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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 pu- rification 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 23 POETS & WRITERS the literary life THE ART OF READING 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 NOV DEC 2012 24 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.
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  • Gerard Manley Hopkins and Old English Poetry: a Stylistic Analysis
    Gerard Manley Hopkins and Old English poetry: a stylistic analysis Item Type text; Dissertation-Reproduction (electronic) Authors Li, Leshi Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 23/09/2021 14:04:44 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/565498 GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS AND OLD ENGLISH POETRY: A STYLISTIC ANALYSIS by Rebecca Lee A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY WITH A MAJOR IN ENGLISH LITERATURE . In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 19 8 1 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE As members of the Final Examination Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Rebecca Lee_________________________________ entitled GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS AND OLD ENGLISH POETRY:___________________ A STYLISTIC ANALYSIS and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Date Date Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate's submission of the final copy of the dissertation to the Graduate College. I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement. * / ■ ? ■ / Dissertation Director Date / STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at The University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library» Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission5 provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made.
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