Relevant background | Themes | Poetic Techniques

Gerard Manley Hopkins [1844-1899]

Relevant Background

• GM Hopkins wrote Nature Poetry and Spiritual Poetry, often combined.
• Hopkins was raised an Anglican and was highly educated. He was brilliant at the classics and at etymology (the study of the origin of words). In his early adult life he was seen as unusual but quick-witted and had admiring friends.
• After he converted to Catholicism in 1865 and began studying to become a Jesuit Priest his personality changed. He became aloof and sour, curbing his sense of humour. He resigned himself to the strict rules of Jesuit life.
• Eventually, he became a teacher of classics but with time he was alienated by his religious vocation without being able to face that truth about himself. His Terrible Sonnets show that he displaced that alienation into self-disgust.
• Hopkins’ conversion proved problematic. It led more to spiritual suffering than fulfilment. It caused him to suppress his emotions and his poetic talent. Due to his understanding of Jesuit rules, he did not publish his poems.
• Hopkins was intensely devout, obedient and personally strict. This is clear both from the Terrible Sonnets and from the homage to God he expressed in many of his other poems. The reader has to decipher whether that homage was spontaneous or out of a sense of obligation—ecstasy or obedience?
• Hopkins’ poems reveal his elation in portraying nature. He had a natural intuition for, and response to, beauty in the world around him. But the poems show that he often transcended, denied or set aside his aesthetic pleasure. He relied on an obscure church philosopher Dun Scotus to justify for himself his delight in pleasurable observation of the natural world. In truth, Hopkins was not happy with himself. His self-torture is manifested in his poetry.
• His frequent inability to sustain his euphoric tone deserves enquiry. Were his lapses from euphoria caused by his despair at human indifference towards conserving the earth’s beauty? Were they caused by religious zeal? Or by puritanical guilt? Or by his perception of his duty as a priest?
• In some of his poems, Hopkins modified his initially excited tone. Sometimes, even in his more up-beat poems, the tone veered momentarily towards despair or disgust. Towards the close of his poems, Hopkins often sublimated his joy at natural beauty into spiritual adulation for God’s power.
• Rather than dwell on sensual beauty or the pleasure he felt from nature’s grandeur, some of Hopkins’ poems reveal how he felt the urge to transcend his rapture and turn his joyous experience into a tribute to God.
• It was unnatural for a man of Hopkins’ disposition to put to one side his sensitive and happy response to all that he perceived. His religious vows caused him to abandon delights and hate his inner self. Increasingly, he grew ineffective as a teacher and preacher and suffered ill health and desolation.
• Consequently, the later poems that Hopkins wrote show how he suffered from self-hatred, guilt, religious doubt, spiritual bitterness and despair.
• Self-denial and genius are a volatile mixture. The combination certainly led to a unique poetic style: obscure expression combined with a rare gift for poetic invention. He used terse and condensed language both to celebrate beauty in the natural world and to expresses his self doubt, self hatred and torture in trying to please an invisible God
• Hopkins had a revolutionary approach to communication and description: He invented words and omitted words; he inverted meaning; he used fresh colloquial expressions; he used daring imagery; he devised new rules of rhythm; he created meaning through extraordinary verbal sound effects and he performed gymnastic feats with syntax leading to condensed meaning.
• Although Hopkins is a difficult poet, knowledge of his background and style will enable assiduous students to de-code him. The rewards outweigh the drawbacks. Hopkins’ great achievement is that he articulates the unique shape, the texture, the individual beauty and energy of his poetic subjects.
• For unique shape, texture, surface beauty, inner qualities and individuality Hopkins coined the term ‘inscape’.
• For the sensation of beauty, the inner energy and life force that the inscape emitted to the perceiver, Hopkins coined the term ‘instress’.
• He re-invented language so as to epitomise inscape and to reveal instress.
• In other words Hopkins verbalised the unique inner qualities [instress] and appearance [inscape] of his human and natural subject matter.
• Although a Victorian poet and a suppressed personality, his style is very twentieth century. In literary tradition, his reputation stems from his experimentation with language, the brilliance of his arguments within the tight sonnet form and his epiphanies as he observed the multi-dimensional individuality of everything he beheld. To some he is a radical genius.

Themes

1. All individual beauty in nature or man is an expression of God’s beauty:

‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God’ [God’s Grandeur]
‘For Christ plays in ten thousand places’ [Kingfishers]
‘A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning in Eden garden’ [Spring]
‘And the fire that breaks from thee then a billion times told lovelier, more dangerous, o my chevalier!’ [The Windhover]
‘Glory be to God for dappled things
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow …
‘Landscape plotted and pieced -- fold, fallow, and plough’ [Pied Beauty]
‘He fathers forth whose beauty is past change’ [Pied Beauty]
‘Oh thou lord of life send my roots rain’ [Thou art indeed Just]
‘Mended being anointed and all’ [Felix Randal]

Theme 1 above and theme 2 below can be discussed as a tension within Hopkins.

2. Elation at human experience based on an instinctive response to natural beauty and empathy for the human condition [regardless of God]:

‘There lives the dearest freshness deep down things’ [God’s Grandeur’]
‘What would the world be, once bereft of wet and wildness?’ [Inversnaid]
‘I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
 dom of daylight's dauphin’ [The Windhover]
‘My heart in hiding stirred for a bird—the achieve of, the mastery of the thing’ [The Windhover]
‘shéer plód makes plough down sillion shine’ [The Windhover]
 ‘Nothing is so beautiful as spring when weeds in wheels shoot long and lovely and lush’ [Spring]
‘Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying, What I do is me: for that I came.’ [Kingfishers]
‘…thrush through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
the ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing’ [Spring]
‘This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears’ [Felix Randal]
‘thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers’ [Felix Randal]

3.      Everything has individual beauty and its own inner energy:

‘Each mortal thing does one thing and the same’ [Kingfishers]
 ‘It will flame out, like shining from shook foil’ [God’s Grandeur’]
 ‘There lives the dearest freshness deep down things’ [God’s Grandeur’]
‘All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled’ [Pied Beauty]
‘Brute beauty and valour and act, oh,
air, pride, plume, here Buckle’[The Windhover]
‘his mould of man’ [Felix Randal]

4.      Hopkins both cherished the environment and feared for the damage done to it by humans:
[To show how Hopkins cherished it you should select some of the quotes provided for in themes 1,2&3; for his fears select from the quotes below]

 ‘Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
  And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
  And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell.’[God’s Grandeur’]

‘cloy’ [Spring]

‘What would the world be, once bereft
of wet and of wildness? Let them be left’ [Inversnaid]

5. Tension arises from an ambiguous relationship with God. Nature may reflect divine beauty, God is a protecting and redemptive influence but God is also problematic because he is remote.

6. Use some of the affirmative quotes cited under theme 1 above and also the following quotes, in order to discuss both aspects of a soul in crisis:

‘The Holy Ghost over the bent world broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings’ [God’s Grandeur’]
‘Since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom tendered to him’ [Felix Randal]
‘My duty all ended’ [Felix Randal]
‘Cries like dead letters sent to dearest him that lives alas! away’ [I wake]
‘God’s most deep decree bitter would have me taste’ [I wake]
‘Comforter where is your comforting?’ [No Worst]
‘Mary mother of us where is your relief?’ [No Worst]
‘Why do sinner’s ways prosper?’ [Thou art]
‘Thou dost defeat, thwart me’ [Thou art]

7. Disgust, Alienation, Despair, Self-hatred and Personal Frustration cloud the Aesthetic Vision. Balance the quotes used for themes 2,3,4&5 and also consider the following quotes:           

‘And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell’ [God’s Grandeur’]
‘the sots and thralls of lust do in spare hours more thrive’ [Thou Art]
‘Sickness broke him’ [Felix Randal]
‘a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
it rounds and rounds Despair to drowning’ [Inversnaid]
‘Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy’ [Spring]
‘Time’s eunuch’ [Thou art]
‘But not I build’ [Thou art]
‘Pitched past pitch of grief’ [No Worst]
‘I am gall. I am heartburn’ [I Wake]
‘Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Self yeast of spirit a dull dough sours’ [I Wake]
‘Their scourge to be as I am mine, their sweating selves’ [I Wake]

Poetic Techniques

Some of the quotes below have a colour coding in order to partially highlight sound techniques, sound harmony or verbal music.

Sound Effects
The colour coding for sound repetition is as follows:

Alliteration

Assonance

Internal Rhyme or Cross Rhyme or Conventional (end of line) Rhyme

Consonance, including sibilance.

Consonance and Internal Rhyme may incorporate Alliteration and Assonance.

Try to add your own further examples

If you refer to these techniques when answering on a poet, state their purpose in re-enforcing meaning or creating the language construct that a poem is. Present them as evidence of the poet’s craft.

Sound effects:

‘rinse and wring the ear’[Spring]

Musical effects enhance Hopkins’ language and imagery. In the above quote the repeated ‘ri’ sound provides a shrill music that imitates the thrush and enhances the meaning of these unusual words for birdsong. The ‘ri’ sound is invigorating, a form of onomatopoeia as it imitates the birdsong and also is the reverse of the sound of ‘ear’ or ‘ear’ backwards. This analysis shows how far Hopkins will go to achieve a sound effect. Here is another example of onomatopoeia: ‘Generations have trod, have trod, have trod’.  Figure out why. Find more!

Learn from the following analysed lines how to discover your own sound patterns:

‘For Christ plays in ten thousand places’ [Kingfishers]
‘A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the b eginn ing in Eden garden’ [Spring]

‘a billion times told love ier, more dangerous, o my chevalier!’ [The Windhover]

‘What would the world be, [] once bereft of wet and wildness?’ [Inversnaid]

‘Pitched past pitch of grief’ [No Worst]

‘Pitched past pitch of grief’ [No Worst]

Rhyme

Hopkins’ end of line rhyming is very patterned. In the sonnets the rhyme is Petrarchan and mostly according to the following scheme;
abba abba cdcdcd

For example in God’s Grandeur the 14 end sounds are as follows:
od, oil, oil, od, od, oil, oil, od, ent, ings, ent, ings, ent, ings.

There are only four different end-sounds for the sonnet: ‘od’, ‘oil’, ‘ings’ and ‘ent’.

In the other poems there is a set pattern also, easy to pick out. Now try to discover your own. The pattern in rhyme and the evident sound repetitions are intended to suggest order and shape in the universe as designed by God. But this may also reflect Hopkins’ acceptance of a scientific world order—which marked a progressive side to his character.

Sprung Rhythm 
[This is an experimental rhythm technique that added to the fluency of certain poems by counting stressed syllables only. Conventional poetry was based on the iambic foot, an unstressed syllable followed by a single stressed syllable. In Hopkins’ lines only the stressed syllables count—for many of his poems he dropped the formula approach of matching stressed and unstressed syllables that poets usually keep to]. The two main examples are Felix Randal and The Windhover. Note the 16 syllables you pronounce when you utter the second line from The Windhover. Only 5 Syllables are stressed, though.

‘dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding…’
[The Windhover]

Now try to discover your own sprung rhythm, verbal music/sound effects.

Tone

Hopkins tone is rarely light but there is a lot of variation of tone within poems. Add your own examples.

Solemn: ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God’ [God’s Grandeur’]
Admiring: ‘Glory be to God for dappled things’ [Pied Beauty]
Anxious/Despairing:  ‘What would the world be, once bereft of wet and wildness?’ [Inversnaid]
Self-hating/bitter: ‘blood brimmed the curse’.[I Wake]
Disgust: ‘And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell’ [God’s Grandeur’]
Frustration: ‘I am gall. I am heartburn’ [I Wake]
Depressing:  ‘my lament is cries countless’ [I Wake]
Intimate:  ‘O my chevalier!’ [The Windhover]
Euphoric:  ‘the mastery of the thing!’ [The Windhover]
Tender and awed:  ‘with ah! bright wings’ [God’s Grandeur’]
Respectful and gracious: ‘Thou art indeed just, Lord’ [Thou Art]

Condensed language [including ellipsis—the omission of words]:
[‘with’ is omitted] ‘blood brimmed [with] the curse’. [I Wake]
[Cryptic—many words omitted]:‘Selves – goes itself’ [Kingfishers]
[‘like’ is omitted] ‘Thrush's eggs look [like] little low heavens’ [Spring]                  

‘He fathers forth’ [Pied Beauty]
‘fretty chervil’ [Thou art]
‘the sots’ [Thou Art]

Obscure language:

‘Self yeast of spirit a dull dough sours’ [I Wake]
‘the fleece of his foam flutes’ [Inversnaid]
‘just man justices’ [Kingfishers]
‘force I must be brief'[No Worst]
‘a comfort serves in a whirlwind’ [No Worst]

Unusual colloquial words:

‘degged’ [Inversnaid]
‘all road’ [Felix Randal]

‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God’ [God’s Grandeur]
‘Pitched past pitch of grief’ [No Worst]
‘dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon’ [The Windhover]
‘Buckle’[The Windhover]

‘the achieve’ [The Windhover]
‘twindles’[Inversnaid]
‘fleshed’ [Felix Randal]
‘forepangs’ [No Worst]

Compound words:

 ‘rollrock highroad’‘[Inversnaid]
A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth [Inversnaid]
‘féll-frówning’ [Inversnaid]
‘big-boned and hardy-handsome’ [Felix Randal]
 ‘Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls’ [Pied Beauty]
‘no-man-fathomed.’ [No Worst]

Unusual Syntax [word order]:

Clause disorder: ‘He fathers forth whose beauty is past change’ [Pied Beauty]
Clause disorder: ‘till time when reason rambled in it and some fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended?’ [Felix Randal]

Condensed syntax [word order that ‘inscapes’ and reveals intense emotion]:

 ‘Self yeast of spirit a dull dough sours’ [I Wake]
3 subjects, 3 verbs, 1 object (3 alliterating pairs): ‘Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse’.[I Wake]

Metaphor:‘Oh thou lord of life send my roots rain’ [Thou art]
Metaphor:  ‘Time’s eunuch’ [Thou art]
Metaphor:  ‘horseback brown’ [Inversnaid]
Simile: ‘Cries like dead letters’ [I wake]
Synecdoche: ‘My tongue had taught thee comfort’ [Felix Randal]
Metaphor: ‘the fire that breaks from thee’ [The Windhover]

Hyperbole [exaggeration]:

‘…a billion times told lovelier, more dangerous, o my chevalier!’ [The Windhover]
‘For Christ plays in ten thousand places’ [Kingfishers]
‘blood brimmed the curse’.[I Wake]

Form

Hopkins favoured the Petrarchan form of Sonnet with its switch of thought or feeling between the octave and the sestet. The sonnet is a good vehicle for intense emotion and condensed argument.