Academically brilliant as an Oxford University student, in 1866 Gerard Manley Hopkins left the Anglican Church, to which both of his parents were deeply committed, to become a convinced Roman Catholic. Following his personal ‘conversion’, he obeyed an inner ‘call’ to follow a strict Jesuit course of spiritual formation. Thereafter, he became a faithful servant of the Catholic Church wherever he was posted. However, his academic potential was never fulfilled. His poetry was never published in his lifetime, and in Cardinal Henry Newman’s complimentary terms, as a priest he could best be described as, ‘a successful failure’!  Like Hopkins to whom he owes a debt of gratitude, the compiler of this selection of his verse was ‘converted’ to a living faith and commitment to Jesus Christ and ‘called’ to a discipleship that would be worked out not in the Church of Scotland, his heritage, nor the local Congregational Church in which his parents had been active, but in the ordained ministry of the established Church of England.[1]

In pastoral placements in parishes in England, Scotland and Ireland, in school teaching and in tutorial duties in college and university, Hopkins was obedient and committed to his Jesuitical priestly training. In the course of its outworking, he became at times occupationally both deeply depressed and personally elated.  Internally, he found his saving resort in writing poetry that was in fact rejected for publication by his Jesuit superiors, and therefore did not appear in print during his lifetime. Nevertheless through his poetry, Hopkins was able to express his personal doubts and faith, along with his painful struggle in trying to reconcile them wherever the Church sent him to serve. He likened himself, as a poet, to a tree growing against the background of a changing sky and climate. He pictured it speaking to humankind in its different seasons: in December ‘furled fast’, but in May ‘blue and snow white through them, a fringe and fray of greenery.’

Not of all my eyes see, wandering on the world,

Nothing a milk to the mind so, so sighs deep

Poetry to it, as a tree whose boughs break in the sky.[2]

In this writer’s case, on leaving the parish, an understanding church member gave me a copy of The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins into which I have dipped from time to time ever since, but quite recently I have learned to treasure and search it more closely. The poems have given me personal spiritual insights and also helped to provide me with a theological interpretation of my experiences following more than sixty five years of active ministry. But first, let there be a necessary warning!

Gerald Manley Hopkins’ idiomatic style, ‘sprung rhythm’, peculiar vocabulary, alliteration, and wordage set him uniquely apart from other more distinguished, popular and romantic nineteenth century poets. At first I was easily put off by his idiosyncratic manner which was quite different from his more immediately appealing contemporaries. I needed to be convinced that he had something to say to me, having been brought up in a Protestant evangelical understanding of Christian conversion. It was through an early twentieth-century non-denominational, evangelistic and mainly middle-class movement among both boys and girls, but separately. Called, ineptly as it now seems, ‘Crusaders’, it was founded in 1906 and we met in weekly ‘classes’ scattered around the country and often focussing on the gospel appeal for ‘conversion’ at our summer camps and house parties.  ‘Sanctification’ was taught as a distinctive Christian difference or ‘separation’, but in stark contrast to the Roman Catholic Church-centred view of it. Yet there were similarities, and it was certainly seen as a progression that would be equally life-changing. For Hopkins, from a devoted but traditional Anglican home, it involved a voluntary decision on his part to accept a meticulous Roman Catholic allegiance, to a Jesuitical ‘military’ discipline of personal holiness and obedience to the Church. For me, it involved the adoption of a lifestyle based strictly on the practice of daily Bible reading and Christ-centred prayer, which would lead me to personal witness and practical daily Christian living, in fellowship with other Christians.

Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Background

 Born into an established, comfortable and committed Anglican family, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) won a poetry prize at Highgate School before going up to Oxford in 1863 to read Classics. There, he gained a double-first degree and in 1866 won his College accolade, ‘The Star of Balliol’. It was there too that his spiritual uncertainty found its turning point, as he put it: ‘He hath abolished the old drouth, / And rivers run where all was dry, / The field is sopp’d with merciful dew. / He hath put a new song in my mouth, / The words are old, the purport new, / And taught my lips to quote this word / That I shall live, I shall not die, / But I shall when the shocks are stored / See the salvation of the Lord.’[3] The following years were both to test his spiritual conversion and break his inherited Anglican allegiance.

At that time, Oxford University was in religious turmoil. The High Church Party in the Church of England was enjoying a revival at the expense of the alert but increasingly divided Evangelical Party on the one hand, and the Broad Church’s intellectual critique of fundamental Christian truths on the other.[4] Led by John Keble (1792-1866), Edward Pusey (1800-82) and John Henry Newman (1801-90), a group of Oxford churchmen produced a series of Tracts for the Times against Popery and Dissent (1833-41). Of the three, Newman was the most prominent, but was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1845. He long continued to be hero-worshipped by Hopkins, and maybe one of his early poems reflects his admiration: ‘LOVE I was shown upon the mountain-side / And bid to catch Him ere the drop of day. / See, Love, I creep and Thou on wings dost ride: / Love, it is evening now and Thou away: / Love, it grows darker here and Thou art above; /Love, come down to me if Thy name be Love.’[5]

For Hopkins, his three years in the University proved to be a period of tumultuous personal and spiritual struggle. For a start, he had to face a conflict between a burgeoning desire for Christ and his same-sex attraction to other male students, possibly one in particular. In February 1865 Hopkins met Digby Mackworth Dolben (1848-67), a strikingly handsome poet who was a devotee of Anglo-Catholic ritual and Roman Catholic ‘habits’ (dress). He described the encounter as: ‘the single most momentous emotional event’ of his life.[6] Moreover, it is Dolben’s name and address that appears on the page before a sonnet Hopkins wrote on or about 26th April 1865: ‘Where art thou friend, whom I shall never see, / Conceiving whom I must conceive amiss? / Or sunder’d from my sight in the age that is / Or far-off promise of a time to be;’ [7]

For Hopkins the poet, there was an early gargantuan struggle to relate the physical beauty of the natural world, and its particular expression in the form of at least one of his fellow human beings, to the internal spiritual call of God in Christ. It was a matter of life and death. In 1863 he had burned his earliest poetry, fearing it was just a symbolic expression of his ‘self-parade’.  But, in what seems to be both an expression of his devotion to Christ and a poetic tribute to Dolben, his appreciation of natural and human beauty lies deep in the fact that it is to be recognised as an outpouring of the ineffable beauty of Christ.

The City and University of Oxford was the context in which Hopkins’ growing understanding of the mystery of God’s real presence in Transubstantiation and the Immaculate Conception was to develop:

Godhead, I adore thee fast in hiding; thou

God in these bare shapes, poor shadows, darkling now:

See, Lord, at thy service low lies here a heart

Lost, all lost in wonder at the God thou art.[8]

He was helped to understand this revelation by the insights of the Franciscan philosopher, Duns Scotus (c.1265-1308).[9] He had studied and taught in Oxford, and the memory of the man, and his setting, evoked deep emotions in Hopkins. Shortly after his ordination to the priesthood (1877) he wrote of the contribution of Scotus in Oxford with deep feeling: ‘Yet ah! this air I gather and I release / He lived on; these weeds and waters, these walls are what / He haunted who of all men most sways my spirits to peace;  / Of reality the rarest-veined unraveller; a not / Rivalled insight, be rival Italy or Greece; / Who fired France for Mary without spot.’[10]

Like Scotus, Hopkins believed in the freedom of God to reveal himself not so much in the theories of philosophers, be they Latin or Greek, but in particular people, places and things as they are; and in what they do. See more of this below. However pre-eminently, God made himself known in his Incarnation, the person of Jesus Christ, the Immaculate Conception, and in the Atonement on the cross where God really did undo himself, pouring out his very self in love. His purpose was so that humankind could understand the extent of God’s love and forgiveness, and so would discover freedom from guilt and fear, and go on to live in love.

On Christmas Day 1866, and facing stern parental opposition, Hopkins followed Newman in his conversion from Protestant to the Catholic faith.  In spite of all the political, religious, social and academic sanctions then operating against Roman Catholics in Oxford University, he perceived a divine personal vocation. ‘Moonless darkness stands between. / Past, the Past, no more to be seen! / But the Bethlehem star may lead me / To the sight of Him Who freed me / From the self that I have been. / Make me pure, Lord: Thou art holy; / Make me meek, Lord: Thou wert lowly; / Now the beginning, and alway: / Now begin, on Christmas day.’[11]  The poem was to be followed less than a month later by another aspiration, The Habit of Perfection, which began, ‘Elected Silence, sing to me / And beat on my whorled ear, / Pipe me to pastures still and be / The music that I care to hear…. Be shelled, eyes, with double dark / And find the uncreated light:’ The poem ends with what was to be his lifelong personal commitment, ‘And, Poverty, be thou the bride / And now the marriage feast begun….’[12]

In practice, his decision in Oxford to become a Roman Catholic was the prelude to a significant visit to Birmingham Oratory where he met Newman, former evangelical Anglican vicar of S. Mary’s, Oxford, who agreed to ‘receive’ him on 21st October 1866. After this, he was ‘confirmed’ by Archbishop Henry Manning (1808-92) on 4th November. It was undoubtedly Newman who influenced his later decision to become a Jesuit. Jesuits, an order founded in 1540, were noted for their blind military-style obedience to authority, and total commitment to the Church’s mission and ministry. In May 1868 Hopkins wrote to Newman to tell him of his decision to become both a Jesuit and a priest.

In brief this is what followed; after his novitiate he was ordained a priest in 1877. This was succeeded by brief practical pastoral placements (1877-81).[13] He then taught at Stonyhurst College (1882-84) before becoming Professor of Greek in University College, Dublin for five years. He died in June 1889. Through the intervening years from 1866, Hopkins was to experience a personal spiritual progression through three defining spiritual phases reflected in his poetry of the period: 1. Measured Delight; 2. Meeting Depression; and 3. Confronting Despair.

1. Measured Delight: in Wales (1874-77)

In 1874 Hopkins was sent by his Jesuit superiors to spend three mainly joyful years at S. Bueno’s in North Wales. Built in 1848 as a College for aspiring priests, it was here in the natural beauty of North Wales that he once again resumed the poetic vocation that, ten years earlier, he had abandoned as a spiritually dangerous discipline. His poetry once again became the expression of his personal theology, informed by the insights of Duns Scotus who, as noted above, he had first learned to appreciate when he was studying in Oxford.

It is fascinating to learn that the Catholic Dictionary of Theology (ed. H.F. Davis, London, 1962) actually used Hopkins’ poetry to explain and illustrate the meaning of the complex philosophical ‘realism’ of Duns Scotus.[14] One example of Hopkins’ poetic explanation is his poem, Duns Scotus’s Oxford. Another more explicit summary appears within an untitled but often quoted poem:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

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.

I say more: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is-

Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men’s faces. [15]

Hopkins, like Scotus, recognised the haecceitas (this-is-ness) of every single thing.[16] Moreover, having embraced the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation in relation to both the Eucharist and the Immaculate Conception, he had come also to believe that all sorts of things have sacramentally an inherent ‘self’ or ‘inscape’ – an observably natural God-givenness – which is outwardly expressed in what he called its ‘instress’. The poem above illustrates beautifully his understanding of God’s creative way of working in our everyday world, and letting it be known.

The months immediately surrounding his ordination to the major Jesuit orders of Subdeacon, Deacon and Priest, on September 21-23, 1877, were both enriched and given expression in his poetry, within the natural context of Wales. While there, his poems reflecting their beautiful setting also reveal Hopkins’ preparation both for the priesthood and the challenging wider ministry of the Church which lay ahead.[17]

In the late winter of early 1877 Hopkins was to explore God’s ‘selving’ (i.e. ‘inscape’ and ‘instress’) from his reflection on the priestly call to mission and his own realistic observation of its context in industrialised North Wales. It was not without deep-rooted hope: ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God. / It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;’ But ‘… all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; / And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil / Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. / And for all this, nature is never spent; / There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; / And though the last lights off the black West went / Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs – / Because the Holy Ghost over the bent / World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.’ [18]

In May 1877 he could therefore write joyfully: ‘Nothing is so beautiful as Spring-‘ / ‘What is all this juice and all this joy? / A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning / In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy, / Before it cloud, Christ, lord and sour with sinning, / Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy, / Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.’[19]

But also by contrast and writing in Spring in Rhyl, he could describe it as ‘this shallow and frail town’. Maybe, he had in mind the popular summer day-trips from industrialised Liverpool because in the holiday resort he detects ‘two noises’. To the right is the unremitting round of time and ‘the tide that ramps against the shore;’ But to the ‘Left hand, off land, I hear the lark ascend, / … And pelt music, till none’s to spill nor spend.’[20]

In the same Welsh summer setting, his poem The Caged Skylark recognises the frustration that can accompany a Christian journey, and reveals the need for spiritual retreat. ‘ As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage / Man’s mounting spirit in his bone house, mean house, dwells – / That bird beyond the remembering his free fells, / This in drudgery, day-labouring-out life’s age. / Though aloft on turf or perch or poor low stage, / Both sing sometimes the sweetest, sweetest spells, / Yet both droop deadly sometimes in their cells / or wring their barriers in bursts of fear or rage.’ Is he is comparing the setting of a popular holiday resort with own personal perspective on S. Bueno’s? ’Not that the sweet-fowl, song-fowl, needs no rest – / Why, hear him, hear him babble and drop down to his nest, / But his own nest, wild nest, no prison.’[21]

At the end of May, perhaps anticipating the challenge of the priestly ministry which lay only months ahead of him, Hopkins compiled the first version of The Windhover: To Christ our Lord, and claimed not long after, ‘that is the best thing I ever wrote’.

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon in his riding

 Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! Then off, off forth on swing,

     As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

     Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

     Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!’ [22]

These poems, including the one set in Rhyl, sprang up within the beautiful scenery of North Wales. But, sometime during the year he also wrote The Lantern out of Doors, a reflection on human sources of light in the surrounding darkness. In the course of his training, Hopkins found dogmatic and moral theology, along with canon law, very dry as they were taught at S Bueno’s. Consequently, within such a context of natural and spiritual wonders around him but also perhaps in the dreariness of the seminary, ‘Sometimes a lantern moves along the night / That interests our eyes. And who goes there? / I think; where from and bound, I wonder, where, / With, all down darkness wide, his wading light?’ Did Hopkins describe one or other of the aspiring priests who travelled with him? ‘Men go by me whom either beauty bright / In mould or mind or what not else makes rare: / They rain against our much-thick and marsh air / Rich beams, till death or distance buys them quite. / Death or distance soon consumes them; wind (wīnd), / What most I may eye after, be at the end / I cannot, and out of sight is out of mind.’ But, ‘Christ minds: Christ’s interest, what to avow or amend / There, eyes them, heart wants, care haunts, foot follows kind, / Their ransom, their rescue, and first, fast, last friend.’[23]

In the summer of 1877 shortly before his ordination Hopkins wrote the poem Pied Beauty, a favourite of many, which in many ways encapsulates his theology inasmuch as it sums up the direct self-revelation of God in Creation.[24] His mentor, Scotus, had believed: ‘Every creature, insofar as it is a being, represents God.’[25]  In poetic form and with conviction, Hopkins wrote from his personal perspective: ‘Glory be to God for dappled things….’ In the wonderful Creation the beauty of God is revealed:

All things counter, original, spare, strange:

     Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

          With swift, slow: sweet, sour: adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

         Praise him.

Moreover, just three weeks before his ordination in September, and the timing seems to have been significant, perhaps as he reflected on his forthcoming ministry and the potential it offered for an effective and fruitful priesthood, Hopkins wrote Hurrahing in Harvest.[26] ‘SUMMER ends now; barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise / Around; up above, what wind-walks! / … I walk, I lift up heart, eyes, / Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;’ ‘… And the azurous hills are his world-wielding shoulder / Majestic – as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet! – / These things were here and but the beholder / Wanting; which two when they once meet, / The heart rears wings bold and bolder / And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.’[27]

     2. Meeting Depression: in Sheffield, Liverpool and Glasgow (1878-82)

Although Hopkins was now ordained, he had not been permitted to complete the normal fourth year of training because of his poor performance in the theology exam. Instead, in 1878 he was sent to educate teenagers in Mount S. Mary’s College near Chesterfield, where as a school teacher he proved to be a disaster in the depressingly ‘smoke-ridden’ atmosphere around the ‘steel-city’ Sheffield. It presented a stark contrast to the grandeur of North Wales, and it was while there that he wrote his tragic poetic account of a second shipwreck. The setting of it, like that of the first, The Wreck of the Deutschland (1875)[28], seemed to reflect the context of both his own ongoing and deeply felt struggle, on the one hand for what he called ‘rare-dear Britain’ and on the other for his own continuing inner spiritual wreckage. ‘But to Christ lord of thunder / Crouch; lay knee by earth low under: / Holiest, loveliest, bravest, / Save my hero, O Hero savest.’[29]

Things improved a little when he was sent back to Oxford which he continued to love, but now with qualifications: ‘Thou hast a base and brackish skirt there sours / That neighbour-nature thy grey beauty is grounded / Best in; graceless growth, thou hast confounded / Rural rural keeping  – folk, flocks, and flowers.’[30] Things had changed there for the industrial worse, as illustrated in his popular poem, Binsey Poplars: felled 1879. The poem registered his strong objection to human indifference to the intrinsic ‘selving’ of objects of natural beauty; for example, ‘My aspens dear….’. He judged that their creative ‘instress’ was threatened in a world increasingly destructive in its impulsive industrialisation:

O if we but knew what we do

When we delve or hew-

Hack and rack the growing green!

Since country is so tender….

Where we, even where we mean

To mend her we end her,

When we hew or delve:

After-comers cannot guess the beauty been….[31]

In January 1880 Hopkins was placed in Liverpool, ‘a most unhappy and miserable spot’, where a third of the population was Irish, for the most part unemployed shipbuilders who were often homeless, drunken and poverty-stricken. However, notably for one of them, Hopkins was able to prove to be a deeply caring and effective parish priest. Reflecting on Felix Randal he wrote, ‘Sickness broke him. Impatient, he cursed at first, but mended / Being anointed and all; though a heavenlier heart began some / Months earlier, since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom / Tendered to him. Ah well, God rest him all road ever he offended!’[32]

In the Spring of that barren year he used to find brief and welcome relief from his body- and soul-sapping urban ministry in occasional visits to say mass in a private chapel at Rose Hill in the more rural Lydiate, a stop on the railway line to Southport. Yet a few months later, at the start of Autumn and possibly in veiled self-revelation and self-pity, he was writing Spring and Fall: to a young child (Margaret): ‘Ah! as the heart grows older / It will come to such sights colder / By and by, nor spare a sigh / Though forests low and leafmeal lie (as revised in 1884: ‘though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie’) /and yet you will weep and know why…. / It is the blight man was born for, / It is Margaret you mourn for.’[33] Certainly in October that year Hopkins described himself as ‘so fagged, so harried and gallied… and the drunkards go on drinking, the filthy, as the scripture says are filthy still.’[34]

His next posting to assist at S. Joseph’s, Glasgow, was not much better although it did offer a few days escape to Loch Lomond where he found some consolation in the wilderness of wildness contrasting it, as he did so strikingly, with the urban wilderness of the city, Glasgow. Nevertheless, the poem he wrote during a short break (September 1881) acknowledges the presence, even in blessed and beautiful Inversnaid, ‘Of a pool so pitchblack, fell-frowning, / It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.’ He spelt Despair with a capital D. It is as though Hopkins is acknowledging, even in the wild beauty of a highland burn cascading down a majestic Scottish mountain, his own ongoing spiritual struggle with depression. But the poem, like the verses he composed in Wales, finally recovers a longing, enshrined for Hopkins in the natural world. ‘What would the world be, once bereft / Of wet and wildness? Let them be left, / O let them be left, wildness and wet; / Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.’[35]

In October 1882 he began the third year of the Jesuit novitiate at Manresa House in Roehampton and completed the Long Retreat before taking his final vows in August 1883. The Long Retreat was designed to help Jesuits recover their initial vocation. For Hopkins it was a blessed relief; ‘my mind is here more at peace than it has ever been and I would gladly live all my life… in as great or a greater seclusion  from the world and be busied only with God.’[36] He was able to recover some of the personal stability he had experienced in Wales before ordination. He sensed it in the countryside around Ribblesdale in Lancashire: ‘Earth, sweet Earth, sweet landscape, with leaves throng / And louched low grass, heaven that dost appeal / To, with no tongue to plead, no heart to feel; / That canst but only be, but does that long – / Thou canst but be, but that thou well dost; strong / Thy plea with him who dealt, nay now does deal, / Thy lovely dale down thus and thus bids reel / Thy river, and o’er all to rack (for conservation) or wrong.’

For Hopkins the world of nature proclaims the eternal ‘being’ of God. But what is the role of humankind in the world? Disappointingly selfish! ‘And what is Earth’s eye, tongue, or heart else, where / Else, but in dear and dogged man? – Ah, the heir / To his own selfbent so bound, so tied to his turn, / To thriftess reave both our rich round world bare / And none reck of world after, this bids wear / Earth  brows of such care, care and dear concern.’[37]

In fact, when he returned to Stonyhurst to teach undergraduates Latin and Greek in August 1882, it was in ‘a heavy weary state of body and mind in which my go is gone.’[38] It was there that he completed a poem that he had begun two years earlier, The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo. His post-Ordination challenge now was how to keep beauty ‘from vanishing away’. His response to that call was: ‘Do what you may do, what, do what you may, / And wisdom is early to despair; / Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done / To keep at bay / Age and age’s evils…. / Be beginning to despair, to despair, despair…. / Spare! / There is one, yes I have one (Hush there!), / Only not within seeing of the sun…. / Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver…. / A care kept. – Where kept? do but tell us where kept, where. – / Yonder. What high as that! We follow, now we follow. – Yonder, yes yonder, yonder, / Yonder.’[39]

     3. Confronting Despair: in Dublin (1884-89)

 In February 1884 Hopkins moved to Dublin, ’a joyless place’, to become Professor of Classics at University College, founded by Henry Newman in 1554. But he was also appointed Fellow of the Royal University of Ireland (1879-1909). There, he was given the task of administering and grading university examinations, a responsibility which he took up conscientiously. Unsurprisingly, he found it a dispiriting task for so gifted, meticulous and perfectionist a scholar as he was. The next five years were profoundly depressing and a personal spiritual challenge to both his ultimate Christian hope and his contribution to the Christian mission in Ireland. Once again ‘Despair’ can appear in his poetic determination to resist, with a capital D.

NOT, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;

Not untwist – slack they may be – these last strands of man

In me or, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;

Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.[40]

As early as 1887 he was to judge his time Ireland as having been ‘three hard wearying wasting wasted years.’ Handwritten, but an undated and untitled poem of the period is revealing. Hopkins summed up his depressing assessment of Dublin and his own spiritual vitality: ‘The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less; / The times are winter, watch, a world undone; / They waste, they wither worse; they as they run / Or bring more and more blazon man’s distress. / And I not help. Nor word now of success: / All is from wreck, here, there, to rescue one – / Work which to see scarce so much as begun / Makes welcome death, does dear forgetfulness. / Or what is else? There is your world within. / There rid the dragons, root out there the sin. / Your will is law in that small commonweal….’[41]

But were his last years wasted? In his hero Newman’s view of the Church, it is ‘the rule of God’s Providence that we should succeed by failure.’[42]  Moreover, what was true for the Church was also to be true for the individual believer: ‘We advance to the truth by experience of error; we succeed through failures. Such is the process by which we succeed; we walk to heaven backward.’ Christians ‘seem to fail’, but in fact they ‘rise by falling’. The Bible shows how ‘God’s servants, even though they began with success, end with disappointment; not that God’s purposes or His instruments fail, but that the time for reaping what we have sown is hereafter, not here.’ Newman insists, ‘the good cannot conquer, except by suffering. Good men seem to fail; their cause triumphs.’[43]

But between 1885 and 1887 Hopkins was to compose what have come to be known as the ‘Dark’ and ‘Terrible’ Sonnets, or ‘Sonnets of Desolation’, which reveal the internal turmoil of a conscientious priest and academic who believed the University, ‘drags me on with the collar round my neck.’[44] ‘No  worst, there is none / Pitched past pitch of grief, / More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring. / Comforter, where, where is your comforting?…. / My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief-woe, world-sorrow…. / O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap / May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small / Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep, / Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all / Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.’[45] He was therefore…

     Wasting his time

Hopkins summed up his assessment of the wastage of his own gifts in the University, and even within his own inner being: ‘The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less; / The times are winter, watch, a world undone:  / They waste, they wither worse; they as they run / Or bring more and more blazon man’s distress. / And I not help. Nor word now of success: / All is from wreck, here, there, to rescue one – / Work which to see scarce so much as begun / Makes welcome death, does dear forgetfulness. / Or what is else? There is your world within. / There rid the dragons, root out there the sin. / Your will is law in that small commonweal….’[46]

He expands the theme of passing time in the unfinished ode To His Watch, which is a hope-less and time-limited plea barely mitigated by a small amendment: ‘ Field-flown, the departed day no-morning brings / Saying ‘This was yours’ with her, but new one, worse, / And then that last and shortest….’.  Perhaps there is a smidgeon of hope: ‘we all have ‘one spell and well that one. There, ah thereby / Is comfort’s carol of all or woe’s worst smart.’[47]

     In fruitless endeavour

‘…Why do sinners’ ways prosper? And why must / Disappointment all I endeavour end? / Wert thou my enemy, O my friend, / How would thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost / Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust / Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend, / Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes / Now, leaved how thick! Laced they are again / With fretty chervil, look, and fresh windshakes / Them; birds build – but not I build; no, but strain. / Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes. / Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.’[48]

     In the wrong place

In Dublin, Hopkins reflected sadly on his physical and circumstantial ‘remove’ from familiar and much-loved contexts: 1. From his much loved family’s presence, faith and practice; 2. From England, the country of his birth and often-expressed personal allegiance; 3. In Ireland, where he complains bitterly of his own predicament.

In one poem that can probably be dated from this period he sums up his lonely self-assessment.  ‘To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life / Among strangers. Father and mother dear, / Brothers and sisters are in Christ not near / And he my peace / my parting, sword and strife. / England, Whose honour O all my heart woos, wife / To my creating thought, would neither hear / Me, were I pleading, plead nor do I:  wear- / y of idle a being but by where wars are rife. / I am in Ireland now; now I am at a third / Remove. Not but in all removes I can / Kind love both give and get. Only what word / Wisest my heart breeds dark heaven’s baffling ban / Bars or hell’s spell thwarts. This to hoard unheard, / Heard unheeded, leaves me a lonely began.’[49]

     And In the dark night

‘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.’[50]

     Nevertheless patient

‘PATIENCE hard thing! The hard thing but to pray, / But bid for, Patience is! Patience who asks / Wants war, wants wounds; weary his times his tasks; / To do without, take tosses, and obey. / Rare patience roots in these, and, these away, / Nowhere. Natural heart’s-ivy Patience masks / Our ruins of wrecked past purpose. There she basks / Purple eyes and seas of liquid leaves all day. / We hear or hearts grate on themselves: it kills / To bruise them dearer. Yet the rebellious wills / Of us we do bid God bend to him even so.  / And where is he who more and more distils / Delicious kindness? – He is patient. Patience fills / His crisp combs, and that comes those ways we know.’[51]

     Persevering in hope

 ‘My own heart let me more have pity on; let / Me live to my sad self hereafter kind, / Charitable; not live this tormented mind / Wit this tormented mind tormenting yet. / I cast for comfort I can no more get / By groping round my comfortless, than blind / eyes in their dark can day or thirst find / Thirst’s all-in-all in all a world of wet. / Soul, self: come, poor Jackself. I do advise / You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile / Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size / At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile / ‘s not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather – as skies / Betweenpie mountains – lights a lovely mile.’[52]

     Toward ultimate glory

On a scrap of paper, which fortuitously for present day readers cannot be dated as early or late in his life-story, Hopkins sums up his deeply perceptive and self-aware outlook on personal holiness which persisted from the beginning to the end of his personal spiritual journey. It is based on II Corinthians 3.18: ‘All of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected  a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.’

Hope holds to Christ the mind’s own mirror out

To take His lovely likeness more and more.

It will not well, so she would bring about

A growing burnish brighter than before

And turns to wash it from her welling eyes

And breathes the blots off all with sighs on sighs.

Her glass is blest but she as good as blind

Holds till her hand aches and wonders what is there;

Her glass drinks light, she darkles down behind,

All of her glorious gainings unaware.

I told you that she turned her mirror dim

Betweenwhiles, but she sees herself not Him.[53]

In spite of this perceptive reflection on personal holiness, it would be wrong to think that Hopkins had no early joy in an ultimate hope for himself and for humankind. As noted above, he was able to assert, as a twenty-year-old, that an inherited Anglican upbringing had sprung to life: ‘He hath put a new song in my mouth, / The words are old, the purport new, / And taught my lips to quote this word / That I shall live, I shall not die.’ That certainly continued to be his hope when it came to dying at the age of 45 years. Conscientious, but feeling overwhelmed by his weighty responsibility for marking and grading university examinations, on 6th May he told his parents he had ‘a sort of typhoid’. Hs parents arrived at his bedside on 5th June and he died of typhoid and peritonitis aged 44, on 8th June 1889. According to Paul Mariani, earlier that day he had been heard talking to himself. Over and over again he was repeating the same words, ‘I am so happy’, ‘I am so happy’.[54]

It seems that from the beginning to the end of his voyage of faith, and in spite of his not infrequent expressions of extreme desolation such as those which reveal the empathy he felt for those in his account of two notorious shipwrecks, he was reflecting on his own life experience. But he was not without the Christian hope of eternal glory:

Man, how fast his fire-dint, his mark on mind, is gone!

Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark

Drowned. O pity and indignation! Manshape, that shone

Sheer off, disseveral, a star, death blots black out; nor mark

Is any of him at all so stark

But vastness blurs and time beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,

A heart’s-clarion! Away grief’s gasping, joyless days, dejection.

Across my foundering deck shone

A beacon, an eternal beam. Flesh fade, and moral trash

Fall to the residuary worm; world’s wildfire, leave but ash:

In a flash, at a trumpet crash,

I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and

This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,

Is immortal diamond.[55]

Conclusion

The spiritual certainty which Hopkins sought, and discovered in and through the Catholic Church, was significant because he did not find it in the resorts more typical of the Church in his day and age: for instance, and in particular, in the outlook of Thomas Aquinas who had tried to reconcile Aristotelian scientific rationalism with Christian revelation, as a series of ladders culminating in God. However at Oxford, Hopkins had been introduced to Duns Scotus. ‘While Aquinas had asserted that “grace builds upon nature,” Scotus, kindred to Gerard’s temperament, could be said to have shown that “grace already inhabits nature”.’[56] He embraced this conviction as a Roman Catholic ‘realist’ whose faith was not ‘speculative’ or ‘theoretical’, but experiential. All created things and beings have a distinctive God-created and particular God-revealing ‘inscape’ and ‘instress’ which speaks briefly but concisely for God in the world.

The last poem that Hopkins wrote seven weeks before he died was realistic like the rest. In deep self-awareness, he used the image of a disappointed pregnant mother to illustrate his experience of the hopeful but demanding process of the Jesuits in their training of a promising priest. But he thought they would be disappointed. ‘The fine delight that fathers thought’ they foresaw in the training of an exceptional Jesuit priest was not fulfilled as he, or they, had anticipated. Regarding his assessment of his own written verses. Hopkins also concluded that he was but a poet manqué.

Sweet fire the sire of muse, my soul needs this;

I want the one rapture of an inspiration.

O then if in my lagging lines you miss

The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation,

My winter world, that scarcely breathes that bliss

Now, yields you, with some sighs, our explanation.[57]

In short, he died as a disappointed priest and an unpublished poet. But he died a ‘happy’ faithful man. Time has revealed him to be all that Newman could have expected of one of his protégés: a Christian who was a successful failure.

Primary Source

The Poems of Gerald Manley Hopkins, Fourth Edition, ed.  W.H.Gardner and N.H. Mac Kenzie, Oxford University Press, 1967. First edition, ed. Robert Bridges, OUP, 1918. Second Edition, OUP, 1930. Third Edition, OUP, 1948.

 Other Sources (in chronological order)

The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Eds. Humphrey House & Graham Storey, Oxford University Press, 1959.

The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ed. Christopher Devlin, Oxford University Press, 1959.

A Concordance to the English Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Compilers: Robert J. Dilligan & Todd Bender, Madison, Milwaukee, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1970.

Ellsberg, Margaret R. Created to Praise: The Language of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Oxford University Press, 1987.

The Fine Delight, Centenary Essays on Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ed. Francis L. Fennell, Chicago, Loyola University Press, 1989.

The Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Wordsworth Poetry Library, Ware, 1994.

Mac Kenzie, Norman H. A Reader’s Guide to Gerard Manley Hopkins, 2nd edition, Philadelphia, S. Joseph’s University Press, 2008.

Mariani, Paul, Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life, New York, Viking, 2008.

The Gospel in Gerard Manley Hopkins: Selections from His Poems, Letters, Journals, and Spiritual Writings, Ed. Margaret R. Ellsberg, Walden, New York, Plough Publishing, 2017.

Randall, Catharine, A Heart Lost in Wonder: The Life and Faith of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2020.

Notes:

[1] My personal story contrasts with that of Gerard Manley Hopkins in its context but is surprisingly similar in some of its features and consequences, if not in the outcome. When I left parochial ministry many years before retirement it was not, I think, because of failure or disappointment. It was because our parish church council had, with the help of a highly regarded consultant, drawn up a plan for the future of the large parish of which I was Rector. It had local approval but in the event it was rejected by the Bishop and the Patron of the parish, which left me nonplussed, and facing an uncertain future while seeking the way ahead.

[2] Poem No. 149 (‘Ashboughs’ was probably written in 1885).  In 1961 a twentieth century contemplative, Thomas Merton (1915-68),  also used  a tree as the picture in which he discerned God speaking through his created order; ‘The more a tree is like itself, the more it is like Him. If it tried to be something else which it was never intended to be, it would be less like God and therefore it would give Him less glory.’ Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation , Shambhala Publications, Boston & London, 2003, p.31.

[3] Poem No. 8 Untitled (July 1864).

[4] See Essays and Reviews (1860).

[5] Poem No. 20 ‘The Halfway House’ (October 1865). In his Apologia (1864), Newman had described Anglicanism as the half-way house to Rome.

[6] Robert Bernard Martin, Gerald Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life, New York, Putnam, 1991, p. 80.

[7] Poem No. 13 Untitled (April 1865).

[8] An affirmation of ‘transubstantiation’ in a Eucharistic hymn by Thomas Aquinas (1225-74):   ‘Adoro te supplex latens deitas’. Translated by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

[9] Probably born in Berwickshire, Duns Scotus both studied and taught in Oxford, and possibly Cambridge.

[10] Poem No. 44 ‘Duns Scotus’s  Oxford’ (1878 or 79).

[11] Poem No. 129 Untitled  (Christmas 1865).

[12] Poem No. 22 ‘The Habit of Perfection’ (January 1866).

[13] First, he taught at S. Mary’s College, Sheffield, (1877-78), before he was posted to a fashionable Jesuit church in London (1878), and from thence back to his beloved Oxford (1878-79) and ministry in S. Aloysius Church, before returning to Manchester and then to the slums of Liverpool and Glasgow (1881).

[14] See Norman H. Mac Kenzie, A Reader’s Guide to Gerard Manley Hopkins, 2nd edition, Philadelphia, S. Joseph’s University Press, 2008, p. 106.

[15] Poem No. 57 (probably written at S. Bueno’s  College, c. 1877).

[16] haecceitas,  when literally translated, conflates haec which means: ’in this particular instance’; ecce which means ‘look!’; and caecitas  which means ‘what is indiscernible’ or (summarising Duns Scotus’s theological conclusion) ‘of God’. First proposed by John Duns Scotus, haecceias is therefore a non-qualitative God-given property responsible for a specific a thing’s individuation and identity, or ‘this-is-ness’.

[17] As the Foreword explains; for most of this author’s Anglican ministry before retirement (1960-2000) he was engaged in training ordination candidates, and the newly ordained, for their future pastoral ministries.

[18] Poem No. 31 ‘God’s  Grandeur’ (February 1877, then revised, as was frequently Hopkins’ custom).

[19] Poem No. 33 ‘Spring’  (May 1877 at  S. Beuno’s).

[20] Poem No. 35 ‘The Sea and the Skylark’ (Originally ‘Walking by the Sea’ May 1877 at Rhyl).

[21] Poem No. 39 ‘The Caged Skylark’ (May 9-14, 1877 at Rhyl).

[22] Poem No. 36 ‘The Windhover: To Christ our Lord’ (May 1877), in a letter June 22, 1879.

[23] Poem No. 40 ‘The Lantern out of Doors’ (S. Bueno’s possibly in March or April 1877).

[24] Poem No. 37 ‘Pied Beauty’  (Summer 1877).

25 Omnis creatura, secundum quod est ens, repraesentat Deum. In Ordinatio or The Oxford Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, Book 1, Distinction 3, Question 4.

[26] A year later (16 July 1878) he explained, ‘The Hurrahing Sonnet was the outcome of half an hour of extreme enthusiasm as I walked home alone one day from fishing in the Elwy.’ Mac Kenzie 2008:79.

[27] Poem No. 38 ‘Hurrahing in Harvest’ (1st September, 1877).

[28] Poem  No. 28  ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, (December 6-7 1875. Written  at S. Bueno’s early in the course of his training there).

[29] Poem No. 41 ‘The Loss of the Eurydice’, Foundered March 24, 1878. (Written post-Ordination in Mount  S. Mary’s,  April, 1878).

[30] Poem No. 44 ‘Duns Scotus’s Oxford’ (possibly 1878 , or more likely as dated in one script, March 1879).

[31] Poem No. 43 ‘Binsey Poplars: felled 1879’ (Oxford, 13 March 1879).

[32] Poem  No.53 ‘Felix Randal’ (Liverpool, 28 April 1880).

[33] Poem No. 55 ‘Spring and Fall: to a young child’ ( written at Rose Hill, Lydiate, 7 September 1880).

[34] In a letter 26 October 1880. The Major Works, Including All the Poems and Selected Prose, ed. Catherine Phillips, Oxford University Press, 2002,  p. xxxi.

[35] Poem No. 56 ‘Inversnaid’  (Loch Lomond, 28 September 1881).

[36] Cited in Robert Bernard Martin, Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life, New York, Putnam, 1991, p.338.

[37] Poem No. 58 ‘Ribblesdale’ (Stonyhurst 1882-83). In old English: to ‘reave’ is ‘to commit ravages’; to ‘reck’ is ‘to care about’; to ‘brow’ in this context is to ‘overlook’.

[38] The Gospel in Gerard Manley Hopkins: Selections from His Poems, Letters, Journals, and Spiritual Writings, Ed. Margaret R. Ellsberg,  New York, Plough Publishing House, 2017, p. 137.

[39] Poem No. 59 ‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’ (Hampstead 1880 & Stonyhurst 1882). Note with reference to the injunction: to ‘spare’, the Latin, spero, means ‘I hope’ or ‘I look for.’

[40] Poem No. 64 ‘Carrion Comfort’ (‘composed about August 1885 and revised September 1887.’ Mac Kenzie 2008:173).

[41] Poem No. 150 ‘The times are nightfall’ (undated. ‘The handwriting suggests 1886.’ Mac Kenzie 2008:228).

[42] The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, Ed. Charles Stephen Dessain, London, Nelson, 1961, xxx.142.

[43] Parochial and Plain Sermons, London, Rivingtons, 1881, 8 vols., ii.93, v.319-20, viii.130 & 141. Cited by Ian Ker, Oxford University, ‘G.M. Hopkins Archive 1987-2024’:-

https://www.gerardmanleyhopkins.org/Lectures_2007/hopkins_and_newman.html#:~:text=The%20Letters%20and%20Diaries%20of,Oxford%3A%20Clarendon%20Press%2C%201973%2D)%2C%20xxii.289. (2nd August 2025).

[44] Sermon and Devotional Writings, Ed. Christopher Devlin, Oxford University Press, 1967, pp. 262-3. Cited in Mac Kenzie 2008:177.

[45] Poem No. 65 ‘No worst, there is none….’ (undated, but possibly 1884-85, Mac Kenzie 2008:175).

[46] Poem No. 150 (untitled and handwritten, possibly 1886, Mac Kenzie  2008:228).

[47] Poem No. 153 ‘To his Watch’  This was handwritten on a single sheet with corrections including, ‘We have only one spell on earth and must use that one well’. (probably Dublin 1885-86, Mac Kenzie 2008:229),

[48]  Poem No. 74 Justus quidem tu es, ‘Thou art indeed just, Lord’ (Dublin 17 March 1889). Hopkins died 8 June 1889.

[49] Poem No. 66 ‘To seem the stranger lies my lot’ (undated).

[50] Poem No. 67 ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark.’ (undated, but probably c. 1885).

[51] Poem No. 68 ‘Patience, hard thing!’  (undated but probably 1885-86).

[52] Poem No. 69 ‘My own heart let me have pity’ (undated but possibly 1885-86).

[53] Poem No. 151 (on a page possibly torn from the Dublin Note-book 1884-85. Mac Kenzie 2008:228.)

[54] Paul Mariani, Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life, New York, Viking, 2008, p. 425.

[55] Poem  No. 72 ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection’,  (‘composed in Dublin 26 July 1888, “on a windy bright day” preceded and followed by floods of rain –  a  “preposterous summer.” Cited in Mac Kenzie 2008:196).

[56] Catharine Randall,  A Heart Lost in Wonder: The Life and Faith of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, p. xx.

[57] Poem No. 76 ‘To R. B.’ (22 April 1889). Robert Bridges (1844-1930), was both to publish and promote his work. He also was a poet who in 1913 became Poet Laureate. A very Broad Church Anglican friend from their days together in Oxford, Hopkins was nicknamed ‘Posey’, whereas Bridges was known as a ‘hearty’. In 1918 and 1930, Bridges was responsible for the first and second published editions of Hopkins’ poetry.