FAVORITE POET

Since my college days (in a Jesuit University) I have had a fascination with the great English poet GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS. I thank my first year literature professor, Father Smith, SJ, for his introduction  Recently I received the book: The Gospel in Gerard Manley Hopkins by Margaret R. Ellsberg.

Gerard Hopkins ranks seventh among the most frequently reprinted English language poets surpassed only by Shakespeare, John Donne, Wm. Blake, Yeats, Dickinson, and Wordsworth. Amazingly enough his mature work consists of only 49 poems. According to Dana Gioia (poet Laureat of California), he was an influence on Dylan Thomas, W.H. Auden, Seamus Hearney and other great poets of our modern time.

While considered one of the major poets of Victorian England, along with Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Matthew Arnold, Gerard Hopkins was almost unknown until 1918 when his book "Poems" was published, as edited by his friend Robert Bridges, then Poet Laureate.

Born in 1844, in the London suburb of Stratford, Essex, Gerard grew up in London’s Hampstead, among a comfortable family talented in word, art, and music. In 1863 he went to Oxford where he did brilliantly, yet anguished over religion. With the counsel of (Bl.) John Henry Newman, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church in October of 1866. After finishing Oxford in 1867, he taught for some months at Bl. Newman’s Oratory School near Birmingham.

Gerard entered the Society of Jesus on September 7, 1868, and did his novitiate in London and his philosophy in Lancashire. After a year of teaching in the Jesuit Juniorate, he began theology at St. Beuno’s College in the north of Wales where, in the winter 1875-76, he wrote the long ode “The Wreck of the Deutschland”, a poem in memory of five Franciscan Nuns, exiles by the Falk Laws, drowned in 1875.

He was ordained in 1877 and in spite of his long studies he managed eleven sonnets.

Wm. Hart McNichols

In October Hopkins left Wales, a place of great inspiration for him, to teach and minister in Derbyshire, London, Oxford, Bedford Leigh, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Stonyhurst, a Jesuit college in Lancashire.

In 1884 Hopkins went to Dublin as Professor of Greek at University College and examiner in the Royal University. But his chronic depression was magnified by bad eyesight, political irritation, spiritual desolation, and exhaustion from grading hundreds of examination papers.

 In 1885-86 he wrote seven sonnets, the “Terrible Sonnets” or “Dark Sonnets,” painful, dark poems with technical perfection.”  Yet at the same time he gave us poems expressing patience and hope in Christ, though his final poem describes a “winter world ” in which his “sweet fire” of poetic inspiration has waned. A few weeks later, on June 8,1889, he died, a victim of typhoid fever. At the end he considered himself a failure, yet his few poems were to change the course for

poetry we have today.

Vincent McDonnel

Hopkins’ poems, first published in 1918, grew into fame after the second edition of 1930. “Hailed as experimental and strikingly modern, they display rich music, novel rhythms, clustered words, craggy strength, and poetic power.”( Joseph J. Feeney, S.J.)

One of my favorite’s- and a lesser known poem- is:

Heaven—Haven
A nun takes the veil

    I have desired to go
       Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
    And a few lilies blow.

    And I have asked to be
       Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
    And out of the swing of the sea.