GERARD
MANLEY
HOPKINS
'S
MISDIRECTED FAITH
by
Dr. David B. Axelrod
Viewed from the
perspective of a non-believer, Gerard Manley Hopkins's unfortunate religious
obsession seems responsible for the suppression of one of literary history’s
great poetic talents and as likely for his early death. That Hopkins is best
known and most frequently anthologized for religious poems like “Pied
Beauty,” is an unfortunate irony, for it is as likely that his true religion
and greatest gift—poetry itself—was seriously damaged and at times
completely suppressed by his misdirected zeal for God.
Hopkins, himself,
gives ample credence to this view when he tells his sister, Grace, that “I
destroyed the verse I had written when I entered the [Jesuit] Society and meant
to write no more” (Phillips 249). Worse, he says, “a very spiritual man once
told me that . . . the best sacrifice was not to destroy one’s work but to
leave it entirely to be disposed of by obedience” (249). One can only
speculate whether that “spiritual man,” was a Jesuit mentor, who, seeing
Hopkins
was devoted to poetry, imposed a harsh discipline upon him to rid him of that
passion.
This becomes all
the more tragic when
Hopkins
says “There is more peace and it is the holier lot to be unknown than to be
known” (249) and that for Jesuits, “brilliance doesn’t suit us” (251).
The adherence to this view creates a conflict for
Hopkins
as he states “nature has two different, two opposite aspects, teaching
opposite lessons of life” (236). In keeping with this dichotomy, he
distinguished between “inscape” and "outscape." Though some try to
define "inscape" largely as a religious matter, it works as well to
consider it a reflection of
Hopkins
's inner, truer feelings. His poetry
and his love of nature are the true “inscape.” The “outscape” then,
would be all that he assigned himself as his religious obligations. His
outscape, quite literally, would be the way he clothed himself as a priest, even
as he wrote like a pantheist and a free spirit.
Further,
Hopkins
spent endless hours sermonizing in what, to those outside the faith, can only
seem like cult behavior. Had he applied that same time and talent to his
greatest gift—poetry—we can only assume he would have propelled himself to
ever greater creation, invention and likely fame. After all, he measured each
place he visited or lived as happy or unhappy according to whether it was
“Museless” (244). A happy life, he believed, was one that gave rise to
poetry! Faith, religion are not how happiness is measured. His joy was poetry.
(As a side note, for Beatles fans, he referred to
Liverpool
as among the museless places!)
In his journals
and letters, his explanation of his own poems and poetics further support the
view that his “better nature” was in his poetry, more than his proclaimed
faith. He explains his use of sprung rhythms as “the native and natural rhythm
of speech, the least forced naturalness of expression.” In his poetics, for
all his mastery of form,
Hopkins
wants to move away from dogma, even saying of
Milton
, he “keeps up a fiction of strict form even as he tries to spring free”
(228).
Hopkins discusses
beauty as “that which is seen in the mind.” Commenting on Tennyson,
Hopkins
said “his gift of utterance is truly golden. . . but wanting in nobility,”
while “in Burns there is . . . a richness and beauty . . . which lends worth
to his smallest fragments” (240-241). From this we may discern that Hopkins's
own standard of beauty and the worth of a soul was measured in the worthiness of
verse, just as the “most strictly beautiful lines [of Burns, that Hopkins
remembers] are those drawn from and describing nature” (241). Here is the true
Hopkins proclaiming himself a naturalist poet, free of conventional dogma and
rules.
More striking
still, was his love of
America
’s Walt Whitman, of whom he says “I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s
mind to be more like my own than any other man’s living” (256). He says he
strives, in his own poems, to what he characterizes as Whitman’s “savagery
of his art” and gives his own example of such emotions in his poem “Binsey
Poplars”:
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 [sic]
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.
(142)
What energetic
language, what raw emotion directed at the trees’ cutting. What music in the
words, and unembarrassed transference of emotion between man and nature.
Hopkins
tells us “a perfect style must be of its age” (253) and so he rejects the
archaic and overly-formal and sides with Whitman and the language of the people.
Compare his
duty-ditties for God to his passionate observation of human nature and nature
more broadly, and
Hopkins
becomes the poster-boy for a person in need of deprogramming. Only those
blinded by a similar religious indoctrination would say his sacrificing a
position of wealth and position in society, for a post as a priest and teacher,
was a good decision. His retreat, in his later life, to the solitude and natural
beauty of Monasterevin, is testimony to his need to let his real faith—in
poetry—flourish. How much longer he might have lived and created if he had
lived the privileged life he was born to, we can’t know but as likely, he
would have lived much longer as a comfortable and famous poet.
One need not be an atheist to espouse this view. In fact, an
understanding if not a belief in a broader, universal energy or spirit, makes
the case ever more strongly that Hopkins really believed most and would have
served a high purpose more steadfastly in his true religion—poetry. The
structure he chose, which acknowledges the Holy Spirit, could as easily have
been a more pantheistic view. It’s said he came as close to pantheism as a
Jesuit could.
Devotion to nature aside, it was poetry itself that he constantly, and
clearly loved most. He made lists of what to give up for lent, but he made poems
of what he knew best—the teeming natural settings he frequently visited. A
trip to a new location might require his visiting a church but his journals,
letters, finest creations were the notes he took observing the landscape, the
clouds in a valley, the predominance of oaks and birch.
For those who have ever slept through a sermon, it would have been a
great relief, or more likely a stimulating experience to have, instead, heard
Hopkins's poems read aloud or discussed. In the service and sometimes the
defense of his true religion—poetry—Hopkins wrote extensively on prosody,
explaining his metrics, his invention of new words and uses of language, his
belief that poetry, to rise to its highest level, “should affect the language
of common speech” (256). His reiteration of religious canon is boring.
His poetics are new, fresh, important.
In a letter to Bridges, his friend, fellow poet and editor, that
Hopkins
wrote not long before he died,
Hopkins
may as well be Whitman, famous for his saying: “Do I contradict myself? Very
well then, I contradict myself.”
Hopkins
proclaims “To produce is then of little use unless what we produce is known .
. . widely known” (256). For all his attempts to subjugate his poetic talents
for the sake of his Jesuit duties, he returns to his real passion. He roots for
“Victory,” to be “an unfading bay tree.” He reconciles his having a
“Hyde”—as in Jekyll and Hyde— (265) and it is his truer nature that he
wishes to be his legacy, telling us all to “Let your light shine before man”
(265). For
Hopkins
, that light was clearest and purest not so much in his obedience to religious
doctrine as in his poetry.
Nota
Bene:
If you pay a Ph.D.
enough, he will turn his expertise to any specific purpose. There is ample
evidence in how tobacco companies can still drag out experts, even doctors to
tell you that smoking not only doesn’t harm your health, it’s good for you.
Thus, what some call research others see as simply rationalizing. Those who
believe as
Hopkins
did, that service of God should trump
even a great talent, go on writing about the great religious poet, Gerard Manley
Hopkins. Those who hold a different bias see his work quite differently.
Equally, if not more firmly and emphatically, the case can be made that, but for
his indoctrination into an overbearing society, he was one of the English
language’s greatest practitioners—indeed innovators —of poetry.
SOURCE CONSULTED
All page numbers and quotes refer
to Oxford World’s Classics edition:
Phillips, Catherine, editor. Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Major Works.
Oxford
University
Press:
Oxford
, 2002.