper, the language of inspiration. The word inspiration need cause no difficulty. I mean by it a mood of great, abnormal in fact, mental acuteness, either energetic or receptive, according as the thoughts which arise in it seem generated by a stress and action of the brain, or to strike into it unasked. This mood arises from various causes, physical generally, as good health or state of the air or, prosaic as it is, length of time after a meal. But I need not go into this; all that it is needful to mark is, that the poetry of inspiration can only be written in this mood of mind, even if it only last a minute, by poets themselves. Everybody of course has like moods, but not being poets what they then produce is not poetry. The second kind I call Parnassian. It can only be spoken by poets, but it is not in the highest sense poetry. It does not require the mood of mind in which the poetry of inspiration is written. It is spoken on and from the level of a poet’s mind, not, as in the other case, when the inspiration which is the gift of genius, raises him above himself. For I think it is the case with genius that it is not when quiescent so very much above mediocrity as the difference between the two might lead us to think, but that it has the power and privilege of rising from that level to a height utterly far from mediocrity: in other words that its greatness is that it can be so great. You will understand. Parnassian then is that language which genius speaks as fitted to its exaltation, and place among other genius, but does not sing (I have been betrayed into the whole hog of a metaphor) in its flights. Great men, poets I mean, have each their own dialect as it were of Parnassian, formed generally as they go on writing, and at last,—this is the point to be marked,—they can see things in this Parnassian way and describe them in this Parnassian tongue, without further effort of inspiration. In a poet’s particular kind of Parnassian lies most of his style, of his manner, of his mannerism if you like. But I must not go farther without giving you instances of Parnassian. I shall take one from Tennyson, and from Enoch Arden, from a passage much quoted already and which will be no doubt often quoted, the description of Enoch’s tropical island.
             The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns
          And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven,
          The slender coco’s drooping crown of plumes,
          The lightning flash of insect and of bird,
          The lustre of the long convolvuluses
          That coil’d around the stately stems, and ran
          Ev’n to the limit of the land, the glows
          And glories of the broad belt of the world,
          All these he saw.                               [II. 572—80]

Now it is a mark of Parnassian that one could conceive oneself writing it if one were the poet. Do not say that if you were Shakespear you can imagine yourself writing Hamlet, because that is just what I think you cannot conceive. In a fine piece of inspiration every beauty takes you as it were by surprise, not of course that you did not think the writer could be so great, for that is not it,—indeed I think it is a mistake to speak of people admiring Shakespear more and more as they live, for when the judgment is ripe and you have read a good deal of any writer including his best things, and carefully, then, I think, however high the place you give him, that you must have rated him equally with his merits however great they be; so that all after admiration cannot increase but keep alive this estimate, make his greatness stare into your eyes and din it into your ears, as it were, but not make it greater,—but to go on with the broken sentence, every fresh beauty could not in any way be predicted or accounted for by what one has already read. But in Parnassian pieces you feel that if you were the poet... 

from letter: To Alexander William Mowbray Baillie, Sept. 10. 1864.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, from Gerard Manley Hopkins: Selected Letters. Copyright © 1990 by Oxford University Press, Ltd. 

Binsey Poplars

felled 1879

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 so 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 unselve 
The sweet especial scene, 
Rural scene, a rural scene, 
Sweet especial rural scene. 

The Times Are Nightfall

The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less;
The times are winter, watch, a world undone:
They waste, they wither worse; they as they run
Or bring more or more blazon man’s distress.
And I not help. Nor word now of success:
All is from wreck, here, there, to rescue one–
Work which to see scarce so much as begun
Makes welcome death, does dear forgetfulness.
Or what is else? There is your world within.
There rid the dragons, root out there the sin.
Your will is law in that small commonweal .
[ibid. p.161]

The Windover

The Windhover

To Christ our Lord

(Note that this dedication to Christ address Him directly and makes him part of the poem)

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
this morning I caught [sight of] the minion or servant of the morning, [who is] the dauphin, or crown-prince,
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
of the Kingdom of Daylight — — a falcon spotted or dappled by the dawn as he was riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
the steady air over the rolling hills or land and as he was striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
high up in the sky. Howin his ectasy he halted with his wings as if he were pulling back on a horse's reins,
In his ecstacy! then off, off forth on swing.
Then, he would launch himself again [as a child] on a swing.
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on bow-bend: the hurl and the gliding
[In the same way that] a skater's heel smoothly sweeps around a curve [when skating figures], the
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
bird's hurling itself against the wind and then gliding with it, rebuffed and conquered that powerful natural
Stirred for a bird, — the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
force. My heart, which had been in hiding (from WHAT?), stirred itself — became excited for the bird's achievement and power, for its mastery of natural forces.

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Then, at this point, all the bird's brute, animal beauty, courage, and — oh! — his proud air and feathers
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
buckle or crumple! And the fire (the bright red of the bird's chest feathers as well as higher beauty)
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
is a billion times lovely and more dangeorus [that the earlier mastery of natural forces that the hawk had show in his gliding, oh my chevalier (knight).

No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
The fact that [the beauty of falling, danger, and descent is greater than the beauty of power] should not surprise us, because nature abounds with other instances of this higher principle: (1) simple plodding work of the ploughman makes the plough shine from its polishing against the cut earth and also makes the sillion, cut
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear
earth, shine, and [similarly] (2) bleak-looking embers [in a stove or fireplace], ah my dear[Christ],
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
when they fall and hurt themselves also break open and the gashes reveal the beauty of red and gold.
written: 1877
published: 1918
[Posted from Victorian Web: A Reading of Gerard Manley Hopkins's "The Windover"

A Fingerpost

from Letter: To Bridges  Stonyhurst, Blackburn.  May 30, 1878
...I want the stanza corrected thus:
   Look, foot to forelock, how all things suit! he
   Is strung by duty, is trained to beauty,
         And brown-as-dawning-skinned
   With brine and shine and whirling wind.

   The difficulty about the Milky Way is perhaps because you do not know the allusion: it is in Catholic times Walsingham Way was a name for the Milky Way, as being supposed a fingerpost to our Lady's shrine at Walsingham.
...I shall never have leisure or desire to write much.  There is one thing I should like to get done; an ode on the Vale of Clwyd...     [ibid. The Major Works, pp.233-234]

A Divine Spark: 'Poetry As Sacrament'

. . . My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, -- the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
The Windhover

                                 2

                I did say yes

            O at lightning and lashed rod;

        Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess

            Thy terror, O Christ, O God;

    Thou knowest the walls, altar and hour and night:

    The swoon of a heart that the sweep and the hurl of thee trod

        Hard down with a horror of height:

 And the midriff astrain with leaning of, laced with fire of stress.

                               3

                The frown of his face

            Before me, the hurtle of hell

        Behind, where, where was a, where was a place?

            I whirled out wings that spell

    And fled with a fling of the heart to the heart of the Host.

     The Wreck of the Deutschland

“… when in the winter of '75 the Deutschland was wrecked in the mouth of the Thames and five Franciscan nuns, exiles from Germany by the Falck Laws, aboard of her were drowned I was affected by the account and happening to say so to my rector he said that he wished someone would write a poem on the subject. On this hint I set to work and, though my hand was out at first, produced one. I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm which now I realized on paper."

The result is an ode of thirty-five eight-line stanzas, divided into two parts. The first part, consisting of ten stanzas, is autobiographical, recalling how God touched the speaker in his own life....

Ideas of Inscape and Instress

E. Ruskin and Hopkins’ Ideas of Inscape and Instress

   As we have noted, Hopkins first used his characteristic aesthetic terms, inscape and instress, in the 1868 notes on the philosopher Parmenides which he made while teaching at Newman’s Oratory School in Birmingham.  There is no indication that the terms were specifically derived from or inspired by Parmenides.  In fact, they appear to be familiar terms to Hopkins when he first wrote them….It is…not unlikely that these terms, while exhibiting a Ruskinian core, were created by Hopkins in the context of his study of classical Greek philosophy. 69  As Fike suggests, perhaps the term inscape is a cognate of the Greek verb skopein (to look attentively) or the noun skopos (that upon which one fixes his or her look). 70  In any case, the essential point is that Hopkins’ use of inscape implies many of the elements of Ruskinian aesthetics discussed above.  It implies unity and, in that unity, the typical form by which one species of thing is distinguished from other species.  It also implies individual forma which distinguishes an individual object form other objects of the same kind.  As Fike states:

   The term is thus designed to cover precisely the discovery that Hopkins had made at the climax of his attempt to train himself as an artist;  namely, that there are individual characteristics in an oak, for example, which make it unlike any other oak in existence.  There was no term in English to express this kind of reality, so Hopkins coined a term.  Regularity and irregularity are thus implied in the term….”71

   The idea of inscape, then arose out of Hopkins’ aesthetic concerns and, as we have seen, his aesthetics were shaped by Ruskin.  Inscape, in its deepest root, refers to beauty…There is also continuity between Hopkins’ unique term instress and his early aesthetic theory.  Hopkins used instress variably, but it has two essential meanings.  It refers to the force that holds the inscape of an object together as well as to the effect or feeling produced by inscape within the beholder of a particular object.  As W. A. M. Peters wrote:

   The original meaning of instress…is that stress or energy of being by which ‘all things are upheld,’ and strive after continued existence.  Placing ‘instress’ by the side of ‘inscape’ we note that the instress will strike the poet as the force that holds the inscape together; it is for him the power that ever actualizes the inscape.  Further, we observe that in the act of perception the inscape is known first and in this grasp of the inscape is felt the stress of being behind it, is felt its instress…We can now understand why and how it is that ‘instress’ in Hopkins’ writings stands for two distinct and separate things, related to each other as cause and effect; as a cause ‘instress’ refers for Hopkins to the core of being or inherent energy which is the actuality of the object; as effect ‘instress’ stands for the specifically individual impression the object makes on man. 74

The poem as sacrament: the theological aesthetic of Gerard Manley Hopkins

 By Philip A. Ballinger

Peeters Press Louvain  W. B. Eerdmans   2000

A Poem A Day from the George Hail Library ~ Selected by Maria Horvath: Hopkins

A Poem A Day from the George Hail Library ~ Selected by Maria Horvath: Hopkins
Excerpt:
The poem below is one of Hopkins’s variations on the Petrarchan sonnet, which he calls a “curtal” or restricted sonnet, made up of only ten and a half lines. With an “octave” of six lines of specific examples and a “sestet” of four and a half lines of descriptive adjectives, the sonnet explains Hopkins’s definition of beauty.

According to the Hopkins scholar Peter Milward, this is “essentially ‘pied beauty’ — beauty that is intricately interwoven with white and black, light and darkness, summer and winter, day and night, heaven and earth. Upon this fundamental contrast supervene the varied colors of the rainbow, even as the rising of the sun over the earth imparts to all things a dappled or mottled appearance and diversifies them in almost unlimited individuality.”

PIED BEAUTY

Glory be to God for dappled things —
For skies of couple-color 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 swíft, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

Beauty of Inscape

July 19, 1872
...Stepped into a barn of ours, a great shadowy barn, where the hay had been stacked on either side, and looking at the great ruddy arched timberframes---principals(?) and tie-beams, which make them look like bold big A's with the cross-bar high up---and I thought how sadly beauty of inscape was unknown and buried away from simple people and yet how near at hand it was if they had eyes to see it and it could be called out everywhere again.,,,p.211, Journal
[ Catherine Phillips (ed.), Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Major Works, Oxford’s World Classics, 2009]