POETS AND POETRY.

DIFFICULT BEAUTY.

GERARD 14Luamnv HOPKINS, a Jesuit priest, died in 1889. His poems have been anthologized, sparingly and perhaps not wisely : four years ago they were collected and edited by the Poet Laureate. They are known mainly to students of prosody and to the youngest generation of poets. Readers who meet them for the first time and attempt them casually often make neither head nor tail of them ; here and there they may be astounded by some audacious phrase—" the dappled-with-damson east," " a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage," or, of the stars, " 0 look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air I "—but, without persistence, they may dismiss most of the poems as quaint and perverse or account it disproportionate to spend much labour on one poet, a poet not canonized among the great. Indeed, Gerard Hopkins may well be taken as a test-case in obscurity.

His poems repay study. He was, like all true poets, " the first poet in the world for some things." And his difficulties are necessary : they are the impress of himself. He was a man of heightened, almost hysterical, acuteness of sense. To him, the thrush :—

" Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing " ;

and, when a cuckoo calls :— " The whole landscape flushes on a sudden at a sound."

Coincident with this quickening of sense was a fierce varia- bility of mood. He was subject often to the " carrion comfort, despair," and he spoke truly when he described himself as :—

" this tormented mind "With this tormented mind tormenting yet."

Like most other true poets he had little of that sense of humour which makes our humanity half laughable, that minor blasphemy through which we alleviate the stress of life. And, naturally with such a temperament, what most affected him in fact and art, his ideal beauty, was a moodlessness, a suddenly-seized, abrupt finality, a flash off an architypical perfection. His torment came from the conflict between his belief in this absolute and the acknowledged rarity in the world of evidence for belief. His quickened sense gave him also an original pattern of music for his verse and original theories in metric. It was a music sometimes too sweet :— " In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam Flutes and low to the lake falls home."— but more generally nerved by clash and resolved inconsonance, knit close and made virile. He never betrayed it for the sake of meaning ; but he was fastidious, too, to match sense with music. For this reason he was compelled often to use obscure words or curious new coinages. And in his deter- mination to have sense and music at one, to reconcile emphasis and euphony, he took other liberties with language. He refused to give prominence to words that are not visual and dynamic, to stress articles, pronouns, or conjunctions. He would tuck them away in unheard-of places or entirely omit them, and his scholarship in Latin made him forget that an uninflected language has need of such words. He wrote for no public, he hoped for no fame, he made no compromise. His qualities had thus the fullest room for development. He was, as Mr. Robert Bridges remarks, &fp Teptrraros, and his " arch-especial spirit " comes nakedly from his poems.

These are the causes of his obscurity : briefly, he created an idiom of his own. The poems are not so hard of com- prehension as at first sight they seem. Read slowly and, as it were, tonelessly, but with alert intelligence, they will soon shape themselves and cohere. I have chosen one for comment, part paraphrase, part explanation, not because it seemed more beautiful than others, but because it illustrates his phraseology and cast of thought, and because it seems to me that a reader, once master of such a poem as this, will be able to find his way with ease among most of the others :— " To rvhal serves Mortal Beauty To what serves Mortal Beauty—dangerous ; does set danc- ing blood—the 0-seal-that-so feature, flung prouder form Than Purcell tune lets tread to ? See : it does this : keeps warm

Men's wits to the things that are ; what good means—where a glance

Master may more than gaze, gaze out of countenance.

Those lovely lads once, wet-fresh windfalls of war's storm, How then should Gregory, a father, have gleaned else from swarm-

ed Rome. But God to a nation dealt that day's dear chance.

To man, that needs would worship block or barren stone, Our law says : Love what are love's worthiest, were all known ; World's loveliest—men's selves. Self flashes off frame and face. What do then 7 how meet beauty ? Merely meet it ; own, Home at heart. heaven's sweet gift ; then leave, let that alone. Yea, wish that though, wish all, God's better beauty, grace."

What is the purpose of a sudden, transitory beauty (when such beauty is da,pgerous, quickens our pulses so), a feature, appearance, turn of body that makes us cry out to have it kept eternally as it is, a form that is thrown from its object more sheerly, with more assured finality, than the forms even a tune of Purcell's creates without effort for our spirits to dance to ? It keeps men with an alert affection for reality. What an excellent means of achieving this it is, when a quick glance may bring out and secure more beauty than a pro.. longed stare. How otherwise, if there weren't this sudden beauty, could Gregory, in crowded Rome, have found out the Angle slaves ? Gregory's chance-seeing of their loveliness was God's doing, to bless a whole nation. Man naturally would concentrate his affection on the static things of earth, but Christ has told us to love what, if we could see thoroughly, is the worthiest thing to love, the souls, selves, of men, the real being and make of men. We see it sometimes in a flash from their attitude or countenance. What are we to do when we meet it ? Merely take it, recognize it, in our deepest heart, as the gift of heaven ; and then have done, draw no morals, pursue it no further. But yes, one thing there is : wish that and everything else a better beauty than beauty, a linking-up with God's purposes.

My explanation is clumsy and spoils the poem ; perhaps it will help with the syntax and show that Gerard Hopkins writes, in fact, with perfect clarity. For amends I will quote, without intrusion, a simpler poem :—

" Spring and Fall

to a young child.

Margaret, are you grieving Over Goldengrove unleaving Leaves, like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for. can you 1

Ah 1 as the heart grows older It will come to such sights colder By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie ;

And yet you will weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name • Sorrow's springs are the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed What heart heard of ghost guessed.

It is the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for." ALAN PORTER.