Let me wish here a happy birthday to my second favorite poet in the English language, Gerard Manley Hopkins, born July 28, 1844 in Stratford, England. I remember as an undergraduate at UCLA Professor Nisbett told our Victorian Literature class that Hopkins was “either the greatest of the minor poets in the English language, or the least of the great poets in the English language.”
I favor the great classification, but wherever you place him he was an outlier in the English literary canon…a different kind of poet in most every way. Frail and fastidious, and thought to have had bipolar disorder, he was a deeply religious man who converted to Catholicism, then became a Jesuit priest who ministered to the English poor of Liverpool.
Hopkins had a radically different idea of what English poetry should be, from words to rhythms. He advocated using Latinate words sparingly, if at all; instead, he urged going back to Anglo Saxon and Norse words even if they were archaic, and inventing your own words if they seemed to fit. (Note in the Margaret poem below the apparent neologisms “leafmeal,” “unleaving,” and “goldengrove,” then go to the dictionary and see how they all seem to trace back to Hopkins.)
He believed poetry was meant for the ear, not the eye. It was, in his words, “speech framed to be heard for its own sake and interest even over and above its interest of meaning.” He certainly practiced what he preached in his slim body of work, and his poetry is heard in its harsh music of words of one and two syllables, heavy on alliteration, assonance, and internal rhyme.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Hopkins as a poet was that he was not published in his short lifetime of 44 years. Nor did he wish to be. His friend Robert Bridges followed his friend’s wishes and kept his work private…until 1918—29 years after the poet’s death. Thankfully, they have trickled out ever since.
Hopkins’s fresh and distinctive style has influenced poets ever since, most notably T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and W. H. Auden. (I have always assumed that the Margaret and Felix celebrated below were parishioners of his.)
Spring and Fall:
to a young child
Margaret, are you grieving
Over goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! As the heart grow older
It will come to such sights colder,
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie,
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight that man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
Felix Randal
Felix Randal the farrier, O is he dead then? my duty all ended,
Who have watched his mould of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome
Pining, pining, till time when reason rambled in it, and some
Fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended?
Sickness broke him. Impatient, he cursed at first, but mended
Being anointed and all; though a heavenlier heart began some
Months earlier, since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom
Tendered to him. Ah well, God rest him all road ever he offended!
This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears.
My tongue had taught thee comfort, touch had quenched thy tears,
Thy tears that touched my heart, child, Felix, poor Felix Randal;
How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years,
When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers,
Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!