GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
This is the fifth in our Lent Series on English spiritual writers.
THE few who regularly read poetry now may well find that it fills a kind of religious craving in their lives. So it is that Hopkins's poetry may have a quasi- spiritual appeal even to many who ignore the truths that made sense of the world for Hopkins, such as the incarna- tion of Christ and the immanence of God.
One of the characteristics of Hop- kins's poetry is particularity: which is to say, the `thisness' of things, Scotus's `haecceity'. Really, there is no more need to accept the philosophical justi- fication that might be found in Scotus than to swallow whole Hopkins's own theory of poetry. Thisness' works poetically, whether you have read a word of Scotus or not, just as the versification of Hopkins succeeds whether or not his theory of 'sprung rhythm' is its explanation.
The sonnet 'As kingfishers catch fire' exemplifies haecceity: Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells;.
Crying What I do is me; for that I came.
In the concluding sestet, Hopkins goes daringly further with his, 'I say more . . .', and gives a Christocentric resolu- tion to the poem. Hopkins (1844-89) was every inch a Victorian. He found geology as fasci- nating as philology. He was a Balliol man and was received into the Church by Cardinal Newman. Like Newman he was introspective, but in his case the cast of his mind forced him into self- torment. This operated not only in a `dark night' of his spiritual life, but in everyday activities such as marking examination papers, where he agonised for days over exactly the right results to award. Yet he remained heroically faithful to his vocation as a Jesuit priest.
The psychological anguish that Hop- kins suffered is memorably confronted in one of his 'sonnets of desolation', 'I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day'. Here, Hopkins puts into words his self-loathing and suffering, but by his fingertips pulls himself into a resolute attitude of hope, if only by comparing himself to the damned.
Like Therese of Lisieux, Hopkins shows that it is not necessary to he balanced in temperament to be holy. The poems and selected prose of Hopkins are published in paperback by the Oxford University Press.
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