Gerard Manley Hopkins (The poet-priest of Singing Birds)

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
(The poet-priest of Singing Birds)

Birds, especially, the singing birds, exercised a great spell on the Victorian poet-priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Many of his well-known poems and sonnets have something to do with birds, their music, movement or strength. Thus the Cuckoo, the Woodlark, the Skylark, the Windhover exercised a powerful influence over him. His intense and fervid reflections were triggered off by the sound and sight of birds on their daring flights. His deeply sensuous and intensely religious temperament found its counterpoise in the melodious and powerful beats of the birds on their wings. Hopkins’ life illustrates how a fervent Nature-poet could develop himself into a mystic by the formative discipline, without ceasing to be the admirer of the Earth’s Glory and God’s Grandeur.

Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “the Star of Balliol”, became, of his own choice, the novitiate of the Society of Jesuits. On becoming a Jesuit, he burnt all the verses, nay all the boats, with a firm resolve not to write any more. He resolved to write no more.

He was lost in delight, in spite of his firm resolve, in the world of inscapes. The principle of individuation of Don Scotus supplied him with the necessary philosophical corraboration for his poetic effusions. He came across the writing of this Medieval Philosopher, Duns Scotus, while he was under the rigorous training for the priesthood. Even before he left Oxford, Hopkins had realised that pure aestheticism, to the exclusion of every other purpose in art, was a dangerous single path. Much of the robustness of Hopkins’ mature poetry was the result of the tension between the creative impulse and acquired discipline. In other words, the tension was the outcome of “the naked encounter of sensualism and asceticism.” This inner conflict was misconstrued as the indication of fundamental doubt. “Hopkins’ poems”, observed a discerning critic, Dr Pick, “are love letters sent to the dearest that lives far away.”

The fervent poet-priest was captivated by the wordless music and artless movement of birds. On hearing the Cuckoo, he cried with flushed delight:

Repeat that, repeat,
Cuckoo, bird, and open ear-well, heart-springs, delightfully sweet,
With a ballad, with a ballad, a rebound
Off trundled timber and scoops of the hillside ground,
hollow hollow hollow ground:
The whole landscape flushed on a sudden at a sound.
(Some Unfinished poems and Fragments)

The sweet joy of the Woodlark, with its “balance and buoy”, tickles him with delight and wonder:

Teevo, cheevo, cheevio chee:
O where, what can that be?
Weedio, weedio ! there again!
So tiny a trickle of song-strain;
And all round not to be found
For brier, bough, furrow, on green ground
Before or behind or far on at hand
Either left either right
Any where in the sunlight.
(The Woodlark)

He dives deep to pick up the lost cheer and charm of earth’s past prime in the two noises too old to end:

On ear and ear two noises too old to end
Trench-right, the tide that ramps against the shore;
With a flood or a fall, low lull-off or all roar,
Frequenting there while moon shall wear and wend.
Left hand, off land, I hear the lark ascend,
His rash-fresh, re-winded new-skeined score
In crisps of curl off wild winch whirl, and pour
And pelt music, till none’s to spill nor spend.
(The Sea and the Skylark)

The enticing trickle of the Woodlark, the radiating flush of the Cuckoo song, the intuitive divination of the lost cheer in the two voices of the Sea and the Skylark, deepen into the melancholy reflection at the state of the caged Spirit and Skylark:

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 indrudgery, day-labouring-out life sage. (TheCagedSkylark)

The drooping spirit of Hopkins soars up in boundless ecstasy with the daring Windhover:

I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom
of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-drawn-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, oft forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurland gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart inhiding
Stirred for a bird,the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
(The Windhover)

He sees “the dearest freshess deep down things” and ever surging energy of Nature that glows with God’s Grandeur:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God,
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed–Why do men then now rack his rod?
(God’s Grandeur)

“Pied Beauty” is a sublime paean to God who fathers-forth all things of contrasting qualities and shapes:

Glory be to God for dappled things–
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fres-fire coal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced-fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and trackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour, a dazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change; praise him.
(Pied Beauty)

Every line of this poet-priest sensitively curves itself into the infinite music and variegated pattern of life. “The inscape” joy spurts out in the early poems. In the later poems, the poets submission to the impact of Jesuit discipline, putting Christ at the summit in the vast heirarchy of Being and Becoming, comes out with greater ardour. “The ceaseless creation and freshness deep fascinate him. Finally the poet of intense ecstasy deepens into a mystic, delighting in the vision of the Holy Ghost brooding over the bent world, with warm breast and bright wings.

In Hopkins, there is intense fusion of thought and feeling; insight into the glory of Earth and its musical patterns. He is the poet who ferments in other poets. He is, indeed, “the most powerful and profound religious poet” endowed with unusual integrity–both intellectual and aesthetic.