Читать книгу The Gospel in Gerard Manley Hopkins - Gerard Manley Hopkins - Страница 15

Journals

(1864–1875)

Hopkins included relatively few personal notes in his journals, and those few reveal the quality of his own highly “stressed” character. Since he had forbidden himself his natural outlet of poetry, the journals became an outpouring of self-expression. Higgins describes them as “the counterpoint to days of study, whether academic or theological. There are times, however, when he slips back into the self-reporting mode, feeling emotionally bruised. Hopkins is, first and last, a textual being.…”10 The entries oscillate between ecstatic descriptions of natural phenomena and painful self-examination. After 1875, when he ceased keeping journals, the stress and compression that marked his nature took both form and content in his verse once again.

1864

January 27. Two swans flew high up over the river on which I was, their necks stretched straight out and wings billowing.

Note on green wheat. The difference between this green and that of long grass is that first suggests silver, latter azure. Former more opacity, body, smoothness. It is the exact complement of carnation.

Nearest to emerald of any green I know, the real emerald stone. It is lucent. Perhaps it has a chrysoprase [golden-green stone] bloom. Both blue greens.

It is a happy thing that there is no royal road to poetry. The world shd. know by this time that one cannot reach Parnassus except by flying thither. Yet fr. time to time more men go up and either perish in its gullies fluttering excelsior flags or else come down again with full folios and blank countenances. Yet the old fallacy keeps its ground. Every age has its false alarms.

The poetical language lowest. To use that, wh. poetasters, and indeed almost everyone, can do, is no more necessarily to be uttering poetry than striking the keys of piano is playing a tune. Only, when the tune is played it is on the keys. So when poetry is uttered it is in this language. Next, Parnassian. Can only be used by real poets. Can be written without inspiration. Good instance in Enoch Arden’s island.¹¹ Common in professedly descriptive pieces. Much of it in Paradise Lost and Regained. Nearly all The Faery Queen. It is the effect of fine age to enable ordinary people to write something very near it. – Third and highest poetry proper, language of inspiration. Explain inspiration. On first reading a strange poet his merest Parnassian seems inspired. This is because then first we perceive genius. But when we have read more of him and are accustomed to the genius we shall see distinctly the inspirations and much that wd. have struck us with great pleasure at first loses much of its charm and becomes Parnassian. – Castalian, highest sort of Parnassian. e.g. “Yet despair touches me not, Tho’ pensive as a bird Whose vernal coverts winter hath laid bare.”¹² … Much Parnassian takes down a poet’s reputation, lowers his average, as it were. Pope and all artificial schools great writers of Parnassian. This is the real meaning of an artificial poet.

1866

May 3. Cold. Morning raw and wet, afternoon fine. Walked then with Addis, crossing Bablock Hythe, round by Skinner’s Weir through many fields into the Witney road. Sky sleepy blue without liquidity. Fr. Cumnor Hill saw St. Philip’s and the other spires through blue haze rising pale in a pink light. On further side of the Witney road hills, just fleeced with grain or other green growth, by their dips and waves foreshortened here and there and so differenced in brightness and opacity the green on them, with delicate effect. On left, brow of the near hill glistening with very bright newly turned sods and a scarf of vivid green slanting away beyond the skyline, against which the clouds shewed the slightest tinge of rose or purple. Copses in grey-red or greyyellow – the tinges immediately forerunning the opening of full leaf. Meadows skirting Seven-bridge road voluptuous green. Some oaks are out in small leaf. Ashes not out, only tufted with their fringy blooms. Hedges springing richly. Elms in small leaf, with more or less opacity. White poplars most beautiful in small grey crisp spray-like leaf. Cowslips capriciously colouring meadows in creamy drifts. Bluebells, purple orchis. Over the green water of the river passing the slums of the town and under its bridges swallows shooting, blue and purple above and shewing their amber-tinged breasts reflected in the water, their flight unsteady with wagging wings and leaning first to one side then the other. Peewits flying. Towards sunset the sky partly swept, as often, with moist white cloud, tailing off across which are morsels of greyblack woolly clouds. Sun seemed to make a bright liquid hole in this, its texture had an upward northerly sweep or drift fr. the West marked softly in grey. Dog violets. Eastward after sunset range of clouds rising in bulky heads moulded softly in tufts or bunches of snow – so it looks – and membered somewhat elaborately, rose-coloured. Notice often imperfect fairy rings. Apple and other fruit trees blossomed beautifully.…

June 30. Thunderstorms all day, great claps and lightning running up and down. When it was bright between times great towering clouds behind which the sun put out his shaded horns very clearly and a longish way. Level curds and whey sky after sunset. – Graceful growth of Etzkoltzias or however those unhappy flowers are spelt. Yews and evergreen trees now very thin and putting out their young pale shoots.

July 17.… It was this night I believe but possibly the next that I saw clearly the impossibility of staying in the Church of England, but resolved to say nothing to anyone till three months are over, that is the end of the Long, and then of course to take no step till after my Degree.

July 19.… Alone in the woods … I have now found the law of the oak leaves.…

“Found the law of the oak leaves”? At the heart of Hopkins’s lifelong and consistent poetic reside the concepts of inscape and instress, thus named by Hopkins when he was an undergraduate. By “inscape” Hopkins means pattern in nature, and by “nature” he means not only oak leaves in the woods and clouds in the summer, but the more general reality of the universe, of “the way things are.” For Hopkins, inscape results from divinely intelligent creation. Catherine Phillips, one editor of Hopkins’s collected works, explains his idea of instress this way: “Unlike ‘inscape,’ which is the result of mental analysis and perception, ‘instress’ is more nebulous, often, although not always, associated with feeling; it is the identifying impression a thing can communicate to a careful and receptive observer. Hopkins also uses the term to mean ‘the stress within,’ the force which binds something or a person into a unit.”13 Those of us who have the eyes to see and the will to know can instress an inscape by not just “taking” it in, but by “stressing” it in. “The law of the oak leaves” is their inscape; Hopkins “found” that law on July 19, 1866, and instressed it.

1868

May 2. Fine, with some haze, and warm. This day, I think, I resolved.

May 5. Cold. Resolved to be a religious.

May 6. Fine but rather thick and with a very cold N.E. wind.

May 7. Warm; misty morning; then beautiful turquoise sky. Home, after having decided to be a priest and religious but still doubtful between St. Benedict and St. Ignatius.…

May 11. Dull; afternoon fine. Slaughter of the innocents. See above, the 2nd.

July 11.… How fond of and warped to the mountains it wd. be easy to become! For every cliff and limb and edge and jutty has its own nobility. – Two boys came down the mountain yodeling. [Hopkins is visiting Switzerland.] – We saw the snow in the hollows for the first time. In one the surface was crisped across the direction of the cleft and the other way, that is across the broader crisping and down the stream, combed: the stream ran below and smoke came fr. the hollow: the edge of the snow hewn in curves as if by moulding planes. – Crowd of mountain flowers – gentians; gentianellas; blood-red lucerne; a deep blue glossy spiked flower like plantain, flowering gradually up the spike, so that at the top it looks like clover or honeysuckle; rich big harebells glistening black like the cases of our veins when dry and heated fr. without; and others. All the herbage enthronged with every fingered or fretted leaf. – Firs very tall, with the swell of the branching on the outer side of the slope so that the peaks seem to point inwards to the mountain peak, like the lines of the Parthenon, and the outline melodious and moving on many focuses. – I wore my pagharee and turned it with harebells below and gentians in two rows above like double pan-pipes. – In coming down we lost our way and each had a dangerous slide down the long wet grass of a steep slope.

1870

February. One day in the Long Retreat (which ended on Xmas Day) they were reading in the refectory Sister Emmerich’s account of the Agony in the Garden and I suddenly began to cry and sob and could not stop. I put it down for this reason, that if I had been asked a minute beforehand I should have said that nothing of the sort was going to happen and even when it did I stood in a manner wondering at myself not seeing in my reason the traces of an adequate cause for such strong emotion – the traces of it I say because of course the cause in itself is adequate for the sorrow of a lifetime. I remember much the same thing on Maundy Thursday when the presanctified Host was carried to the sacristy. But neither the weight nor the stress of sorrow, that is to say of the thing which should cause sorrow, by themselves move us or bring the tears as a sharp knife does not cut for being pressed as long as it is pressed without any shaking of the hand but there is always one touch, something striking sideways and unlooked for, which in both cases undoes resistance and pierces, and this may be so delicate that the pathos seems to have gone directly to the body and cleared the understanding in its passage.

March 12. A fine sunset: … The next morning a heavy fall of snow. It tufted and toed the firs and yews and went on to load them till they were taxed beyond their spring. The limes, elms, and Turkey-oaks it crisped beautifully as with young leaf. Looking at the elms from underneath you saw every wave in every twig (become by this the wire-like stem to a finger of snow) and to the hangers and flying sprays it restored, to the eye, the inscapes they had lost. They were beautifully brought out against the sky, which was on one side dead blue, on the other washed with gold.

September 24. First saw the Northern Lights.… This busy working of nature wholly independent of the earth and seeming to go on in a strain of time not reckoned by our reckoning of days and years but simpler and as if correcting the preoccupation of the world by being preoccupied with and appealing to and dated to the day of judgment was like a new witness to God and filled me with delightful fear.

1871

End of March and beginning of April. – This is the time to study inscape in the spraying of trees, for the swelling buds carry them to a pitch which the eye could not else gather – for out of much much more, out of little not much, out of nothing nothing: in these sprays at all events there is a new world of inscape. The male ashes are very boldly jotted with the heads of the bloom which tuft the outer ends of the branches. The staff of each of these branches is closely knotted with the places where buds are or have been, so that it is something like a finger which has been tied up with string and keeps the marks. They are in knops of a pair, one on each side and the knops are set alternately, at crosses with the knops above and the knops below, the bud of course is a short smoke-black pointed nail-head or beak pieced of four lids or nippers. Below it, like hollow below the eye or the piece between the knuckle and the root of the nail, is a half-moon-shaped sill as if once chipped the wood and this gives the twig its quaining.…

April 22. But such a lovely damasking in the sky as today I never felt before. The blue was charged with same instress, the higher, zenith sky earnest and frowning, lower more light and sweet. High up again, breathing through woolly coats of cloud or on the quains and branches of the flying pieces it was the true exchange of crimson.…

May 9. This day and May 11 the bluebells in the little wood between the College and the highroad and in one of the Hurst Green cloughs. In the little wood / opposite the light / they stood in blackish spreads or sheddings like the spots on a snake. The heads are then like thongs and solemn in grain and grape-colour. But in the clough / through the light / they came in falls of sky-colour washing the brows and slacks of the ground with vein-blue.… The bluebells in your hand baffle you with their inscape.… With a shock of wet heads; the long stalks rub and click and flatten to a fan on one another like your fingers themselves would when you passed the palms hard across one another, making a brittle rub and jostle like the noise of a hurdle strained by leaning against; then there is the faint honey smell and in the mouth the sweet gum when you bite them.…

1872

March 13. After a time of trial and especially a morning in which I did not know which way to turn as the account of De Rancé’s final conversion was being read at dinner the verse Qui confidunt in D[omin]o sicut mons Sion¹⁴ which satisfied him and resolved him to enter his abbey of La Trappe by the mercy of God came strongly home to me too, so that I was choked for a little while and could not keep back my tears.…

July 19. The ovary of the blown foxglove surrounded by the green calyx is perhaps that conventional flower in pointed and other floriated work which I could not before identify. It might also be St. John’s-wort.

Stepped into a barn of ours, a great shadowy barn, where the hay had been stacked on either side, and looking at the great rudely arched timberframes – principals (?) and tie-beams, which make them look like bold big A’s with the cross-bar high up – I thought how sadly beauty of inscape was unknown and buried away from simple people and yet how near at hand it was if they had eyes to see it and it could be called out everywhere again.…

After the examinations we went for our holiday out to Douglas in the Isle of Man Aug. 3. At this time I had first begun to get hold of the copy of Scotus on the Sentences¹⁵ in the Baddely¹⁶ library and was flush with a new stroke of enthusiasm. It may come to nothing or it may be a mercy from God. But just then when I took in any inscape of the sky or sea I thought of Scotus.