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Wells Cathedral Sermon 20.10.2019Gerard Manley Hopkins 1844-89This last week the ceremony took place in Rome at which John Henry Newman was declared a saint; it was marked here by a special Evensong at which the Roman Catholic Bishop of Clifton gave the blessing. This weekend in Wells the Festival of Literature gets underway, and I for one have spent too much money on tickets for some unmissable speakers.The coincidental occurrence of the festival following on the canonisation has brought to my mind a figure who for me at least connects them both. I mean the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who was both a follower of John Henry Newman and an undoubted master of English poetic form, the forerunner of poetic advancements in the twentieth century. You may have heard of him, you may even have been set to study his poems at school, though if you were it would almost certainly be in the sixth form because they are generally thought to be too difficult for the earlier years. It is just possible that you had thought that after the trials and tribulations of fighting your way through ‘The wreck of the Deutschland’, the opening poem is any collection of his poems that is known as ‘the dragon at the gate’ because of its difficulty, you would not have to confront his complications and complexities again. If this is so, I hope by the time I have finished you will be prepared to think again.Gerard Manley Hopkins lived in the latter part of the nineteenth century, well after Keats and Shelley and the other Romantics. He was born in Essex and educated in London and Oxford – the kind of brilliant student who even his own teachers admired. Searching for a deeper faith than the Anglicanism of his family, at Oxford he came under the influence of Newman and converted to Roman Catholicism. He entered the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, with all the rigours involved in that, and he was trained in this vocation at various places throughout the country – Birmingham, Lancashire and North Wales.Ordained in 1877, Hopkins served in a succession of Catholic parishes, but he was never much good as a pastor and a disaster as a preacher. His sermons to dock workers in industrial Liverpool were remembered as packed with literary references and intricate metaphors that congregations failed to follow, and no doubt told him so. He was sent to teach in Catholic colleges, and finally in Dublin, where he died of typhoid fever in 1889, only 45 years old.Hopkins wrote poetry from his school years onwards. But in the early years of his spiritual renewal as a Roman Catholic he came to think that the sheer pleasure of celebrating the physical world in its natural and human beauty was irreconcilable with what should be an ascetic life as a Christian. When he joined the Jesuits he burnt most of what he had written. It was only some years later, with the encouragement of his Jesuit superiors, that he resumed. The poems he then wrote through the rest of his life stand out in English verse as among the most challenging and singular, and among the most beautiful and troubling. As they became known in the years following his death, and were gradually brought together and published in the early decades of the twentieth century, their qualities attracted admiration from such giants of verse as W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot, and they exerted profound influence on such masters as Dylan Thomas.What are these qualities and why this wide influence? And why, as I would claim, is Hopkins a poet not only for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but even more for the twenty-first century?When you look at a Hopkins poem, you are quickly made aware of English language being used in a radically new way. In fact, you might say that Hopkins tortures English. Here is an example from a poem he wrote when he was racked with doubt about his worthiness before God and his worth as a man. They are the opening lines of a poem called ‘Peace’:When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,Your round me roaming end, and under be my bows?When, when, Peace, will you, Peace?Here Hopkins talks of peace as a dove hovering round him but never coming to rest within him, tantalising him by its possibility never turning into reality. This much it is possible to glean from one or two readings. But what about the language? What about the apparently wanton disregard for normal grammar in that line ‘Your round me roaming end, and under be my bows’: we would expect ‘End your roaming round me, and be under my boughs’. The metaphor of peace as a circling dove and the poet as a tree is demanding enough, but why add to it this straining and breaking of language? An even more flagrant example of the stresses under which Hopkins places the language comes in the last line I have quoted: ‘When, when, Peace, will you, Peace?’ The repetitions here presumably mimic the circling of a dove but on the page their meaning is hard to follow, and they can appear gratuitous. Is this just twisting the meanings and expected sequences of words for the sheer pleasure of it, or does it have a serious purpose?Examples can be multiplied, maybe none of them so challenging as the opening lines of what may be Hopkins’s most famous poem, ‘The windhover’:I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn falcon, in his ridingof the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wingIn his ecstasy! Then off, off forth on swing,As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and glidingRebuffed the big wind. My heart in hidingStirred for a bird, - the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!My goodness! What, you may say, what is that all about? Why is the language so difficult?The poem is, of course, about a falcon. Hopkins, in his time of study in North Wales, out for an early morning walk has caught sight of the bird hovering motionless, controlling the air currents with deft movements of its wings, before diving off on a swoop that is as clean as a skater completing a figure over the ice. The heaping up of noun and participle one on another helps to convey the tension coiled up within the bird, and then the soundless movement as it moves off to another spot. This movement is conveyed not only by the Hopkins’s choice of words, but also in the way he fits them together.For Hopkins the feat accomplished by the falcon is something to be admired in and for itself, leaving him wondering and holding his breath in appreciation. He changes the normal use of words, making a verb into a noun, a noun into a verb, in order to slow down his readers as they work on his meaning. He wants them to take in the vision, and grasp the creature doing what it can do. The falcon is realising itself, becoming itself in the full exercise of its potential. This is what it can do, this is what it is.Hopkins’s ability to see things as they secretly and really are, to admire them in and for themselves, and to refashion language to convey their uniqueness, and in fact to draw attention to the uniqueness of language, is evident throughout his poems. It is an ability to value things not for how they may be useful or for their monetary worth, or even for how they may function as part of a larger system. They are unique in themselves, and it is their ‘thisness’, as he calls it, that he celebrates. It extends throughout nature – ‘Nothing is so beautiful as spring – when weeds in wheels grow long and lovely and lush’ – and throughout humanity – a young soldier taking his first communion shows attentiveness to what he is doing that focuses the ‘thisness’ of humanity.Hopkins is for people who walk down Wells high street oblivious to everything apart from their mobiles held in front of them, to people who know the price of things but do not recognise their value, or to people who prize things only to the extent they can make use of them. He calls them to recognise the world as it is in itself, to see that it exists apart from them, each thing a true character in itself, having its own unique ‘thisness’ that they are invited to admire and enjoy. It calls them to free themselves from the mistake of thinking they are the centre of their universe, and celebrate the fact that they are no more than one small element in a vast complexity they will never master. At the same way, calls them to acknowledge that they themselves have intrinsic worth deriving from a uniqueness hidden within themselves. The ‘thisness’ of natural and manmade objects, and of humans themselves, is of such worth that ordinary language is not capable of describing it, but must be recast in order to point to it and the significance it possesses deep down in itself.Hopkins would go further than this. Making use of insights from the medieval philosopher John Duns Scotus, he would say that the unique thisness of a bird in the majesty of its hovering, or a freshly fallen chestnut revealed as shining brown when it is released from its cracked shell, or a virile smith wielding his hammer to forge a piece of iron, each reveals the presence of God. This he calls the inscape of the being or things, like a landscape – say that of the levels to Glastonbury Tor from the Mendips – but deep within until it is revealed through a demonstration of what the being can do. This is why he violates language, I suspect, to ask you to halt, grasp the thing for what it is, appreciate it and give thanks to God for the hint of His being it discloses.Maybe now I am beginning to make it a little clearer why it is worth coming to grips with Hopkins and wrestling with the poetic violence he does to the English language, and why he is a poet not just for the late Victorian world or the early twentieth century, but also for the twenty-first century. You and I are as involved as anyone from Hopkins’s own time in what he calls mere ‘getting and spending’, and just as prone to overlooking and undervaluing. Stop, he says, halt for a moment and look. Recognise the unique character and worth of what and who is around, and celebrate. As an earlier nineteenth-century poet wrote, this may bring you ‘thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears’. Or, as Hopkins intended, it may bring you up short before the Divinity he says is the origin that is to be glimpsed through the thisness of each and every created thing. ................
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