by Spencer Reece

from American Poetry Review, September / October 2009

I think then no one can admire the beauty of the body more than I do, and it is of course a comfort to find beauty in a friend or a friend in beauty. But this kind of beauty is dangerous. Then comes the beauty of the mind, such as genius, and this is greater than the beauty of the body and not to call dangerous. And more beautiful than the beauty of the mind is the beauty of the character, the "handsome heart."

—Gerard Manley Hopkins,
in a letter to Robert Bridges, October 25, 1879

I.

What happens when a poet goes silent? Emily Dickinson's retreat and absence from church services led to the composition of her existential hymns. Sylvia Plath's failed marriage shut her down: she went from the loquacious housewife promoting her much more famous husband, Ted Hughes, sending out her own poems assiduously in his shadow, to suddenly writing the poems that would make her name. The Ariel manuscript grew quickly and quietly each dawn before her children awoke, and in the rapid silence her poems were divorced from the world's chatter. The definitive fiat that defined her last poems was so unlike her meticulously polished pieces in her first collection The Colossus. Silence has enhanced poetic careers.

It is impossible to imagine Gerard Manley Hopkins forging his sensual works without the anvil of his silences. His silences took three forms.  First, the permanent longing that haunts the poems is unequivocally connected to the hands of a Jesuit who kept a vow of celibacy. I, for one, cannot separate the words that touch me today from the fact that the mati who wrote them hardly touched.

Second, the engines of Hopkins's sonnets run on the elected muteness of his decision not to write for seven years in his early priesthood. In an early letter to Robert Bridges, his closest friend, he writes, "What I had written I burnt before I became a Jesuit and resolved to write no more, as not belonging to my profession, unless it were the wish of my superiors; so for seven years I wrote nothing but two or three little presentation pieces." In 1875, when he finally allowed himself to write poems, at the bequest of his rector, he wrote his early masterpiece "The Wreck of The Deutschland." This early refusal launched the rest of his writing days, which lasted the next fourteen years. The writing,  electric, ecstatic, was shared with few.

Third, he chose to remain unpublished. AIthough he sought to publish "The Wreck of The Deutschland" through a Jesuit publication anonymously, the poem was eventually rejected. After that, he discouraged nearly all publications unless approved by his Jesuit superiors. But this deliberate muzzling created a foolproof endgame, so that as long as he lived he blocked his poems from the world, for he must have known his obscure, intimate spiritual contraptions were unlikely to pass under Jesuit noses without complaint. The cloister of silence he built around his poems contributed to their eccentric, private grace and this rages still through the anthologies. It was not that Hopkins stopped writing, it was that he stopped communicating: the more his lips closed, the more his poems opened. That he did not live to see himself appreciated remains a bittersweet insight.

Passion remains the nerve center of a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem. This passion, mostly unspent by its author, I take the liberty of assuming binds us to his poems. His lines work the mouth and tongue and jaw, the poem presses on the reader's lips: reciting a poem by Hopkins, the reader feels Hopkins returned for a kiss. The kiss feels less like the kiss of peace after Holy Communion than something more pent-up behind a closed door. The verse, flush with sounds and smells of flesh, requires saliva to propel it into existence. Hopkins wrote to Bridges, who was constantly chiding him for his obscurity, "Take breath and read [my poems] with the ears, as I always wish to be read, and my verse becomes alright." Hopkins stretches his lines to the breaking point like the cat-gut strings of a violin. The loin-driven words like "charged" and "sweating" and "flesh-filled" are caked onto his canvases like Van Gogh's strokes. His sprung rhythm throws off the Shakespearean sonnet for a new beat based on stress rather than a predictable syllable count: Hopkins's hands emerge from his alb to undo the metrical corsets: the threads of free verse have begun to spool out.

Like Walt Whitman, another sensualist working the other side of the Atlantic at the same time, Hopkins opens the doors of stanzas in order to disrobe. But the methods of the two men could not have been more different. Shunning audiences unless they were in pews, Hopkins wrote in a letter, "My vocation puts me before a standard so high that a higher can be found nowhere else." Transcendental Whitman had his American vistas for his altar, praising the smell of his own body odor from his pulpit. He seemed to gain energy from publishing—and re-publishing—Leaves of Grass. No renunciations worked to Whitman's advantage. Every single earthly pleasure built the lines that made his poems great. Unlike Whitman, Hopkins labored to button the erotic, living behind his priestly obedience and self-denial, never to hold his own book in his hands.

Hopkins had no trouble being ecstatic about Godly things, but the beauty of the flesh feels constantly problematic to anyone reading these poems, and in particular the terrible sonnets, or what he terms his “sonnets of desolation," written toward the end of his life in 1885. The Holy Ghost of the earlier "God's Grandeur," written in 1877, grew colder the longer Hopkins wrote. Erasing his sexual self propelled the passion of his ink. It is a simplistic argument. If only the heart and the spirit were that simple. Perhaps this legendary, sensitive man sought the confines of Catholicism for self-preservation beyond the sexual? Perhaps. I wish to allow for that space in considering the complexity of the human spirit, but there is no getting around the blunt, Freudian feel of repression in these poems for me. Speaking of Whitman, Hopkins comes close to out-Freuding Freud when he writes in a letter to Bridges, "I may as well say what I should not otherwise have said, that I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman's mind to be more like my own than any other man's living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession. And this also makes me the more desirous to read him and the more determined that I will not."

Hopkins is trapped in the amber of British Victorian thought, and before we label him one thing or another we need to have the archaeological compassion of seeing him in his time and place. Benjamin Jowett, a Greek tutor at Oxford at the time said, "A man is not a man who does not control his passions." If Hopkins was homosexual, he had devised away to survive it: abnegating his impulses, his poetry floods with passion. I would hate to think what would have become of Hopkins if he had never picked up a pen again. Whether Hopkins saw the life of a celibate Catholic priest as a way of kenneling his passions, there is no doubt that the failure to control his passion is Hopkins's great success.

II.

I wish to look at one particular late "terrible" sonnet, "I Wake and Feel," which was sent to no one. Six in all, these terrible sonnets, written toward the end of his life, came to be known as "terrible" because, according to Hopkins's friend Canon Dixon, they reached a crystallization of melancholy. They also reach a crystallization of his silence. In these sonnets, his silence feels like it might explode. His silence has filled the church and is pressing against the rafters. Hopkins speaks from a bare stage, middle-aged, having more in common here with Emily Dickinson's trap doors than with Whitman's lavish scrims. It is easy to imagine this poem contained in the architecture of a confessional booth, the door shut, the light dark:

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light's delay.
   With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.

   I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
   Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

In many ways the language is less obscure than earlier work, the meter less sprung. The poem builds exclusively with monosyllables like sturdy bricks. The first iambic pentameter line trudges out a string of sharp monosyllables, our speaker's feet falter in the last iamb and cause the reader to pause, too, as the line's logic reverses itself on the comma: our speaker is not illuminated by waking to light but held down by dark. From the outset, we hear this peculiar alliteration: "I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day." "Feeling" close to "falling," the two words yoked together like they are in Genesis, with Adam and Eve's sexual love wound inextricably to their punishment. Hopkins places similar-sounding  words with similar meanings next to each other so words meet their cousins: these etymological family reunions create a cognitive dissonance—the verbal picnic contrasts sharply with the starvation described. Darkness is separated from day by the small negative "not." The first line feels like it is laboring to get out of bed and perform the daily office. There is nostalgia for sleep, the closest thing we know of death while we live. The speaker of this poem is on his knees, praying for amnesia.

What we know of his biography at this time is dark. He could not acclimate himself to Ireland, where he had been sent to teach classics to large classrooms of diffident students. He was cut off from any family. His workload was heavy. He worked past midnight in a room at the back of a house off Stephen's Green, the view out his grimy window reflected his face with his sunken cheekbones. To his mother he wrote that his cheekbones were like harp frames. His chamber pot filled with diarrhea. His eyesight failed. The eyes themselves bled. Migraines pounded in his temples. Whose prayerful hands would not buckle?

Insomnia predominates the next cluster of lines, a literary precursor to Plath's 4 a.m. hand-wringing beneath a ceiling without stars: "What hours, O what black hours we have spent / This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went! / And more must, in: yet longer light's delay." Enjambment and a curious shell game of pronouns cause the speaker and the reader to slow. The "we" at first indicates a sense of community. But by the third line, the second person referring to the speaker's heart would seem to indicate our speaker is alone, addressing the different parts of himself. His handsome heart looks through a glass blackly. In a late letter to Bridges, he writes of not having the "inducements and inspirations" to motivate himself. He felt love to be "the great moving power and spring" of poetry and the person he was in love with (Christ) seldom stirred his heart. Despite all the wild ambiguity of his work, obfuscating explanations of his concept of "inscape" based on the thought of Duns Scotus, Hopkins's way of dealing with humankind was peculiarly black and white. Was it the Catholic in him? Was it the closeted Victorian homosexual in him? Whatever the answer, his celibacy lacked spirit. Or did his spirit lack celibacy?

Furthermore, he felt when he was stirred by this higher passion it would be sacrilegious to "make capital" from it. Thank goodness he allowed himself to make his beautiful architecture even though he chose not to sell it. Curiously, this argument that priesthood trumps poet-hood continues to this day. As one now seeking Holy Orders, with a published book of poems, I have been asked more than twice if I will stop writing. Today, when faced with the poems, I follow Hopkins down his seminary corridor, and even if he locked most of the doors behind him, I would like to believe that one can write and be called. What vexed Hopkins, I believe, was his sexuality, more than his priesthood.

In the second stanza comes: "But where I say / Hours, I mean years, mean life." How many of us in middle age, in mid-speech, realize much more time has elapsed in the telling of a story than we had expected? Years accrue into a life too rapidly. It is hard not to see what follows next as repressed homoeroticism: "And my lament / Is cries ,countless, cries like dead letters sent / to dearest him that lives alas! Away." It is not much of a stretch to trip over the crucifix and connect these lines to Hopkins's relationship to Robert Bridges's distant cousin, Dugby Mackworth Dolben. Hopkins met Dolben in February 1865. The men were young, handsome Oxford students. In his private journals, Hopkins tries valiantly to suppress his erotic attraction to Dolben, but fails. Hopkins's High Anglican confessor forbade him from having contact with Dolben except by letter. The letter perhaps carried intimate power for disclosure for Hopkins, which he now brought to the poem. Dolben drowned in June of 1876. The relationship, whatever its nature, ended. The following year, Hopkins sought the collar. It does not appear that the renunciation of this sexual and emotional relationship transferred to a love of God worked all the time. In "I Wake and Feel," the transplant is rejected.

One of his students will recall long after Father Hopkins is gone that while lecturing on Homer about Helen, he said, "You know, I never saw a naked woman." And then, after a pause, "I wish I had." It is painful to hear. In some of the last correspondences with Bridges, Hopkins refers to himself as "time's eunuch." "All impulse fails me: I can give myself no sufficient reason for going on. Nothing comes: I am a eunuch-but it is for the kingdom of heaven's sake." Whatever Hopkins's sexuality, repressing it did not a contented man make.

In the last two triplets, our poet moves out of the bed and his desk where letters were written, to a Eucharistic scene: "God's most deep decree / Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me; / Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse." The bones of the speaker are filled with flesh, the fs harkening back to our association with "fall" arid "fell." Sadly, Hopkins sees himself as cursed by his blood. His bones, flesh, and blood are a chalice brimming with sin. Even the Eucharist works no magic. Hopkins cannot connect.

"Self yeast of spirit a dull dough sours" densely packs the line showing the body itself as a source for the body of Christ to rise in. "Self yeast" is one of many examples of Hopkins's idiosyncratic portmanteau words. These yoked words cast a spell on me like that other poet of Welsh lineage, 'Dylan Thomas: I feel I am being spoken to in a way that no one has ever spoken to me and never will again. I fall in love.

But this soliloquy does not beckon so much as fold in with sourness. "I see / the lost are like this, and their scourge to be / As I am mine." The speaker has seen the way his own heart has gone and that "the lost" are in company with him—"sweating selves"—one imagines Dublin's squalor outside his window. In the chiaroscuro of that last room, Hopkins catches a whiff of his own decay. Yeast and sweat and sourness heat up the oven of his mind. A fallen man rises inside the priest.

If the poem's language grows more compact and obscure as it descends, it is helpful to listen to what Hopkins wrote to Bridges in defense of his most obscure tendencies: " I was not over-desirous that the meaning of all should be quite clear, at least unmistakable ... the lines and stanzas should be left in the memory and superficial impressions deepened ... I am sure I have read and enjoyed pages of poetry that way." This waking witness haunts the page.

There is another way of interpreting the isolation reverberating throughout this poem: the poet who wrote these lines was a priest long before Vatican II, when priests kept their back to the congregants. The poem shadows this isolated liturgical choreography. Early Catholic reformers were a few decades away. The church would soon demand, encouraged by Father Guardini, that priests turn around. That Hopkins was close to such an embrace is as painful to observe as the fact that Plath was just a decade away from the Women's Movement.

Maybe in time his self-deprecations would have been less negative than calling himself "gall" and "heartburn" —the first connoting something bitter to endure, the second, even more visceral, one imagines the speaker's esophagus burning as he prays. "I am gall, I am heartburn" —never has a more unappealing personal ad been written. How great the contrast compared to Whitman's joyful proclamations: "I am large, I contain multitudes" or "For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you." Hopkins cannot celebrate himself .

Hopkins ends his poem in a hellish basement. Bad as life might be, it is not as bad as those damned to be lost without faith, although the tone is hardly convincing, unlike, say, the trumpeting, imperative voice that closes "Pied Beauty": "Praise him." The poet who wrote early on in religious exuberance, "The world is charged with the grandeur of God" closes his terrible sonnet with two monosyllables, "but worse." How that "but worse" double-bolts our celibate into his sonnet. His faith stripped. This is a far cry from George Herbert, who two centuries earlier sat down to a banquet at the end of "Love (III)" with serene surrender to his God, "’You must sit down: says Love, 'and taste my meat,’ / So I did sit and eat." The jagged caesuras in Hopkins's lines, compared to the soft iambs of Herbert, underscore the conflict Hopkins had between his religious obligations, his poetic talent and the sensual dead-end his life had become. The effect is not one of reclining, but flailing.

Such are the letters Hopkins left the world that never wrote to him. They are dead in his hands, only to be resurrected now after his death. His unrealized poetic career may have been palatable to him, with all his rationalizations about a higher calling, but it must have been a bitter pill to swallow that in his time on this earth he earned a reputation as a dismal failure as a preacher. By all accounts, he was forgettable. According to his recent biographer, Paul Mariani, Hopkins had "a pronounced tendency to over-elaborate, to go on at too great length, and so lose his audience." Oddly, despite graduating with a first from Oxford, Hopkins had barely passed his third year theological Jesuit exam and was thus prevented from ever rising in the Catholic hierarchy. The exams no longer exist, but it is possible that Hopkins's answers were simply so original they were dismissed. After all, T. S. Eliot received a "B" in expository writing his freshman year. In another instance, though, the Jesuit Fathers snickered during one of Hopkins's sermons to the point that Hopkins lost his place. The limitations of Hopkins—his celibacy, his Jesuit rules, his thwarted Jesuit career, his uninspired preaching—were maybe hidden blessings, creating the silent vacuum for the poems. When Bridges derided Hopkins for obscurity for the umpteenth time, Hopkins wrote, "the poem [here referring to 'The Wreck of The Deutschland'] is all strictly true and did occur; nothing is added for poetical padding." Sermons he might have padded, but the poems, behind their enforced silences, allowed him to be clear.

III.

In 1889, Hopkins's parents were summoned. Their eldest son, Gerard, had contracted a virulent form of typhoid fever. The parents traveled the train tracks that stapled the English countryside. They saw coal pits gouged into the landscape like blind eye sockets. They smelled the factories exuding their rotten egg smell from sulphuretted hydrogen. They traveled to Dublin. They arrived at his bedside as a Jesuit priest gave Hopkins his last rites. In a fever, Hopkins repeated, "I am so happy. I am so happy."

A collected edition of the Hopkins poems would not be published until forty years after his death. Robert Bridges would become Poet Laureate of England. On July I, 1926, between the two world wars, the afternoon warming the pink rhododendron bushes, long before the beautiful closets of Hopkins's poems fluttered open to the hands of readers like me, a young Virginia Woolf, herself familiar with the many ambiguous permutations of love, came calling to ask the then eighty-two-year-old Bridges to see the Hopkins manuscripts. Woolf was entranced by Hopkins's exuberant, slightly feminine script. She did not ask to listen to or discuss any of Bridges's poems. There must have been an awkward silence. All of Bridges's poems would be forgotten soon. For the moment, Bridges returned from the kitchen and silently served Virginia Woolf her tea.  

 

About the Author
Spencer Reece is the author of The Clerk's Tale, published by Houghton Miffin in 2004. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a postulant for Holy Orders in the Episcopal Church.

American Poetry Review
Philadelphia

Editors: Stephen Berg, David Bonanno, Elizabeth Scanlon