Gerard Manley Hopkins

the literary Life The Art of Reading Gerard Manley Hopkins

Austerity made sublime

he poets in my orbit have a uniform reaction when they discover that I spent a year study- ing the work of the nineteenth-century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins under the eminent ETnglish poet Geoffrey Hill: first incredulity, then envy, then a bit of bafflement. Why a novelist would choose such tutelage is a kind of hieroglyphic they can’t quite crack. William Giraldi is The others in my Hopkins graduate seminar at Boston the author of the novel Busy University in 2003 must have felt a similar species of as- Monsters (Norton, 2011) and tonishment: I was the only nonpoet among them, out of fiction editor for the journal their coven and off in a corner scratching down Hill’s every AGNI at Boston University. sentence as only the worshipful will. The younger novel- ists in my orbit skip the incredulity and envy and arrive immediately at bafflement. If I mention that Hopkins and Hill have meant more to me than Melville and James, their foreheads wrinkle. They have nary an inkling of what I might mean, but they suspect that this cross-genre scholar- ship is peculiar if not out-and-out blasphemous. How does a novelist benefit from the close study of a poet? In the clutches of a medieval melancholy, living with a woman who no longer loved me, straining to complete a graduate degree and the manuscript of a god-awful novel about a biblical flood, I went to Hill and Hopkins—the two most austere wordsmiths in our tongue, separated by a hundred and fifty years of English verse—as both a penance and purification. Penance because every for- mer Catholic feels the guilt pangs of apostasy, and purification because my sorrow had me feeling downright defiled—emotionally, spiritually, literally. (Hopkins was an apostate too: He abandoned Anglicanism for Roman Catholicism in 1866 and, eighteen years later, quit Eng- land for Ireland.) I had wandered briefly across Hop- kins’s rock-ribbed earth during my critical excursions into Donne’s “Holy Sonnets” and Wordsworth’s Prelude, and knew of Hill as the gravest, most formidable living poet in English—he makes Seamus Heaney look like Shel Silverstein—but I couldn’t have divined the degree to which these two poets would lay siege to my waking hours, alter my artistic temperament, and permit me to take part in literary creation at its highest level. Heart-wrecked and outcast, I woke each dawn with a trench carved through

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my center and reached for Hop- guage is tyrannical.” Elsewhere Hill kins the way others cling to Christ. has said that the democratic quality of Eighteen times a day I crooned the difficult poetry derives from “doing Hopkinsian first line of Hill’s debut your audience the honor of suppos- collection, For the Unfallen (1959), as if ing that they are intelligent human it were an ecstatic mantra assuring my beings.” The intellectual anemia of own miracle: “Against the burly air I “populist poetry,” on the other hand, strode / Crying the miracles of God.” “treats people as if they were fools.” Because Hill’s objective correlative Hopkins’s only audience during is often esoteric English history or an his lifetime was the risen Christ— +44 (0) 1267 676656 opaque tract of theology—in Tenebrae to Hopkins no fool—and those few

[email protected] [email protected] (1978) Hill quips that “theology makes friends, such as Bridges and R. W. good bedside reading”—and because Dixon, who were privileged enough to his vision will not apologize for un- receive his sound by post. Hear this, fettered erudition, willfully confused the first half of “No Worst,” among critics charge him time and again with the “Terrible Sonnets”—also called a paucity of feeling, as if the only ac- the “Sonnets of Desolation”—which ceptable expression of emotion must Hopkins composed in Dublin during (A) be easefully understood, and (B) that dolorous year of 1885: contain daffodils and lonely clouds. But a poet’s meaning—any sublime No worst, there is none. Pitched writer’s meaning, Hill lectured— past pitch of grief, More pangs will, schooled at MA MA Celtic studies Writing MA Creative always resides in language (a notion

1 year MA programs include: he first gleaned from Allen Tate, who forepangs, wilder wring. Comforter, where, where is your was responsible for transforming the comforting? teenage Hill into a poet). In addition Mary, mother of us, where is your to offering us the objective correla- relief? tive, T. S. Eliot insisted that “genuine My cries heave, herds-long; huddle poetry can communicate before it is in a main, a chief understood.” It achieves that com- Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old munication through sound (meter anvil wince and sing— and rhyme), which appeals to feeling Then lull, then leave off. Fury had the same way music does. This is why shrieked ‘No ling- you can delight in hearing Hopkins all ering! Let me be fell: force I must day long with only an inchoate com- be brief.’ prehension of his intent—why you can know what he means without at first Or this, the second half of “I Wake knowing precisely what he means. and Feel,” also among the “Terrible Hear is the crucial term. Hopkins Sonnets”: • Semester abroad • Summer schools • UG/PG/PhD/Research degrees Full • campuses Two • Internships composed all his verse for reciting, a fact he repeatedly emphasized in let- I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s ters to his steadfast friend, the poet most deep decree Robert Bridges. Whenever Hill de- Bitter would have me taste: my taste livered Hopkins to us in his sonorous was me; Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood Worcestershire brogue, we froze as brimmed the curse. if from fear—fear of missing a single selfyeast of spirit a dull syllable in that refulgent recitation. dough sours. I see Hopkins sounds like no one else in The lost are like this, and their English, but he is not the obscurantist scourge to be some readers have taken him for. His As I am mine, their sweating selves; poems, like Hill’s own, are arduous but worse. the way all important poetry is ardu- for for the experience of a lifetime ous. “Difficult art is democratic,” Hill Memorize those lines like liturgy Study in Wales… maintained, “while simplified lan- (Harold Bloom has contended that if

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the literary life the art of reading

you commit Hamlet’s words to mem- always to commune ory you will know him, and the same with the messiah he is true for Hopkins), recite them to feels he does not de- yourself every hour during your dark serve, to grasp Him, night of the soul, feel their “inner to gain respite from vibrations”—Irving Howe’s term for the crisis gnawing his the metrical buzz of Eliot’s verse— spirit. That music can and by morning’s shine you will un- be mysterious the way derstand what they mean: the pitch, God must always be. In the forepangs, the herds-long, and the Hopkins, style, struc- anvil; the bitter taste, the flesh filled, ture, and theology are the blood brimmed, and the scourge. inextricable—his style Hill instructed me to memorize the is his substance. He “Terrible Sonnets” if I truly wanted devised sprung rhythm to live in them, if I wanted them to because unconven- breathe in me, and now their clanged tional communication rhythms are as large a part of my con- was necessary in order sciousness as the faces of my sons. to behold God’s grace. His innovation takes here can be meaning in some wearing, but you rhythm before there is need not be privy to meaning in definitions, his mechanics of “in- in diction. What you stress” and “inscape,” hearT in Hopkins is “sprung rhythm,” or his Wordsworthian an emotion-pressed metrics— program of holiness influenced by the nursery rhymes A sculpture of Gerard Manley Hopkins by Rowan Gillespie. manifest in nature, to he treasured as a child—that makes be stirred by Hopkins’s complete use of the accentual pos- Hopkins from day one, their bang- verse—especially the “Terrible Son- sibilities of the language. The lines bang Anglo-Saxon rhythms and al- nets,” that blistering chronicle of a are marked by definitive stresses, literative melodies—cadence from poet caught in the molars of melan- major and minor, instead of syl- clangor—mere copies of the master’s choly. With the possible exception of lables. (Hopkins turned poor Rob- art. Bob Dylan once had the humil- Donne’s “Holy Sonnets,” their inten- ert Bridges batty with his obsessive ity to recognize that he requires sity of feeling is unrivaled in English- stressing—“stress is the life of it,” he music to make poetry of his words, language poetry. To hear them is to wrote Bridges about his meter.) Each whereas for the genuine poet—he enter the tarred abyss that Hopkins unit or “foot” of a line holds up to was thinking of Eliot—the words was sunk in during their composi- four syllables but only a single stress. are the music. For the sheer ecstasy tion. These are two lines from the second of the acoustic, neither Whitman Hill could not brook those indo- stanza of his moiling masterwork nor Swinburne surpasses Hopkins: lent critics who have branded Hop- “The Wreck of the Deutschland”— His stanzas are perfectly carpentered kins a poet of despair. They fail to the thirty-five-stanza poem Bridges amphitheaters. Half a century ahead recognize that for Hopkins—a Jesuit dubbed “a great dragon folded in the of his time, he performed the feat priest of extreme piety, of Ignatian gate to forbid all entrance”—with of being modern while remaining austerity—despair meant doctrinal the stresses in bold: “The swoon of a loyal to tradition, a poet for whom despair, the sin of shunning God, heart that the sweep and the hurl of common Victorian English simply of shucking all hope of salvation in thee trod / Hard down with a horror would not do. Each time we return Christ. This shunning is akin to the of height.” And from stanza three: “I to his verse we are confronted by its Augustinian idea of evil as complete whirled out wings that spell / And bewitching intricacy. alienation from God, and Hopkins fled with a fling of the heart to the Hopkins’s syntactical and metri- knew that despair meant the dam- heart of the Host.” cal innovation was not an iconoclastic nation of his eternal soul—the very Sing that—rap it if you want. reaction against iambic pentameter spiritual suicide for which Marlowe’s Hip-hop is a more deserving no- or a mere eccentricity, but rather Faustus is yanked hellward. The menclature than rappers realize. a dire and humble spiritual initia- “Terrible Sonnets” are documents

rowan gillespie They’ve been unwittingly sampling tive. The intensity of his music aims of desolation; the agon at work in

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Hopkins is against the Ignatian im- numerous clerical and teaching po- in Dublin. The writing of the “Ter- mediacy of affliction, not despair. sitions all over Britain. He torched rible Sonnets” in such an almost The evidence waits at the start of much of the verse he composed as a existential state required what F. R. “Carrion Comfort”: “Not, I’ll not, student—an incalculable loss—and Leavis named “the heroic quality of carrion comfort, Despair, not feast didn’t write any poems at all for nine Hopkins’s genius.” Robert Bridges, on thee.” And in “The Leaden Echo,” years as he struggled to reconcile the always of two minds about that ge- that echo proclaims, “So be begin- poet’s mission with the cleric’s con- nius, waited an unforgivable twenty- ning, be beginning to despair,” but stancy. His only obligation was the nine years after Hopkins’s death to Hopkins counters with: “O there’s exalting of Christ’s glory—Saint Ig- give the world an edition of his ex- none; no no no there’s none.” natius insisted that “man is created to traordinary verse. Still, the anguish in the “Terrible praise”—and poetry was impossible Sonnets” feels like despair, in our unless it served that end. In 1884 he he sublime, the ecstatic, colloquial use of the term as syn- moved to Ireland and plummeted the Keatsian apprecia- onymous with depression. Hopkins into darkness. tion of nature—these grappled with melancholy through- Hopkins was nearly inconsolable are everywhere in Hop- out most of his abbreviated life. (He teaching Greek at University Col- kins,T despite their being birthed by died of typhoid in 1889 at the age of lege in Dublin. Harassed by health the religious melancholy of an an- forty-four.) His decision to convert problems, hounded by a repressed guished man. Hill called Hopkins’s to Roman Catholicism as an under- homosexuality, he missed his be- vitality “the energy of the self,” and grad at Oxford proved tortuous; he loved homeland and his family. In a it’s true that Hopkins at his best considered it a betrayal of his family letter from that time, he writes of scarcely has an equal in his pre- and his country, both staunchly An- “that coffin of dejection and weak- sentation of self. As for Hill—what glican. He took his religious orders ness in which I live, without even seems like obscurantism and cryp- into the Society of Jesus in 1868, just the hope of change.” In another, he tic or hybridized Christianity in his two years after his conversion, and writes of the “three hard wearying verse is really an assertion that ideas then for more than a decade held wasting wasted years” he has spent are experiences, that the mind has a

nov dec 2012 26 the literary life the art of reading life—that art, music, belief, and his- when he was my teacher, nearly a Bush would quote Hopkins, to which tory rendered in the organic quag- decade ago, slow moving and some- Hill replied, “If the president had mire of language uncover something what slumped, and yet he astounded quoted Hopkins he would be quite essential about our existence. A dis- us weekly with his comedic flares. a different person, wouldn’t he?” At ciple of Hopkins, Hill nevertheless During a thirty-minute discussion one of my visits to his book-gorged has his own vision of our fallen state. about Hopkins’s use of a particular office in the Theology Building— Hopkins would not have been capable comma, Hill said that the use illus- after the Hopkins seminar ended I of these two stanzas by Hill, from trates “the fragility of a comma,” continued to study informally with Tenebrae: and then paused to consider the Hill each week; he always wore black phrase, whispered it again to him- sweat suits assaulted by cat hair—I I cannot turn aside from what I do; self, and exclaimed “Ahh,” kissing commented that Saint Ignatius “sure you cannot turn away from what I three fingers theI talian way. About is a tedious fellow,” and Hill quaked am. the semicolon before “cliffs of fall” with laughter for well nigh a minute. You do not dwell in me nor I in you in “No Worst,” he remarked on “the Imagine my bliss at having uninten- delicate membrane of a semicolon,” tionally cracked up the living titan of however much I pander to your name then stood—slowly—to bow. “It’s English verse. or answer to your lords of revenue, the most important semicolon in By the time I crossed genre lines surrendering the joys that they English poetry,” he said, sitting. “Of and studied Hopkins with Hill, I condemn. course you can’t prove me wrong.” had been writing fiction in earnest About Hopkins’s aesthetic sensi- for nearly a decade: three novels As a teacher, Hill surrendered no bility: “True beauty presupposes and dozens of stories, most of them joy. The effect of his understated duty”—pause—“I should have gone Hemingway-cum-Carver counter- comedy in the classroom was sharp- into advertising. It’s too late now.” feit, handily begotten and almost ened in contrast to the gravity we all The day after President George worthy of a disinfected Dumpster. expected, to the grave aura he emit- W. Bush’s State of the Union address, An aptitude for storytelling is not ted. Hill was seventy-one years old a student joked that she had hoped enough. One must learn to live in

We are pleased to welcome

27 poets & writers the literary life the art of reading language, and this living was not pos- you that it’s impossible to prove how of activating self-knowledge or de- sible for me before Hopkins and Hill, one book is better than another. The lighting in analogues, and a pander- despite my immersion in the best difference between a major poet and ing to the simplistic and reductive, prose stylists in English, from Sterne a minor one is that the major poet which is precisely how propaganda to Nabokov to Updike to Barry Han- writes into the density of language works. nah to Martin Amis. Hill led us in while the minor one merely floats In his 1982 biography of John Ber- our staunch attention to pairs of on top of it, and the same holds for ryman, John Haffenden quotes the words in Hopkins—“disabling cold” prose writers. “Hopkins,” Hill said, poet: “Everything good in the end and “chilling remembrance” and “enters language as a bird takes off is highbrow; all the artists who have “baffling ban”—and inspired in me into the air,” and that’s exactly what ever survived were intellectuals.” a reverence for words as gravid things you feel when reading Nabokov and You might not believe that, but be- neither to be rushed nor thought of Bellow at their most vibrant. You lieve this: If your novel is yet another as satisfied gifts from the muse, but know when you’re holding a novel domestic drama about middle-class rather as deliberate instruments of whose language betrays a staggering malaise, one more researched exege- assertion painstakingly chosen for lack of register, every noun and verb sis on “the way we live now,” a cata- their specific function. the available jargon, every adjective ract of suburban realism rendered Attention to language seeks value limply obvious, a morass of cliché in yawnful detail, in sentences that and believes that value can be found. without vigor or revelation, abrupt smirk at their own flaccid confec- In his conviction of art’s hierarchy, sentences that have arrived on the tion, expect to be forgotten. In The Hill urged us to trace down to the page without a commitment to the Orchards of Syon (2002), Hill claims: minutest detail how and why some- dynamism and dimensions of lan- “Last days, last things, loom on: I thing is superior to something else— guage. What’s the chief defect that write / to astonish myself.” Last days Dickinson is superior to Rossetti just makes Tom Clancy vastly inferior to and last things are always looming. as Bellow is superior to Mailer, and Nadine Gordimer? The lame inevi- The time for astonishment is short. that superiority can be substantiated tability of his language, flogged sen- Stretch for austerity made sublime. by language. Don’t let anyone tell tences that disclose a mind incapable Cry the miracles of God.

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