Gerard Manley Hopkins

I have confessed, over on Lectio, my undying love for the poet Hopkins, so it grieves me to report that some of my esteemed colleagues and contemporaries despise his writing. In the U.S. especially, the new formalists can’t abide his sprung rhythm, much preferring the more regular cadences of, say, A. E. Housman. Critic William Logan in a recent issue of Poetry singled Hopkins out for special scorn, citing some of his more “overripe” lines.

It must be admitted: when Hopkins was bad, he was horrid! Then again, as Don Paterson recently said in his T. S. Eliot lecture: “Between the great [poem] and the bad, there's a hairline fracture.” In his finest poems, Hopkins achieved a balance between the lofty and the homely, lush diction and plain. In the following poem, he tries for that effect but it fractures and the result is almost embarrassing.

I read this as another of Hopkins’ poems in which he expresses existential despair over human physicality. Some assume that sexuality was this scrupulous priest’s undoing, but in my opinion the despair was rooted in his chronic intestinal woes; hence, here we have what may be the first reference to defecation in a serious English lyric (“voids with shame”). As if that weren’t enough, the prototypical man in this poem also gets a hussy for a wife, meaning, I suppose, that all women are hussies. Not a noble statement, nor an honest one, for the celibate Hopkins did enjoy close, mutually admiring relationships with some women. The poem also presents a jarring hodgepodge of images and ideas—fallen Angels, breath, musical instruments—and the penultimate line is impenetrably dense, the last one rhyme-driven and inane. (Do keep in mind that Hopkins died two months later and that this may not be a work he considered finished.)

[Untitled]

The shepherd’s brow, fronting forked lightning, owns
The horror and the havoc and the glory
Of it. Angels fall, they are towers, from heaven—a story
Of just, majestical, and giant groans.
But man—we, scaffold of score brittle bones;
Who breathe, from groundlong babyhood to hoary
Age gasp; whose breath is our memento mori—
What bass is our viol for tragic tones?
He! Hand to mouth he lives, and voids with shame;
And, blazoned in however bold the name,
Man Jack the man is, just; his mate a hussy.
And I that die these deaths, that feed this flame,
That…in smooth spoons spy life’s masque mirrored: tame
My tempests there, my fire and fever fussy.
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