Genius so tortured he hid his soaring elegies to England from the world
HAS any poet in the english language ever so exuberantly celebrated the beauty of Nature in all its variety as Gerard Manley hopkins?
‘ Glory be to God for dappled things,’ he cries in one poem, marvelling at the multi- coloured palette of the natural world. ‘Look at the stars! Look, look up at the skies!’ he instructs us in another, echoing an impulse none of us can resist when out on a clear night.
hopkins was always looking, always observant. No one who has read his poem The Windhover will ever forget its evocation of a bird of prey in flight, hovering over the landscape just as all of us have seen. It is one of the most amazing word pictures in any language.
hopkins was, moreover, perhaps the most english of our poets. he wrote in one of his letters: ‘If the english race had done nothing else, yet if they left the world the notion of a gentleman, they would have done a great service to mankind.’
he is one of the finest writers this country has ever produced, a creative force who ranks alongside his predecessors in the 19th century, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats.
Yet the paradox is he was completely unknown in his lifetime. Indeed, he would never have been known at all, had not one of his friends — a figure totally forgotten to us now, though famous in his own lifetime — chosen to publish these wonderful poems after hopkins’s tragically early death.
And this friend, Robert Bridges, did not even value hopkins’s poetry very highly himself!
It is hopkins’s brilliance — along with his intense relationship with Bridges — that makes today’s announcement about the archive of Bridges’ letters and papers being left to the country so exciting.
hopkins today is so important that his poems are taught to every student of english literature and find their way into all the anthologies.
Yet in his lifetime he was simply a priest whose poetry had never been printed or published.
In contrast, Bridges was one of the few poets to be made a peer. he was awarded the Order of Merit. his collected poems sold in their tens of thousands and when Bridges died, in 1930, he was the Poet Laureate.
Today he is out of print and more or less unheard-of. has the history of literature ever known such a reversal in fortunes as the story of these two friends?
The Bridges archive has been left in the care of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and is full of documents that give us an unvarnished insight into hopkins’s life. Amid the dozens of boxes containing letters from the great and famous literary figures of the day — letters from the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, or from the Prime Minister herbert Asquith — there is one treasure beyond price: it is known as Manuscript A.
It is an almost complete collection of the poetry of hopkins, written in the poet’s own hand, and corrected in red ink by his friend ... Bridges. Bridges had these poems, which were sent to him over the years through the post, bound into a handsome volume — Manuscript A.
The librarian who showed me the treasure said that merely to open it made her go weak at the knees. It had the same effect on me. Indeed, when I opened it and turned its pages, I found tears coursing down my cheeks. All these poems were written in obscurity, and without any hope of being published. Yet they are among the most magnificent things written in english.
Why did the tears run? I think, three reasons. First, hopkins was one of
the most innovative and original poets in our language, and here were his poems, written by his own hand, and now held in mine. It was as if I were touching him personally. Second, the poems were remarkably quirky and modern for their day. Not for the sake of impressing anyone, though — no one except Bridges and two or three others ever read them during the poet’s lifetime.
But alone it is not that for we their value style them, it is also for their passionate intensity. Whether he was mourning the loss of Binsey Poplars’ near Oxford, vandalistically hacked down in 1879: My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,/ Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,/ All felled, felled, are all felled.’ Whether he was contemplating the life of his working-class parishioners and penitents — Felix Randal the farrier, or the bugler boy to him he gave First Communion — Hopkins felt things, and conveyed experiences with an intensity rarely expressed. And third, I think, the tears came because one is immediately conscious, when reading Hopkins, either his poetry or his journals, of the tragedy of his life. the price he paid for being able to convey, so freshly, the reality of things, was having a vulnerable, ultra-sensitive temperament.
Despair came often, especially near the end of his life when he wrestled with mind-torturing depressions, as in such sonnets as ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day/What hours, O what black hours we have spent/ this night’ or, ‘We hear our hearts grate on themselves’.
the little volume of calligraphed leaves in Hopkins’s handwriting is a witness to miraculous creativity, and also an intensity of inner suffering rarely so well articulated.
Yet were it not for Bridges, none of us would have known any of this.
their friendship began at Oxford university, where they made an odd couple: Manley slight and little over 5ft; Bridges big, muscular, handsome, sporty and good at rowing.
After Oxford their paths diverged. Bridges, a natural conservative in politics, married and qualified as a doctor. to Bridges’s horror, Hopkins become not only a Roman Catholic, but a Jesuit priest. Worse, Hopkins, who had worked in some of the poorest areas of Liverpool and Birmingham, became a Lefty.
Hopkins was innocent enough to hope that he might one day convert Bridges to his own opinions. He wrote something he later nicknamed his ‘red letter’ to Bridges on August 2, 1871. ‘ I am afraid some great revolution is not far off. Horrible to say, in a manner I am a Communist.’
Bridges was appalled, and did not correspond with Hopkins for months, but somehow their friendship survived.
Most of the letters Hopkins wrote, now in the archive, were about poetry. Presumably the same was true of the letters Bridges wrote back, though only one letter of his survives. the others he destroyed.
this one Bridges letter concerned Hopkins’s health. Father Hopkins was ill in Dublin, aged 45 — an English priest who had been sent to teach at the new Catholic university there. He was desperately homesick, and suffered from crippling inner sorrows: ‘to seem the stranger lies my lot … I am in Ireland now’.
Never a strong man, he had developed typhoid fever. Bridges wrote to him. ‘Dearest Gerard, What is this fever?...’ he asked. ‘I wish I could look in on you and see you for myself.’
Alas, Hopkins died before Bridges could, killed by the typhoid. Bridges was a good doctor. Perhaps he would have been able to save his friend. In the event all he was left with were his letters — and poems.
these Hopkins poems are of course the prize of the collection. But almost the most remarkable document I read on my visit to the Bodleian was a note from Bridges himself about those poems. It was to a minor poet, a clergyman called Canon Dixon, who was another of Hopkins’s friends. Bridges wrote, after Hopkins died ‘dear Gerard was overworked and unhappy. But how much worse [his death] would have been had his promise or performance been more splendid’.
In other words, Bridges thought his friend’s poetry odd, and interesting, but certainly not in the first rank. In some ways it makes his patient labour of editing Hopkins and persuading the Oxford university Press to print the poems, all the more generous.
the Bridges papers have come to the Bodleian Library through a scheme known as Acceptance in Lieu, in which the Arts Council and HM Revenue, Customs and Excise accept some literary or artistic treasure from a family in lieu of paying death duties.
Recent acquisitions in the Bodleian include the papers of the late Denis Healey, an invaluable treasure-trove of letters, speeches and diaries revealing the life of a man who was at the heart of politics in this country for 50 years.
they have also got the papers of the poets Stephen Spender and Philip Larkin, and the novelist and travel-writer Bruce Chatwin. Some writers have been generous enough to donate their archives — Alan Bennett’s is perhaps the most famous.
I believe it is absolutely vital to our national life that we preserve and expand our archives. All of the ones in the Bodleian and other great national libraries, such as the British Library in London or the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, are very far from being just dead piles of paper.
THE Bodleian is at the forefront of training graduates in the archival skills needed to put manuscript material online.
One of the most exciting developments of recent years was the Royal Archives’ decision to put all Queen Victoria’s Journals on line. the sourfaced old lady you see in statues of Queen Victoria erected after her death is instantaneously transformed, when you read her journals, into a fascinating human being, full of passion and intelligence.
thanks to the archivists’ diligent work, history is fizzing to life on our computer screens. there has never been a time in history when history itself was so available.
the Bridges donation to the Bodleian is therefore not just an act of depositing a set of manuscripts, however precious, in some air-conditioned storage where it will scarcely be seen or used. they are unedited, unvarnished records of history — and in the case of Gerard Manley Hopkins, an extraordinary insight into a tortured but effervescent mind who brought Nature to life on the page as never before.