| CTK READING GROUP INFORMATION |
The CTK Reading Group was formed as a Christ the King Parish activity in April 2003. Its aim is
to read together literature or poetry of general interest to English Catholics. The group meets
approximately every two weeks on Sunday evenings from 6.00 – 7.00 pm at Embrook Court when
we share and discuss our reactions to the current topic. The group is open to everyone with an
interest in the Group’s program. To join the group contact either Enda Conlon (0118 9868113) who
acts as secretary/convener or Fr. Gerard (0118 9314469). One can join the group at any time, but
the most natural time is at the start of a new topic.
Our first topic, which ran from April to October 2003 was “The Poetry of Gerard Manley
Hopkins”. Currently, from Nov 2003, we are reading some G. K. Chesterton (Fr. Brown Short
Stories) and some Graham Greene (The Power and the Glory). At a recent meeting, current
members of the group avowed an interest in the following topics, which we hope to make the basis
of subsequent reading cycles.
(a) English Catholicism in late Tudor and Stuart times
(b) The Early Fathers of the Church
(c) Medieval English Catholic figures – (e.g. Ockham Duns Scotus )
(d) Luther and the Reformation
Any new members of the group should feel welcome to propose other topics from which we could
construct a reading cycle.
to read together literature or poetry of general interest to English Catholics. The group meets
approximately every two weeks on Sunday evenings from 6.00 – 7.00 pm at Embrook Court when
we share and discuss our reactions to the current topic. The group is open to everyone with an
interest in the Group’s program. To join the group contact either Enda Conlon (0118 9868113) who
acts as secretary/convener or Fr. Gerard (0118 9314469). One can join the group at any time, but
the most natural time is at the start of a new topic.
Our first topic, which ran from April to October 2003 was “The Poetry of Gerard Manley
Hopkins”. Currently, from Nov 2003, we are reading some G. K. Chesterton (Fr. Brown Short
Stories) and some Graham Greene (The Power and the Glory). At a recent meeting, current
members of the group avowed an interest in the following topics, which we hope to make the basis
of subsequent reading cycles.
(a) English Catholicism in late Tudor and Stuart times
(b) The Early Fathers of the Church
(c) Medieval English Catholic figures – (e.g. Ockham Duns Scotus )
(d) Luther and the Reformation
Any new members of the group should feel welcome to propose other topics from which we could
construct a reading cycle.
Notes on G. M. Hopkins
Gerard Manley Hopkins was born in Stratford on July 28th 1844, the eldest of nine children.
His parents were moderate High Church Anglicans. His father, Manley Hopkins who was, by
career, the head of an insurance firm, had published a volume of verse. Accomplishment ran in
the family. Two of his brothers became professional artists and Gerard himself was as
precocious in drawing as in his command of language. He attended Highgate School in London
and in 1863 went to Balliol College as an exhibitioner in classics. He was received into the
Catholic Church on October 21st 1866 by Dr. (later Cardinal) Newman. The following year he
completed his education at Oxford, taking a first in Greats. He took up a teaching post at the
Oratory school in September 1867. During this year, following discussions with Newman, he
resolved to become a priest. He hesitated for a period between the Benedictines and the
Jesuits, opting ultimately for the latter. He was accepted as a novice in May 1868 and joined
the Jesuit noviciate in Manresa house in Roehampton in London on September 7th of the same
year. The next two years were a period of highly disciplined religious formation in the Jesuit
tradition. He took his first vows as a Jesuit in September 1870. The next three years of a
Jesuit’s training are called the “philosophate”. Hopkins spent these years in the Jesuit college
at Stonyhurst in Lancashire where he studied secular subjects like mathematics, ethics and
logic. He spent the year 1873-74 teaching in Roehanpton before proceeding to the next part of
the Jesuit training – the “theologate”. This is a period of three years spent studying
ecclesiastical subjects - scripture, theology, canon law and Church history. Hopkins spent the
years of the theologate in St. Bueno’s College in NorthWales. At the end of this period, in
September 1877, Hopkins was ordained to the priesthood. After ordination Hopkins spent the
next four years in a variety of positions - he taught in Mt. St. Mary’s school in Sheffield, he
was a preacher at Farm St. Church in London, he did supply at Leigh in Lancashire and was a
curate in Oxford, Liverpool and Glasgow. The final part of his Jesuit training is the
“tertianship” . This is a period of a year and is a return to the humbling disciplines of the
noviciate before a Jesuit makes his final vows. Hopkins returned to Roehampton for the
tertianship and made his final vows as a Jesuit on Aug 15th 1882. He began teaching classics
at Stonyhurst in September 1882 and remained there until early 1884 when he was appointed
Professor of Greek Literature at University College, Dublin. He remained in Dublin until his
death from typhoid on June 8 1889. He is buried in the Jesuit plot in Glasnevin cemetery. The
first edition of his poems was placed in the hands of his bed ridden 98 year old mother, Kate, in
December 1918. The edition had been prepared by his friend Robert Bridges, now the poet
laureate, and the dedication of the book to his mother was composed by A.E. Housman.
To get some feel for Hopkins’ poetry one needs to have some understanding of his character,
of the frustrations and disappointments of his life, of the wholeheartedness of his religious
convictions, and of the philosophical and aesthetic ideas he cherished.
Hopkins had a number of facets to his character. He was a talented boy much loved by his
cultivated and affectionate family. He had both a natural gift and a need for friendship. We owe
the survival of his poems to his friendship with Robert Bridges, sustained throughout his adult
life. He had a rigorous, high-spirited, clear-sighted humorous mind, with zero sugar content. He
felt, thought and saw things in an exact intense and unflinching way. He was possessed of an
irrepressible self-confidence in the correctness of his judgments and opinions, even when he did
not know much about a subject. This served him well when faced with a complete lack of
interest in, or comprehension of, his poetry by his Jesuit confreres. A resolute, steely side to
his character could prompt him to act in rather extreme ways, which bruised his closest
relationships. While still a schoolboy, to make a point to his bullying headmaster, he abstained
from liquids until his tongue turned black. He brusquely rejected the reasonable advice of his
parents to wait a little before committing himself to the Catholic Church. One can still wince at
the pain of his father’s reply, when Gerard made it plain to his parents, in a very high-handed
letter, that he was going to be received into the Catholic Church as soon as possible and the
cure for any sense of estrangement they might feel was for them to become Catholics as well.
“Can you really put aside all our claims on you by saying that it rests with us to think as you do
? …… All we ask of you is for your own sake to take so momentous a step with caution and
hesitation ? Have we not a right to do this ? Might not our love and sorrow entitle us to ask it
? …O Gerard my darling boy are you indeed gone from me ?. ”
Hopkins’ letters around the time of his becoming a Catholic show his very characteristic
independence of mind and determination to follow conviction with action. To Newman, who was
to receive him he wrote:
“I do not want to be helped to any conclusions of belief, for I am thankful to say that my mind is
made up. But the necessity of becoming a Catholic coming upon me suddenly has put me in
painful confusion of mind about my immediate duty in my circumstances”.
To his friend Canon Liddon who sought to dissuade him with the reproach that he was acting
essentially on a self-indulgent emotional spasm he wrote:
“I can hardly believe anyone became a Catholic because two and two makes four more fully
than I have.”
Hopkins did not enjoy much conventional success as a poet. The “Wreck of the Deutchland”,
written in 1875 after seven years of poetic silence and now seen as a great overture to his
mature work was rejected by the Jesuit magazine “The Month”. A similar fate befell “The
Loss of the Eurydice” and his superiors refused permission for the “The May Magnificat”,
written for the occasion, to be placed before the statue of Our Lady in the garden at
Stonyhurst during May. During his lifetime he saw only one of his poems – the Silver Jubilee –
appear in print. Nor did he flourish as a Jesuit. He passed all the examinations of the Order,
but some only just. He was not recommended, as was normal for the most promising Jesuits,
for a 4th year in the theologate and took his final vows as a “Spiritual Coadjutor” as opposed
to a “Professed Jesuit” - only the latter were eligible for the highest offices of the Order. The
fact is that at the activities the Order valued – preaching, teaching, scholarship within the
approved tradition, and general effectiveness in the world, Hopkins was not notably talented.
His reputation within the Order was that he was clever but odd and quirky and difficult to
assign to a position where his talents could find proper outlet. For his part he was a loyal,
scrupulous, Jesuit and never regretted his decision to join the Order – though he did once
reproach himself for “backward glances with his hand upon the plough”. It is very difficult to
see that Hopkins was a natural Jesuit. The training and esprit of Jesuits of his day was
deliberately military in inspiration. Discipline, obeying orders and sacrificing one’s individuality
to the collective purpose was as much the ethos of a Jesuit then as of a paratrooper today. It is
all too easy to imagine Corporal Hopkins as snapping to attention with the best of them but,
like the rookie soldier in Henry Reed’s poem “The Naming of Parts” unable to prevent his
mind wandering to more congenial subjects. Among them and loyal to them – but of them?.
He felt himself to be an under-achieving failure and he was indeed dogged throughout his life
by an inability to finish things. However he never lost a wry high-spiritedness and astringent
vivacity in expressing his sense of his own failure, which rather belies any easy attempt to
categorise him as simply depressed. His remark, from his time in Ireland where being a
patriotic Englishman cast among an Irish Jesuit community sympathetic to the Irish national
cause had its foreseeable problems, is typical.
“I have now been in Ireland for three hard, wearying, wasting wasted years during which I
have, in the main, done the will of God and marked many, many examination papers”
It was not in Hopkins’ nature to be half hearted about things or to blunt the sharpness his
reactions to adversity and tragedy with easy comforts. His religion was his primary take on life
– the reaction of the whole man to the whole of life. His piety is consequently the piety of a man
determined to reconcile all his felt and observed experience – including disappointment and
disaster - with his sense of the mystery of the ways of God to man. Hopkins’ religious
sensibility was not one of tranquil trust in the providence of God, but has an argumentative,
wrestling, restless quality reminiscent of Job. This comes out, not just in the later “terrible”
sonnets
“Wert thou my enemy, o thou my friend,
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost”
but also at the very start of his mature work in the “Wreck of the Deutschland”
“Father and fondler of heart thou has wrung
Hast thy dark descending and most are merciful then”
or
“Thy unchancelling, poising palms were weighing the worth”
To my knowledge, he is the only poet who gives completely unequivocal expression to Catholic
teaching on the redemptive potential of suffering and tragedy,
Philosophically Hopkins had a view on the problem of “individuation” – i.e. what is it that
makes one thing of a given type different from another thing of the same type? The standard
answer of modern scientific common sense, dating essentially from Aristotle as modified by
Aquinas, is that “the principle of individuation of things of the same type is matter”. Thus two
gingerbread men, stamped out by the same gingerbread man cutter, have the same form and
differ only in being constituted out of different portions of gingerbread. Without becoming
unduly philosophical we can say that Aquinas and his kind of thinking appeal to minds drawn to
administration or to law, to classifying the multiplicity of things into conceptual categories and
to dealing with things in general rather than in the particular. This kind of thinking is very
useful and it would be foolish to disparage its value. However, it does not encompass the entire
spectrum of human sensibility to the world and it can be criticised as not doing justice to the
mysterious, dynamic movements of the mind by which we come to recognise concrete,
individual things. These must, of course, take place before any abstractions or generalisations
can be made. Although Aquinas was the official philosopher of the Church and of the Jesuits,
Hopkins did not warm to him. During his philosophate years in Stonyhurst he became very
much more drawn to another medieval philosopher, Duns Scotus, not for nothing also known as
“the subtle Doctor”, who taught a concept of the “haeceitas” or “thisness” of things. The
force of his teaching is to emphasise the importance of a full response to and appreciation of
the concrete individual thing or person and to remind us that an individual should represent
more than just an opportunity for an exercise in classification. Hopkins liked Duns Scotus
because he saw in him an anticipation of his own ideas, which were centred on two words of his
own coinage – “inscape” and “instress”.
The concepts of “inscape” and “instress” are best understood as expressing Hopkins’ inchoate
ideas about human perception. The problem of perception is the following. When we take in
information about something through our senses, how much of it represents objective reality
and how much of it is conjured up by our own minds? This has been a vexed question from the
times of the Greek philosophers to modern day philosophers of science, pondering the nature
of an observation. Hopkins’ views are intermediate between the two extreme positions - on the
one hand that the senses are reliable conduits of information about the external objective world
and, on the other hand, that the external world is an illusion manufactured by the mind for its
own inscrutable purposes. Hopkins concept was that the inscape of a thing was constituted by
those aspects of it which were the source of its “individually distinctive beauty”. The inscape of
a thing is an objective attribute of the thing and is accessible to the senses if sufficiently tuned.
For a living creature the inscape is most evident when the creature engages in an activity that
authentically manifests its nature. Thus, for Hopkins’s, the concept of “inscape” seems to flesh
out Duns Scotus’ rather rarefied idea of “haecceitas” and provides him with a more satisfying
principle of individuation than the principle of “material difference” advocated by the tradition
stemming from Aquinas. His concept of “instress” seems to arise by a far-reaching extension
of the metaphor that we use when we say “She made a great impression on me”. The
“instress” of a thing, unlike the inscape, does not refer to an objective quality of the thing
itself, but rather to the impact the inscape makes on a mind sensitive enough to take in the
inscape. In trying to make Hopkins’ ideas seem natural, one could say that he thought that
perception was more like reading a text – where the boundaries of the subjective and objective
are more blurred - than it is like peering at something through a microscope.
Hopkins’ gave particular expression to his views in this matter in two poems “As kingfishers
catch fire” and “Henry Purcell”. In the first of these he writes:
“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 scecond he makes it clear that what he loves above all is to catch sudden sight of those
unconscious moves, or gestures or tell-tale touches that could only come from that individual as
he does what fulfils his nature. Hopkins word for these characteristic actions is “sakes”. The
sakes are scattered unconsciously from purposeful action; for if created consciously the
“sakes” would degenerate into mere affectation or mannerism.
“It is the forged feature finds me; it is the rehearsal
Of own, of abrupt self there so thrusts on, so throngs the ear.
Let him oh! with his air of angels lift me, lay me! only I’ll
Have an eye to the sakes of him”
A second influential strand in Hopkins’ thinking is his view that the language and rhythm of
poetry in English should not be based on models taken from other languages – especially the
classical ones, but should be rooted in the usages and rhythm of ordinary speech. For Hopkins,
poetic expression is properly achieved by a sort of turbo-charging of the ordinary modes of
expression – rather than by trying to shoe horn English into poetic conventions and metres
native to another language. He writes :
“So also I cut myself off from the use of ‘ere’, ‘o’er’, ‘wellnigh’, ‘what time’, ‘say not’ (for ‘do
not say’), because though dignified they neither belong to nor could arise from, or be the
elevation of, ordinary speech. For it seems to me that the poetical language of the age should
be the current language heightened, to any degree heightened and unlike it, but not an obsolete
one”
This conviction is visible in his poetry in at least two ways.
Firstly, he almost completely eschews words derived from Latin or Greek in favour of the
Anglo-Saxon.stratum of the language. For instance the sharp-focussed directness, both
linguistic and visual, of the following verse, from “The Wreck of the Deutschland”, relies
almost exclusively on Anglo-Saxon words.
“She drove in the dark to leeward,
She struck not a reef nor a rock,
But the combs of a smother of sand: night drew her
Dead to the Kentish Knock;
And she beat the bank down with her bows and the ride of her keel;
The breakers rolled on her beam with ruinous shock;
And canvas and compass, the whorl and the wheel
Idle for ever to waft her or wind her with, these she endured”
It is as if Hopkins determined to clear away the accumulated layers of Latin and Greek silt
before chiselling his poetry directly on the hard Anglo-Saxon bedrock of the English language.
Secondly, his poetry is peppered (and indeed salted) with turns of phrase that most English
teachers would itch to underline in red and rebuke as being “too colloquial”. For instance, from
the “Wreck of the Deutschland” , “she that weather sees one thing, one” ; from Felix Randal
“Impatient, he cursed at first, but mended being anointed and all.” ; from the Windhover “No
wonder of it”.
Hopkins aesthetic convictions are of a piece with his linguistic ones. Despite the
obscurities in his verse and the singularities of his own character he is the poet who writes in
heightened but ordinary language to celebrate the aesthetic impulses and the broadly Christian
moral sensibilities of most men and women. He is more the poet of the touchline Dad who,
glimpsing displays of characteristic flair in a young footballer cries out “Go on my son” than he
is of the studied, intellectualised aestheticism of the art historian. Recently the press covered
extensively the courageous achievement of a brain damaged former boxer in completing the
London marathon course in 6 days. The appeal of the story lies in the analogy of the physical
excellences shown by a professional boxer with the moral excellences needed to shuffle a
broken down body round 26 miles. Particularly in the Windhover, Hopkins gives, with
customary verve and energy, exact expression to this moral outlook, placing it in a specifically
Christian context.
Hopkins is an antidote to a number of commonly encountered tendencies and habits that,
however well intentioned and understandable, are ultimately humanly impoverishing. One
example is the tendency to dodge the force and reality of direct immediate experience. This
sometimes manifests itself in denial by taking refuge in sentimentality or, in the more
intellectually minded, by refraction through a prism of one’s favourite foundational theory into
diffuse scholarly generalities. Hopkins lived long enough to feel he was getting old and to see
in himself the first signs of physical decay. His lines express vividly and unflinchingly the
natural reaction of fear and dread to aging and dying. As everywhere in Hopkins, before
comfort can be offered the truth must be faced.
“…. since, no, nothing, can be done
To keep at bay
Age and age’s evils, hoar hair.
Ruck and wrinkle. drooping, dying, death’s worst, winding
sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay;
So be beginning, be beginning to despair”
In contrast to this Tennyson’s lines from Ulysses
“ Old age hath yet its honour and its toil
…….
Though we are not that force which in olden days moved heaven and earth
That which we are we are,
One equal temper of heroic hearts
To strive to seek to find and not to yield”
begin to seem like so much club house bravado and Yeats’ lines from Byzantium
“An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick,
Unless soul claps its hands and sings and louder sings
For every tatter in its mortal dress”
invites the suspicion, hard to avoid with Yeats, that., essentially, he is modelling a set of
attitudes and beliefs temporarily donned and displayed to best advantage. – but he doesn’t
really believe any of it.
Hopkins’ poetry is a counter to the view that the conventional frustrations and disappointments
of life should be addressed pharmaceutically – that there is “some sweet oblivious antidote
can pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow and raze out the written troubles of the brain”. A
cultural tradition civilises by offering a mapping from the world within to the world without. It
does this primarily through the exemplars it offers in its literature and its poetry. This is all
unexceptionable when applied to, say, being brave, or being patriotic or being in love or being
righteously angry. For all of these there are numerous poetic and literary exemplars which
provide cultural reference points and records of the experience of others against which the
individual can compare and refine the emotions and impulses that well up from within his own
psyche. There are fewer exemplars for the kind of routine unhappiness and frustration, which
was in large part Hopkins’s lot, caused by want of appreciation of one’s talents, and generally
being misunderstood, over looked and ignored. Hopkins, in “Thou art indeed just” articulated
his own experience against the tradition of biblical lamentation by the prophets. In turn,
Hopkins’ own poetry creates reference points for how to think and feel about individual
experiences of this general type and acts, to some degree, as a counter to the coarsening and
diminishing tendency to medicalise these most common of experiences.
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Gerard Manley Hopkins was born in Stratford on July 28th 1844, the eldest of nine children.
His parents were moderate High Church Anglicans. His father, Manley Hopkins who was, by
career, the head of an insurance firm, had published a volume of verse. Accomplishment ran in
the family. Two of his brothers became professional artists and Gerard himself was as
precocious in drawing as in his command of language. He attended Highgate School in London
and in 1863 went to Balliol College as an exhibitioner in classics. He was received into the
Catholic Church on October 21st 1866 by Dr. (later Cardinal) Newman. The following year he
completed his education at Oxford, taking a first in Greats. He took up a teaching post at the
Oratory school in September 1867. During this year, following discussions with Newman, he
resolved to become a priest. He hesitated for a period between the Benedictines and the
Jesuits, opting ultimately for the latter. He was accepted as a novice in May 1868 and joined
the Jesuit noviciate in Manresa house in Roehampton in London on September 7th of the same
year. The next two years were a period of highly disciplined religious formation in the Jesuit
tradition. He took his first vows as a Jesuit in September 1870. The next three years of a
Jesuit’s training are called the “philosophate”. Hopkins spent these years in the Jesuit college
at Stonyhurst in Lancashire where he studied secular subjects like mathematics, ethics and
logic. He spent the year 1873-74 teaching in Roehanpton before proceeding to the next part of
the Jesuit training – the “theologate”. This is a period of three years spent studying
ecclesiastical subjects - scripture, theology, canon law and Church history. Hopkins spent the
years of the theologate in St. Bueno’s College in NorthWales. At the end of this period, in
September 1877, Hopkins was ordained to the priesthood. After ordination Hopkins spent the
next four years in a variety of positions - he taught in Mt. St. Mary’s school in Sheffield, he
was a preacher at Farm St. Church in London, he did supply at Leigh in Lancashire and was a
curate in Oxford, Liverpool and Glasgow. The final part of his Jesuit training is the
“tertianship” . This is a period of a year and is a return to the humbling disciplines of the
noviciate before a Jesuit makes his final vows. Hopkins returned to Roehampton for the
tertianship and made his final vows as a Jesuit on Aug 15th 1882. He began teaching classics
at Stonyhurst in September 1882 and remained there until early 1884 when he was appointed
Professor of Greek Literature at University College, Dublin. He remained in Dublin until his
death from typhoid on June 8 1889. He is buried in the Jesuit plot in Glasnevin cemetery. The
first edition of his poems was placed in the hands of his bed ridden 98 year old mother, Kate, in
December 1918. The edition had been prepared by his friend Robert Bridges, now the poet
laureate, and the dedication of the book to his mother was composed by A.E. Housman.
To get some feel for Hopkins’ poetry one needs to have some understanding of his character,
of the frustrations and disappointments of his life, of the wholeheartedness of his religious
convictions, and of the philosophical and aesthetic ideas he cherished.
Hopkins had a number of facets to his character. He was a talented boy much loved by his
cultivated and affectionate family. He had both a natural gift and a need for friendship. We owe
the survival of his poems to his friendship with Robert Bridges, sustained throughout his adult
life. He had a rigorous, high-spirited, clear-sighted humorous mind, with zero sugar content. He
felt, thought and saw things in an exact intense and unflinching way. He was possessed of an
irrepressible self-confidence in the correctness of his judgments and opinions, even when he did
not know much about a subject. This served him well when faced with a complete lack of
interest in, or comprehension of, his poetry by his Jesuit confreres. A resolute, steely side to
his character could prompt him to act in rather extreme ways, which bruised his closest
relationships. While still a schoolboy, to make a point to his bullying headmaster, he abstained
from liquids until his tongue turned black. He brusquely rejected the reasonable advice of his
parents to wait a little before committing himself to the Catholic Church. One can still wince at
the pain of his father’s reply, when Gerard made it plain to his parents, in a very high-handed
letter, that he was going to be received into the Catholic Church as soon as possible and the
cure for any sense of estrangement they might feel was for them to become Catholics as well.
“Can you really put aside all our claims on you by saying that it rests with us to think as you do
? …… All we ask of you is for your own sake to take so momentous a step with caution and
hesitation ? Have we not a right to do this ? Might not our love and sorrow entitle us to ask it
? …O Gerard my darling boy are you indeed gone from me ?. ”
Hopkins’ letters around the time of his becoming a Catholic show his very characteristic
independence of mind and determination to follow conviction with action. To Newman, who was
to receive him he wrote:
“I do not want to be helped to any conclusions of belief, for I am thankful to say that my mind is
made up. But the necessity of becoming a Catholic coming upon me suddenly has put me in
painful confusion of mind about my immediate duty in my circumstances”.
To his friend Canon Liddon who sought to dissuade him with the reproach that he was acting
essentially on a self-indulgent emotional spasm he wrote:
“I can hardly believe anyone became a Catholic because two and two makes four more fully
than I have.”
Hopkins did not enjoy much conventional success as a poet. The “Wreck of the Deutchland”,
written in 1875 after seven years of poetic silence and now seen as a great overture to his
mature work was rejected by the Jesuit magazine “The Month”. A similar fate befell “The
Loss of the Eurydice” and his superiors refused permission for the “The May Magnificat”,
written for the occasion, to be placed before the statue of Our Lady in the garden at
Stonyhurst during May. During his lifetime he saw only one of his poems – the Silver Jubilee –
appear in print. Nor did he flourish as a Jesuit. He passed all the examinations of the Order,
but some only just. He was not recommended, as was normal for the most promising Jesuits,
for a 4th year in the theologate and took his final vows as a “Spiritual Coadjutor” as opposed
to a “Professed Jesuit” - only the latter were eligible for the highest offices of the Order. The
fact is that at the activities the Order valued – preaching, teaching, scholarship within the
approved tradition, and general effectiveness in the world, Hopkins was not notably talented.
His reputation within the Order was that he was clever but odd and quirky and difficult to
assign to a position where his talents could find proper outlet. For his part he was a loyal,
scrupulous, Jesuit and never regretted his decision to join the Order – though he did once
reproach himself for “backward glances with his hand upon the plough”. It is very difficult to
see that Hopkins was a natural Jesuit. The training and esprit of Jesuits of his day was
deliberately military in inspiration. Discipline, obeying orders and sacrificing one’s individuality
to the collective purpose was as much the ethos of a Jesuit then as of a paratrooper today. It is
all too easy to imagine Corporal Hopkins as snapping to attention with the best of them but,
like the rookie soldier in Henry Reed’s poem “The Naming of Parts” unable to prevent his
mind wandering to more congenial subjects. Among them and loyal to them – but of them?.
He felt himself to be an under-achieving failure and he was indeed dogged throughout his life
by an inability to finish things. However he never lost a wry high-spiritedness and astringent
vivacity in expressing his sense of his own failure, which rather belies any easy attempt to
categorise him as simply depressed. His remark, from his time in Ireland where being a
patriotic Englishman cast among an Irish Jesuit community sympathetic to the Irish national
cause had its foreseeable problems, is typical.
“I have now been in Ireland for three hard, wearying, wasting wasted years during which I
have, in the main, done the will of God and marked many, many examination papers”
It was not in Hopkins’ nature to be half hearted about things or to blunt the sharpness his
reactions to adversity and tragedy with easy comforts. His religion was his primary take on life
– the reaction of the whole man to the whole of life. His piety is consequently the piety of a man
determined to reconcile all his felt and observed experience – including disappointment and
disaster - with his sense of the mystery of the ways of God to man. Hopkins’ religious
sensibility was not one of tranquil trust in the providence of God, but has an argumentative,
wrestling, restless quality reminiscent of Job. This comes out, not just in the later “terrible”
sonnets
“Wert thou my enemy, o thou my friend,
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost”
but also at the very start of his mature work in the “Wreck of the Deutschland”
“Father and fondler of heart thou has wrung
Hast thy dark descending and most are merciful then”
or
“Thy unchancelling, poising palms were weighing the worth”
To my knowledge, he is the only poet who gives completely unequivocal expression to Catholic
teaching on the redemptive potential of suffering and tragedy,
Philosophically Hopkins had a view on the problem of “individuation” – i.e. what is it that
makes one thing of a given type different from another thing of the same type? The standard
answer of modern scientific common sense, dating essentially from Aristotle as modified by
Aquinas, is that “the principle of individuation of things of the same type is matter”. Thus two
gingerbread men, stamped out by the same gingerbread man cutter, have the same form and
differ only in being constituted out of different portions of gingerbread. Without becoming
unduly philosophical we can say that Aquinas and his kind of thinking appeal to minds drawn to
administration or to law, to classifying the multiplicity of things into conceptual categories and
to dealing with things in general rather than in the particular. This kind of thinking is very
useful and it would be foolish to disparage its value. However, it does not encompass the entire
spectrum of human sensibility to the world and it can be criticised as not doing justice to the
mysterious, dynamic movements of the mind by which we come to recognise concrete,
individual things. These must, of course, take place before any abstractions or generalisations
can be made. Although Aquinas was the official philosopher of the Church and of the Jesuits,
Hopkins did not warm to him. During his philosophate years in Stonyhurst he became very
much more drawn to another medieval philosopher, Duns Scotus, not for nothing also known as
“the subtle Doctor”, who taught a concept of the “haeceitas” or “thisness” of things. The
force of his teaching is to emphasise the importance of a full response to and appreciation of
the concrete individual thing or person and to remind us that an individual should represent
more than just an opportunity for an exercise in classification. Hopkins liked Duns Scotus
because he saw in him an anticipation of his own ideas, which were centred on two words of his
own coinage – “inscape” and “instress”.
The concepts of “inscape” and “instress” are best understood as expressing Hopkins’ inchoate
ideas about human perception. The problem of perception is the following. When we take in
information about something through our senses, how much of it represents objective reality
and how much of it is conjured up by our own minds? This has been a vexed question from the
times of the Greek philosophers to modern day philosophers of science, pondering the nature
of an observation. Hopkins’ views are intermediate between the two extreme positions - on the
one hand that the senses are reliable conduits of information about the external objective world
and, on the other hand, that the external world is an illusion manufactured by the mind for its
own inscrutable purposes. Hopkins concept was that the inscape of a thing was constituted by
those aspects of it which were the source of its “individually distinctive beauty”. The inscape of
a thing is an objective attribute of the thing and is accessible to the senses if sufficiently tuned.
For a living creature the inscape is most evident when the creature engages in an activity that
authentically manifests its nature. Thus, for Hopkins’s, the concept of “inscape” seems to flesh
out Duns Scotus’ rather rarefied idea of “haecceitas” and provides him with a more satisfying
principle of individuation than the principle of “material difference” advocated by the tradition
stemming from Aquinas. His concept of “instress” seems to arise by a far-reaching extension
of the metaphor that we use when we say “She made a great impression on me”. The
“instress” of a thing, unlike the inscape, does not refer to an objective quality of the thing
itself, but rather to the impact the inscape makes on a mind sensitive enough to take in the
inscape. In trying to make Hopkins’ ideas seem natural, one could say that he thought that
perception was more like reading a text – where the boundaries of the subjective and objective
are more blurred - than it is like peering at something through a microscope.
Hopkins’ gave particular expression to his views in this matter in two poems “As kingfishers
catch fire” and “Henry Purcell”. In the first of these he writes:
“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 scecond he makes it clear that what he loves above all is to catch sudden sight of those
unconscious moves, or gestures or tell-tale touches that could only come from that individual as
he does what fulfils his nature. Hopkins word for these characteristic actions is “sakes”. The
sakes are scattered unconsciously from purposeful action; for if created consciously the
“sakes” would degenerate into mere affectation or mannerism.
“It is the forged feature finds me; it is the rehearsal
Of own, of abrupt self there so thrusts on, so throngs the ear.
Let him oh! with his air of angels lift me, lay me! only I’ll
Have an eye to the sakes of him”
A second influential strand in Hopkins’ thinking is his view that the language and rhythm of
poetry in English should not be based on models taken from other languages – especially the
classical ones, but should be rooted in the usages and rhythm of ordinary speech. For Hopkins,
poetic expression is properly achieved by a sort of turbo-charging of the ordinary modes of
expression – rather than by trying to shoe horn English into poetic conventions and metres
native to another language. He writes :
“So also I cut myself off from the use of ‘ere’, ‘o’er’, ‘wellnigh’, ‘what time’, ‘say not’ (for ‘do
not say’), because though dignified they neither belong to nor could arise from, or be the
elevation of, ordinary speech. For it seems to me that the poetical language of the age should
be the current language heightened, to any degree heightened and unlike it, but not an obsolete
one”
This conviction is visible in his poetry in at least two ways.
Firstly, he almost completely eschews words derived from Latin or Greek in favour of the
Anglo-Saxon.stratum of the language. For instance the sharp-focussed directness, both
linguistic and visual, of the following verse, from “The Wreck of the Deutschland”, relies
almost exclusively on Anglo-Saxon words.
“She drove in the dark to leeward,
She struck not a reef nor a rock,
But the combs of a smother of sand: night drew her
Dead to the Kentish Knock;
And she beat the bank down with her bows and the ride of her keel;
The breakers rolled on her beam with ruinous shock;
And canvas and compass, the whorl and the wheel
Idle for ever to waft her or wind her with, these she endured”
It is as if Hopkins determined to clear away the accumulated layers of Latin and Greek silt
before chiselling his poetry directly on the hard Anglo-Saxon bedrock of the English language.
Secondly, his poetry is peppered (and indeed salted) with turns of phrase that most English
teachers would itch to underline in red and rebuke as being “too colloquial”. For instance, from
the “Wreck of the Deutschland” , “she that weather sees one thing, one” ; from Felix Randal
“Impatient, he cursed at first, but mended being anointed and all.” ; from the Windhover “No
wonder of it”.
Hopkins aesthetic convictions are of a piece with his linguistic ones. Despite the
obscurities in his verse and the singularities of his own character he is the poet who writes in
heightened but ordinary language to celebrate the aesthetic impulses and the broadly Christian
moral sensibilities of most men and women. He is more the poet of the touchline Dad who,
glimpsing displays of characteristic flair in a young footballer cries out “Go on my son” than he
is of the studied, intellectualised aestheticism of the art historian. Recently the press covered
extensively the courageous achievement of a brain damaged former boxer in completing the
London marathon course in 6 days. The appeal of the story lies in the analogy of the physical
excellences shown by a professional boxer with the moral excellences needed to shuffle a
broken down body round 26 miles. Particularly in the Windhover, Hopkins gives, with
customary verve and energy, exact expression to this moral outlook, placing it in a specifically
Christian context.
Hopkins is an antidote to a number of commonly encountered tendencies and habits that,
however well intentioned and understandable, are ultimately humanly impoverishing. One
example is the tendency to dodge the force and reality of direct immediate experience. This
sometimes manifests itself in denial by taking refuge in sentimentality or, in the more
intellectually minded, by refraction through a prism of one’s favourite foundational theory into
diffuse scholarly generalities. Hopkins lived long enough to feel he was getting old and to see
in himself the first signs of physical decay. His lines express vividly and unflinchingly the
natural reaction of fear and dread to aging and dying. As everywhere in Hopkins, before
comfort can be offered the truth must be faced.
“…. since, no, nothing, can be done
To keep at bay
Age and age’s evils, hoar hair.
Ruck and wrinkle. drooping, dying, death’s worst, winding
sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay;
So be beginning, be beginning to despair”
In contrast to this Tennyson’s lines from Ulysses
“ Old age hath yet its honour and its toil
…….
Though we are not that force which in olden days moved heaven and earth
That which we are we are,
One equal temper of heroic hearts
To strive to seek to find and not to yield”
begin to seem like so much club house bravado and Yeats’ lines from Byzantium
“An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick,
Unless soul claps its hands and sings and louder sings
For every tatter in its mortal dress”
invites the suspicion, hard to avoid with Yeats, that., essentially, he is modelling a set of
attitudes and beliefs temporarily donned and displayed to best advantage. – but he doesn’t
really believe any of it.
Hopkins’ poetry is a counter to the view that the conventional frustrations and disappointments
of life should be addressed pharmaceutically – that there is “some sweet oblivious antidote
can pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow and raze out the written troubles of the brain”. A
cultural tradition civilises by offering a mapping from the world within to the world without. It
does this primarily through the exemplars it offers in its literature and its poetry. This is all
unexceptionable when applied to, say, being brave, or being patriotic or being in love or being
righteously angry. For all of these there are numerous poetic and literary exemplars which
provide cultural reference points and records of the experience of others against which the
individual can compare and refine the emotions and impulses that well up from within his own
psyche. There are fewer exemplars for the kind of routine unhappiness and frustration, which
was in large part Hopkins’s lot, caused by want of appreciation of one’s talents, and generally
being misunderstood, over looked and ignored. Hopkins, in “Thou art indeed just” articulated
his own experience against the tradition of biblical lamentation by the prophets. In turn,
Hopkins’ own poetry creates reference points for how to think and feel about individual
experiences of this general type and acts, to some degree, as a counter to the coarsening and
diminishing tendency to medicalise these most common of experiences.
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