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Peter Milward. The Priestly Poems of G.M. Hopkins
The Priestly Poems of G.M. Hopkins. Peter Milward, S.J
Introduction
“Thee, God, I come from, to thee go”
“Thou mastering me God!”
“The world is charged with the grandeur of God”
“Look at the stars! Look, look up at the skies!”
“Nothing is so beautiful as spring!”
“I remember a house where all were good to me”
“On ear and ear two noises too old to end trench”
“I caught this morning morning’s minion”
“Glory be to God for dappled things!”
“Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise”
“As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage”
“Sometimes a lantern moves along the night”
“The Eurydice – it concerned thee, O Lord”
“May is Mary’s month”
“My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled”
“Towery city and branchy between towers”
“Have fair fallen, O fair, fair have fallen”
“Some candle clear burns somewhere I come by”
“Now Time’s Andromeda on this rock rude”
“When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove”
“Felix Randal the farrier, O is he dead then?”
“Margaret, are you grieving?”
“This darksome burn, horseback brown”
“Earth, sweet Earth, sweet landscape”
“As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame”
“Wild air, world-mothering air”
“To what serves mortal beauty?”
“Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable”
“Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee”
“To seem the stranger lies my lot”
“No worst, there is none!”
“I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day”
“Patience, hard thing!”
“My own heart let me more have pity on”
“Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows flaunt forth”
“Honour is flashed off exploit”
“Thou art indeed just, Lord”
“The shepherd’s brow, fronting forked lightning”
“The fine delight that fathers thought”
“How all’s to one thing wrought!”
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It may truly be said of Gerard Manley Hopkins that, for all his complaints to the contrary, he enjoyed the inestimable advantage of having been unable to get most of his poems published before his premature death in 1889. Even then he had to remain in the realm of the blessed for another thirty years before the time was judged right by his all too critical friend Robert Bridges for the publication of his Poems by the Oxford University Press in 1918. And even then it took another twelve years before they went into a second edition thanks to Charles Williams in 1930, and another eighteen years before the more authoritative third edition was brought out by W.H. Gardner in 1948. Only then may it be said that the poet at long last came into his own, and even then it was not so much in his native England as in an American exile, according to the sad saying of Jesus that “No man is a prophet in his own country.”
Then, we may ask, what was so advantageous to Hopkins in such a long period of waiting for world recognition of his poems? It was simply because this deprived him of any incentive to write for his Victorian contemporaries or to adapt his thoughts and words to their narrowly insular tastes. As G.K. Chesterton truly says of them in his magisterial Victorian Age in Literature, the authors of that age, for all the world-wide extent of the boasted British Empire, were all so narrowly imperialistic, looking on the world around them with red-tinted spectacles and looking down on so many less favoured countries with self-satisfied complacency. It was from these contemporaries that Hopkins cut himself off first by conversion to the Catholic Church in 1866, thanks to the mediation of John Henry Newman (the least narrow-minded of the Victorians, in Chesterton’s opinion), secondly by admission into the Society of Jesus two years later.
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In any case, what distinguishes the plays of Shakespeare from those of all his contemporary dramatists is exactly what distinguishes the poems of Hopkins from those of all his contemporary poets, namely the power of their genius to transcend the narrow limits whether of the Elizabethan or the Victorian age, by means of their respect for and familiarity with the height and depth, the length and breadth of the tradition of Catholic Christendom. That is why, after William Shakespeare, I point unhesitatingly to Gerard Manley Hopkins as the greatest poetic genius in all English literature, even with the inclusion of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Milton.
“Over again I feel Thy finger and find Thee.” In search of us it is you who reach down to us, who find us. Then it is we who feel your finger and find you. It is your Holy Spirit, finger of your right hand, who fly down upon us, who come and overshadow us, who breathe upon us as in a new creation. We are like Adam in the painting, reaching out our limp finger as best we can, so as to touch your outstretched finger.
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