Pied Beauty

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
1877

INTRODUCTION

The British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins is often described as an early modern poet ahead of his Victorian time. This is perhaps why, while he wrote "Pied Beauty" in 1877, in common with most of his other poetry, it was first published twenty-nine years after his death. It appeared in the first collected edition of his poems, Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by Robert Bridges (1918). The poem subsequently appeared in the second complete edition of Hopkins's poetry, published in 1930. As of 2006, "Pied Beauty" was available in Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works, edited by Catherine Phillips (1986).

"Pied Beauty" is one of the first poems that Hopkins wrote in the so-called sprung rhythm that he evolved, based on the rhythms of Anglo-Saxon and ancient Welsh poetry. His aim was to approximate the rhythms and style of normal speech, albeit speech infused with a religious ecstasy and enthusiasm that are characteristics of his poetry. The poem also embodies Hopkins's innovative use of condensed syntax and alliteration. It is written in the form of a curtal or shortened sonnet, another of Hopkins's stylistic inventions. Thematically, the poem is a simple hymn of praise to God for the "dappled things" of creation. God is seen as being beyond change but as generating all the variety and opposites that manifest in the ever-changing world. Hopkins is best known as a nature poet and a religious poet,

and "Pied Beauty" perfectly exemplifies both these aspects of his work.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Gerard Manley Hopkins was born on July 28, 1844, in Stratford, Essex, England, to Manley Hopkins, a marine insurance adjuster, and Catherine (Smith) Hopkins. He was the first of their nine children. His parents were devout High Church Anglicans. The family had a lively interest in religion and the creative arts. Manley published a volume of his poetry the year before Hopkins's birth and frequently reviewed poetry; Catherine was a keen reader, and the young Hopkins and his siblings involved themselves in literature, music, and painting.

Stratford was becoming industrialized during Hopkins's boyhood, and in 1852, the family moved to the then more rural area of Hampstead, north of the city of London, in the belief that it would provide a healthier environment.

Hopkins attended Highgate Grammar School from 1854 until 1863. He won the poetry prize and a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied from 1863 to 1867. At Oxford, he was strongly influenced by the aesthetic theories of the essayist and literary critic Walter Pater, who was one of his tutors, and of the art critic and social commentator John Ruskin. Literary influences included the Anglican poets George Herbert and Christina Rossetti. It was during his Oxford years that Hopkins began to question the religion in which he had been brought up. He came under the influence of John Henry Newman (later Cardinal Newman), one of the founders of the Oxford movement (also called Tractarianism), which aimed to bring the Anglican Church back to its Catholic roots. In 1845, Newman had converted from the Anglican faith to Roman Catholicism. In 1866, Hopkins, to the consternation of his parents, also converted to Catholicism and was received into the Catholic Church by Cardinal Newman himself. The following year, Hopkins graduated with a first-class degree in classics.

In 1868, Hopkins joined the Society of Jesus, often called the Jesuits, with the aim of becoming a Jesuit priest. He gave up writing poetry and burned his poems, believing that they had no place in the life of someone who was committed to God. Only when he read the writings of the theologian Duns Scotus (1265-1308) in 1872 did he decide that poetry might be compatible with his religious vocation. He was also encouraged to return to writing poetry by his mentors in the Society of Jesus. In 1874, while Hopkins was studying theology in North Wales, he learned Welsh. He began to adapt the rhythms of Welsh poetry to his own poetry, evolving a metrical system that he called sprung rhythm. He put his metrical theories into practice in a radically innovative poem, "The Wreck of the Deutschland," about the 1876 sinking of a ship that carried five Franciscan nuns, exiles from Germany. Over the next year, Hopkins continued to use sprung rhythm in some of his most famous sonnets, including "God's Grandeur" and "Pied Beauty" (both written in 1877).

After he was ordained as a priest in 1877 and until 1881, Hopkins did parish work in Sheffield, Oxford, and London, and then in the slums of the three industrialized cities, Manchester, Liverpool, and Glasgow. He followed this work with three years of teaching Latin and Greek at Stonyhurst College, Lancashire. In 1884, he was appointed professor of Greek and Latin at University College, Dublin. This period of his life was marked by depression, precipitated partly by his overly conscientious marking of hundreds of student examination papers. He suffered a period of religious doubt, which led to his writing a series of sonnets characterized by spiritual despair, including "Carrion Comfort" and "No Worst, There is None" (both c. 1885). Hopkins died of typhoid fever in Dublin on June 8, 1889. He appears to have overcome his low spirits before he died, and according to W. H. Gardner in Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889): A Study of Poetic Idiosyncrasy in Relation to Poetic Tradition, his last words were reported to be, "I am so happy."

Apart from a few uncharacteristic poems that appeared in periodicals, Hopkins did not publish his poetry during his lifetime. His friend, the poet Robert Bridges (1844-1930), whom Hopkins met at Oxford, arranged the publication of the first volume of his poetry in 1918.

POEM TEXT

This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions.

POEM SUMMARY

Stanza 1, lines 1-2; stanza 2, line 11

"Pied Beauty" opens and closes with variants of the two mottoes of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), of which Hopkins was a member. As cited by Peter Milward in A Commentary on the Sonnets of G. M. Hopkins, the two mottoes are: "Ad majorem Dei gloriam (To the greater glory of God) and Laus Deo semper (Praise be to God always)." Milward points out that it is customary for pupils in Jesuit schools to write an abbreviated form of the former motto, A. M. D. G., at the beginning of each written exercise, and the latter motto, L. D. S., at the end. Thus Hopkins appears to be treating his poem as an exercise in the Jesuit tradition.

Line 1 begins a hymn of praise to God for creating "dappled things" that embody the "Pied Beauty" of the title. These are things of mottled or variegated hue that display variety and pairs of opposites (such as light and dark). The whole of stanza 1, the sestet of the curtal sonnet, consists of a number of such things. Line 2 gives two examples of dappled things. In a simile, the poet likens "skies of couple-colour" to a "brinded" or striped cow, since both are of two contrasting colors.

Stanza 1, lines 3-4

The poet turns his attention to the river, where trout swim, their skins showing rose-colored markings "all in stipple," meaning spots such as an artist might create by using small touches of the brush, a technique known as stippling. Then the poet draws attention to the windfalls from chestnut trees. When chestnuts hit the ground, their dull brown shells break open to reveal reddish-brown nuts within, which the poet likens in a metaphor to coals that break open in a fire and glow red. He notes the wings of finches, which are of varied colors.

Stanza 1, lines 5-6

The poet broadens his vision to take in the landscape. This is not an untouched, virgin landscape, but a landscape worked and shaped by man: it is "plotted and pieced," meaning divided into sections or plots. A "fold" is an enclosure for sheep; "fallow" refers to a field left for a period of rest between crops; and "plough" refers to a field tilled in preparation for crop planting. All these references include, by implication, man's intervention in the natural landscape. In line 6, the poet draws more direct attention to man, this time in the form of his trades and the clothes and tools associated with them. The trades are spoken of in terms of their neatness and orderliness: "gear and tackle and trim," with "trim" perhaps suggesting the sailboats of fishermen.

Stanza 2, lines 7-8

In the quatrain of the curtal sonnet, the poet leaves behind the concrete examples of dappled things of stanza 1. He turns his attention inward, to his reflections on the abstract qualities he admires in "dappled things." He appreciates their oddness, uniqueness, and rarity, all of which contribute to their preciousness. His use of the words "fickle" and "frecklèd" to describe these things is noteworthy, as these are both qualities that were neither admired nor appreciated in the Victorian age. "Fickle" was most often applied to inconstant lovers (more frequently women) and unstable and capricious people. Many ladies with freckled complexions employed poisons and potions to try to remove the marks and attain the uniformly pale color that was fashionable. The poet's description of these things as "counter," as well as meaning contrary to expectation and therefore unusual, suggests an opposition to the mainstream of opinion. The interjection of "who knows how?" adds an element of wonder and mystery.

Stanza 2, lines 9-11

The poet describes the way in which the dappled things are "fickle, frecklèd": they embody pairs of opposite or contrasting abstract qualities. Those mentioned are swiftness and slowness, sweet and sour, and brightness and dimness. In conclusion, the poet returns to the theme he introduced in the first line: the creator of all this variety, change, and contrast is God, "whose beauty is past change." He ends with a simple half-line consisting only of the exhortation, "Praise him."

THEMES

Nature's Variety and God's Unity

"Pied Beauty" is a hymn of praise to the variety of God's creation, which is contrasted with the unity and non-changing nature of God. This variety is embodied in the "dappled things" of nature, as detailed in the sestet of the curtal sonnet. The significance of these things lies in the union of contrasting or opposite qualities in one being or aspect of creation. Thus bi-colored skies and streaked cows display contrasting hues; the "rose-moles" on the trout stand out against the background color of the skin; finches' wings have bars of contrasting colors; broken-open chestnuts show a bright color inside against their dull-colored outside; and the worked landscape consists of divisions that separate one part from another.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

• Write an essay in which you compare and contrast "Pied Beauty" with John Keats's poem "Ode to a Nightingale" or Dylan Thomas's poem "The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower." What does each poem reveal about the relationship between man, God, and nature?
• Write a poem on any topic using sprung rhythm and alliteration. You may use any number of syllables per line, but you must keep to a set number of strong stresses per line (as in Hopkins's "Pied Beauty," you may vary the number by one only). You may use rhyme or not, as you wish. Write a short separate paragraph on how the techniques of sprung rhythm and alliteration helped or hindered the meaning of the poem. Finally, perform your poem and read your paragraph to a group.
• Hopkins's poems often move between a personal, sensual experience to a philosophical reflection. Write an essay discussing this movement with relation to at least three of his poems.
• Identify some images that recur in Hopkins's poems, and write an essay on how they relate to the themes of the poems.
• Read about Hopkins's religious life and views, and create a class presentation in which you relate your findings to his poetry.

The "Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls" seems to open up a moral and personal aspect to the theme of variety. The idea of the broken-open chestnuts revealing a shining hidden glory within symbolically suggests that a humble, unremarkable, or flawed exterior can conceal a beautiful, divinely

inspired soul. This suggestion is picked up by the ambiguous adjectives "fickle, frecklèd," which are commonly used to describe things of which the Victorian mainstream did not approve, such as inconstant lovers and less-than-flawless complexions. From the point of view of the visual arts (Hopkins was a keen painter), these elements represent asymmetry, or broken symmetry. Whereas an even-colored object or being displays symmetry, a dappled object or being displays asymmetry. In the visual arts, the power of a painting, drawing, or sculpture comes from the interplay between symmetry and broken symmetry. In terms of poetry, this might be expressed in terms of regular rhythm (symmetry) and broken rhythm (asymmetry). In giving thanks to God for "All things counter, original, spare, strange," Hopkins includes in his hymn of praise people and other beings who are different, unusual, and (figuratively speaking) swimming against the mainstream. It can be no accident that such words were repeatedly applied to Hopkins's poetry, which was stylistically and thematically so far ahead of its time that readers found it odd, difficult, and even incomprehensible. Hopkins was aware of this, writing in a letter of February 15, 1879, to Robert Bridges (reproduced in Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works), "No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness." In "Pied Beauty," oddness and contrariness are brought into the fold of God's diverse creation.

Man and his environment are also unified. The landscape is not one of untouched nature, but one that is formed and shaped by man, to such an extent that it is defined by the activities of man within it: the sheepfold, the land that man has ploughed, and the land that he has left to rest between crops. At a time when the Industrial Revolution was prompting many writers and thinkers to lament the growing gap between man and the countryside, and the consequent destruction of the countryside by the manufacturing activities of man, this poem is a celebration of the oneness between rural man and his land. Hopkins portrays man as just another organic part of God's creation, enfolded into the landscape, not a force that is destroying that creation. The "trades" that he mentions are not the searing, smearing, and blearing trades of that other poem of 1877, "God's Grandeur," but trades that bring man into a cooperative and order-creating relationship with creation, embodied in the neatness of the image, "their gear and tackled and trim."

Piedness or variety is unified and embodied by each being named in the poem. Thus, though the cow is bi-colored, it is a single being and thereby represents a unity of contrasting elements. There is unity in diversity too in the poet's juxtaposition of contrasting beings or elements. Thus the solid, familiar form of the cow is set against the unbounded, infinite skies or heavens, just as the various, finite, and ever-changing forms of creation are set against the oneness, infinity, and constancy of God. In the second stanza, the theme is broadened to include abstract qualities that are opposite or contrasting in the same way in which, in the concrete examples of the first stanza, the colors on the cow and the trout are opposite or contrasting. To unify such abstract opposites as swift and slow, bright and dark, is a greater imaginative stretch than envisaging contrasting colors on an object, but such is the momentum of the poem that nothing could seem more natural. The poem concludes with the ultimate expression of piedness: God and his creation, the one and the many. The one and the many, however, are ultimately one, the God that is praised in the extremely simple, disyllabic final line before the poem drops into the silence of contemplation.

STYLE

Sprung Rhythm

Hopkins based his sprung rhythm on the metrical systems of Anglo-Saxon and traditional Welsh poetry, and he used this rhythm for much of his poetry. Sprung rhythm is based on the number of stressed syllables in a line and permits any number of unstressed syllables. Each foot consists of a first strongly stressed syllable, which either stands alone or is followed by unstressed syllables. Generally there are between one and four syllables per foot. An example from "Pied Beauty" is line 1, which can be scanned thus: "Glory | be to | God for | dappled | things," with four strong stresses falling on "Glo-" in the first foot, "God" in the third foot, "da-" in the fourth foot, and "things" in the fifth foot. The strong stresses in all feet except the second fall on the first syllable of the foot; even in the second foot, the stress is stronger on the first syllable than the second. Most lines of this poem have four or five strong stresses.

An additional feature of sprung rhythm is the free use of juxtaposed stresses without intermediate unstressed syllables. Examples from "Pied Beauty" include "all trades," "swift, slow," and "Praise him." In the last two of these examples, Hopkins has signaled to the reader that both syllables should have strong stresses by marking them with his customary acute accent. In the first example, he has marked "all" with a strong stress, and if the reader takes account of the sense, he or she must also stress the next word, "trades."

Compound Words

In his poetry, Hopkins uses an extraordinarily high number of compound words in order to convey meaning in a graphic and condensed form. Sometimes, it is difficult to work out whether these are adjectives, nouns, or verbs, which creates ambiguity and complexity. Examples from "Pied Beauty" are "couple-colour," "rose-moles," "Fresh-firecoal," and "chestnut-falls." Hopkins's use of compound words is a deliberate borrowing from the Anglo-Saxon and Welsh poetic traditions.

Alliteration

Alliteration is the repetition of initial consonant sounds in neighboring words. An example from "Pied Beauty" is "fickle, freck frecklèd," where the initial consonant alliterates. Sometimes, the alliterated sound falls inside a word, but it must begin a stressed syllable, such as "adazzle, dim," where the d is the repeated sound. Alliteration is one of Hopkins's most characteristic poetic techniques and his heavy reliance upon it is another borrowing from the Anglo-Saxon and Welsh verse traditions. In the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, for example, each line is divided into two half-lines, and the first stressed word of the second half-line must alliterate with at least one of the stressed syllables in the first half-line. Other words may alliterate as well.

Curtal Sonnet

"Pied Beauty" is one of Hopkins's three curtal or shortened sonnets, the others being "Peace" and "Ash Boughs." It differs from the standard Petrarchan sonnet (named after Petrarch, the fourteenth-century Italian poet) in that while the Petrarchan form is divided into an octave (eight lines) and a sestet (six lines), in the curtal sonnet, the octave becomes a sestet and the sestet becomes a quatrain (four lines), followed by a half-line tail-piece. In the traditional Petrarchan sonnet, the octave sets up a proposition or problem, while the sestet provides the resolution. "Pied Beauty" does not follow this pattern, but the sonnet form is still used to create a turnabout in focus. The first stanza or sestet ranges from God, then the heavens (in the Biblical account of creation in Genesis, God's first act was to create the heavens), and then the individual beings of creation. The progression is from the vast and infinite to the small and particular. The second stanza or quatrain reverses this process, ranging from the particular and varied "All things," to the more abstract qualities such as swiftness and slowness, thence to God's act of creation ("He fathers-forth,") and ultimately, to the unchanging nature of God himself.

COMPARE & CONTRAST

• 1870s: Hopkins's innovative use of sprung rhythm, alliteration, compound words, and condensed syntax, in part borrowed from Anglo-Saxon and Welsh poetic techniques, is considered radical, strange, and shocking.

  Today: Poetic techniques pioneered by Hopkins have entered the mainstream of literature, having influenced such poets as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis, and Ted Hughes. Modern poets use a variety of regular and irregular metrical styles, alliteration, and compound words to express their meaning.

• 1870s: The Industrial Revolution reaches its height in Britain, prompting writers to comment on the profound social, environmental, and economic changes it brings in its wake. It also brings a renewed interest in the beauty and sacredness of nature, expressed in keenly observed detail in Hopkins's poetry.

  Today: Environmentalists and social commentators continue to draw attention to the effects of industrialization on man and nature, and the topic continues to inspire writers. Governments have taken some measures, such as creating national parks, to protect certain areas from industrial development.

• 1870s: Following the expulsion of the Society of Jesus from the Catholic European nations and their colonies in the latter half of the eighteenth century (this was a secular act prompted by resentment of the Jesuits' intervention in governmental policies such as slavery), in the early 1800s, the Jesuits are restored in most countries. Throughout the nineteenth century, the society expands and sets up many colleges and universities in Britain, the United States, and other countries.

  Today: Jesuits are free to practice their faith and, in most places in the world, to work in their ministries. In the second half of the twentieth century, following a trend in the Catholic priesthood in general, the numbers of members of the Society of Jesus decline. However, according to the official website of the British Province of the Society of Jesus (www.jesuit.org.uk), as of 2006, the society has around 20,000 members worldwide, engaged in a variety of ministries.

Rhyme Scheme

The standard rhyme scheme of the octave of a Petrarchan sonnet is a-b-b-a, a-b-b-a. For the sestet the commonest rhyme schemes are c-d-e-c-d-e or c-d-c-c-d-c, though other variants are to be found. The rhyme scheme of "Pied Beauty" is a-b-c-a-b-c for the sestet, and d-b-c-d-c for the quatrain and tail-piece. It can be seen that Hopkins brings over two of his rhymes from the sestet into the quatrain and tail-piece. This creates a continuity that unifies the two stanzas and reinforces the sense of resolution and completeness at the poem's end. The poem's regular rhyme scheme adds to the chiming effect created by the sprung rhythm and alliteration. The rhymes in the poem are masculine, meaning that the rhyme falls on a stressed syllable. This has a stronger, more emphatic effect than feminine rhymes, where the rhyme falls on an unstressed syllable.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The Society of Jesus (Jesuits)

St. Ignatius of Loyola (born Iñigo López de Loyola, 1491-1556) founded the Society of Jesus, or the Jesuits, as they are commonly known, in 1534. The Jesuits are a religious order of Catholics who profess direct loyalty and service to the pope. They are often called "Soldiers of Christ" and "Footsoldiers of the pope," partly because St. Ignatius was a soldier before he became a priest. St. Ignatius emphasized the importance of love for God and believed that man was created to praise and serve him (as, for instance, the poet of "Pied Beauty" does, while exhorting his readers to do likewise). In the process, he will save his own soul. Unusual among Christian teachers, St. Ignatius believed that emotions were important and taught that a person should be sensitive to the emotions that shaped him (a factor that may well have appealed to the emotionally sensitive Hopkins). At the same time, he taught that a person should be indifferent to the comfort or discomfort of his circumstances, to whether he was enjoying his activity or not, and to cultivate a state of serene acceptance. In addition, St. Ignatius taught that God is present in all things, so there is no division between the sacred and profane. This idea would accord well with Hopkins's ecstatic love and appreciation for the natural world and mankind, which are expressed in "Pied Beauty." Possibly as a result of this aspect of St. Ignatius's philosophy, Jesuits have been prominent in the arts and sciences.

As of 2006, Jesuit ministries were established worldwide and focused on education, missionary work, and ministry in human rights and social justice. Hopkins began training to be a Jesuit priest in 1868 and was ordained as a priest in 1877, the year in which he wrote "Pied Beauty." The poem begins and ends with variations of the Jesuit mottoes and thereby takes on the flavor of a Jesuit devotional exercise.

Duns Scotus, Nature, Inscape, and Instress

Blessed John Duns Scotus (1266-1308) was an English theologian and philosopher. Gardner, in Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889): A Study of Poetic Idiosyncrasy in Relation to Poetic Tradition, believes that it is most likely that it was the work of Scotus, which Hopkins began to read in 1872, that influenced Hopkins to arrive at a metaphysical fusion of God and nature. Scotus was of the Franciscan tradition, which emphasized the importance of love of nature, God's creation, as a means of loving and praising God. Gardner comments: "Scotus taught that God the Son ‘personifies’ nature; yet a pantheistic heresy [a belief that identifies God with the universe] is carefully avoided, since although He is in the world, He is not of it." Gardner cites a journal entry by Hopkins as expressing this notion: "I do not think that I have ever seen anything more beautiful than the bluebell I have been looking at. I know the beauty of our Lord by it."

Hopkins's poetry, including "Pied Beauty," shows an exquisite sensitivity to, and sharp observation of, nature. His is not a generalized vision but a particular one that identifies, for example, the exact pattern and color of a trout's skin, and this habit of particularity, too, may have been influenced by Scotus. Scotus used the term haecceitas (this-ness) to express the individuation of natural being and object as it comes into manifestation. This has some similarity with Hopkins's concepts of inscape and instress, terms that he coined to express his perception of nature. While the exact definitions of these terms were probably only known to Hopkins, inscape may be defined as the unified group of characteristics that give each thing its uniqueness. Instress is defined variously (depending on context) as the force of being that holds the inscape together or the impulse from the inscape which carries it whole into the mind of the beholder. Hopkins acknowledged his debt to Scotus in forming these concepts in a journal entry, cited by Gardner: "when I took in any inscape of the sky or sea I thought of Scotus."

The Industrial Revolution and Nature

The Industrial Revolution began in England in the late eighteenth century and from there, spread around the world. By the time Hopkins wrote "Pied Beauty" in 1877, it was in full flow and had radically and permanently changed the landscape and social organization of Britain. Hopkins's own family relocated in order to escape the rapidly industrializing environment of their hometown, Stratford in Essex. Hundreds of thousands of rural people migrated to the industrialized towns in search of work, including those in which Hopkins worked as a priest: Manchester, Liverpool, and Glasgow. Many found jobs in factories, but the work followed the fluctuations of markets, and poverty, disease, and hardship were widespread. For the first time, a large sector of the population lost access to land to grow food, leading to problems of hunger. Meanwhile, rural areas fell into decline as the center of the economy shifted to the towns.

Writers such as the poet William Blake (1757-1827), the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865), and the social and art critic John Ruskin (1819-1900) wrote at length about the social problems caused by the Industrial Revolution. In parallel, there grew among romantic and other writers an appreciation of the beauty of nature (which was under threat due to the sprawl and pollution of industrialization) and of fast-disappearing rural skills and trades (which were viewed as tying man to nature, unlike dehumanizing factory work). Hopkins showed a keen awareness of the problems, as is clear from his poem "God's Grandeur" (published in Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works), which contains the line, "all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil." The trades mentioned in "Pied Beauty," with their "gear and tackle and trim," do not appear to be tainted with industrial associations; they are the rural trades that tie man to the "plotted and pieced" landscape and enable him to bring order to it.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

With a few exceptions of uncharacteristic poems appearing in minor periodicals, Hopkins's poems were not published during his lifetime and were read only by friends and fellow poets. Hopkins resisted the entreaties of his friends to publish. His reluctance was probably due to his anticipation of responses such as that of the poet and critic Coventry Patmore after wrestling with a number of Hopkins's poems. Patmore, cited in Paul L. Mariani's A Commentary on the Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, complained that the poems required "the whole attention to apprehend and digest them." He added that Hopkins's poetry was "arduous" enough without the added difficulty of "several entirely novel and simultaneous experiments in versification and construction," together with an "altogether unprecedented system of alliteration and compound words."

Patmore was perhaps vindicated in his view by the slow sales of the 1918 publication of the first collected edition of Hopkins's poems, Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by Robert Bridges, in which "Pied Beauty" was included. The English poet A. E. Housman gave his opinion of the collection in a letter of 1918 to Robert Bridges, cited in the University of Glasgow website article "Paper 17. Literature 1830-1914 (Victorian)." Housman dismisses Hopkins's attempts at sprung rhythm as being less competent than "many a humble scribbler of words for music-hall songs" has written. He accuses Hopkins of doing more "violence" to the English language than even the poet John Keats, and of trying to "compensate by strangeness for the lack of pure merit."

"Pied Beauty" subsequently appeared in the second complete edition of Hopkins's poetry, published in 1930. This time, popular taste had begun to catch up with Hopkins's innovative style. The edition met with considerable critical and public acclaim and established Hopkins's influence on twentieth-century poets. Not everyone was wholly impressed, however. T. S. Eliot (in his 1934 essay "After Strange Gods," as cited in the University of Glasgow website article "Paper 17. Literature 1830-1914 (Victorian)") noted that while Hopkins's innovations were good, "like the mind of their author, they operate only within a narrow range." Eliot wrote that they sometimes come close to being "purely verbal, in that a whole poem will give us more of the same thing, an accumulation, rather than a real development of thought or feeling."

Donald Davie, in his 1952 book Purity of Diction in English Verse (cited in the University of Glasgow website article, "Paper 17. Literature 1830-1914 (Victorian)"), lambasts Hopkins for his "self-regarding ingenuity," which "may be called decadent." Hopkins, Davie writes, is the greatest poet of a decadent age, "because he cultivates his hysteria and pushes his sickness to the limit." Part of Hopkins's decadence, Davie added, lies in "the refinement and manipulation of sensuous appetite": his work tries to restore "to a jaded palate the capacity for enjoyment." Davie, like Housman, objects to what he sees as Hopkins's lack of respect for the English language and his forcing it into "a muscle-bound monstrosity."

Over the decades, readers and critics have become used to many of the poetic innovations that were once considered so strange and difficult in Hopkins's poetry, allowing his strengths to come to the fore. His work gained particular admiration from many adherents of the New Criticism that dominated the study of English literature in Britain and the United States from the 1920s until the 1960s. The New Critics' emphasis on close reading of the text led them to appreciate Hopkins's short and condensed poetry, to such an extent that in 1952, the critic F. R. Leavis was able to begin his essay on Hopkins, "Metaphysical Isolation" (published in Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Critical Symposium) with the bold statement, "That Hopkins has a permanent place among the English poets may now be taken as established beyond challenge: academic scholarship has canonized him." "Pied Beauty" is among the most frequently anthologized of Hopkins's poems, and it is widely taught in schools and colleges. Kevin Heller, in his article for Explicator (2001) entitled "Hopkins's ‘Pied Beauty,’" surely expresses the views of many modern critics and readers when he praises the poem for its "creativity and brilliance."

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

• All of Hopkins's poems, along with extracts from his journals and letters, and some of his sermons and devotional writings, are collected in Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works (1986), edited by Catherine Phillips. Readers new to his poetry may enjoy "The Windhover," "God's Grandeur, and "As Kingfishers Catch Fire." For an example of his so-called terrible sonnets, "No Worst" may be of interest.
• Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life (1991), by Robert Bernard Martin, is an interesting biography that argues that Hopkins projected his suppressed homoerotic impulses onto God and nature, producing some of the most sensually ecstatic religious poetry in English literature. Martin gained unprecedented and unrestricted access to Hopkins's notebooks to write this biography.
• Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology (2005), by Eugene H. Peterson, is a popular book written for the general reader in which the author explores the meaning of Biblical texts through the beauty of creation and the tragedies of history. Peterson, a pastor and professor, argues that spirituality is a sensual process.
• Readers who enjoy Hopkins's poetry may also appreciate that of the seventeenth-century English metaphysical poet John Donne. Most of his poems, including his love poetry and religious poems and writings, are collected in John Donne: The Major Works, including Songs and Sonnets and Sermons (2000).

CRITICISM

Claire Robinson

Claire Robinson has an M.A. in English. She is a writer and editor and a former teacher of English literature and creative writing. In the following essay, she examines how Hopkins uses the poetic techniques of the oral traditions of Anglo-Saxon and traditional Welsh poetry to express his meaning in "Pied Beauty."

Gerard Manley Hopkins's experimentation with the poetic techniques of Anglo-Saxon and Welsh poetry was entirely geared to his intention that his poems be read aloud with the ear, not on the page with the eye. In a letter of August 21, 1877 to Robert Bridges (cited in Gerard ManleyHopkins: The Major Works), he writes, "My verse is less to be read than heard … it is oratorical, that is the rhythm is so." In another letter to Bridges in 1886 (cited by Paul L. Mariani in A Commentary on the Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins), enclosing his sonnet, "Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves," he writes:

Of this long sonnet above all remember what applies to all my verse, that it is, as living art should be, made for performance and that its performance is not reading with the eye but loud, leisurely, poetical (not rhetorical) recitation, with long rests, long dwells on the rhyme and other marked syllables, and so on.

One of the tools that Hopkins took from the Anglo-Saxon and Welsh oral traditions was alliteration, the repetition of initial consonant sounds in neighboring words, sometimes called consonant-chiming. For example, every line of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf contains three alliterations. The Welsh-language poetic genre called cynghanedd (meaning harmony), a traditional form dating from ancient times and continuing into the present day, relies heavily on alliteration and internal rhyme (in which two or more words in the same line rhyme). Hopkins was studying the Welsh language and literature in the years prior to writing "Pied Beauty."

In "Pied Beauty," Hopkins includes such alliterative phrases as "skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow," where the initial letter "c" is repeated three times, and "Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls," where the alliteration lies in the letter "f." The effect of alliteration is similar to rhyme in that it sets up an expectation of repetition that is later satisfied, thereby carrying the listener through the poem. (For one who recites, the alliteration is an aid to memory.) It also has a musical, incantatory effect similar to that of metrical rhythm, due to the repetition of sounds. Often, Hopkins reinforces the chiming effect of the alliteration by making the alliterations fall on strongly stressed syllables, in the Anglo-Saxon style. This point is illustrated in all the above examples.

Hopkins's use of compound words is another conscious borrowing from the Anglo-Saxon tradition. Beowulf is laden with such constructions, called kennings (literally, knowings). A king is called a ring-giver (a king rewards his warriors with gifts of rings), a burial mound is an earth-hall, and a ship is a sea-rider. Such descriptions lend a concrete and picturesque quality to the object described; they pull it from the realm of the abstract into the more directly felt world of the senses, turning an idea into an object. For example, Hopkins's "couple-colour" conjures up a concrete image of a pair, perhaps a pair of people, while the word two and the prefix bi-, which have the same meaning, completely fail to stir the senses. The expression "Fresh-firecoal" invokes the familiar image of a burning coal breaking open and glowing red, but it is lent a new twist by the addition of "Fresh-," an adjective that connotes both newness and vitality.

The Anglo-Saxon language abounds in words describing the concrete and tangible world, as opposed to the often more abstract and cerebral Latin- and Greek-derived words that entered the English language with the Norman conquest of 1066. Anglo-Saxon-derived words are also usually shorter than Latin- or Greek-derived words, creating a more forceful sound effect. Hopkins's poetry is laden with words with Anglo-Saxon roots, which he prefers to those with Latin or Greek roots. Everyday speech has far more Anglo-Saxon-derived words than does formal speech or writing, and Hopkins wanted to approximate normal speech in his poetry. He also used many dialect and archaic words that hark back to the Anglo-Saxon past. An example from "Pied Beauty" is "brinded," an archaic and dialect word meaning striped or streaked, which is derived from the Anglo-Saxon bernen or brinnen, to burn.

The most important influence of Anglo-Saxon verse on Hopkins's poetry lay in its metrical system. Hopkins's sprung rhythm is based on a metrical style that was common in Anglo-Saxon poetry such as Beowulf and William Langland's Piers Plowman. This metrical style has a set number of strong stresses per line. Each line is divided into two half-lines; there are two strong stresses per half-line and alliteration only occurs on stressed syllables. Each line can contain any number of syllables. "Pied Beauty" has four or five strong stresses per line, and many of the strong stresses alliterate also. For example, in the line, "Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches wings," three of the four strong stresses fall on the syllables beginning with the letter "f" the other strong stress falls on "chest-."

The Anglo-Saxon and sprung meters are different from the traditional meter of English verse written after the Norman invasion of 1066. The Norman style, which became the traditional English style, counts both stresses and syllables, rather than just stresses. It contains a regular number of syllables per foot, with the stress generally falling in the same place within each foot except when the rhythm is deliberately changed for emphasis. In his "Author's Preface" to the 1918 edition of his poetry, reproduced in Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works, Hopkins called such traditional meter "Running Rhythm." He noted that while he himself made use of it, if strictly adhered to, it made verse become "same and tame."

Hopkins favored sprung rhythm because he believed it was the rhythm of common speech. It may be added that this rhythm is uniquely well-suited to Hopkins's declamatory, ecstatic, and enthusiastic style in general, and to the hymn of praise "Pied Beauty" in particular. Hopkins noted in a letter of April 2, 1877, to Robert Bridges (cited in Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works) that sprung rhythm was "the most rhetorical and emphatic of all possible rhythms." Robert Lowell, in his essay "Hopkins' Sanctity," in Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Critical Symposium by the Kenyon Critics, notes the perfect correspondence between Hopkins's rhythmical style and his personality: "Hopkins' rhythms even when he is not writing sprung-rhythm have the effect of a hyperthyroid injection. As we know from the letters and personal anecdotes, he lived in a state of exhilaration."

Hopkins's sprung rhythm draws its power from the tension between the regular rhythms of poetry, which were usual in the poetry of his time, and his deliberately disturbed rhythms, which he called counterpointed rhythm. Regular rhythm tends to soothe and lull readers with its incantatory effect, whereas irregular rhythm such as Hopkins uses wakes them up and shocks them into something approaching a state of astonishment, awe, or wonder. An example is the first stanza of "Pied Beauty," in which Hopkins employs emphatic and sometimes staccato rhythms that load each line with a sense of exhilaration. In the second stanza, the shift in focus from outward creation to inward reflection is reflected in a slowing down of the rhythm and tempo. This is reinforced by the longer vowel sounds of line 7; it is impossible to read it as quickly as the first stanza. Line 9, with its list of opposite qualities, speeds up, as is usual with a list, but then the tempo slows markedly in the momentous lines 10 and 11: "He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: / Praise him." The combination of a number of strongly stressed long vowel sounds and the four consecutive strong stresses falling on the final four words forces the reader to slow down.

The changes in rhythm and tempo between the lively first stanza and the more ponderous second perfectly reflect the meaning. The first stanza is quick and lively and expresses the variety of God's creation; the second is slower and more reflective and expresses both the poet's wondering introspection. The final one-and-a-half lines are slowest and grandest of all, and express the unchanging nature of God.

Hopkins never used innovative poetic techniques for their own sake. Rather, he used them to express and deepen the meaning of his poems. His theories of sprung rhythm and his study of the Anglo-Saxon and Welsh traditions have proved taxing for students of literature to research and understand. What matters is the end result: verse that shimmers with a sensual passion for life and its creator. This can only be fully realized by reading his poetry aloud, which is where the study of Hopkins's verse should begin and end.

Source: Claire Robinson, Critical Essay on "Pied Beauty," in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2007.

Kevin Heller

In the following essay excerpt, Heller gives an interpretation of Hopkins's "Pied Beauty," in which attention is given to the prayer form of the poem and how the "pied" poetic elements reflect the topic.

Through the use of various poetic devices in "Pied Beauty," Gerard Manley Hopkins causes the words of his poem to take on meaning beyond their dictionary definitions. By alluding to common prayers and manipulating both sound effect and stanza form. Hopkins makes his poem itself an example of pied beauty: it is pied, ordered and beautiful, and is an imitation of the creative act of God written to praise him in the form of a poem-prayer.

With the opening line, "Glory be to God […]" (1), Hopkins alludes to the "Glory Be"—"Glory be to the Father, and to the son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen." By beginning "Pied Beauty" with those words, Hopkins forces the reader to recall the entire prayer and asks the reader to consider his poem a prayer. The "Glory Be" itself is unclear just what, exactly, about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is deserving of glory, but Hopkins provides an answer: the pied beauty of so many of God's creations is what causes God to be deserving of glory. In "Pied Beauty," God deserves glory for having created such beautiful things out of nothing, and humans have no idea what magnificent creation God will place on the earth in the future, just as the "Glory Be" discusses the past, present, and future.

The last line of Hopkins's poem, "Praise him" (11), is significant, just as the last line of the "Glory Be" is "Amen." Granted, "amen" does not mean "praise him," but rather "certainly" or "truly." Hopkins implies, however, that "Praise him" and "Amen" should be equated, and the context makes sense: Hopkins believes "Certainly" or "Truly" one should "Praise him." Readers can imagine listening to "Pied Beauty" being read (as it was intended to be read) aloud and nodding in assent to the last line. They might even be tempted to call out "Amen" or "Praise him."

The sounds that Hopkins's audience hears are brilliantly construed sentences and words that illustrate just why God deserves glory for his myriad creations: By combining words in such a new, unique, and beautiful manner, just as God created so many things in the world, Hopkins creates pied sounds—and both God's and Hopkins's creations are beautiful in their pied nature: God creates "brinded cows" the "couple-colour" (2) of the sky, and Hopkins creates beautiful sounds, such as, "Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings" (4). This phrase alliterates with f four times and contains six sprung rhythm feet—three single stresses, and three trochees—just as three separate God-created natural things are discussed. Further. Hopkins highlights the pied nature of the three things, because the reader cannot easily distinguish between the subject noun and the modifier in the sets "fresh-firecoal," "chestnut-falls," and "finches' wings." One word does not modify the other, but both work in conjunction to heighten the pied nature of their pairings. God creates "rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim" (3)—a line rich in imagery and sound. Hopkins creates a fraction of a line. "who knows how?" (8) in which the letter o is pronounced differently—in a pied fashion—in three separate words: these words utilize w's and h's to make the pattern "whwhw." Hopkins combines things in ways that do not at first seem to go together. But both God and Hopkins give their creations order, and within that order is beauty. Or within that beauty is order. In the line "With swift, slow; sweet sour; adazzle, dim" (9), Hopkins uses four w's and four s's, two a's, two d's, and two z's, creating the pattern "ababababcdceed" (fourteen letters, just as a sonnet is fourteen lines) and Hopkins uses a modified form of the sonnet in "Pied Beauty."

A ten-and-a-half-line poem is not standard; it is "counter, original, spare, strange" (7). But the beauty of the form comes from its complexity and ingenuity within the boundaries of order: A typical sonnet could be eight and six lines, but Hopkins writes "Pied Beauty" in six and four and half lines—exactly proportionate to a regular fourteen-line sonnet (8/6 and 6/4.5; 8 × 4.5 = 36 and 6 × 6 = 36). The form of "Pied Beauty" is Hopkins's way of praising God through imitation: Hopkins created something pied and beautiful—the ten-and-a-half line sonnet—while maintaining order.

Whereas a prose version of the points Hopkins makes may be lucid, the effect that allusion, sound effect, and stanza have in "Pied Beauty" cannot possibly be captured in anything but poetry. Hopkins's poem and God's creations are both deserving of glory for their creativity and brilliance, but God created Hopkins: possibly an example of pied beauty himself.

Source: Kevin Heller, "Hopkins's ‘Pied Beauty,’" in Explicator, Vol. 59, No. 4, Summer 2001, pp. 191-92.

John Ferns

In the following essay, Ferns gives a critical analysis of Hopkins's work.

While Gerard Manley Hopkins's importance as a Victorian poet is well established, his significance as a Victorian prose writer is not as fully recognized. This is, perhaps, because his prose did not appear in single works, like John Ruskin's Modern Painters, Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, or Walter Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance, published in his lifetime but is found in such varied forms as essays, notes, sermons, and letters which were not collected and published until well after his death. Nevertheless, Hopkins is demonstrably one of the great writers of Victorian prose just as he is one of the era's great poets. He deserves consideration alongside such acknowledged masters of Victorian prose as Arnold, Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, and John Stuart Mill. As a literary critic, for example, Hopkins is surely the most important and perceptive critic of English poetry between Arnold and T. S. Eliot and an important link in the critical tradition they represent. His achievement in prose is intimately related to his achievement in poetry. In fact, the two achievements are really one; in his prose as well as in his poetry there is the same "strain of address" (as Hopkins called it), the same enthusiasm, feeling, love, inspiration, and sincerity—a unity of purpose confirmed in his Catholic faith and reaching back from Aquinas to Aristotle through Christ, whom Hopkins regarded as the best judge of literary ventures as well as of human lives.

Hopkins was born at Stratford, Essex, on 28 July 1844 to Manley and Kate Smith Hopkins. He was the eldest of their eight children who survived childhood. Manley Hopkins was a prosperous marine insurance adjuster and a minor poet. Gerard attended Highgate Grammar School (1854-1862) where he became an excellent student of Greek and Latin. He won an Exhibition scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1863.

In July 1866 Hopkins decided to become a Roman Catholic. He was received into the Catholic Church by John Henry Newman in October 1866. In 1867 he graduated with a double-first class degree in classics. The following year he decided to enter the Society of Jesus, and as a consequence of this decision he burned his early poetry, inadvertently overlooking some working drafts. His nine years of Jesuit training took place at various Jesuit houses throughout Britain, in particular Roehampton, Stonyhurst, and St. Beuno's. In 1877 Hopkins was ordained a priest and during the next seven years carried out pastoral duties that included preaching and teaching in London, Oxford, Bedford Leigh, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Stonyhurst. The poverty and distressing social conditions that he witnessed in these industrial towns caused him to express deep concern in his letters to Robert Bridges and others.

He was appointed professor of Greek at Royal University College, Dublin, in 1884, a position he held until his early death from typhoid fever on 8 June 1889. The poetry which he began to write again late in 1875 and which he shared only with his family and a few friends, such as Robert Bridges, Richard Watson Dixon, and Coventry Patmore, was eventually published in an edition prepared by Bridges in 1918, nearly thirty years after Hopkins's death. The earliest extant letters, diary entries, and notebooks date from his later school days and earliest undergraduate years at Oxford University. The volume The Notebooks and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1937), edited by Humphry House in the 1930s and enlarged with the help of Graham Storey as The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1959) in the 1950s, contains, as well as early diaries and journals, undergraduate essays on a range of subjects. Besides book lists, the volume includes etymological notes and Lenten self-admonitions. Its focal point is an extended journal mainly of nature observations but also of spiritual experiences that Hopkins kept from 1866 to 1875.

The chief influence on the technique of Hopkins's detailed nature observations was likely the art critic John Ruskin, who in volume one of his Modern Painters (1843) advised that "Every landscape painter should know the specific characters of every object he has to represent, rock, flower, or cloud." Together with this was the classical-Arnoldian wish which Hopkins shared to represent the object "as in itself it really is." These notes, then, written during an extended period of self-elected poetic silence become, at times, almost prose poems in their impassioned contemplation of nature—for example, bluebells, described by Hopkins in May 1871: "This day and May 11 the bluebells in the little wood between the College and the highroad and in one of the Hurst Green cloughs. In the little wood/opposite the light/they stood in blackish spreads or sheddings like the spots on a snake. The heads are then like thongs and solemn in grain and grape-colour. But in the clough/through the light/they come in falls of sky-colour washing the brows and slacks of the ground with vein-blue, thickening at the double, vertical themselves and the young grass and brake fern combed vertical, but the brake stuck the upright of all this with light winged transoms. It was a lovely sight.—"

This dense and detailed prose—which it took the greater selectivity of the beautiful sonnets of six years later, such as "Pied Beauty" and "Hurrahing in Harvest," to turn into poetry—is a prose that hardly knows what prose is. It is prose that lacks the discipline of writing for an audience, other than oneself. Much later, Hopkins was to complain to his friend and fellow poet Coventry Patmore about Patmore's and John Henry Newman's prose. The comments that follow he would no doubt have been willing to apply to his own early prose. To Patmore in October 1887 he wrote a passage that gives a good sense of what Hopkins thought successful prose should be: "It is that when I read yr. prose and when I read Newman's and some other modern writers' the same impression is borne in on me: no matter how beautiful the thought, nor, taken singly, with what happiness expressed, you do not know what writing prose is. At bottom what you do and what Cardinal Newman does is to think aloud, to think with pen to paper. In this process there are certain advantages; they may outweigh those of a perfect technic; but at any rate they exclude that; they exclude the belonging technic, the belonging rhetoric the own proper eloquence of written prose. Each thought is told off singly and there follows a pause and this breaks the continuity, the contentio, the strain of address, which writing should usually have."

Hopkins goes on to argue that the beauty and eloquence of good prose cannot come wholly from the thought expressed. He offers Edmund Burke as an example of a prose writer who colorlessly transmitted his thought in prose. However, because Burke was an orator his writing emerged from an oratorical tradition and thus possessed the "strain of address" that Hopkins believed necessary to successful prose. John Henry Newman, Hopkins believes, does not follow the common tradition of English prose. He seems, Hopkins suggests, to write from the assumption that Edward Gibbon was the last master of traditional English prose as well as from the point of view that, since Gibbon cannot be emulated, it is best to "begin all over again from the language of conversation, of common life." Hopkins, then, tells Patmore that he (Patmore) writes prose from a conviction that the style of prose must be different from the style of poetry. But, Hopkins argues, prose style must be a "positive thing and not the absence of verse forms; … pointedly expressed thoughts are single hits and give no continuity of style." In Hopkins's view, good prose must always possess "continuity of style" and "strain of address." What Hopkins had discovered between 1871, when he wrote the bluebell passage, and 1887 was that to make his prose successful he needed to write with an audience in mind. Perhaps the bluebell passage shows "strain of address" and "continuity of style" but it does not possess them to the degree that the letter to Patmore does. Nevertheless, the journal of 1866-1875 does contain examples of moving prose when, for instance, Hopkins expresses the simple certainty of his religious belief. If Augustan prose lost the ability to express religion, Hopkins marvelously recovers that capacity for Victorian prose in the following passage from his journal for 8 October 1874, which possesses both "strain of address" and "continuity of style" even though Hopkins continues, here, to serve as his own audience. He had visited St. Winefred's well at Holywell with his Jesuit colleague Barraud, and there is a significant movement in the passage from natural observation to something approaching religious rapture: "Bright and beautiful day. Crests of snow could be seen on the mountains. Barraud and I walked over to Holywell and bathed at the well and returned very joyously. The sight of the water in the well as clear as glass, greenish like beryl or aquamarine, trembling at the surface with the force of the springs, and shaping out the five foils of the well quite drew and held my eyes to it. Within a month or six weeks from this (I think Fr di Pietro said) a young man from Liverpool, Arthur Kent (?), was cured of rupture in the water. The strong unfailing flow of the water and the chain of cures from year to year all these centuries took hold of my mind with wonder at the bounty of God in one of His saints, the sensible thing so naturally and gracefully uttering the spiritual reason of its being (which is all in true keeping with the story of St. Winefred's death and recovery) and the spring in place leading back the thoughts by its spring in time to its spring in eternity: even now the stress and buoyance and abundance of water is before my eyes."

The passage begins, like many of his earlier nature observations, in notes rather than with continuous prose: "Bright and beautiful day. Crests of snow could be seen on the mountains." The images are more sharply differentiated than are those in the bluebell passage, but essentially Hopkins uses the same method of recording observation. What distinguishes this passage from the earlier one and leads to increasing "strain of address" and "continuity of style" is the consideration of the miraculous cure. Hopkins's reflection, then, deepens and, as he would in the poetry he was shortly to recommence writing, he moves from a sense of the natural to a perception of the divine. "The Windhover" and "Hurrahing in Harvest" provide analogies from the poetry to what is happening here. The prose style in the journal passage is affected and changes from the fragmentariness of the nature observation of "Bright and beautiful day" to the continuity of the long, concluding, perfectly clear and moving sentence. What impresses is the wonder of Hopkins's simple faith, the realization that despite the fact that he lived in an age of doubt he believed in miracles. As F. R. Leavis observed in the second annual Hopkins Lecture, published by the Hopkins Society in 1971, "Hopkins, in a wholly unpejorative sense, was simple. There is nothing equivocal in his verse, and in the letters we see the simplicity as that of a man of high intelligence, fine human perception, irresistible charm and complete integrity."

Once Hopkins was ordained a priest at St. Beuno's Seminary, North Wales, in the fall of 1877, he had to assume priestly duties, one of which was preaching. His preaching, in London, Oxford, and eventually in Bedford Leigh and Liverpool, as well as the poetry he had recommenced writing in 1875, helped to extend the flexibility and range of his developing prose style. We should note, in this connection, that the sprung rhythm which he introduced into his poetry was, in his own words, "the nearest to the rhythm of prose, that is the native and natural rhythm of speech, the least forced, the most rhetorical and emphatic of all possible rhythms, combining, as it seems to me, opposite and, one wd. have thought, incompatible excellences, markedness of rhythm—that is rhythm's self—and naturalness of expression." For surely in recovering the alliterative rhythms of medieval verse in such poems as The Wreck of the Deutschland (1876), Hopkins was also recovering the rhythms of early English prose, with its two-beat phrases held together by stress patterns within and between phrases, its dependence on rhythm more than syntax to determine meaning, and its stringing together of main clauses connected by and and but. Just as Hopkins's poetry was influenced by Old and Middle English alliterative verse, his prose was influenced by early English prose. Understanding Hopkins's relationship to medieval prose and verse traditions helps to lead us to the heart of Hopkins's literary achievement. He brought poetry closer to the rhythm of prose. What he failed to achieve in prose as a preacher, he succeeded in presenting as a poet in such works as The Wreck of the Deutschland. But as his poetry and prose matured they came together in such a manner that in his later years Hopkins expressed similar thoughts in similar ways in both his meditation notes and in his sonnets of desolation.

The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, unpublished until 1959, contains both his less successful sermons and his deeply moving meditations. Though Hopkins was not thought by his Jesuit superiors or, apparently, by his audience to be a successful preacher, his sermons were clearly very carefully prepared. They demonstrate all the expected oratorical features such as repetition and accumulation, and Hopkins obviously took great care in his sermons to suit his matter to the capacity of his hearers. His painstaking preparation is perhaps clearest in his sermons delivered to his largely working-class parishioners at Bedford Leigh in Lancashire. The following passage from a sermon delivered on 23 November 1879 shows that by that date Hopkins was completely aware of the importance of "strain of address" and "continuity of style." His sermon oratory is also carefully shaped, though it is not Hopkins's best prose. He is speaking of Christ: "I leave it to you, brethren, then to picture him, in whom the fulness of the godhead dwelt bodily, in his bearing how majestic, how strong and yet how lovely and lissome in his limbs, in his look how earnest, grave but kind. In his Passion all this strength was spent, this lissomness crippled, this beauty wrecked, this majesty beaten down. But now it is more than all restored, and for myself I make no secret I look forward with eager desire to seeing the matchless beauty of Christ's body in the heavenly light…."

Despite his sensitive handling of repetition and accumulation here, Hopkins would not be remembered as a prose writer for prose like this. Its alliteration is a little too self-conscious and the passage exudes, in places, an air of almost Pre-Raphaelite or decadent loveliness.

It is in the three published volumes of his letters—to Robert Bridges, to his former schoolmaster Richard Watson Dixon, and to others, including his parents and his Oxford friend Alexander Baillie—that Hopkins's claim to importance as a writer of Victorian prose lies. And the claim must be made in this way: Hopkins's prose is of interest because it is important literary criticism which also illuminates the creative practice of a major English poet. The letters, moreover, reveal a sense of the discovery and lively development of fresh thought.

One important aspect of Hopkins's contribution to literary criticism in the letters is his striking out against Tennyson's Parnassian style in the hope of restoring a language of inspiration to English poetry. Hopkins's essential critique of Tennyson occurs in an early letter to his friend Baillie, written in September 1864 when Hopkins was twenty years old. He announces somewhat melodramatically to his friend, "Do you know, a horrible thing has happened to me. I have begun to doubt Tennyson." The reason for doubt is that Tennyson writes too much "Parnassian," which Hopkins differentiates from the language of inspiration in the following way: "I think then the language of verse may be divided into three kinds. The first and highest is poetry proper, the language of inspiration. The word inspiration need cause no difficulty. I mean by it a mood of great, abnormal in fact, mental acuteness, either energetic or receptive, according as the thoughts which arise in it seem generated by a stress and action of the brain, or to strike into it unasked.…the poetry of inspiration can only be written in this mood of mind, even if it only last a minute, by poets themselves."

Hopkins's best prose is inspired writing as is his best poetry. The sense of intense concentration on the object that Hopkins himself speaks of as contentio or "strain of address" is perceptible in Hopkins's prose especially when he feels the force of divine inspiration, as he does in the 1874 journal account of the visit to Holywell and as he does in a later letter to Dixon discussing Wordsworth's Immortality Ode. Parnassian, in contrast to the language of inspiration, is the "second kind" of poetic language that Hopkins argues can "only be spoken by poets but it is not in the highest sense poetry…. It is spoken on and from the level of a poet's mind, not, as in the other case, when inspiration which is the gift of genius, raises him above himself." He goes on to offer an analysis of a passage from Enoch Arden to establish his point that Tennyson palls because he writes too much Parnassian. Hopkins's own return in his poetry from the mellifluous, Latinate diction of Tennyson to a more Germanic, Anglo-Saxon diction in the writing of The Wreck of the Deutschland involves an important shift in the language of English poetry which is also reflected in Hopkins's prose. When Hopkins counters Bridges's dislike of Dryden in a letter of November 1887, he describes Dryden's language in a way that characterizes his own poetry and prose, "he is the most masculine of our poets; his style and his rhythms lay the strongest stress of all our literature on the naked the and sinew of the English language, the praise that with certain qualification one would give in Greek to Demosthenes, to be the greatest master of bare Greek…."

Hopkins was remarkably faithful, throughout his life as a critic, to his early judgment of Tennyson. He simply came to believe more and more fully that inspiration, whether in poetry or prose, came from God. A later judgment of Tennyson, in a letter to Dixon written in February or March 1879, shows the continuity in Hopkins's critical thought and is, as well, a representative example of his mature critical prose. The following passage shows a comprehensive grasp of Tennyson's canon to 1879 and a maturity of critical judgment: "You call Tennyson ‘a great outsider’; you mean, I think, to the soul of poetry. I feel what you mean, though it grieves me to hear him depreciated, as of late year has often been done. Come what may he will be one of our greatest poets. To me his poetry appears ‘chryselephantine’; always of precious mental material and each verse a work of art, no botchy places, not only so but no half wrought or low-toned ones, no drab, no brown-holland; but the form, though fine, not the perfect artist's form, not equal to the material."

Hopkins goes on to argue that Tennyson is at his best when inspired by personal feeling as in In Memoriam which Hopkins considers a divine work. Also, he admires Tennyson the pure rhymer and simple imaginer of "The Lady of Shalott," "Sir Galahad," "The Dream of Fair Women," and "The Palace of Art." However, Hopkins thinks that the want of perfect form in Tennyson's imagination comes out in his longer works—Idylls of the King, for example, which Hopkins considers "unreal in motive and incorrect. He shd. have called them Charades from the Middle Ages…." Galahad, in one of the later Idylls, Hopkins considers "a fantastic charade-playing trumpery Galahad, merely playing the fool over Christian heroism." Although Hopkins finds the individual scenes from the Idylls triumphs of language and "of bright picturesque," the overall effect is that of a charade and not as dramatically convincing as the plays on Drury Lane. Tennyson's opinions are neither original nor independent in Hopkins's view and often sink into vulgarity. "Locksley Hall," Maud, Aylmer's Field, and The Princess are "ungentlemanly rows," though Tennyson, Hopkins notes, lacks the real rakishness and rascality of Goethe or Burns. For Hopkins, Tennyson is at his worst in such rhetorical pieces as "The Lord of Burleigh" and "Lady Clare Vere de Vere." He concludes, however, by reaffirming his admiration for Tennyson—"a glorious poet and all he does is chryselephantine."

Hopkins's assessment of Tennyson is typical of his critical prose in that it is both generous and critical, his language is colloquial ("no botchy places … no drab, no brown-holland"), and he provides a criticism of Tennyson that the common reader can grasp. Even the dubious criticism of Maud and The Princess as "ungentlemanly rows" gains point when we understand that Hopkins was making a moral rather than a merely social judgment. Hopkins thought that the perfect gentleman was Christ. In an 1879 letter to Bridges he makes a further comment on Tennyson and an account of truly gentlemanly qualities he believes that the best poetry should possess: "Tennyson: his gift of utterance is truly golden, but go further home and you come to thoughts commonplace and wanting in nobility (it seems hard to say it but I think you know what I mean)." Then, speaking of Bridges's poetry he observes, "Since I must not flatter or exaggerate I do not claim that you have such a volume of imagery as Tennyson, Swinburne, or Morris, though the feeling for beauty you have seems to me pure and exquisite; but in point of character, of sincerity or earnestness, of manliness, of tenderness, of humour, melancholy, human feeling" are those of true gentlemanliness that, for Hopkins, characterize the best literature.

Another excellent example of Hopkins's critical prose is found in his letter of 23 October 1886 to Dixon when he defends Wordsworth's 1807 Immortality Ode against Dixon's indifference to the poem. In the latter part of the letter, Hopkins speaks of Wordsworth and Plato: "human nature in these men saw something, got a shock; wavers in opinion, looking back, whether there was anything in it or no; but is in a tremble ever since. Now what Wordsworthians mean is, what would seem to be the growing mind of the English speaking world and may perhaps come to be that of the world at large/is that in Wordsworth when he wrote that ode human nature got another of those shocks, and the tremble from it is spreading. This opinion I do strongly share; I am, ever since I knew the ode, in that tremble. You know what happened to crazy Blake, himself a most poetically electrical subject both active and passive, at his first hearing: when the reader came to ‘The pansy at my feet’ he fell into a hysterical excitement. Now commonsense forbid we should take on like these unstrung hysterical creatures: still it was proof of the power of the shock."

Hopkins continues by arguing that the ode is better than anything else by Wordsworth. Wordsworth was an imperfect artist capable of deep insight in some instances and little in others, but the subject matter of the ode is "of the highest, his insight was at its very deepest, and hence to my mind the extreme value of the poem." Wordsworth's poetic execution, in Hopkins's view, rises to the occasion of his subject. His rhymes are "musically interlaced," his rhythms successful. Wordsworth's diction throughout the ode Hopkins considers "charged and steeped in beauty and yearning." Hopkins's oratorical and rhetorical style in the letter and the strain of his address reach their height in his final comment: "For my part I shd. think St. George and St. Thomas Canterbury wore roses in heaven for England's sake on the day that ode, not without their intercession, was penned…." Again we have the sense of an enthusiastic critical intelligence, alive in its admiration of Wordsworth's ode. As in his criticism of Tennyson, Hopkins shows the acute critic's capacity to go directly to the heart of his subject. Whereas Tennyson is suspect in his inability to sustain inspiration, Wordsworth provides an inspired insight into the nature of immortality. Such significant perceptions, written from moral conviction and expressed with point, place Hopkins in the English critical tradition that includes Johnson, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Arnold, and culminates in the literary criticism of T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis. In both the passages on Tennyson and Wordsworth, Hopkins's moral and religious convictions, his "strain of address," and his capacity to sustain an argument or perception, his "continuity of style," are evident as they are, too, throughout his nature, sermon, and meditation writing. In addition to the commentaries on Tennyson and Wordsworth, Hopkins, in his letters, offers equally perceptive critical discussions of Milton, Browning, Barnes, and others. We see throughout the letters the delicacy, the fineness of Hopkins's sensibility, the warmth of his friendship, and the strength of his moral intelligence.

Two further aspects of Hopkins's prose deserve to be considered. His seriousness is frequently leavened by a sense of humor which helps to give freshness and vitality to his writing. His April 1871 letter describing to his sister Kate his response to a smallpox vaccination is spontaneous and amusing: "We were all vaccinated the other day. The next day a young Portuguese came up to me and said ‘Oh misther 'Opkins, do you feel the cows in yewer arm?’ I told him I felt the horns coming through. I do I am sure. I cannot remember now whether one ought to say the calf of the arm or the calf of the leg. My shoulder is like a shoulder of beef. I dare not speak above a whisper for fear of bellowing—there now, I am going to say I am obliged to speak low for fear of lowing. I dream at night that I have only two of my legs in bed. I think there is a split coming in both my slippers. Yesterday I could not think why it was that I would wander about a wet grass-plot: I see now. I chew my pen a great deal. The long and short of it is that my left forequarter is swollen and painful (I meant to have written arm but I could not)." In a letter to Bridges of 2 August 1871 his awareness of prose style is revealed in amusing parodies of Carlyle, written in imitation of Carlyle's "most ineffacious-strenuous heaven-protestations, caterwaul, and Cassandra-wailings." Writing to Bridges from Ireland in August 1884, he records an amusing incident: "I must tell you a humourous touch of Irish Malvolio or Bully Bottom, so distinctively Irish that I cannot rank it: it amuses me in bed. A Tipperary lad, one of our people, lately from his noviceship, was at the wicket and another bowling to him. He thought there was no one within hearing, but from behind the wicket he was overheard after a good stroke to cry out 'Arrah, sweet myself!'" And in the same year, in a letter to his sister, he produces a marvelous parodic transcription of Irish speech: "And now, Miss Hopkins darlin yell chartably exkees me writin more in the rale Irish be raison I was never rared to ut and thats why I do be slow with my pinmanship, bad luck to ut (saving your respects), and for ivery word I delineate I disremember two, and thats how ut is with me."

For Hopkins, however, the other side of this humor is the sense of melancholy present in the early letters and ever increasing through the last five years of his life, which he spent as professor of Greek at what is now University College, Dublin. The following paragraph from his retreat notes written at St. Stanilaus' College, Beaumont, on 1 January 1889 is surely the seed for one of his last sonnets of desolation, "Thou Art Indeed Just Lord": "I was continuing this train of thought this evening when I began to enter on that course of loathing and hopelessness which I have so often felt before, which made me fear madness and led me to give up the practice of meditation except, as now, in retreat and here it is again. I could therefore do no more than repeat Justus es, Domine, et rectum judicium tuum and the like, and then being tired I nodded and woke with a start. What is my wretched life? Five wasted years almost have passed in Ireland. I am ashamed of the little I have done, of my waste of time, although my helplessness and weakness is such that I could scarcely do otherwise. And yet the Wise Man warns us against excusing ourselves in that fashion. I cannot then be excused; but what is life without aim, without spur, without help? All my undertakings miscarry: I am like a straining eunuch. I wish then for death: yet if I died now I should die imperfect, no master of myself, and that is the worst failure of all. O my God, look down on me." In this disturbing passage one perceives the anguish that animates Hopkins's need to write. His final auditor is God.

Hopkins's prose underwent considerable and rapid development during his short career. From brief nature observations he moved to religious meditations on the divine origins of nature. After his ordination, he turned his developing awareness of the possibilities of prose to the writing of sermons. Throughout his life he was a lively and, when his religious duties allowed, prolific letter writer. His letters, with their moral intelligence, critical estimates of English poetry, and sensitivity to the dynamism and to the spiritual and physical poverty of his times, establish him as an important writer of Victorian prose. As a literary critic he has been unduly neglected, though it is perhaps not surprising that Hopkins's prose has been slower to gain acceptance than his poetry. It did not begin to be published until nearly twenty years after the first collection of his poetry appeared. However, the prose has been used by most critics of Hopkins's poetry because in expressing the drama of his inner life it provides the best introduction we have to that poetry. W. H. Gardner, in his two-volume Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) (1944, 1949), and F. R. Leavis, in The Common Pursuit (1952), are two critics who have realized the importance of Hopkins's prose particularly in relation to his poetry. Nevertheless, full-length studies of Hopkins as a Victorian prose writer and literary critic remain to be written.

Source: John Ferns, "Gerard Manley Hopkins," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 57, Victorian Prose Writers After 1867, edited by William B. Thesing, Gale Research, 1987, pp. 130-38.

SOURCES

Gardner, W. H., Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889): A Study of Poetic Idiosyncrasy in Relation to Poetic Tradition, Vol. 2, Oxford University Press, 1949, pp. 21, 22, 367.

Heller, Kevin, "Hopkins's ‘Pied Beauty,’" in Explicator, Vol. 59, No. 4, Summer 2001, p. 192.

Hopkins, Gerard Manley, "Author's Preface," in Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works, edited by Catherine Phillips, Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 106.

———, "God's Grandeur," in Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works, edited by Catherine Phillips, Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 128.

———, Letter to Robert Bridges, August 21, 1877, in Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works, edited by Catherine Phillips, Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 229.

———, Letter to Robert Bridges, April 2, 1878, in Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works, edited by Catherine Phillips, Oxford University Press, 1986, pp. 228, 229.

———, Letter to Robert Bridges, February 15, 1879, in Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works, edited by Catherine Phillips, Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 235.

———, "Pied Beauty," in Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works, edited by Catherine Phillips, Oxford University Press, 1986, pp. 132-33.

"Jesuits Worldwide," in Jesuits in Britain, the official website of the British Province of the Society of Jesus, http://www.jesuit.org.uk/overseas/worldwide.htm (accessed December 5, 2006).

Leavis, F. R., "Metaphysical Isolation," in Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Critical Symposium by the Kenyon Critics, Burns & Oates, 1975, p. 115.

Lowell, Robert, "Hopkins's Sanctity," in Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Critical Symposium by the Kenyon Critics, Burns & Oates, 1975, p. 92.

Mariani, Paul L., A Commentary on the Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Cornell University Press, 1970, pp. xviii, 198.

Milward, Peter, S.J., A Commentary on the Sonnets of G. M. Hopkins, Hokuseido Press, 1969, p. 30.

"Paper 17. Literature 1830-1914 (Victorian)," website of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Glasgow, http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/SESLL/EngLit/ugrad/hons/materials/hopkins2.htm (accessed December 5, 2006).

FURTHER READING

Brown, Daniel, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Northcote House Publishers, 2002.

This book provides an accessible introduction to Hopkins's poetry in the light of his prose writings, which are used to illuminate Hopkins's thinking on nature, prosody, language, philosophy, science, and theology, as well as his ideas on inscape and sprung rhythm.

Heaney, Seamus, ed., Beowulf: A New Verse Translation, W. W. Norton, 2001.

In his translation of the epic Anglo-Saxon poem, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney has preserved the alliterative and rhythmical patterns and the profusion of kennings that characterized the original. The poem tells the story of the warrior Beowulf and his battles with three monsters.

Muller, Jill, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Victorian Catholicism: A Heart in Hiding, Routledge, 2003.

Muller examines Hopkins's life, writings, and spirituality in the context of a newly industrialized, anti-Catholic, and increasingly secular England. She shows how the preoccupations and disappointments of Hopkins's career reflect the deflation of Catholic hopes during the second half of the nineteenth century.

Sheehan, Sean, Student Guide to Gerard Manley Hopkins, Greenwich Exchange, 2005.

This critical study explores the relationship between Hopkins's poetry and his philosophy. Sheehan shows the intimate relationship between Hopkins's perceptions, his poetic expression, and his idea of inscape.