Transcription
Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of the greatest and most innovative poets of the past two centuries. Christopher Ricks calls him the most original poet of the Victorian age. Robert Bernard Martin, a biographer of Hopkins, claims that his poetry was as influential as T.S. Eliot's initiation of the modernist movement, which we know is a huge statement.
Other poets, such as W.H. Auden and Dylan Thomas, found his unique prose liberating. And Cecil Day-Lewis, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, they all, and many others, borrowed from Hopkins's technical innovations, the metrical innovations we'll be talking about today.
So, in terms of devotional poetry, Hopkins is unique in that his poetry works according to an aesthetic spiritual principle that he perceived in nature and in life. That is to say, life, really nature, encompasses not just landscapes, but human nature as well, and even the spiritual nature. For him, in this lecture, we'll explore his unique approach to language, rhythm, and form, while also considering his religious beliefs. So, we'll be looking at his specifically devotional verse. In fact, most of his poetry, and the large body of work of his work, is devotional poetry, poetry.
Now, it's easy to get bogged down in prosody and poetics when lecturing on Hopkins, I think. But his poetry is best understood through the reading of it. And I want to return to a principle that I've been coming to again and again with these lyric poets that we've been studying, and it's that of mimetic enactment, representation, that a poem is essentially the shape of sound and meaning, but it's also an audible incarnation of its content. And this is something that I think Hopkins certainly explicitly believes in.
To get it started, I want to read Hopkins' poem "Inversnaid," which was a brook in Scotland. This really beautifully demonstrates how sound is inextricable from poetic sense.
Inversnaid
This darksome burn, horse-back brown,
His roll-rock high road roaring down
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.
A windpuff bonnet of fawn-froth turns
And twirls over the broth of a pool.
So pitch-black fell frowning it rounds and rounds
Despair to Drowning.
Begged with dew-dappled with dew are the groins of the briar
That the brook treads through.
Wiry heath-packs, flitches of fern,
And the bead-bonnie ash that sits over the burn.
What would the world be, once bereft of wet and of wildness?
Let them be left, oh let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet!
The metrical movement, I'm sure you heard, leaps according to Hopkins' sprung rhythm, as the first three stanzas of the poem enact the movement of Inversnaid. Sprung rhythm is a term that Hopkins coined to describe the, the springing loose of regular meter. You know, all other poetry has what's called running meter. It's, it's regular, but this is sprung meter. It's, it's this heavier use of stressed syllables. And sprung rhythm is the, the architecture of sound for these poems that we're going to be looking at today. The lines leap with spondees, here trip with anapests, collide with trochees, and steady momentarily in the eddying swirl of iambic meter. The contained chaos of its rhythmic rapture, like the brook in Inversnaid, is contained in the sonic assurance of the couplets, the rhyming couplets. Sounds like two sides of the channel that contain it. The rhymes steady the sound, promising and fulfilling. And the sense of the poem overflows at the precipice of some enjambed lines here, moments where the sound is established by the rhyme, but the sense actually overflows into the following line.
And the poem is primarily that of an interior experience, by the sight of Inversnaid, the bliss at the prospect of moving water, and its emotional effects upon the speaker. They become one with the poem once the interior experience has become exterior through voice. The poem changes. Right here, the poet's interior voice surfaces in the final stanza, when with reflective distance, the speaker utters this sober benediction: "Oh, let them be left, wildness and wet; long live the weeds and the wilderness yet!"
Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Victorian poet. He was born in 1844. You pull up his picture. Born in 1844. Here he is. He was the eldest of eight children of Manley Hopkins. He attended Highgate School before entering Oxford. He went to Balliol College and he entered there in 1863. And you'll remember from our last lecture in this series, you'll remember Christina Rossetti, and that the, the Oxford Movement was in full swing at this time. And this places Hopkins right in the center of all of that. And like Rossetti, Hopkins admired the ritualistic worship of the ancient liturgy, that which was restored with the Tractarians. And when he was an undergraduate, he actually became what was called then a Puseyite, who was an admirer of Dr. E.B. Pusey, who was an Ang, who was an Anglo-Catholic, one of the Tractarians. And Pusey was known for championing the middle way, between low church Calvinist or Evangelical liturgies and the Roman Church. He wanted to steady in the middle.
Now, while Hopkins was at Oxford, he, this places him among the major thinkers of the time. He studied under Walter Pater, whose teaching and criticism inclined Hopkins towards the new aestheticism that would emerge in Pater's later writings. I think we can see this in some of Hopkins' writings as well. Hopkins also, at that age, was taken with the humanism of Matthew Arnold. And those of you who watched the lecture on Victorian era poetry know a little bit about that already. You might even think of the Victorian medievalism, including the Oxford Movement, Pater's new aestheticism, and even some of the aspects of Arnold's humanism. It seemed Hopkins was born an old soul. You can kind of see that in his eyes. He was certainly a very serious young man.
On one occasion, as a student, he accepted a wager to abstain from drinking any liquids for a week, in order to prove that people consumed more liquids than the body needed, he said. And his tongue grew black, and he actually collapsed at drill. So, not sure if he made it that whole week, but he gained a reputation around with the students and also the professors. But all this reveals, I think, an earnestness that is somewhere between a boyish gusto and an Arnoldian high seriousness. And it's hard to tell where exactly he is on that spectrum at times.
But more importantly, while he was at Oxford, he met Robert Bridges. And Robert Bridges would become the close friend who would be the one to disclose Hopkins' poetry to the world after Hopkins' death. Hopkins' fame is all posthumous, by the way, at least as a poet. So, Hopkins, as a student, he soon followed the footsteps of John Henry Newman. Some of you may know he was the leading Tractarian of the Oxford Movement, who eventually decamped from the Church of England into Roman Catholicism. So, Hopkins followed him. Hopkins too converted and was actually received into the Roman Church by Newman himself in 1866.
This was a huge blow to the family, who was deeply Protestant, deeply Anglican. And it's difficult to imagine the long-held fear and suspicion and animosity that the English Protestants had for Roman Catholicism. Even Anglo-Catholics, perhaps even especially Anglo-Catholics, even among the high church Anglo-Catholics, converting to Rome was a disgrace. It's something they wanted to prevent among their followers. So, Hopkins' family pretty much denounced him, although he sometimes returned to celebrate Christmas. So, it wasn't a huge break, but yeah, they worked out a deal. He, he had to promise his father, it seems, not to try to convert the younger children of his household and his relatives, at least until they were of their own age, he said. So, there was some working out of the deal.
But then Hopkins became a Jesuit novice in 1868. And the Jesuits, by the way, they were regarded by the English people as the worst kind of Roman Catholic you possibly could be, because they were really the spearhead of the Counter-Reformation. There's a long, contentious history between Jesuits, going all the way back to Robert Southwell, all the way up to the 19th century. So, this was salt on the wound to his friends and family, further widened the rift between himself and home.
And there's an early poem that he wrote sometime between 1865 and 1866, around the time of his conversion, that I think gives us a nice picture of what religious life meant to him, what the ordered life meant to him. It's called "Heaven-Haven," with the subtitle "A Nun Takes the Veil." And remember everything we learned about the Victorian period and its anxieties as we're reading this.
Heaven-Haven
I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail,
And a few lilies blow,
And I have asked to be
Where no storm comes,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.
And it's when you complete the poem that you realize just how much work this subtitle is doing. You never would connect it to this if it were not there. In doubt of the swing of the sea.
So, when Hopkins entered the Society of Jesus, as the order of Jesuits is called, he actually burned the poems he had written up to that point. And he had been writing poetry since he was a schoolboy. And most of his poems that we have are from the period when he began writing poetry again, around the time he was a Jesuit priest and professor in Dublin. He never published them, but shared them with his friend Bridges and others.
So, Hopkins was ordained a priest in 1877 and ended up at the University College, Dublin, where he held a professorship in Greek until his death. He did not live a long life. He died at 45 of typhoid fever in 1889. And it's said that one of the last things he ever said was, "I am so happy. I am so happy." His poems came to light in 1918, when Bridges published the first edition. So, that should give you a sense of where this is located within the modernist movement and where you could possibly trace the influence of Hopkins, where you can begin to do that.
Now, what makes the poetry of Hopkins unique is his use of his own metrical and formal logic that he called inscape. This was an aspect of sprung rhythm that I've introduced. His poem "Spring" is a sensuous celebration of the growth of organic form. We have things shooting out of the earth, and juices, and joy, and lush things all springing from living things. It's partly about inscape, I think. Inscape, for him, was this distinctive attribute or a collection of distinctive attributes that give something its unity, its particularity, its individuality.
One of the scholars of Hopkins, W. Peters, in his 1948 critical study on Hopkins, defines inscape as "the outward reflection of the inner nature of a thing, or a sensible copy or representation of its individual essence." I think there's a popular definition of a sacrament as an outward sign for an inward reality that's been going around for some centuries now. Notice the similarity of that. And J. Robert Barth published a book on Hopkins' sacramental view of nature, viewed nature much like a sacrament in that respect.
Helen Gardner, another excellent critic, in her 1970 edition of Hopkins, writes that inscape means "those aspects of a thing or group of things which constitute its individual and special unity of being, what Hopkins called the individual distinctive beauty, the very essence of its nature."
So, I'd like to read "Spring" for you, and then I'm going to show it to you. Well, now, it does have a visual element. So, let me just share it with you and read it aloud so you can see what it looks like.
Spring
Nothing is so beautiful as spring,
When weeds and wheels shoot long and lovely and lush,
Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and ring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing.
A glassy pear tree leaves and blooms they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With thickness. The racing lambs too have their fling.
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 a cloud, Christ, Lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, oh my mays' child, thy choice and worthy the winning.
For Hopkins, the vision of nature, its inscape, was sacramental, as I suggested. The weeds, the wheels, the thrushes, the eggs, the timber, the echoes, even the descending blue, comprise the inscape, the outer form through which the aesthetic life drive of spring lives. Just as the forms of nature develop from this inner drive, this inner principle which creates the form of things, poetry, he believed, could and should allow the same natural, spiritual, aesthetic principle to determine its form. He wants to tap into this energy that creates things, this creative imagination within the universe.
"Nothing is so beautiful as spring." We might take that superlative statement on the beauty of spring as one of the principles of his poetry. The season of formal growth, when nascent life leaps into shape, when weeds and wheels shoot long and lovely and lush, thrush's eggs look little low heavens. And as your eyes skipping along mine, at least, supplies, look like little low heavens. But this, this line gets me, because there is no "like." It's an unusual construction. "Eggs look little low heavens," and the absence of "like" muddles the comparative activity in the brain involved in an explicit simile, I think intentionally making that confusion of the eggs themselves and heaven, as though there's two truths in one. And it's not necessarily a referential departure from eggs like heavens, but it contains it all.
"And through the echoing timber does so rinse and ring." This call of the thrush, "rinse and ring the ear." A sensuous description of the hearer's encounter with the bird song. Rings, it rinses, and rings. "Strikes like lightning." That's also an inscape. It's a form of the world. Shape, color, sound, texture greets the senses to create this experience of a sensuous aesthetic description, which in this poem is so Keatsian in its organic musicality and coarse consonants that as they are coarse here, mellow into kind of lush sibilance. "The glassy pear tree leaves and blossoms they brush the descending blue." "That blue is all in a rush with thick with richness." Excuse me.
And then the question at the sestet, it's a sonnet, to bring us back to the point of relation, followed immediately by an answer. We saw this in "Inversnaid," and we see it in many of his poems. "What is all this juice and all this joy?" A strain. Answer: "A strain of the Earth's sweet being in the beginning, in Eden Garden." That Eden, the paradisal world, lay recoverable and discernible to the spiritual eye of human beings. Now was what the poetry of Hopkins wants to show and to teach. It's an amazing, astounding theological claim. And it's one that we saw in Traherne, or Traherne will with electric alacrity be able to navigate time and space and go back and inhabit the old experiences he purportedly had in childhood, at least the old like poems try to do that here too. Eden is accessible. And I think both Traherne and Hopkins are poets of ecstasy, both in different ways. I think Hopkins does it, and I think he's the superlative poet of ecstasy. He wanted to make poetry move to the spiritual motions that underpin all organic life, all nature. He believed that the poet must be able to see and discern the underlying metaphysical principle that impels all things into form. So, he didn't just want to observe nature with this Baconian empirical eye. He looked for the deeper spiritual life underpinning beauty, underpinning life.
And this was a pattern, a principle. What was this pattern? What was this intrinsic quality behind life in the world? Goethe was obsessed with the same question, by the way. And when he went to Germany, in, I believe, the year 1800 or 1802, he was studying under the German botanist Blumenbach, who had his theory of the "bildungstrieb," the formative drive. And I think Hopkins is getting at something very similar here. It's the force that drives all things into our incarnational form, the form that he called inscape. Hopkins, which is governed by the aesthetic principle that creates that individually distinctive form that constitutes the oneness of an object. But the spiritual creative energies that pattern all natural life, he called instress. So, we have inscape, which is the form, and then instress, which is the life drive.
In another poem titled "God's Grandeur," Hopkins gives us a sense of instress, I think, this formative drive, this "bildungstrieb" that pushes all things into inscape. And this poem was requested by Jeffrey, whenever patrons here, so at his request, I have included it in the poem. And I just see a comment in the chat: "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower." Oh, from Robert, quoting Dylan Thomas. Wow, that's so, that's so Hopkins.
So, here's "God's Grandeur." Thank you for that, Robert.
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 not reck his rod?
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: the soil
Is bare nor can foot feel, being shod.
And all is for this? No, 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.
Begins with this declarative statement, which seems to be another overarching declaration of his poetic vision and what he wanted to cultivate in his poetry and what his poetry aimed to express. In one of his journal entries, by the way, most editions of Hopkins will come with journals and letters in the back of them, very helpfully. And they're there for a good reason. The editors include them because there's so much in the journals and the letters that Bridges and others that inform the poetry he writes. In one of the journal entries, he says, "I thought how sadly beauty of inscape was unknown and buried away from people, and yet how near at hand it was, if they had eyes to see it, and it could be called out everywhere."
I think his poetry is calling out, making people aware, teaching people how to read nature. He wants to inculcate this. From what from the present is here, we move to the future, in the second line, perhaps to the eschaton, when he writes, "it will flame out." I think the world will flame out, or the grandeur itself, perhaps, will flame out of the world like shining from shook foil. Yes, the "yet" certainly refers to grandeur here. "Believe it will flame out. It gathers to a greatness like the ooze of oil crushed." And then another question, which he will answer, rather: "Why do men then now not reck his rod?" "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." "The soil is bare, nor can foot feel, being shod." The shotted foot, direct contact with nature is prevented by the shot foot. Contact with the earth is intercepted. And it's all backward. The foot is covered, but the soil is bare. It should be the opposite. The foot should be bare, the earth should be covered in green or whatever it is.
Lone, you'll notice how conspicuously the sprung rhythm mimics the Anglo-Saxon poetics we saw in the Anglo-Saxon lecture. And actually, I believe I read this poem at the end of that. Hopkins was enamored of Old English poetry. And in a letter to Bridges in 1882, he said, "I am now learning Anglo-Saxon, and it is a vastly superior thing to what we have now." Actually, thought it was better. Hopkins modeled his own sprung rhythm on the Anglo-Saxon poetics.
And now here comes some hope at the sestet. "And all is for this? No, nature is never spent; there lives the dearest freshness deep down things." There lives the dearest freshness where deep down things. And Aaron, in the comments, I want to return here because this is also a good point. Thanks, Aaron. "Reck his rod." Going back to this, "reck his rod." Aaron connects this to Psalm 23. Oh, that's interesting. That man rebels against the power of God. And then he supplies that quotation here, which I'll read: "Psalm 23: Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us." Interesting. The rod being a figure of chastisement and even judgment, perhaps. But more, I think, as chastisement. "Rod of the nations." Thanks for that, Aaron. Yes. "Deep down things." I think is where the life of instress dwells. Is the principle of the inscape, what forms it? "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." So, we even get the sense, you know, this goes back to the shook foil and the shining. Get the sense that the instress, the life, the organic life, "bildungstrieb," the life force coming out of earth and shaping things, and even shaping his poetry, is warmed by this brooding Dove, which is very Miltonic. And you get this really cosmic perspective and vantage point with that epithet, "the bent world." Love that.
We have some more comments here. Let me check that. Sorry, wrong verse. Okay, Aaron's correcting the verse there. It's actually 29. "You shall break them with a rod of iron." Ah, okay. "And dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel." Yeah, says "rod" explicitly. Aaron says, "Yes, thank you. Good connection." So, that's Psalm 29. I love that statement: "There lives the dearest freshness of deep down things." It seems that getting at the deep down things, this instress, requires not digging, but seeing. And there are moments when Hopkins himself believes he sees into the inscape of things.
Once, while he was walking the fells with one of his friends, Mr. Lucas, he notices what he says, "the ruddy fern in the evening light." This is in a passage from his journal that I'll just read to you. "On the fells with Mr. Lucas, Parlick Pike in that ridge, ruddy with fern and evening light, grounded, sheeted with taut, tattered streaks of crispy, gritty snow. This is prose, by the way, but it sounds pretty much like his poetry. Green, white tufts of long bleached grass like heads of hair on the crowns of heads of hair, each a whirl of slender curves, one tuft taking up another. However, these I might have noticed any day. I saw the inscape though, freshly, as if my eye were still growing, though with a compassion the eye and the ear are for the most part shut, and instress cannot come." And instress cannot. There's something solitary and very intimate about the way instress, or the vision of instress, comes to one. He's saying, and this was a special case in which he saw freshly the inscape, saw into the life of things, as Wordsworth might say.
And then Robert mentions an interesting pattern here in the chat. "Worth mentioning last line words begin WB WB WB." Interesting.
So, what's fascinating about Hopkins' concept of instress is that it doesn't just describe the process of producing form, although it does do that, but it also works upon the viewer. So, instress informs inscape in the object, but it also informs how that object is perceived. There's an instress, this inner life, that is that meets it. It seems it also works from the viewer, from the object to the beholder, and from the beholder to the object. So, that the process of perception participates in the energies that determine the form. And one scholar calls it this quasi-mystic illumination. And Helen Gardner, talking about instress, identifies instress as an energy that holds inscape together, something perhaps like the Holy Spirit hovering over the bent world, brooding with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. So, this Gardner says very helpfully, it's a force that carries into the mind of the perceiver. It is, she says, "this is her quotation, ultimately the stress of God's will in and through things." The instress is the creative energy that is still unfolding, it seems.
Now, so we've covered sprung rhythm, inscape, instress. I think you're well equipped to journey into the poems of Hopkins, even more from that perspective. But I want to close with "The Windhover," which was requested by Joe Barnes on here. So, I wanted to include it. It's an apt poem to include, one of his best. I want to consider this poem as one of Hopkins' reconciliations of the perfect brutality of nature with the goodness of God. And this, if you're familiar with Victorian poetry, was something that the Victorian mind was struggling with a lot. How is it that, especially after Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, in which life is formed and generated through this struggle, how do you reconcile that with a benign God? It was something that they often thought about. I think this poem wrestles with it, although it does other things than that. But I just want to focus on how it wrestles with this question, because Hopkins comes to a place that I think Tennyson couldn't get to. And we're going to read a little Tennyson. Yeah, he struggled with it.
The Windhover
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
Loveler, more dangerous. O my chevalier!
no wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
Observe how the poet describes this predatory bird, the windhover. "Brute beauty," "more dangerous," "wonder of it." Words associated with the sublime experience of terror. "Buckle" even could refer to a quick movement and the preparation for battle. And even the words "gall" and "gash" suggest violence. And I'm just locating these, I'm just focusing on these here to think about the fierce, predatory nature of the bird, and how to reconcile that with the providence of a Christian God, a God of love.
Tennyson wondered the same, as I mentioned. "Why was nature so brutal and vile if God were really good?" And nature, it seems, is very indiscriminate and careless in her in her care. This is from Canto 54 from *In Memoriam*. "Are God and nature then at strife, that nature lends such evil dreams? So careful of the type she seems, so careless of the single life." I'm thinking of our discussion of Mary Oliver's poem that Julia brought to discussion after the postmodernist lecture, and the idea that the sun rises even on a scene of horror, as though indifferently. It's like Emily Dickinson's "Apparently with no surprise" when the frost beheads the flower under the eye of an approving God.
So, he doesn't quite come to this. This is not the entire Canto. It's from Canto 54, and then he develops it again in 56, where he actually quotes Canto 54. "So careful of the type, but no." "From scarped cliff and quarried stone / She cries, 'A thousand types are gone. / I care for nothing, all shall go. / Thou makest thine appeal to me; / I bring to light life, I bring to death / The spirit does but mean the breath. / I know no more.'" And he shall He, Man, her last work, who seemed so fair, such splendid purpose in his eyes, who rolled the psalm to wintry skies, who built him fells of fruitless prayer, who trusted God was love indeed, and love creation's final law—though nature, red in tooth and claw with ravine, ravine, shrieked against his creed. Who loved, who suffered countless ills, who battled for the true, the just, be blown about the desert dust, or sealed within the iron hills. No more. Monster, then a dream. Discord, dragons of the pride that tear each other in their slime, where mellow music matched with him. Oh, life as frail then as frail! Oh, for thy voice to soothe and bless! What hope of answer or redress behind the veil? Behind the veil.
Another form of question and answer, in which the poetic utterance surfaces the question and tries to come to some kind of resolution, some kind of answer. Tennyson defers the answer and the redress. It is something that must wait to be resolved, perhaps after death, or at the eschaton, at the end of all things. It's something we cannot see behind the veil.
But Hopkins, just to return to "The Windhover," for Hopkins, this is not just the description of a bird in flight. It's most likely the scene of a kill. And that's why we have these violent bursts here. You've seen a raptor in flight, you know that these movements, these ecstatic movements, "ringing and raining on wing," and the heel, the skate's heel sweeping smooth on a bow-bend, "the hurl and gliding rebuffed by the big wind," that this is the sort of movement raptors make when hunting. And "the achieve of the mastery of the thing" is no doubt the mastery of execution.
Yet, he is unequivocally in admiration, and even links the poem to Christ in the subtitle, which I very carelessly neglected to include. "Christ Our Lord." To Christ Our Lord is the subtitle, sort of a dedication. This connects the bird to Christ, not only the subtitle, but also that, and also this. I'm going to explain that. The way he addresses Christ. So, he connects the bird as a type of Christ, sort of the way Jonathan Edwards might, or any of the Puritans, or maybe even Wordsworth in some of his later poetry, although he would never do that to Christ, except maybe in the "Ecclesiastical Sonnets." But this is something that the Victorians were doing. "Patmos Metrica" was a collection of poems by Hopkins' uncle, which does the same thing. This is something that he, that Hopkins will do in his poetry a lot. He once said of a bluebell that he knows the beauty of Our Lord in it, in the sight of a bluebell, just tiny little blue flowers that don't really grow any bigger than this.
So, Hopkins' vision of nature is a hermeneutic, similar to the reformed insistence that all scripture must be interpreted in the light of Christ. Only Hopkins has taken this principle and applied it to nature. It's very interesting. The resolution of the brutality of creation, of the sheer achieve of the execution, the mastery of the thing, is resolved, I think, with the goodness of the Creator by likening this brutality to the redemptive swoop of Christ, who descends into the Incarnation in a rung of brute beauty and valor in act to execute salvation. So, it's almost a, you know, we saw in Rossetti a satisfaction theory of atonement. This might be more of a Christus Victor theory, where Christ came and destroyed sin and death. And it's this moment of execution. I think it's this predatory swoop of the windhover that redeems, that is redeemed, rather, by the salvific swoop of Christ. "Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here buckle." There's an urgency here. See how he addresses the windhover? "Oh, my chevalier," which means knight or champion. So, in it's in the spirit of medieval romance that he relocates himself within this type as one to be rescued, transforming the carnivorous buckle of the brute into Christ's mastery over death. "No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion shine." And blue-bleak embers. Ah, my dear. All fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion. It is through the wound, the gash, that the gold-vermilion comes, that the plough down sillion shines.
And so, in a way, it's a theodicy, an explanation for evil. And her, and I keep wanting to say Herbert. And here's why. Hopkins will often, in his writings, reconcile the evil of the world with the sufferings of Christ, saying that this is a God who is also suffering. "Ah, my dear." This is why it's Hopkins, not Herbert. Herbert's "Love III" though has this phrase: "Ah, my dear, then I will serve," says the guest to Love. And Love says, "No, not ye who bore the blame," which would be substitutionary atonement theory. So, we've got allusions to all kinds of different atonement theories, maybe even redemption here, along with the Christus Victor. It's fascinating.
Let's see what's going on in the chat. Robert writes, "As we conclude, if I am mimicking the heartbeat, the ecstasy of the inscape is represented in the animation of the heart in a regular rhythm. Anyone who has ever had either a moment of intense joy or excitement or shock can recall that the heart feels as if it leaps within one's chest. Thus, the inscape manifests itself in the physical sensation as conveyed through language." Yeah, I like that. Beautifully said. Makes me think of Wordsworth's "My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky." You might think that spondee there, a little bit of Wordsworth's sprung rhythm, although he didn't understand it as such.
And Aaron, good point on the sublime feeling of Hopkins' poetry. To be discussed after Kant and Edmund Burke, who both articulated the sublime, were both Christian. Okay, yeah. We've got this terror or tranquilizing sublime, very different in Burke and Kant. But yeah, the aesthetic experience is located within, you could say, a broader theological framework.
So, we began our series earlier this month with the lyrical ingenuity of Mary Sidney Herbert. And I think it's fitting to conclude our four-week course on Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose poetry is a blend of lyrical movement, innovation, and spiritual vision of the natural world. He's a poet who seems to have one foot firmly in the old world of poetry, connected all the way back to the Old English, Middle English traditions, romance. He even violently yokes strange images together, like the metaphysical poets will do. He's got this formal appreciation of the 18th century and the 17th century. And he had, so he's got this one foot in the old world of poetry, and it seems he has the other foot on the threshold of modernist poetry. I think we see that beautifully, especially how his book of poems enters the world stage right at that moment, 1918.
So, to all of my patrons who've supported these lectures and joined me for discussion, thank you. And we're now going to move into discussion now. And to everyone on YouTube, thanks for watching. And until next time.