They Need Each Other

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

Gabriel Torretta, OP 

A 'Locked and Inseparable Combination'

By the presence of His majesty He maketh what He maketh; His presence governs what He made" (II, 10, pp. 16-17).  

This physical immanence of Christ in space and time is an essential part of Hopkins' faith, expressed at the time of his conversion and throughout his life. In The Deutschland (1875-76), Christ is the "Ground of being and granite of it: past all / Grasp God " (101, ll. 254-255). In his last retreat notes of 1889, he writes: "All that happens in Christendom and so in the whole world affected, marked, as a great seal, and like any other historical event, and in fact more than any other event, by the Incarnation; at any rate by Christ's life and death, whom we by faith hold to be God made Man." (5)

"Christ is in every sense God and in every sense man," Hopkins wrote Bridges in 1883, "and the interest is in the locked and inseparable combination, or rather it is in the person in whom the combination has its place." The events of Christ's life are called mysteries, "the mysteries being always the same, that the Child in the manger is God, the culprit on the gallows God, and so on" (p. 188). Augustine often returns to the same paradoxes; one famous passage from a Christmas sermon is typical:

Man's Maker was made man, that He, Ruler of the stars, might nurse at His mother's breasts; that the Bread might be hungry, the Fountain thirst, the Light sleep, the Way be tired from the journey; that the Truth might be accused by false witnesses, the Judge of the living and the dead be judged by a mortal judge, Justice be sentenced by the unjust, the Teacher be beaten with whips, the Vine be crowned with thorns, the Foundation be suspended on wood; that Strength might be weak, that He who makes well might be wounded, that Life might die. (6)

Trivial Accidents

Years earlier in 1866, before his conversion to Roman Catholicism, Hopkins wrote to his friend E. H. Coleridge of the mystery Augustine so eloquently described:

It is one adorable point of the incredible condescension of the Incarnation (the greatness of which no saint can have ever hoped to realise) that our Lord submitted not only to the pains of life, the fasting, scourging, crucifixion etc. or the insults, as the mocking, blindfolding, spitting etc, but also to the mean and trivial accidents of humanity.

Where’s the Foil?

…“The Windhover” is drawn from Hopkins’ knowledge of Robert Southwell’s A Hundred  Meditations on the Love of God, which contains an image of “Christ as a hawk in flight” (181) and an image of the “sprinkled out…flames of fire” (187). 

~James Finn Cotter, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Saint Augustine.  Mount St. Mary College, Newburgh, New York

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

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

'In Life's Wild Wood'

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

OUR generation already is overpast,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pied Beauty

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

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

I Grasp God’s Garment in the Void

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

Christ the Poet

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

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

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

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

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

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

sono io

sono io (--never io sono)                 

                                A wreck of whale bones..      ~Elizabeth Bishop   

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Tiny Harp Indeed

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

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

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

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

….

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

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

Pope Francis I, SJ

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

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

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

Day Bright

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

'Dragonet'|| Watermarks

Dragonet

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

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

The Wreck of the Deutschland

The inscription on the gravestone reads:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The poem is dedicated to

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

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

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

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

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

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

"20

She was first of a five and came

Of a coifèd sisterhood.

(O Deutschland, double a desperate name! 155

O world wide of its good!

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

Christ’s lily and beast of the waste wood:

From life’s dawn it is drawn down,

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

21

Loathed for a love men knew in them,

Banned by the land of their birth,

Rhine refused them. Thames would ruin them;

Surf, snow, river and earth

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

Thy unchancelling poising palms were weighing the worth,

Thou martyr-master: in thy sight

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

Five! the finding and sake

And cipher of suffering Christ. 170

Mark, the mark is of man’s make

And the word of it Sacrificed.

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

Before-time-taken, dearest prizèd and priced—

Stigma, signal, cinquefoil token 175

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

23

Joy fall to thee, father Francis,

Drawn to the Life that died;

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

Lovescape crucified 180

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

And five-livèd and leavèd favour and pride,

Are sisterly sealed in wild waters,

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

24

Away in the loveable west, 185

On a pastoral forehead of Wales,

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

And they the prey of the gales;

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

Falling flakes, to the throng that catches and quails 190

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

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

~from postings, Perry Lorenzo

In wind’s burly and beat of endragonèd seas

                                     

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

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

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

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

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

 

SHIRT OF FLAME: WE PAVED PARADISE

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

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

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

Notes for paper on Hopkins

Notes for paper on Hopkins
Excerpt:

The Dialogue

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

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

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

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

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

      6.  Hopkins had a highly attuned sense of self:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enough! The Resurrection,

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

Across my foundering deck shone

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

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

In a flash, in a trumpet crash, …

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

 

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

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

Earth, Sweet Earth

  Excerpt:

Earth, Sweet Earth   [July 2,12 post]

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), Ribblesdale:

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

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

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

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

The Fire of Christ

“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]”

O the Craftsman

But, when the work was finished, the Craftsman kept wishing that there were someone to ponder the plan of so great a work, to love its beauty, and to wonder at its vastness. - Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

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    *“The truth is ultimately an act of love.”*  ~Bd. John Paul II,  Fides et Ratio

Introduction to the ‘Living Flame of Love’…

   Most probably John introduced these variations into the text while at La Peñuela in the last months of his life, August-September 1591. A witness who lived with him at La Peñuela told of how in the early morning John used to withdraw into the garden for prayer and remain there until, coaxed by the heat of the sun, he returned to his monastery cell where he spent his time writing on certain stanzas of poetry. By this date all his other works, including the Canticle, had reached their final stage. Moreover John brought a copy of the work with him to Ubeda. He gave it as a gift in gratitude to Ambrosio de Villareal, the doctor who had cared for him there. What must have been the doctor's thoughts as he read of "how much God exalts the soul that pleases him"?

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‘As Kingfishers…’

    Abstraction is the enemy of poetry and Hopkins did not need reminding of this: despite the essentially intellectual nature of his theme, there is not a single abstract noun in 'As Kingfishers...'. Hopkins, in full energy, makes the experience present rather than talking about it; and it is good to be there. Desmond Egan analyses this great Hopkins poem line by line, word by word.
Norman MacKenzie dates the sonnet to March or April of 1877 during the time Hopkins was in St. Beuno's and wrote nine sonnets in pastoral Wales. (These included 'God's Grandeur' 'The Starlight Night', 'In the Valley of the Elwy', 'The Windhover' and 'Hurrahing in Harvest' - all of which he dated; and 'For Spring' , 'The Caged Skylark' 'As Kingfishers..' and 'The Lantern out of Doors', which he did not). Surely a'wonder-year' - in MacKenzie's words and one which poet Paul Mariani, in his Commentary has described convincingly as one of growing metrical complexity: Hopkins at the height of his powers - or close to it.

Hopkins was was 33 years old. We are dealing here with a completed work of art. The imagery of the poem has a corresponding coherence - and is often, perhaps, not fully understood.

First of all, here is the text of the poem.

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves - goes itself; myself it speak and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is -
Chríst - for Christ play in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

It starts with a confident assumption: the simile of the first line is based on a comparison of succeeding metaphors: the lightning flight of the kingfisher seems to turn him into a firebolt; the sudden dart of a dragonfly draws (or attracts) a brilliance comparable to that of a fierce blue flame (MacKenzie refers to the blast of a blowpipe)…
MacKenzie suggests another meaning: that the sound tells of the creator - but it seems to me unnecessary to anticipate Hopkins's thesis - particularly when he is dealing with the natural and the inanimate insofar as each is uniquely itself, before he moves onto another level of significance. He is not quite ready to do that yet, until the bell comparison is made. This image includes an example of Hopkins's excited use of a technical term (I think of Shakespeare's 'know a hawk from a handsaw'. a hawk being a large trowel for cement; of Emily Dickenson's 'valves' of attention, referring to the valves or half-doors; or of Hopkins's own 'rung on the rein' in "The Windhover' of the same year where 'ring' means 'to rise spirally'. Poets enjoy such precise, technical words). 'Bow' means the sound-bow of a bell - the lower part, where the hammer strikes and where the note finds its greatest amplification. So: every hanging bell, whenstruck, throws out ('broad' is an adverb meaning 'abroad') its special sound or 'name'…

The movement in 'As Kingfishers..' so far, has been from nature, animate and inanimate, to what is man-made: from kingfisher, dragonfly and stone to string and bell… Each human, every created, and therefore 'mortal' thing also has one distinctive, defining function: a single raison d'etre, of which the earlier imagery provides reminders. It is interesting to see that Hopkins reaches for another metaphor to put words on this: 'being indoors each one dwells'.The metaphor, 'dwelling indoors', living inside oneself, can only apply to the human and not to kingfisher or stone or the like…

The image of Christ's 'playing', in line 11 of 'As Kingfishers...' may owe something - as MacKenzie suggests - to St. Paul's expression: It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me. (Galatians 2 19-20) Zo de ouketi ego, Ze(i) de en emoi Xhristos.

… In one of his short Commentaries on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius ('Contemplatio ad Obtinendum Amorem') written circa 1881, we read, All things therefore are charged with love, are charged with God and if we know how to touch them (,) give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him. (House ed. p.342).
… he invokes the concrete rather than any abstraction: the instinct of a genuine poet. In this regard, some lines from a recent Collection, The World Returning, by contemporary English poet Lawrence Sail are worth quoting:

As when you gingerly open prayerful hands to see what you have caught, that has been tickling your palms with wings or feelers, and you find only the thought of something bright and precise, that must have somehow zig-zagged back to the sky, its image too soon blurred to an idea. (Bloodaxe Books, Tarset, UK, 2002)

How easily a fresh moment or feeling can be lost in words that slide back from life towards the 'idea'.
… the word, meaning 'it is likely (that)'. If we understand the word in this way in As Kingfishers Catch Fire, the meaning is 'it is likely that /in the same way, each tucked string tells ...'

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~ Desmond Egan ,'As Kingfishers Catch Fire'. . . analysis of Imagery