Lower than death and the dark...

   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….
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:  they revealed a deformed image of his own humankind and a violation of Christ’s body; they failed to enact the gradual attainment of colloquy with God which he had previously made the basis of his poetic structures.  Certainly the “terrible sonnets” were a new kind of poetry, and Hopkins was uncomfortable with their heterodoxy.  In the phrase “against my will,” he judged himself by the strictest standards of Christian volition and acknowledged that he had been compelled by instincts merely natural into writing the “wrong” kind of poetry. [I don’t think so!]  He recognized that he could no longer generate the sole kind of poetry he cared to produce or felt justified in producing: poems in praise of God.  He would later admit to Bridges that in his “lagging lines” Bridges would “miss/The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation”  which had informed his earlier work.  Private torment was no fit subject for poems, and particularly not for a man who honored obedience as much as Hopkins did.  {Hmm.  I think the ‘torment’ not private at all---the event itself public, prophetic ---and darkly so.]
   Hopkin’s attitude, however, was more complex than this.  Although he construed the poems as failures in the terms just stated, he also named them “inspirations”---even if not divinely prompted.  [I think they were.]…

The permanent worth of the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins as a writer is threefold. 

 Firstly, he is one of the most powerful and profound of the religious poets and is also one of the most satisfying of the so-called "nature poets" in the English language; 

secondly, to isolate a merit which is really an essential part of his total quality, he is one of the acknowledged masters of original style - one of the few strikingly successful innovators in poetic language and rhythm; 

thirdly, the publication of much of his prose - notebooks, journals, letters, sermons - has given us a body of autobiographical and critical writing which, apart from its broader human interest, throws much light on the development of a unique artistic personality. 

It is no disparagement of Hopkin's prose to say that its value depends to a large extent, though not entirely, upon what it tells us about the poet himself, and especially about his intense practical concern with those interests which inform and shape his poetry, namely his religion, his personal reading of nature, his love for people, and his critical approach to art - and to poetic technique in particular.

Hopkin's life spanned a brief 45 years. In the early part of 1889 his health began to fail rapidly, and he contracted typhoid fever. His parents were summoned to his bedside, the last rites were administered, and on June 8th he died, his last words being, "I am so happy, so happy."
~ Daniel A. Harris, Preface:xiii-xv, Inspirations Unbidden: The “Terrible Sonnets” of Gerard Manley Hopkins,  CA Press, 1982
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Looking back at Hopkins, the UK Jesuits, in the milieu of entrenching modernism and socialism in and out of the Church proper, in the shredding of spiritual and social mores in the Romanticism of the Victorian era of England it is incumbent on readers to avoid hastily pigeonholing his dialogues of poetry.  It is even more disrespectful to tear apart this priest's theology and profanely plunge fragments of his solitude into neat niches that "tickle the ears" of a variety of dogmatic or superficial readers.  This particular work of "Inspirations Unbidden" I find comes closest to my assessment and reactions to Fr. Hopkins's writings, especially his "Terrible Sonnets."