Gm Hopkins, Bernard Shaw

UNIT-I : G. M. HOPKINS, BERNARD SHAW Structure NOTES 1.0 Objectives 1.1 GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS 1.1.1 Hopkins, The Pioneer 1.1.2 Themes in Hopkins's Poetry 1.1.3 Hopkins's theory of ‘Inscape’ and ‘Instress’ 1.1.4 Eccentricity, Oddity, Obscurity in Hopkins's Poetry 1.1.5 The Windhover 1.1.6 Pied Beauty 1.1.7 God's Grandeur 1.1.8 Some Important Explanations 1.2 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW 1.2.1 Important Characters in the Play 1.2.2 Institution of Marriage in Candida 1.2.3 Socialism in Candida 1.2.4 Candida — A Critical Appreciation 1.2.5 Summary of Candida 1.2.6 Marchbanks : spokesman to popularise his revolutionary ideas. 1.2.7 Assessment of the heroine Candida 1.2.8 Characterisation of Morell 1.3 Comprehension Exercises 1.4 Let Us Sum Up 5 1.0 OBJECTIVES In Unit I our objective is to acquaint you with Gerard Manley Hopkins and George Bernard Shaw. We shall not only discuss their life and career but also NOTES their works. We have selected three poems of Hopkins— The Wind-hover, Pied Beauty and God’s Grandeur — and Shaw’s Candida. You will be able to: Discuss these great literary men. Describe the works. Appreciate their works. 1.1 GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS THOUGH VICTORIAN HE IS REGARDED FIRST AMONG MODERN POETS Gerard Manley Hopkins, popularly knows as Gerard Hopkins, belongs to the Victorian Age but in spirit and character he is a modern poet. He writes and thinks very much in the same manner as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, the Sitwells and Yeats. He does not have any of the characteristics of a Victorian poet—none of his facile expression, mellifluous music, haunting cadence and suggestive emotion and lingering delicacy of sentiment. He is original, unconventional, very argumentative, penetratingly intellectual, complex, harsh and difficult. Hopkins actually came to be known to the general public in 1918 when the climate for modern poetry had become congenial. Consequently immediately after the publication of his poems Hopkins was hailed as the first among the Modern, a pioneer. Life and Career Born on June 11, 1844 at Stratford Essex, and died at the early age of forty-five on June 1889 on account of typhoid, Hopkins's life-story is not very eventful or outwardly remarkable. However, he had distinguished himself with a career. He was easily one of the few boys, even at Highgate school, who was noted as a poet as well as a scholar. In 1863 he joined the Balliol College at Oxford. There he came under the spell of the religious and intellectual currents of 6 the thought of the time. He was in particular drawn by the new religious asceticism of Newman who succeeded in winning him over to Roman Catholic faith on October 21, 1866. So that when he left College with a First Class Honours degree in Classics he had made up his mind finally to take holy Orders. In the meantime he toured Switzerland and burnt his poetry. He had also taught NOTES for some time at Newman's Oratory School. Eventually he entered the most austere of Catholic Orders, the Society of Jesus or the Order of Jesuits on September 8, 1868. This was a turning point in his career and the event had a great impact on his life and thought. For seven years Hopkins kept his poetic silence as a measure to attain his detachment from his past. He appears to have a feeling that writing poetry was not only a waste of time for a truly austere and religious soul—it might indeed breed, Hopkins felt, the spiritual danger of pride and desire for fame. Ultimately he did break his silence when his rector requested him to write a poem called “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” but he thought that writing poetry would divert his energies into wrong channels—as a dedicated religious soul, he felt, he should perhaps desist from anything that seemed to be a life of sensual indulgence. He wrote to his friend Dixon: “I hold myself free to compose, but cannot find it in my conscience to spend time upon it (the poem “The Wreck of the Deutschland”); so I have done little and shall do less”. It has been said that the word ‘conscience’: in this sentence is the key-word—all his life was debating within himself whether he should go on writing poetry. He found it possible to reconcile himself to write poetry on a theoretical level but in his heart all his life, he found this difficulty troubling him. One of the reasons why Hopkins wrote so few poems (in all about 52) may be found herein, this “war within” as he expressed it in one of his poems. The year 1868 has been described as the really only one date of great importance in Hopkins's life: the year when he turned a Jesuit. It was also the year when he finished his youth and turned mature, when he completely turned from the life of senses to the life of spirit. He had a Keatsean artistic temperament but he sacrificed it for a life of austere dedication to the service of God. Such was his determined nature in austere matters that we have on record stories how he would drink nothing, he took no liquid at all for a whole weak and nearly collapsed. At another time he gave up eating salt. It was not a simple “war” between good and evil in him, between the spirit and flesh (as Gilkes points out, 7 that is every man's conflict) but to this further antimony in his strangely dual nature – the will to self-negation perpetually at war with the will to self- expression. He wrote to his friend how the will to self-negation has triumphed over the will to self-expression, or in other words, the moralist has taken pre- NOTES eminence over artist in him: “What I had written I burnt before I became Jesuit and resolved to write no more, as not belonging to my profession, unless it were by the wish of my superiors; so for seven years I wrote nothing but two or three little presentation pieces which occasion called for.” Again, as Gilkes points out in A Key to Modern English Poetry, “Thus outwardly during all these seven years there was silence and submission : but inwardly the new poetry was brewing and taking a shape. So when five nuns were drowned and he was asked by his rector to write about them, he produced ‘The Wreck of Deutschland’ in a style which was thoroughly different and Modern”. This poem was sent to the magazine The Month, a leading Catholic Magazine which turned down the publication of the poem “The Deutschland”. It was a poem in modern style and not in the Victorian. On September 23, 1877 he was ordained Priesthood and for four years he visited various Parish churches of the society of Jesus in London, Oxford, Liverpool and Glasgow. He spent 1881 as third year of novitiate at Rockhampton and during 1882-84 he taught Classics at Stony-hurst College, the Jesuit preparatory school. In 1883 he visited Holland and finally in 1884 he was sent to Ireland as Professor of Greek at University College, Dublin, where he spent his last five years. His health was poor and hard work had broken his backbone and he succumbed to a severe attack of typhoid on June 8, 1889. It must be confessed that Hopkins was seething with the “inner war” of which we have had a glimpse during the poetic silence during 1868-75. In later years also he wrote under compulsion and then never published what he wrote. He always felt the lack of an appreciative reading public which is such an encouragement to an artist. His friends Bridges, Dixon and Patmore provided a sympathetic audience but could not adequately encourage his talent. Indeed, he confessed in one of his letters : “There is a point with me in matters of any size when I must absolutely have encouragement as much as crops rain.” As his life progressed his duties as priest or teacher and even as researcher occupied his attention and energy, and he had little time for writing poetry. He often 8 complained : “I am always tired.” For him city life was uncongenial; and his health became more and more precarious. Above all, his life was made especially painful by a state of spiritual aridity and desolation, the price of a delicate soul. He expressed this as follows: NOTES “Feeling, love in particular, is the great moving power and spring of verse and the only person I am in love with (Christ of God) seldom, especia'y now, stirs my heart sensibly and when he does I cannot always 'make capital' of it, it would be a sacrilege to do so.” Yet out of this anguish came almost ‘unbidden and against my Will’ some of his most haunting and terrifying poems, the ‘Terrible Sonnets’ as they have been called. As a counterpart of his cry “All impulse fails me, I can give myself no sufficient reason for going. Nothing comes; I can euchh—but it is for the kingdom of heaven's sake”. Then came the following beautiful sonnet: ....birds build......... but no I build; no, but strain, Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes. Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain. The only consolation in this matter is that although all these things particularly the “inner war” did not allow a large number of poems to be composed by Hopkins, they deepened the quality of the few poems which he did write.

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