ellauri095.html on line 51: Hopkins’s most famous Welsh sonnet, “The Windhover,” reveals that for him this Book of Nature, like the Bible, demanded a moral application to the self. Hopkins wrote in his notes on St. Ignatius: “This world is word, expression, news of God”; “it is a book he has written.... a poem of beauty: what is it about? His praise, the reverence due to him, the way to serve him.... Do I then do it? Never mind others now nor the race of man: DO I DO IT?” One of Hopkins’s attempts to answer that question is “The Windhover.”
ellauri095.html on line 55: Hopkins did live such a life, but the windhover reminded him of Jesus’ great achievements after Nazareth. The windhover “stirred” his desire to become a great knight of faith, one of those who imitate not only the constraint but also the “achieve of, the mastery of” this great chevalier. The “ecstasy” of the windhover recalls Hopkins’s initial desire in “Il Mystico” to be lifted up on “Spirit’s wings” so “that I may drink that ecstasy/Which to pure souls alone may be.” Ultimately, Hopkins became aware that he had been hiding from the emotional risks of total commitment to becoming a “pure” soul. The phrase “hiding” thus suggests not only hiding from the world or from worldly ambition but also hiding from God.
ellauri095.html on line 57: The words “here/Buckle” which open the sestet mean “here in my heart,” therefore, as well as here in the bird and here in Jesus. Hopkins’s heart-in-hiding, Christ’s prey, sensed Him diving down to seize it for his own. Just as the bird buckled its wings together and thereby buckled its “brute beauty” and “valour”and capacity to “act,” so the speaker responds by buckling together all his considerable talents and renewing his commitment to the imitation of Christ in order to buckle down, buckle to, in serious preparation for the combat, the grappling, the buckling with the enemy. As Paul said, “Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the Devil.”
ellauri095.html on line 198: The meaning of “inscape,” that conundrum of Hopkins’s readers. A common misconception of the word is that it signifies simply a unique particular, the unusual feature, the singular appearance.
ellauri095.html on line 213: it would appear that Arthur Hopkins’s superior sketching abilities encouraged his older but smaller brother to concentrate his energies on literary and religious creativity instead.
ellauri095.html on line 250: Both poets concluded their literary careers with devotional commentaries: in Hopkins’s case, his unfinished “Commentary on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.”
ellauri095.html on line 455: Their rivalry began with Hopkins’s response to her poem “The Convent Threshold.” Geoffrey Hartman was clearly on the right track when he suggested in the introduction to Hopkins: A Collection of Critical Essays (1966) that “Hopkins seems to develop his lyric structures out of the Pre-Raphaelite dream vision. In his early ‘A Vision of the Mermaids’; and ‘St. Dorothea’; he may be struggling with such poems as Christina Rossetti’s ‘Convent Threshold’; and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘The Blessed Damozel,’ poems in which the poet stands at a lower level than the vision, or is irrevocably, pathetically distanced.” Such poems were the essence of medievalism in poetry according to William Morris, who felt that Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” was the germ from which all Pre-Raphaelite poetry sprang. Standing beyond Keats, however, the primary source was Dante. Christina Rossetti clearly alludes to Beatrice’s appeal to Dante in “The Convent Threshold”:
ellauri095.html on line 512: The Wreck of the Deutschland became the occasion for Hopkins’s incarnation as a poet in his own right. He broke with the Keatsian wordpainting style with which he began, replacing his initial prolixity, stasis, and lack of construction with a concise, dramatic unity. He rejected his original attraction to Keats’s sensual aestheticism for a clearly moral, indeed a didactic, rhetoric. He saw nature not only as a pleasant spectacle as Keats had; he also confronted its seemingly infinite destructiveness as few before or after him have done. In this shipwreck he perceived the possibility of a theodicy, a vindication of God’s justice which would counter the growing sense of the disappearance of God among the Victorians. For Hopkins, therefore, seeing more clearly than ever before the proselytic possibilities of art, his rector’s suggestion that someone write a poem about the wreck became the theological sanction he needed to begin reconciling his religious and poetic vocations.
ellauri095.html on line 514: Nevertheless, although The Wreck of the Deutschland was a great breakthrough to the vision of God immanent in nature and thus to the sacramentalism that was to be the basis of the great nature poems of the following years, when Hopkins sent the poem to his friend Robert Bridges, Bridges refused to reread it despite Hopkins’s pleas. The poem was also rejected by the Jesuit magazine the Month, primarily because of its new “sprung” rhythm, and many subsequent readers have had difficulty with it as well.
ellauri095.html on line 522: In addition to specific inspirations such as these, the father communicated to his son a sense of nature as a book written by God which leads its readers to a thoughtful contemplation of Him, a theme particularly evident in Manley and Thomas Marsland Hopkins’s book of poems, Pietas Metrica. Consequently, Gerard went on to write poems which were some of the best expressions not only of the Romantic approach to nature but also the older tradition of explicitly religious nature poetry.
ellauri095.html on line 535: Manley Hopkins’s desire to preserve a Wordsworthian love of nature in his children is evident in his “To a Beautiful Child”:
ellauri095.html on line 545: This was a remarkably prophetic poem for Manley Hopkins’s first “beautiful child,” Gerard, born only a year after this poem was published.
ellauri095.html on line 550: Compare Gerard Manley Hopkins’s version of an attempted rescue with the account in the London Times, one of the sources he used for The Wreck of the Deutschland. According to the Times, “One brave sailor, who was safe in the rigging went down to try to save a child or woman who was drowning on deck. He was secured by a rope to the rigging, but a wave dashed him against the bulwark, and when daylight dawned his headless body, detained by the rope, was swinging to and fro with the waves.” Hopkins wrote:
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