PART II

Gerard Manley Hopkins: Oddity and Obscurity

A version of Clare’s ‘I Am’ appeared in The Spectator in 1865. Hopkins copied it into his notebook. Hopkins’s interest in the poem does not sig- nal that Clare had anything other than a local infuence on Hopkins’s , but it is a token of the two poets’ shared concern with the trib- ulations of personality as a source of creative life.1 Hopkins is among the nineteenth century’s most individual writers about individuality. He expressed his sensitivity to his distinctiveness in language which is in itself distinctive.‘[H]uman nature, being more highly pitched, selved, and dis- tinctive than anything in the world’, must have been created by a being even more individual, he argued in some well-known retreat notes. This truth, says Hopkins, only becomes more evident

when I consider my selfbeing, my consciousness and feeling of myself, that taste of myself, of I and me above and in all things, which is more distinc- tive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnut leaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to another man (as when I was a child I used to ask myself: what must it be to be someone else?). Nothing else in nature comes near this unspeakable stress of pitch, distinctive- ness, and selving, this selfbeing of my own: nothing explains it or resembles it, except so far as this, that other men to themselves have the same feeling.2

It is hard to say whether the recognition made in this famous passage is comic or tragic, humanising or isolating. The urgent rhythms of Hopkins’s prose (pitch, distinctiveness, and selving, this selfbeing) strain to conceptu- alise an individuality that remains ‘unspeakable’; they speak of an effort to 112 Part II: Gerard Manley Hopkins: Oddity and Obscurity give voice to personal peculiarity that is at the heart of Hopkins’s artistic endeavour, even as it runs up against the feeling, again fruitful of comedy and tragedy, that such peculiarity may be ‘incommunicable by any means to another man’. ‘[E]very true poet’, Hopkins wrote in a letter of 1878, ‘must be original and originality a condition of poetic genius; so that each poet is like a species in nature […] and can never recur’; ‘The effect of stud- ying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise’, he maintained a decade later, with an eye—half rueful, half insistent—on his own ‘singu- larity’.3 Hopkins’s principal aesthetic concern was with ‘inscape’: ‘species, or individually-distinctive beauty of style’, as he explained it to Coventry Patmore.4 Hopkins’s own coinage, the term suggests in itself the creative pressure Hopkins’s singular sense of the world placed on his language. As puts it, Hopkins was ‘forced by the intensity of his lived experience and the pressure of surrounding life to invent new forms and a highly individual idiom’.5 Intensity of perception is mirrored by individu- ality of style. ‘[P]oetry must have, down to its least separable part, an indi- vidualising touch’, Hopkins told Patmore,6 where ‘touch’ catches fnely Hopkins’s effort to endow poetic language with personal brilliance, but also the countervailing concern to make that individuality felt. Hopkins did not assert his individuality with the same embattled vig- our as Clare did. Where Clare’s effort to ‘create the taste by which he was enjoyed’ warred with cultural stereotype, Hopkins’s anxieties about his ‘right to song’ were often self-directed: though Hopkins’s Catholicism marked him as an outsider, his priesthood meant he was less concerned than Clare to see himself as ‘a poet’—and often actively concerned not to.7 And Hopkins found his voice more suddenly than Clare. What for Clare was a forlorn struggle to be heard on one’s own terms was in Hopkins’s case an abrupt and brilliant realisation of what those terms were: ‘I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm which now I realised on paper’,8 Hopkins wrote to his friend R. W. Dixon in 1878, remembering the composition of The Wreck of the Deutschland two years previously. Hopkins was conscious of the poem’s audacity: he recalled to Dixon that the Catholic journal The Month ‘dared not print it’; and even sympathetic readers were troubled by the force of its originality: compared the poem to ‘a great dragon folded in the gate to forbid all entrance’ in his 1918 edition of Hopkins’s poems.9 The writ- ing’s audacity and its individualism go in hand. Jill Muller has argued that in itself Hopkins’s ‘decision to join the Church of Rome was an action of self-defnition through dissent’,10 and The Wreck continues that act of Part II: Gerard Manley Hopkins: Oddity and Obscurity 113 self-defnition into the poetic sphere. It stands at the head of Hopkins’s mature output as a poem which announces his distinctiveness as a writer; but that announcement is made not—as in Clare—through a forthright assertion of poetic authority, but rather as an unignorable feature of the language, and through a submission of poetic will to God. In the opening stanzas of The Wreck, Hopkins portrays a loving sur- render which is also the discovery of an authentic voice. The stanzas enact Hopkins’s search for a language which speaks with a depth ‘truer than tongue’ (l. 11); one is let in on the discovery of a voice drawn from the heart of his being. The poem’s rhythms draw us into a turbulent inner life, capturing ‘[t]he swoon of a heart that the sweep and the hurl of thee [i.e. God] trod / Hárd dówn with a horror of height’ (l. 14–15).11 Hopkins’s sees the ‘h’ of ‘heart’ dragged through a train of physical buffetings (‘hurl’, ‘Hárd’, ‘horror’, ‘height’) as the momen- tum of the anapaests careers into the bunched emphasis of ‘trod / Hárd down’. But the writing rebounds with an awed sense of the heart’s resil- ience, spiritual rightness, and creative force:

The frown of his face Before me, the hurtle of hell Behind, where, where was a, where was a place?— I whirled out wings that spell And fed with a fing of the heart to the heart of the Host.— My heart, but you were dovewinged, I can tell, Cárrier-wítted, I am bóld to bóast, To fash from the fame to the fame then, tower from the grace to the grace. (l. 17–24)

Spiritual and poetic discovery fuse.12 ‘I whirled out wings that spell’ means ‘I sprouted wings for a short time’ but the construction is awk- ward, and you can also hear in the line a claim about the spreading of poetic wings, as Hopkins learns to ‘spell’ out a sense of his unique self- hood. What is remarkable about Hopkins’s voice is the way its peculiar uniqueness seems so spontaneously achieved. The impression of ‘truth- fulness’ depends upon rhythms which sustain close contact with the heart’s seemingly spontaneous and self-motivated energy. To speak of ‘a fing of the heart’ leaves it uncertain whether it is Hopkins or his heart that is responsible for the ‘finging’: yes, it was ‘My heart’ that ‘fed’ 114 Part II: Gerard Manley Hopkins: Oddity and Obscurity to fnd God under such pressure, Hopkins says wonderingly, but it was ‘dovewinged’, ‘Cárrier-wítted’, apparently under the command of some- thing other than conscious will; and the movement of the verse, fuelled by its currents of alliteration and internal rhyme, seeks harmony with this inner life. Hopkins speaks with a seeming impulsiveness which accords with the way the heart, as Hopkins wondered in a later, more serene poem:

To its own fne function, wild and self-instressed Falls as light as, life-long, schooled to what and why. (‘The Handsome Heart’, l. 7–8)

Again Hopkins marvels at the way individual character manifests itself innately, admiring a ‘wildness’ that doesn’t go awry; and the workings of the verse exhibit the same ‘self-instressed’ qualities, their rhythms springing off an iambic norm at ‘own fne function’ and singing with tro- chaic buoyancy in the second line. The voice, in both instances, owes its ‘truthfulness’ to an exemplary marriage of craft and spontaneity; it seems to discover itself as it goes, as though, in James Milroy’s words, it had ‘its own selfhood’.13 Hopkins speaks, it might be said, with his heart in his mouth. He wrote energetically about ‘human ^spoken^ utterance’ as ‘the natural performance and delivery belonging properly to lyric poetry’ (the dele- tion suggests Hopkins’s sense of the intimacy of ‘human’ character and voice). ‘[T]ill [poetry] is spoken it does not perform, is not itself’, he explained to his brother Everard. ‘Sprung rhythm’, in emphasising the spoken accents latent on the page, ‘gives back to poetry its true soul and self’,14 he argued; and the energy and intricacy of Hopkins’s rhythms ensure their precise responsiveness to his own ‘true soul and self’. ‘[T]o presume to have captured in poetry the native character of spoken rhythm is to presume to have captured at least some of the native char- acter of its speaker’, as Joshua King has said.15 Hopkins’s rhythms aim for ‘an emphasis as much brighter, livelier, more lustrous than the regu- lar but commonplace emphasis of common rhythm as poetry in general is brighter than prose ^common^ speech’. His metrical markings strain and orchestrate his voice with strange urgency. They seek the ‘irregular emphasis of talk’.16 And the sense of someone ‘talking’ is central to the poems’ force and appeal; they breathe a touching, idiosyncratic, per- sonal presence. But if on the one hand the fuency of Hopkins’s idiom Part II: Gerard Manley Hopkins: Oddity and Obscurity 115 impresses, it is often a sense of the ‘irregular’ injected into the ‘common- place’ that generates the poems’ pathos and potency. Hopkins charms and disconcerts for the insouciance with which he inhabits the oddest of idioms: the poetry charts an individual responsiveness to experience in accents by turns dazzling and tender. You can pluck a line almost at random and feel Hopkins’s characteristic marriage of ‘irregularity’ with spontaneous ‘liveliness’ of emphasis. Take the description of how ‘to-fro tender trambeams truckle at the eye’ from ‘The Candle Indoors’ (l. 4). Hopkins speaks as though the weirdness of his way with words were the most natural thing in the world. Yet as he stands outside a window, ‘mus- ing’ (l. 2) at the candlelight which ‘truckles at’ (rolls towards) his eyes from within, the oddity of his perceptions troubles as much as it charms. Charles Williams, introducing the second edition of the poems in 1930, isolated the image as a favourite and refected that ‘it is perfectly possible to smile at the line, but hardly possible to laugh’.17 Williams detects here the unease that shadows the exuberance with which Hopkins strains the norms of the language. Within the context of what eventually turns into a rather self-chastising poem, the exuberance is heartening; but the idiom is the product of an imagination whose individuality underscores its alone- ness; the colloquial energy risks reaching no ear but its own. The chapters that follow attend frst to the sensitivity with which Hopkins’s style, in its blend of the willed and the spontaneous, answers to the forces that shape personal character, and secondly to the gener- osity and self-awareness with which Hopkins mitigated the alienating effects of his own strangeness. In doing so, they emphasise the intelli- gence and humanity with which Hopkins negotiated his sense of him- self as an individual in social, spiritual, and artistic terms. After Bridges’ edition had brought the poems to a broader audience in 1918, Hopkins was seized upon as a pioneer of a new eloquence, driven by his effort ‘to get out of his words as much as possible unhampered by the rules of grammar, syntax, and common usage’, as Leavis put it: ‘He is now felt to be a contemporary, and his infuence is likely to be great’.18 If the sense of Hopkins’s contemporaneity with has dimin- ished, that is in part because his innovations are grounded in a fdelity to personal idiosyncrasy which is Romantic and Victorian in its ancestry, and from which, as we have seen, the high modernist tradition would ultimately turn away. ‘[E]ccentricity, individualism in this sense, was a nineteenth century and especially British habit’, said Arthur Mizener in an essay on ‘Victorian Hopkins’ in 194519; ‘Hopkins’s “Victorianism” is 116 Part II: Gerard Manley Hopkins: Oddity and Obscurity hard to defne’, argues Wendell Stacy Johnson, ‘not only because he is deliberately peculiar, but also because he springs from an age of peculiar writers, an age full of variety and contradiction’.20 Sometimes the criti- cal effort to ‘relocate’ Hopkins ‘among the Victorian writers whom he read, and in the religious, political, and social contexts in which he lived’, as Alice Jenkins puts it,21 involves playing down his peculiarity, as when Alison Sulloway argues that ‘Highly idiosyncratic as it is, [Hopkins’s poetry] transcends private idiosyncrasy to speak of Victorian concerns’.22 Yet the sense of Hopkins’s ‘private idiosyncrasy’ is always liable to resur- face on reading the poems; it is hard to banish the feeling, described by Cecil Day Lewis, that Hopkins is a poet ‘without affnities’, whose ‘voice seems to come out of the blue, reminding us of nothing we have heard before’.23 Hopkins’s voice draws energy from his intelligent awareness of his irregularity—of its dangers as well as its allures. The amplitude of his individualism derives from the way he seeks to mitigate as well as accen- tuate its force—but at its core is a truthfulness, often lively, often desper- ate, to the movements of an individual mind.

Notes 1. Hopkins transcribed the poem into his diary on or in the days following 17 June 1865 (Diaries, 306). For a discussion of the potential infuence on Hopkins’s ‘Binsey Poplars’ of Clare’s ‘Helpstone Green’, see Kelsey Thornton, ‘Sentimental Ecology, John Clare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Trees: A Note’, JCSJ 31 (2012): 43–50. 2. Sermons, 348–9. 3. Correspondence, 809, 963. 4. Correspondence, 835. 5. s tephen Spender, The Struggle of the Modern (Berkeley: U of California P, 1963), 98. 6. Correspondence, 601. 7. For the coincidence of Hopkins’s poetic and spiritual lives, see John Pick, Gerard Manley Hopkins: Priest and Poet (New York: Oxford UP, 1966) and Martin Dubois, Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Poetry of Religious Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2017). 8. Correspondence, 317. 9. Robert Bridges, ‘Notes’, Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins Now First Published (London: Humphrey Milford, 1918), 116. 10. Jill Muller, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Victorian Catholicism: A Heart in Hiding (New York: Routledge, 2003), 3. Part II: Gerard Manley Hopkins: Oddity and Obscurity 117

11. I draw here on my essay ‘Hopkins’s Heart’, Victorian Poetry 54.1 (2016): 93–117. 12. Mackenzie goes through a list of seven possible events they could refer to, the most prominent among which are Hopkins’s conversion and his choice of a vocation (‘Commentary’, Poetical Works, 324). 13. James Milroy, The Language of Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: Andre Deutsch, 1977), 6. 14. Correspondence, 549. 15. Joshua King, ‘Hopkins’s Affective Rhythm: Grace and Intention in Tension’, Victorian Poetry 45.3 (2007): 209. 16. Correspondence, 549. 17. Charles Williams, ‘Introduction to the Second Edition’, Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 2nd edn., ed. Robert Bridges, introd. Charles Williams (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1930), xiii. 18. F. R. Leavis, New Bearings in : A Study of the Contemporary Situation 1932 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 121, 142. 19. Arthur Mizener, ‘Victorian Hopkins’, Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Kenyon Critics (London: Dennis Dobson, 1949), 99. 20. Wendell Stacy Johnson, Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Poet as Victorian (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1968), 6. 21. Alice Jenkins, The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Sourcebook, ed. Alice Jenkins (London: Routledge, 2006), 7. Titles such as Catherine Phillips Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Visual World (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007) and John Parham, Green Man Hopkins: Poetry and the Victorian Ecological Imagination (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010) testify to the developing understanding of Hopkins as a poet engaged with the defning concerns of his epoch. 22. Alison G. Sulloway, Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Temper (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 5. 23. Cecil Day Lewis, A Hope for Poetry cited in Jenkins, Sourcebook, 57.