Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Jesuit priest and a strikingly
innovative poet, who was torn by a lifelong conflict between these two
vocations. He destroyed many of his youthful poems when he was ordained, and
the slim body of work that survived was not published until years after his
early death.
Eldest of nine children, he was born in Essex, in the east
of England, on July 28, 1844.
After Highgate School, where he won the poetry prize, he studied at
Balliol College, Oxford, where he took a double-first class degree in classics.
At Balliol he was drawn to the Oxford Movement, a group of high-church
Anglicans who favored more Catholic practices in the Church of England—and in
1866, Hopkins “went over to Rome,” under the spiritual guidance of John Henry
(later Cardinal) Newman. After studying for the priesthood at St. Beuno’s
Jesuit house in North Wales, Hopkins was ordained a Catholic priest in 1877 and
thereafter served as a missioner, curate, and teacher in Jesuit schools in
London, Oxford, Liverpool, Glasgow, Chesterfield, and Stonyhurst. In 1884, just five years before his
death, he was appointed professor of classics at University College, Dublin,
the institution founded by Cardinal Newman.
Philosophically, Hopkins was much influenced by Duns
Scotus, as well as by the discipline of Jesuit founder Ignatius Loyola.
Hopkins’ surviving poetry, much of it written in what he called “sprung
rhythm,” a ragged meter, with unusual accents indicated, deals mainly with
religious topics, such as original sin (“Spring and Fall”), the wonders of
creation (“Pied Beauty” and “God’s Grandeur”), the redemptive power of Christ
(“The Windhover”), and the anguish of doubt (“Carrion Comfort”). Hopkins sought
to see the inner truth of creation through a quality he referred to as
“inscape,” derived from Scotus’ concept of “thisness” (haecceitas), which can be defined as the harmony, unity, and beauty
perceived in the natural world.
Religious feeling, as well as poetic innovation, can be
seen in a poem such as Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall: to a young child”:
Márgarét,
are you gríeving
Over
Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves,
líke the things of man, you
With
your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh,
ás 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 wíll weep and know why.
Now
no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s
spríngs áre the same;
Nor
mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What
heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It
ís the blight man was born for,
It
is Margaret you mourn for.
The last five years of Hopkins’ life were beset by
illness—constant eye pain and frequent diarrhea, now thought to be Crohn’s
disease, plagued him, and he had recurring bouts of depression, now believed to
be a symptom of undiagnosed bipolar disorder. His mental state was also
probably affected by lifelong repressed homoerotic impulses, which he had first
experienced as an Oxford undergraduate, and over which he had exercised
rigorous control throughout his celibate life.
In May of 1889, Hopkins fell ill with what he first
thought was rheumatic fever. He
consulted a doctor, who treated him for fleabite. The illness turned out to be
typhoid fever, complicated by peritonitis. The typhoid was caused by Salmonella Typhi bacteria, found in food
and water contaminated by sewage in the inadequate drainage system of
University College. He was moved out of his own cramped quarters at the college
to a large, airy room, where he was tended by nurses from nearby St. Vincent’s
Hospital. On the morning of June 8 he received the last rites of the Church,
and he died at 1:30 that afternoon, at the age of forty-four. His last words
were, “I am so happy, I am so happy. I loved my life.”
His funeral mass, concelebrated by three fellow Jesuits,
and with a large number of priests and students in attendance, was on June 11 at
Dublin’s St. Francis Xavier Church. He was buried in Glasnevin Cemetery.
Following his death, Hopkins’ good friend, the poet Ralph
Bridges, began to submit his verses for inclusion in various anthologies, so
that he became gradually known as a poet for the first time. In 1918, when
Bridges had become England’s Poet Laureate, he secured the first publication of
Hopkins’ collected poems in an edition of 750 copies.
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