Carole's Chatter: Great poem by Manley Hopkins

Carole's Chatter: Great poem by Manley Hopkins
Excerpt:
I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail,
And a few lilies blow.....

“like a great dragon,folded in the gate to forbid all entrance.”

As Paul Mariani points out in “Gerard Manley Hopkins,” his generous new biography, the “unpromising beginnings” of Hopkins’s prosodic revolution were in a Jesuit classroom in London, where as a teacher of rhetoric he tried to impart something of his enthusiasm for the later rhythms of Milton and the alliterative effects of the Anglo-Saxons. Then, in 1875, Hopkins was peculiarly moved by the sinking of the Deutschland — in particular by an article in The Times of London about five Franciscan nuns (fleeing the anti-Catholic laws of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf) who clung together in the storm while the tallest cried, over and over, “O Christ, come quickly!” With his rector’s blessing, Hopkins wrote a sprawling tour de force titled “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” in which he first “realized on paper” the oratorical possibilities of so-called sprung rhythm. As Hopkins would tirelessly explain (in so many words) for the rest of his life, this involved “scanning by accents or stresses alone, without any account of the number of syllables, so that a foot may be one strong syllable or it may be many light and one strong.”

Robert Bridges, the future poet laureate of England, informed his friend Hopkins that he’d managed to read all 280 lines of “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” but would not be persuaded for any amount of money to read it again. And yet Bridges remained beguiled by the possibilities of sprung rhythm, attempting (with indifferent results, as Hopkins saw it) to use it in his own work. 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, and toward the end of his biography Mariani gives us a nice glimpse of Bridges’ venerable dotage, when he was visited by Virginia Woolf and Aldous Huxley — not because those two modernists wished to see the laureate himself, but rather because they wished to see “the Hopkins manuscripts” in the laureate’s possession. “Even the self-contented Bridges must see a certain irony in all of this,” Mariani observes.

Mariani, who has written biographies of Hart Crane and Robert Lowell, sketches such scenes to good effect, and writes with a deep, sympathetic knowledge of Hopkins’s sometimes dauntingly esoteric religious and aesthetic concerns (insofar as the two can be properly separated).  ~From a review of Gerard Manley Hopkins, A Life, by Paul Mariani  [Review by Blake Bailey: A Modern Victorian/ NYT/  December 12, 2008]

Make mercy in all of us, out of us all

                                4

                 I am sóft síft

              In an hourglass―at the wall

           Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift,

              And it crowds and it combs to the fall;

       I steady as a water in a well, to a poise, to a pane,

       But roped with, always, all the way down from the tall

           Fells or flanks of the voel, a vein

Of the gospel proffer, a pressure, a principle, Christ’s gift.

                                    5

                  I kiss my hand

               To the stars, lovely-asunder

            Starlight, wafting him out of it; and

                 Glow, glory in thunder;

         Kiss my hand to the dappled-with-damson west:

         Since, tho’ he is under the world’s splendour and wonder,

             His mystery must be instressed, stressed;

For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand.

                                    6

                 Not out of his bliss

              Springs the stress felt

           Nor first from heaven (and few know this)

                  Swings the stroke dealt―

         Stroke and a stress that stars and storms deliver,

         That guilt is hushed by, hearts are flushed by and melt―

                  But it rides time like riding a river

(And here the faithful waver, the faithless fable and miss).

                                     7

                It dates from day

             Of his going in Galilee;

          Warm-laid grave of a womb-life grey;

                  Manger, maiden’s knee;

       The dense and the driven Passion, and frightful sweat;

       Thence the discharge of it, there its swelling to be,

                  Though felt before, though in high flood yet―

What none would have known of it, only the heart, being hard at bay,

                                    8

                Is out with it! Oh,

             We lash with the best or worst

           Word last! How a lush-kept plush-capped sloe

                  Will, mouthed to flesh-burst,

        Gush! ―flush the man, the being with it, sour or sweet,

        Brim, in a flash, full! ―Hither then, last or first,

                  To hero of Calvary, Christ’s feet―

Never ask if meaning it, wanting it, warned of it―men go.

                                    9

                Be adored among men,

             God, three-numberèd form;

           Wring thy rebel, dogged in den,

                  Man’s malice, with wrecking and storm.

         Beyond saying sweet, past telling of tongue,

         Thou art lightning and love, I found it, a winter and warm;

                  Father and fondler of heart thou hast wrung:

Hast thy dark descending and most art merciful then.

                                     10

                  With an anvil-ding

               And with fire in him forge thy will

           Or rather, rather then, stealing as Spring

                     Through him, melt him but master him still:

        Whether át ónce, as once at a crash Paul,

        Or as Austin, a lingering-out sweet skill,

                    Make mercy in all of us, out of us all

Mastery, but be adored, but be adored King.

                        Part the Second

                                       11

             ‘Some find me a sword; some

             The flange and the rail; flame,

          Fang, or flood’ goes Death on drum,

              And storms bugle his fame.

    But wé dréam we are rooted in earth―Dust!

    Flesh falls within sight of us, we, though our flower the same,

          Wave with the meadow, forget that there must

The sour scythe cringe, and the blear share come.

                                        12

               On Saturday sailed from Bremen,

               American-outward-bound,

           Take settler and seamen, tell men with women,

                Two hundred souls in the round―

    O Father, not under thy feathers nor ever as guessing

    The goal was a shoal, of a fourth the doom to be drowned;

            Yet díd the dark side of the bay of thy blessing

Not vault them, the million of rounds of thy mercy not reeve even them in?

                                         13

               Into the snows she sweeps,

               Hurling the haven behind,

           The Deutschland, on Sunday; and so the sky keeps,

               For the infinite air is unkind,

    And the sea flint-flake, black-backed in the regular blow,

    Sitting Eastnortheast, in cursed quarter, the wind;

            Wiry and white-fiery and whírlwind-swivellèd snow

Spins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps.

                                         14

                She drove in the dark to leeward,

                She struck―not a reef or a rock

            But the combs of a smother of sand: night drew her

                Dead to the Kentish Knock;

    And she beat the bank down with her bows and the ride of her keel:

    The breakers rolled on her beam with ruinous shock;

            And canvas and compass, the whorl and the wheel

Idle for ever to waft her or wind her with, these she endured.

                                          15

                  Hope had grown grey hairs,

                  Hope had mourning on,

            Trenched with tears, carved with cares,

                  Hope was twelve hours gone;

    And frightful a nightfall folded rueful a day

    Nor rescue, only rocket and lightship, shone,

             And lives at last were washing away:

To the shrouds they took, ―they shook in the hurling and horrible airs.

                                          16

                   One stirred from the rigging to save

                   The wild woman-kind below,

             With a rope’s end round the man, handy and brave―

….    ~Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, pp. 11-113

In Zikh and Dark Lightning

Poetry—The Ineffable Name of God: Man

(We, as creature, are created in the Image of God.) I had to smile when I read about 'in zikh'.

 In 1933 Heschel already invited his readers to experience a tangible sense of divine presence in his poetry. Heschel’s early poems thus serve as a wonderful introduction to his thought: we can see in them Heschel’s core goals before his exposure to formal academic training and his distraction by phenomenology, aesthetics, and comparative religion.3 In these poems Heschel asks how we are to overcome the indifference of the world around us to God. “It is only God who still believes in God,” he argues (181). Rather than relying on existentialism, Heschel’s method produces an answer to God through the in zikh (thing itself) school of Yiddish poetry. Following its method, Heschel seeks to capture an expressionistic mood of the moment in itself—in this case an expressionistic sense of the divine as an identity with God and an empathy with divine pain.⁴

Am I not—you? Are you not—I?

When a need pains You, alarm me!

When You miss a human being

Tear open my door!

You live in Yourself! You live in me. (31)

This concern for God and the expressionistic portrayal of closeness to God, quickly reminds one of Rainier Maria Rilke’s Book of Hours. Rilke writes about his relationship to God, “I want to mirror Your image to its fullest perfection.” Heschel demurs, however, stating “I didn’t need to study in Rilke’s heder to know there is a God in the world.”

Like the prophets of yore, Heschel felt called by God; he pleaded with God, directly beseeching Him to deliver “a message from You. I cannot curse as justly as did Jeremiah…You are meant to help here, Oh God… I will fulfill your duty, pay your debts” (33). As a twentieth-century prophet whose actions bespeak God’s presence and message on earth, Heschel felt God’s direct word since “God follows me everywhere” (57).   ~ Aggadic Man: The Poetry and Rabbinic Thought of Abraham Joshua Heschel by Alan Brill

Images of Hope and Christ and Apollo: a commentary:

    ‘The Confrontation of Particularity’

         From William F. Lynch, SJ in his writings

…the imagination may, on the other hand, as in the case of writers of comedy, see human particularity in the rough and unvarnished guise of a homely, everyday reality…

This first situation of the imagination, the confrontation of particularity, is so fundamental, so sure and so obvious that I hesitate to dress it in any of its several possible metaphysical costumes. For that may make it seem a kind of recondite truth, somewhat beyond the reach of the ordinary mind, which it most certainly is not.

To use familiar examples, however, the finite is given metaphysical form in the concept of haecceitas, the pure and absolute thisness-and-not-thatness which the great Scotus saw in all things; in the "inscape" which Hopkins, following in Scotus' footsteps, saw in everything; in the single far-thing of the Gospel, which was the key to salvation; and in the little, sensible things which were the source of insight for St. Thomas.

It also appears, less familiarly, in Newman [John Henry Newman], whose extraordinarily concrete metaphysics seemed so revolutionary to many theologians and philosophers, but who said he was confident that he could make all his thought consonant with that of St. Thomas. Here is what Newman said about the definite and the limited:

‘I am what I am, or I am nothing. I cannot think, reflect, or judge about my being, without starting from the very point, which I aim at concluding. My ideas are all assumptions, and I am ever moving in a circle. I cannot avoid being sufficient for myself, for I cannot make myself anything else, and to change me is to destroy me. If I do not use myself, I have no other self to use.

     My only business is to ascertain what I am, in order to put it to use. It is enough for the proof of the value and authority of any function which I possess, to be able to pronounce that it is natural. What I have to ascertain is the laws under which I live.

    My first elementary lesson of duty is that of resignation to the laws of nature, whatever they are; my first disobedience is to be impatient at what I am, and to indulge an ambitious aspiration after what I cannot be, to cherish a distrust of my powers, and to desire to change laws which are identical with myself.

"My testimony is the call to disturb"....wrote Elie Wiesel..."I disturb...because I dare to put questions to God, the Source of all Faith...He alone is not disturbed by it." "I disturb the miscreant because, despite my doubts and questions, I refuse to break with the religious...(p.337, Wiesel) 

Bat Galim (Hebrew: בת גלים‎,Bat lit., Daughter of the Waves)

   Elie Wiesel, the prophetic voice raised to experience and see the storms and the lies, sought to ask the right questions, and to get humanity to see, ask, experience and answer the right questions about horrendous events of the human city and the human soul.

   In A Mad Desire to Dance Wiesel wanted the ‘real memory’.  The psychotherapist of Doriel asked him, “But, why did you invent the lie?”

   “To hide from the truth.”

   “Why are you so eager to hide it?”

   Later.  …”fear of not recognizing myself anymore…the fact is I wasted my life.  Yes, this life left me all alone too often, and I betrayed my solitude.”

   The psychotherapist then said, “Let’s talk about love.”

   “…as a philosophical concept?  …comment on Plato’s Symposium whose aim was to praise Eros the ‘god of love’…or…sensible love or passionate love…or Petrarch’s love for Laura or Dante’s for Beatrice?  And what about David’s love for Bathsheba or Ammon’s for Tamar?  Lovers rarely talk about love, and when they do, they talk badly, more often in the past than in the present…philosophers are anything but lovestruck.”

   Doriel returned to ‘the lie’…He thought about his thesis on the ‘relationship between religion and politics by Jewish scholars in Spain before the expulsion….”

   “…the love of knowledge…love of the Torah is deepening it…the ‘lights’ of the ‘seventh day’ still flickered and beckoned in the depths of my memory.  The beginning of the Sabbath.  The celebration of its perfect holiness…”

   “As I returned from the house of prayer with my father, and when I became older, we both sang:

     “Shalom aleichem, malachei ha-sharet malachei ha-shalom”

        [Peace be with you, servant angels, angels of peace.]

“The following day, after the morning prayer and the meal, my father made all of us fulfill our charitable duties…Dina organized cultural get-togethers.  My mother visited hospitals.  As for me, my father used to take me to the edge of the forest to visit the Jewish patients in the insane asylum….Though he was not at all wealthy and worked hard to earn a living, he took an interest in the insane, for according to him, they were more defenseless than the poor.”

   “At first he used to leave me outside, in the courtyard or garden, while he went and brought ‘his patients’ sweets and fruits.  During the Pesach holiday he gave them matzoh.”

    “…once I spoke with one…who said, “Who can rescue me today?”

   Doriel digressed and said to the doctor:  “There’s also religion, Doctor. By clashing with reason, it can prevent you from living in reality…The rigidity of the laws, the bewitchment of the mystics: these I knew and even liked….You who belong to another world and another time, can’t understand Jewish life in a small town---and Brooklyn was a small town, a shetl, which in spite (of all)…became lively spiritual centers “attuned to the slightest flutter of the Lord’s eyelid.”

Where can I go from Your Spirit? Where can I flee from Your Presence?  If I ascend into Heaven, You are there; If I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there.  If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there Your hand shall lead me, and Your right had shall hold me.  ~Ps. 139:7-10

The salvation of man is through love

"One lonely soul on fire with the Love of GOD may set the whole universe ablaze."  ~unknown
"A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth -- that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart:

The salvation of man is through love and in love.

I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way—an honorable way—in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory...." [7]    ~ Vicktor Frankl 

Flannery O’Connor has described the Communion of Saints as "the action by which charity grows invisibly among us, entwining the living and the dead."

God Loves All Things That Are [h/t Terry]

"God overlooks the sins of men that they may repent...
For you love all things that are
and loathe nothing you have made;
for what you hated you would not have fashioned?
You rebuke offenders little by little,
warn them, and remind them of the sins
 they are committing 
that they may abandon their wickedness
and believe in you O Lord!" - Wisdom 11:22-12:2 

(7) A Divine Eccentricity

   Scripture says that God's people are a 'peculiar' people and if truth be told, one only has to peruse the lives of the Saints to grasp the depths of that statement.  I particularly adore God's ability to be creatively 'diverse' without any need to make 'copies.'  He is too 'beyond' for anyone to put Him in any of our paltry little boxes.  There will never be another St. Francis of Asissi---that is his spot and his alone.  So, with St. Therese and St. Joan of Arc and St. Jerome...God also has had a multitude of hidden saints.  The same God who designed and created the mountain lion also created the little house wren and the duckbill platypus.
   I find them everywhere.  He probably doesn't want them to know it---and each of them would never believe they were saints. And if in a time of disastrous temptation one even secretly believes oneself to be a saint, I must warn you about His wondrous but terrifying 'dark lightning' of Love.

Article: Dublin Freedman’s Journal [1879]

Donahoe's magazine, Volume 1, p.271 [1879]

Article: Dublin Freedman’s Journal

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

   The culturkampf---the legalized persecution of religion in Germany---has wrought disastrous evils for the Protestant Church in the German Empire.  It was mainly of the Catholic Church that Bismarck and Falk, and the rest of the bitter crew who govern Germany, were thinking when they passed their ruthless enactments, and it was the annihilation at which they were aiming.  But in the result, Protestantism has actually been a greater loser than Catholicism, and its complainings are loud and doleful in the extreme.  We find the “Reichsbote,” one of the leading Protestant organs, writing thus:

   “The Evangelical Church has suffered grievously from the culturkampf…Indifference and hatred towards the church and Christianity have increased to an astounding degree, and the unchristianized masses of the humbler classes have ranked themselves in tens of thousands in the ranks of social democracy.  As a result of the putting aside of the church and Christianity, and of the impious doctrine that ‘everything is nature,’ which has become the outcome, immorality has increased, and the number of crimes is being multiplied to an appalling extent.  The bonds of social order are being discovered because the moral factors, authority and religion, have been long since put on one side, and replaced by rationalistic commercialism, so that we find ourselves in face of the most serious complications in the social, moral, and ecclesiastical order.  Of all the promises which were made at the commencement of the culturkampf, not only has not one of them been realized, but the reverse has happened in every direction.  Instead of peace, there are everywhere disorder and disunion.”

    This is a fearfully gloomy picture, and is another revelation to explain the ease and eagerness with which Bismarck entered into negotiations for the appeasement of Catholic consciences in Germany with his Holiness Leo XIII.  The prince-chancellor has clearly a stormy time before him when there is such a combination of discontent in Germany as a persecuted Catholic people, a disappointed and a disintegrating Protestant community, and a ferocious socialism that recognizes no God, scorns all law, and holds life, virtue, order, and authority in contempt.

Snow Waves and Strings of Root

Feb. 24, 1873: Journal

‘Snow Waves’

   In the snow flat-topped hillocks and shoulders outlined with wavy edges, ridge below ridge, very like the grain of wood in line and in projection like relief maps.  These the wind makes I think and of course drifts, which are in fact snow waves.  The sharp nape of a drift is sometimes broken by slant flutes or channels.  I think this must be when the wind after shaping the drift first has changed and cast waves in the body of the wave itself.  All the world is full of inscape and chance left free to act falls into an order as well as purpose: looking out of my window I caught in the random clods and broken heaps of snow made by the cast of a broom.  The same of the path trenched by footsteps in ankledeep snow across the fields leading to Hodder wood through which we went to see the river.  The sun was bright, broken brambles and all boughs and banks limed and cloyed with white, the brook down the clough pulling the way by drops and by bubbles in turn under a shell of ice.

……………….

On his depressions:

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

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

In a Journal note of 1873, when he was 30, he says,
The ashtree growing in the corner of the garden was felled. ..and seeing it maimed there came at that moment a great pang and I wished to die and not to see the inscapes of the world destroyed any more. (4)

-------------------

More and more I find articles disparaging the idea that Hopkins suffered from depressive bouts and fought despair.  Even Christ ‘bled blood tears’ in Gesthemani.  It is a wrong ignorance to not cast the human being in his true mileu which does not lessen one’s view of his greatness or even his holiness [I am irritatingly reminded of the ignorant, shallow and worldly ‘outcry’ against the dark battles Mother Teresa suffered.].  It ignores the fact that each of us is a sinner, born ‘after the fall’, incomplete and wounded.  Mother Teresa, Hopkins and others knew that fact ‘intimately.’  The greatness of their lives lies in the fact of ignis fatuus of duty in the face of such struggles.

Wrinkled in the Moon

"Heaving and wrinkled in the moon, and blind."
……………………
“We noticed smallest things—
Things overlooked before
By this great light upon our Minds
Italicized—as ’twere.”

Yvor Winters’ Quest for Reality

Perhaps mistakenly, Winters chose only two of Donne’s poems for inclusion in Quest for Reality:

 1. “Holy Sonnet VII” (“At the round earth’s imagined corners”). Pictured is a drawing by Fra Bartolommeo from about 1500 “One Angel Blowing a Trumpet and Another Holding a Standard,” in honor of this sonnet’s first line. It’s a pen and brown ink drawing, squared in red chalk for transfer on laid paper (National Gallery of Art, Washington, Woodner Collection, 2006).

2. “A Valediction: Of My Name In The Window”

I should point out, however, that Winters extensively discussed another Donne poem, “Holy Sonnet I,” “Thou hast made me and shall Thy work decay,” in his trenchant essay on Gerard Manly Hopkins (reprinted in The Function of Criticism), which happens to be one of his finest discussions of several individual poems in his writings. In that essay, Winters opens with a comparison of “Thou hast made me,” which he praises quite highly, and Robert Bridges’s “Low Barometer” (even more highly praised) to Hopkins’s “The Windhover,” a discussion which gives deep insights into his theory of literature. He mentioned this sonnet as well in one list of exceptionally great poems in his book on Edwin Arlington Robinson. We will come around in time to considering the poems of Donne’s that Winters chose for the Winters Canon, and at that time I probably will consider a couple other poems by Donne and the reasons Winters might have left “Thou hast made me” out (and whether it belongs back in).

Winters deemed Donne’s early work, that which remains famous, as experimental. You will have to read the essay “Poetic Convention” in his first book Primitivism and Decadence (reprinted in In Defense of Reason) to understand why. Winters’s simplest summary of the matter links Donne to others who might surprise you:

Experimental poetry endeavors to widen the racial experience, or to alter it, or to get away from it, by establishing abnormal conventions. In one sense or another Spenser, Donne, Milton, Hopkins, Laforgue, and Rimbaud are experimental poets of a very marked kind.

I find Winters’s argument for Donne’s classification as an experimentalist convincing, for the most part. But I have never read anyone else who has sided with him in great part on his account of the early Donne. In the same book, in the essay “Primitivism and Decadence,” Winters made a comment that revealed his once very high assessment of Donne’s Holy Sonnets in the 1930s, an assessment which he would gradually lessen, especially concerning the experimental work, in the decades to follow:

The gap between the sonnets of Shakespeare and the sonnets of Donne is not extremely great.

Yet though Winters came to distance himself from that judgment (of both poets, in fact), I would tend to agree with it still. I feel that Winters incorrectly downgraded Donne during the second half of his career. Thomas Mallon’s concluding sentence sums up his very high opinion of Donne:

[This biography] has juice and, best of all, a kind of fearlessness in approaching the “frequently convoluted” emotions of a poet who possessed, if not English literature’s greatest imagination, quite possibly its greatest intellect.

Those are certainly curious judgments to make -- and perhaps indefensible. I’d like to see the case for them made, though, since I like challenging ideas. But, sad to say, Mallon makes not even a brief attempt at a defense. Judging from what I know, Donne did not possess the “greatest imagination” in our literature. Shakespeare would, almost obviously, take that title, in my judgment and that of many, many others, though there are other contenders as well -- Dickens, say. It all depends, of course, on how you define and then apply the concept “imagination.” But I doubt that any case could be made that John Donne is the “greatest intellect” in our literature. My oh my, there are some great intellects that exceed Donne’s by a nautical mile or two: Sam Johnson, Ben Jonson, possibly Shakespeare again, Matt Arnold, Sam Coleridge -- Yvor Winters, for that matter -- and so on…   ~ Thomas Mallon, Yvor Winters Quest for Reality, NYT Book Review [Posted by Ben Kilpela]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/books/review/Mallon-t.html?8bu&emc=bu

Nature and Function of Literature (Winters)

There have been various ideas regarding the nature and function of literature during the twenty-five hundred years or so that literature has been seriously discussed. One might think, offhand, that the possibilities were limitless; but they are actually limited and even narrowly limited-the ideas are all classifiable under a fairly small number of headings. I shall not attempt an historical survey but shall merely attempt a brief classificatory survey. The theories in question can all be classified, I believe, under three headings: the didactic, the hedonistic, and the romantic. I am not in sympathy with any of these, but with a fourth, which for lack of a better term I call the moralistic.

…

In the March 1922 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, the most important poetry journal of the day, a correspondent complained, "Everybody is sentimental, even Mr. Yvor Winters." He was referring to an essay published the previous month, in which Winters, still a very young man, praised writers who had not yet become part of our canon--Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore--and made a characteristic, brilliant remark about Emily Dickinson, "one of the greatest poets of our language." She was, he wrote admiringly, "a terrible woman, who annihilated God as if he were her neighbor, and her neighbor as if he were God."

The letter writer, Baker Brownell, objected with some justice to what appeared to be Winters's aesthetic of fragmentation, that is, his habit of isolating individual lines and passages. As if to correct him, Brownell maintained that the two most distinguished poets of the day were Carl Sandburg and Rabindranath Tagore.

Winters, fully at home in the spirit of modernism, asserted in his essay that the greatest poets alive were Edwin Arlington Robinson and Wallace Stevens. It is worth noting that Stevens at that time had published no book--only poems in magazines--and Winters, writing from New Mexico, where he had gone to recuperate from tuberculosis, was just a few months past his 21st birthday.

Winters noticed such things, too, as when he found in the line masse de calme, et visible réserve from Valéry's "Le Cimetière Marin", the visible embodiment of potency and actuality, crucial concepts in the poem. In three lines from Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning," he sees the kernel of the entire poem. For a woman enjoying coffee and oranges, the brightness of a leisurely morning is darkened by the thought of death and spiritual obligation: She dreams a little and she feels the dark/ Encroachment of that old catastrophe,/ As a calm darkens among water lights. Winters, I think, was the only reader to understand the specificity and function of that image. "If one has ever seen a calm darken among water lights on a large bay or lake, the image is unforgettable," he wrote. And he returned to the image at the conclusion of the poem: "In the first water-image, death encroached as a calm darkens among water lights; then the day was like water; then infinite space is water--bright, beautiful, inscrutable, the home of life and death--and earth is a floating island."

Winters's way with a poem was not to exhaust it, if such a thing were possible, but to point the way toward other perceptions. In his own poem, "The Slow Pacific Swell," the sea holds the reflection of the moon and at the same time is held in the moon's gravitational sway in the line, "Heaving and wrinkled in the moon, and blind."

…The Dickinson is a marvel, a novel in twenty-eight lines. The second stanza:

“We noticed smallest things—
Things overlooked before
By this great light upon our Minds
Italicized—as ’twere.”

The poem justifies Winters’ judgment of Dickinson in In Defense of Reason: “But except by Melville, she is surpassed by no writer that this country has produced; she is one of the greatest lyrical poets of all time.” Of course, Winters judges poems, not poets.

Hopkins' and the Journal

Even more overwhelming were the dramatic waterfalls and glaciers, which inspired some of the journal's most striking and innovative images. The Jungfrau glacier, for example, is represented as the skin of a white tiger flung into the air and allowed to fall, its gnarled ends "in tongues and points like the tail and claws" and its edges "knotted or knuckled like talons." But this sight proved too much even for Hopkins' indefatigable patience: "The spraying out of one end I tried to catch but it would have taken hours" (174).

Hopkins' journal scrutinizes objects with an almost myopic focus on their surface structures and, at times, inhabits a linguistic world of his own invention. The journal displays both inventiveness with the resources of language and frustration with the incapacity of words to represent things. Confronted with the novelty of sights he has never seen, or never noticed in a certain way, Hopkins must formulate his own solutions to the nature writer's perennial challenge: How to represent the experience of discovery.

Remarkable for its tension at the meeting point of seeing and representation, the journal distinguishes itself by the stylistic idiom through which Hopkins tries to "capture" an evanescent perception or the elusive complexity of an object's appearance. He weaves an ostensibly literal language that strives toward what he called the haecceitas or "thisness" of things, concentrating on pattern and structure ("spike flower like plantain, flowering gradually up the spike"), with a figurative language that makes objects imaginatively visible in his text ("every fingered or fretted leaf"). (3) Further, the journal does not merely reflect or record the things Hopkins sees; writing it also enables his insights and enacts his perceptions for later re-reading. The journal therefore functions as an epistemic, or knowledge-seeking, pursuit, embodying in its pages Hopkins' very processes of thinking and discovery.

… His journal, like others, unfolds in the rhythms of periodic encounter, in accumulations of unconnected facts and remarks, and in imagistic, sometimes fragmented bits of text. But although Hopkins' journal practice in many ways resembles other writers', his style of writing, beyond basic notations, bears the quirky uniqueness that leads many critics to label him idiosyncratic. Few diarists work as hard as Hopkins to describe ordinary trees or seawater:….

… Hopkins coaxes, strains at, wrestles with words--almost as poignantly as he wrestles with "(my God!) my God" in his poem "Carrion Comfort"--to wring from them the efficacy he needs to represent new sights. (3)   Mary Ellen Bellanca, Gerard Manley Hopkins' journal and the poetics of natural history. Highbeam.org

Dangerous Beauty

from Dangerous Beauty: Nancy Hartsock

Abstract: 

The notion of self-sacrifice is the dominant melody in the polyphonous symphony of priest-poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’ life and poetry. The influence of The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius and the philosophy of John Dun Scotus, a thirteenth century Franciscan philosopher on Hopkins as he developed his own “theological aesthetic” are undeniable. Hopkins’ ‘theological aesthetic’, drawn from his personal interpretation of these influences, became roots for his intensely passionate and utterly unique Christian poetry. Hopkins’ uses words, literary device, and rhythm in a multi-level yet unifying way to express his Christocentric worldview. Hopkins was a brilliant Oxford scholar with ascetic tendencies who chose to convert to Catholicism, and then to become a Jesuit priest. The sacrifices of his life were costly but deliberately made, and he remained faithful to them until the end of his short life (1844-1889). His over-scrupulous personality, his understanding of sacrifice, penance and the choice to submit to discipline, unfamiliar to many Western Christians, are of monumental importance in consideration of his life and poetry. A great internal war existed between Hopkins’ aesthetic and ascetic natures; the Armageddon of this internal war was fought on the ground of his poetry.

Willing to sacrifice everything in his devotion to Christ, Hopkins came to believe that, for him, beauty was dangerous. His sole desire as a priest was to lead others into relationship with God; ironically, it was his poetry more than his priestly duties which led to the realization of his desire, posthumously.

………………………

His ascetic nature expressed itself through an intense inner drive to master himself; his aesthetic nature was uniquely and deeply sensitive to beauty in all its forms. His art became the battleground where his final conflicts in this world were fought; the place his poetry would hold in relationship to his priesthood was the Armageddon of his inner war.

…The luminosity as well as the threateningly dark shades of self-sacrifice are revealed through Hopkins’ extraordinarily complex sacramental poetry, which was drawn straight from the depths of his personally constructed theological aesthetic. The rationale for sacrifice and the factors which led to his grave internal war can be understood through a respectful consideration of the ‘dangerous beauty’ of Hopkins’ Christian faith, which was a very costly faith consisting of both sparkling joys and ravaging agony…

With his very life, Hopkins believed that full, conscious participation in the timeless “river” of the life of Jesus (DP, S6, 111) would lead to self-sacrifice for all true believers…the costliness of faith in Christ, perhaps a costliness with which western Christians have lost touch. Written at the end of his short life, his “Terrible Sonnets” reveal the personal lengths to which his faith carried him. Hopkins’ sole desire as a priest was to lead others into relationship with God; ironically, it was his poetry more than his priestly duties which led to the realization of his desire, posthumously.

…In Hopkins: A Literary Biography, Norman White writes that on a reading-list Hopkins had drawn up for himself for vacation at this time was Pusey’s article, “Sermon on Everlasting Punishment, and on the Remedy for Sins of the Body.”

White goes on to explain that for Hopkins, “purity [was] associated with sensual

deprivation and self-inflicted punishment, but the rewards [were] forms of delayed and

spiritualized hyper-sensuousness” (113). Hopkins’ superiors found it difficult to steer

him away from “dwelling on his faults and towards the intended consolations,” according

to Catherine Phillips in her introduction to Gerard Manley Hopkins. The Major Works

(xxi)…

…“Purely selfish desires and habits  are to be mortified, that is, put to death. But the self as such is never to be annihilated,” Ong explains…

Further, his vows of poverty, chastity and obedience as a priest constituted a physical, intellectual and emotional sacrifice he chose, a choice he hoped would help him master himself. He felt called by God to the priesthood, and hoped that thrusting himself into his life and work as a priest would help him constrain his own passionate, ‘dangerous’ impulses that he was afraid had the potential to overrun his Christian faith; he was ready and willing to sacrifice these impulses on the altar of his faith in God. In a letter written in 1879 to Robert Bridges, Hopkins mentions three types of beauty…

…The physical beauty of the body Hopkins considered the most dangerous because physical beauty had the potential of leading him/us into worship of the creature rather than the Creator. Fear of his own physical passion is evident in this belief. Beauty of the mind, such as genius, he saw as a beauty of more value. Beauty of character was most desirable, “the handsome heart,” expressed through loving actions rooted in purity (Thornton and Varenne 95). In the long run perhaps the severe beauty of Hopkins’ own Christian faith may have proven the most dangerous beauty of all, for himself…

Hopkins needed the guarded permission the Jesuits gave him to move into his heart; but the guarded permission of the Jesuits was nothing compared to the over-vigilant guardedness with which Hopkins himself kept watch over his own soul.

…Hopkins’ own identification with the life, death and resurrection of Jesus was cemented by his Jesuit formation. Jesus was his beautiful hero, the one who had mastered himself perfectly. Hopkins hoped to follow this example with all his body, mind and spirit. To this end, he studied, meditated on, and lived The Exercises continually until the end of his earthly life. Hopkins had an exceptionally complex imagination, which coupled with an intense sensitivity allowed him to microscopically focus in on, ‘read’ and reproduce detail, while at the same time making meaningful relational connections between what he observed, and those with whom he strove to share his observations. This ability is perfectly illustrated in “Wreck of the Deutschland,” derived from his deeply empathetic and imaginative reading of the shipwreck in The Times, Saturday, December 11, 1875 (reprinted in Storey 99).

…In A Counterpoint of Dissonance, Michael Sprinker suggests that in “The Deutschland,” Hopkins is wrapping all the mysteries of Christianity into one (113).

…He chose an out-of-the-ordinary form (sprung rhythm) and out-of-the-ordinary mechanics for his poetry that enhance the pregnant ideas and words he chooses for his poems in such a way that some, like Philip Ballinger in The Poem as Sacrament. The Theological Aesthetic of Gerard Manley Hopkins, consider Hopkins’ poems sacraments -- both signifying and conveying the grace of God to those with ‘eyes to see and ears to hear.’ Bernard Cooke, in Sacraments and Sacramentality, offers the traditional short definition of Christian sacrament: “Sacraments are sacred signs, instituted by Christ, to give grace.” Sacraments are meant to do something, Cooke states: but “what is done is essentially God’s doing; in sacraments God gives grace” (79).

...like a shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil...

     “…The theology of John Duns Scotus places Christ at the centre of a universe ordered by love. Christ is presented as the basis of all nature, grace and glory – the most perfect model of humanity. He is at the beginning, the centre and the end of the universe.

Lack of AppreciationIn this writer’s opinion Scotus has been greatly misjudged and misunderstood. The learned Jesuit, Father Bernard Jansen, once wrote that “rarely has the real figure of an eminent personage of the past been defaced as has that of the Franciscan John Duns Scotus.” [1] The philosopher Etienne Gilson, wrote “Of a hundred writers who have held Duns Scotus up to ridicule, not two of them have ever read him and not one of them has understood him.”[2]

… In his theology Scotus seeks to build everything on his Christology – a Christology that is at the same time Pauline, Johannine and Franciscan. Pauline, because it develops the insight that Christ is the “image of the invisible God, the first-born of every creature. For in him were created all things... through and unto him” (Col. 1: 15-17). It is Johannine since it sees love at the root of God and of creation…Finally it is Franciscan in that it seeks to harmonise all things in Christ according to the divine plan so that the bond between all creatures is recognised with each being assigned its own place in God’s loving creation…

The Immaculate Conception
During his time at Paris Scotus took his well known stand on the Immaculate Conception of Mary… the people of God, with their inspired sense of right doctrine, continued to promote the doctrine of Mary’s singular privilege. This was especially true of the Church and the faithful in England…

The objection was raised that scripture did indeed oppose this Marian privilege for in the letter to the Romans St. Paul says “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned.” (Rom. 5: 12). This apparently irrefutable text, Scotus argued, proves nothing against the Marian privilege. All agree in universal redemption in Christ, but why should this universal redemption necessarily rule out the Immaculate Conception of Mary? In fact it follows from Christ’s universal redemption that Mary did not have original sin. The most perfect mediator ought to have the most perfect act of mediation in regard to the person in whose favour he intervenes. Mary, his mother, is the person in whose favour Christ intervenes the most as mediator of grace. This wholly perfect act of mediation requires in the one redeemed preservation from every defect, even from the original defect. Therefore the Blessed Virgin was exempted from every stain of sin. Instead of belittling Christ and circumscribing his power, Scotus argues, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception exalts him, attributing to Jesus the most perfect and sublime redemption. This redemption is most perfectly won for Mary, because of her role as the Mother of God, the one through whom the Incarnation would occur. So Mary, far from being outside the realm of redemption, is more indebted than the rest of us to our Saviour Jesus Christ for she has received a more radical redemption.
The Primacy of Christ

The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which the Church definitively approved and declared infallible in 1854, was predicated upon the primacy of Christ…

But there is another manner of looking at the Incarnation, that is also permitted by the Church, although you will find it less widespread. It is a Christocentric thesis, which includes creation and Incarnation in one great theory of the love of God that underlies all existence. This is the theory proposed by Blessed John Duns Scotus in which everything that is is viewed through the lens of the primacy of Christ, the freedom of God and the contingency of the world.
For each creature shines with something of God that can be expressed by no other. Each sun, star, proton, grape and grain is charged with a divine meaning – a meaning that no other can express. And each creature speaks to us of Christ who is the first among creatures.

Poetic Inspiration

The significance of this doctrine has not been lost on poets and theologians, and especially on one of the greatest of English religious poets Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins, writing in Oxford in the 19th century, considered it a privilege to be in the city in which Duns Scotus had lived six hundred years earlier.

“Yet ah! This air I gather and I release
He lived on; these weeds and waters, these walls are what
He haunted who of all men most sways my spirits to peace.
Of realty the rarest-veined unraveller; a not
Rivalled insight, be rival Italy or Greece;
Who fired France for Mary without spot.”[12]

Scotus’ theology inspired some of my favourite lines from Hopkins. In this extract from the Wreck of the Deutschland we hear Hopkins expressing the univocity of being in his poetic language of “instressed” meaning:

“I kiss my hand
To the stars, lovely-asunder
Starlight, wafting him out of it; and
Glow, glory in thunder;
Kiss my hand to the dappled-with-damson west;
Since tho’ he is under the world’s splendour and wonder,
His mystery must be instressed, stressed;
For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless whenI understand.” [13]

In “God’s Grandeur” we hear Hopkins telling of the manner in which we perceive something of God in those moments in which we are open to the reality of nature. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like a shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil.”[14]

And from the first poem I ever loved, Hopkins delights at the majesty of a windhover in the early morning skies and perceives the fire of Christ in the beauty of the creature’s actions:

“Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!”[15]”

The Primacy of Christ in John Duns Scotus: An Assessment

Many of you enjoyed the post on Blessed John Duns Scotus that I put here in April. This article was referred to me by one of our men in formation and I thought you might enjoy it as well:…~Phillippe Yates, OFM (FAITH Magazine January-February 2008)

Culture Desk: Wislawa Szymborska: The Happiness of Wisdom Felt : The New Yorker

Culture Desk: Wislawa Szymborska: The Happiness of Wisdom Felt : The New Yorker
h/t Books, Inq.
Excerpt: Hopkins would approve of honoring this poet.

In a way, Szymborska supplied her own best epitaph, and obituary, in the text of her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in which she took on the “astonishment” of normal life:

“Astonishing” is an epithet concealing a logical trap. We’re astonished, after all, by things that deviate from some well known and universally acknowledged norm, from an obviousness we’ve grown accustomed to. Granted, in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like “the ordinary world,” “ordinary life,” “the ordinary course of events.” …But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/02/wislawa-szymborska-the-happiness-of-wisdom-felt.html#ixzz1lWptleRI

The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo

(Maidens’ song from St. Winefred’s Well)

THE LEADEN ECHO

How to kéep—is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, láce, latch or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, … from vanishing away?
Ó is there no frowning of these wrinkles, rankéd wrinkles deep,
Dówn? no waving off of these most mournful messengers, still messengers, sad and stealing messengers of grey?
No there ’s none, there ’s none, O no there ’s none,
Nor can you long be, what you now are, called fair,
Do what you may do, what, do what you may,
And wisdom is early to despair:
Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done
To keep at bay
Age and age’s evils, hoar hair,
Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death’s worst, winding sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay;
So be beginning, be beginning to despair.
O there ’s none; no no no there ’s none:
Be beginning to despair, to despair,
Despair, despair, despair, despair.


THE GOLDEN ECHO

Spare!
There ís one, yes I have one (Hush there!);
Only not within seeing of the sun,
Not within the singeing of the strong sun,
Tall sun’s tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth’s air,
Somewhere elsewhere there is ah well where! one,
Oné. Yes I can tell such a key, I do know such a place,
Where whatever’s prized and passes of us, everything that ’s fresh and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and swiftly away with, done away with, undone,
Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet dearly and dangerously sweet
Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matchèd face,
The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet,
Never fleets móre, fastened with the tenderest truth
To its own best being and its loveliness of youth: it is an everlastingness of, O it is an all youth!
Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace,
Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks, loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace—
Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath,
And with sighs soaring, soaring síghs deliver
Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death
Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver.
See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair
Is, hair of the head, numbered.
Nay, what we had lighthanded left in surly the mere mould
Will have waked and have waxed and have walked with the wind what while we slept,
This side, that side hurling a heavyheaded hundredfold
What while we, while we slumbered.
O then, weary then why
When the thing we freely fórfeit is kept with fonder a care,
Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept
Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder
A care kept.—Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where.—
Yonder.—What high as that! We follow, now we follow.—Yonder, yes yonder, yonder,
Yonder.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

http://www.poemhunter.com/