The Poet of God’s Grandeur

This post was originally published at The Master's Artist.

During my senior year in high school, I had an English teacher who was diminutive, elderly and more energetic than teachers half her age. She loved literature, and especially English literature, and this senior-year class was devoted to English literature, except for one six-week period when we studied Don Quixote. (I attended a public high school in Louisiana – an all-boys public high school. Louisiana was not known for educational prowess. No one told my teachers that, and I received an extraordinarily fine education.)

It was during that year that I was introduced to the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889). We didn’t spend much time on Hopkins; our textbook England in Literature included three of his poems but explained that his poems were never popular with the general reading public because, for one reason, they were “religious in nature” and didn’t “deal with the problems of everyday man.” This textbook was current in 1968-69. I like the textbook, but it does have an attitude.

Hopkins studied under such varied teachers as the Catholic John Henry Cardinal Newman and the aesthete Walter Pater. He loved poetry, but felt compelled to leave his Anglican upbringing for the Catholic Church, and going so far as to become a Jesuit priest. He wrote poetry when he could, but very little was published during his lifetime. Upon his death, he entrusted all of his poems to a friend, Robert Bridges, who delayed publication for almost 30 years, when Bridges himself was Britain’s poet laureate. An expanded edition was published in 1930 by Charles Williams, the friend of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Additional editions were issued in 1948 and 1967.

His poetry may still not be well known, but his impact has been huge. His innovations in poetic style, which he called “sprung rhythm” for its close connection to spoken speech, influenced W.H Auden, Stephen Spender and Dylan Thomas, and generations of poets after them. Hopkins became well known only long after his death, but his influence on poetry continues today.

Here is one of the three poems included in my senior English textbook (yes, I have a copy; I found it at a used book sale). I recommend reading it aloud.

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 wear’s man’s smudge and shares man’s smell:

      the soil

Is bare now, not 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 ah! bright

      Wings.

Poet Stanley Kunitz talks about how he discovered the poetry of Hopkins, and “God’s Grandeur” in particular, and then reads the poem.

Making Sense of the World

Some of my earliest memories are of my mother reading to me, and reading some of the same things that many, if not most, of us were read – nursery rhymes: Jack and Jill, Humpty Dumpty, Little Boy Blue, Little Bo Peep, Mary Had a Little Lamb. My mother read (and recited) them to me, and when it wasn’t nursery rhymes it was Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Without my realizing it, those readings defined how I understood poetry – a short story or song told in rhyme.

As I got older, my understanding of poetry grew more complex. In grammar school, I can remember poems like “Hiawatha,” “Evangeline,” and “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.” In high school, it included “Thanatopsis,” Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Eliot, Yeats, Vachel Lindsay, Emily Dickinson, and Edgar Less Masters.

I read many of these same poets in college, in greater depth and breadth of their works. The poems that stick out include “Beowulf,” Malory’s “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” and Eliot’s “Four Quartets” (the emphasis on the English poets reflects my English literature courses).

What reading and studying  poetry had the effect of accomplishing was helping me make sense of the world. For me, poetry and fiction did this in a way that non-fiction could not. This is likely why the reading of poetry and fiction (and now the writing of both) has remained an important part of my life.

In Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me, Karen Swallow Prior notes this ability of poetry: “I had come to see that poetry was not a means of escape, but rather an art of reconciliation. For poetry is made in the discovery of resemblances. It seeks likeness, even amidst the strangeness of differences.”

This resonates strongly with me. What she calls “reconciliation” is what I call “making sense,” and they are the same thing. Literature affords the opportunity to understand how others understand the world and express truth, and to find the likeness for ourselves.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Prior cites the example of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), the English poet who wasn’t known as a poet until after his death. During his lifetime, he was known as a Jesuit priest. He was also a man who struggled with his own demons, and he had actually burned all of the early poetry he had written and turned away from it. It was the Church, in this case, the Catholic Church, that convinced him to return to it.

His poetry had been out of fashion for a time, but it’s been making something of a comeback. Prior discusses his poem “Pied Beauty” and it’s a fine poem. My own favorite is “Myself Unholy:”

Myself Unholy

Myself unholy, from myself unholy

To the sweet living of my friends I look –

Eye-greeting doves bright-counter to the rook,

Fresh brooks to salt sand-teasing waters shoaly: --

And they are purer, but alas! not solely

The unquestion’d readings of a blotless book.

And so my trust, confused, struck, and shook

Yields to the sultry siege of melancholy.

He has a sin of mine, he its near brother;

Knowing them well I can but see the fall.

This fault in one I found, that in another:

And so, though each have one while I have all,

No better serves me now, save best; no other

Save Christ: to Christ I look, on Christ I call.

He’s speaking about reconciliation, about making sense of the world, and what he sees as his compass. That compass is how he finds direction.

We all have a compass, some kind of direction-finder that we use to seek understanding and reconciliation. The compass Hopkins used is also mine, which is likely why I’m drawn to his poetry again and again.

Over at The High Calling, Laura Boggess is leading a discussion of Booked each Monday in January. To see what others are saying, please visit The HighCalling.

Related: Do You Know Where the First Amendment Comes From?