Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) was a convert to Catholicism and later a Jesuit priest and poet who created his own unique poetic style. He only achieved fame for his poetry posthumously, dying at only 44 years old. He suffered from depression and many of his poems display an insight into his mental illness and struggles with his faith.

He favoured the sonnet, a traditional poetic form that dates from the 13th century involving adherance to strict rules of rhyme, metre and length. His sonnets that feature on the course can be roughly divided into the ‘Bright Sonnets’ that celebrate nature and God and the ‘Sonnets of Desolation’ that explore the depths of his spiritual and mental misery later in life.

BRIGHT SONNETS

The ‘bright sonnets’ are full of energy and passion for life, nature and God. ‘God’s Grandeur’ is critical of humanity’s exploitation of nature: ‘all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;’ but concludes that nature, with the ‘grandeur of God’, will always recover and win out. And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

‘Spring’, possibly Hopkins’s most famous poem, celebrates the sense of renewal brought by springtime: ‘all this juice and all this joy’. He links it to the Garden of Eden and begs God to protect the spring-like innocence of children. He also links nature and God in ‘As kingfishers catch fire’. For Hopkins, every element of nature was unique and gave glory to God in its uniqueness, which he called ‘inscape’. Everything asserts its presence and existence on earth: ‘myself it speaks and spells, Crying What I do is me: for that I came.’

SONNETS OF DESOLATION

His ‘sonnets of desolation’ or ‘terrible sonnets’, in contrast, explore the misery of a depressed mind and spirit. They were written in Dublin in 1885 at a time when Hopkins felt a failure; unhappy in his work at UCD, frustrated in his lack of success as a writer and often suffering poor health. In the poems, he struggles with his religious faith and battles to overcome the despair that overwhelms him at times.

In ‘No worst, there is none’ he vividly describes his mental anguish: No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,

More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring

Comforter, where, where is your comforting?

He finds no end to his torment, no comfort, even from God and concludes: ‘all Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.’ ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark’ also explores his misery: ‘What hours, O what black hours we have spent /This night!’ He questions God’s apparent decision to reward sinners in ‘Thou art indeed just, Lord’ rather than rewarding those who try to live good lives. He begs for help and support with the simple line: ‘send my roots rain.’

STYLE:

Despite his preference for traditional poetic forms, his poetry was incredibly innovative and feels very modern for the era in which it was written. He used unusual syntax and often invented words to express himself. I’ve already explained his use of the word ‘inscape’ and he also used ‘instress’ to describe the energy at the core of all things. He felt that existing language was inadequate to capture the world accurately so experimented with neologisms and portmanteau or compound words, for example, ‘twindles’ from Inversnaid which fuses ‘twists’ and ‘dwindles’. He also sometimes chose to use obscure dialect words that fit his rhyme or metre better like ‘sillion’ in ‘The Windhover.

Perhaps his most striking stylistic feature is his rejection of iambic pentameter in favour of ‘Sprung rhythm’, an attempt to capture the energy or ‘instress’ of his topic in the flow of words. The dynamic and vibrant ‘Pied Beauty’ demonstrates it well: All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

We can see how musical his poems can be here with his energetic use of alliteration, assonance and internal rhyme. Ultimately his idiosyncratic style became a precursor to the free verse style that became so popular in the twentieth century and remains the style of choice for most poets today.