Refiner’s Fire: Gerard Manley Hopkins: Exploding for Christ

One of two kinds of clearness one should have—either the meaning to be felt without effort … or else, if dark at first reading, when once made out to explode.” Gerard Manley Hopkins, who made that statement, was a writer of “exploding poetry” par excellence, and he did it to the glory of God.

Born in 1844, Hopkins showed considerable brilliance and independence in school, where he was awarded a prize for poetry and an exhibition in classics at Balliol College, Oxford. While there he was heavily influenced by the Oxford Movement, a spiritual revival that began in the Anglican church but eventually led many of its leaders and adherents to desire reunification with the Roman Catholic Church. It was under the influence of these leaders, and particularly John Henry Newman, that Hopkins, at the age of twenty-two, decided to leave the Church of England and become a Catholic. This decision, and his decision to join the Society of Jesus two years later, changed his life permanently, causing partial estrangement from his family and subjecting his life and art to a rigorous spiritual discipline.

Upon entering the monastery, Hopkins burned all the poems he had written and resolved to write no more unless his superiors asked him to, believing that a priest could not also be a poet. Fortunately, many of these early poems survived in the hands of friends, and some of them, such as “Heaven-Haven,” show outstanding beauty and spirituality.

During his first seven years as a Jesuit. Hopkins wrote no poetry. He did keep a careful journal that was to provide him with a rich source of imagery and vocabulary for his mature poems.

Then in the winter of 1875, while Hopkins was at St. Beuno’s College in North Wales, a ship, the Deutschland, was wrecked at the mouth of the Thames. Five Franciscan nuns who had been exiled from Germany were drowned. Hopkins, affected by the account in the London Times, mentioned it to the college rector, who said he wished someone would write a poem about it. With this implied permission, Hopkins set to work on what was to become his longest and in many ways his greatest poem, “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” The poem not only contains an account of the wreck but uses it as a symbol of God’s efforts to enter man’s life. The first section compares Christ’s coming with a storm, and asks that by whatever means, Jesus enter into our lives as Lord:

Be adored among men,

God, three-numbered form;

Wring thy rebel, dogged in den,

Man’s malice, with wrecking and storm.

Beyond saying sweet, past telling of tongue,

Thou art lightning and love, I found it, a winter and warm:

Father and fondler of heart thou hast wrung:

Hast thy dark descending and most art merciful then.

Death opens the second section with a boast, yet “we dream we are rooted in earth—Dust!” Then follows the tempestuous account of the wreck, and we feel it all because of Hopkins’s dense virtuosity of language. “A prophetess towered in the tumult.” the “tall nun” who was reported to have said at her death, for all to hear, “O Christ, Christ, come quickly.” Hopkins sees her as representative of the redemptive power of Christ at its most powerful in a desperate, passion-like situation, christening the “wild-worst Best.” The poem ends with a prayer that Jesus will “easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us,/be a crimson-cresseted east.…” This poem is universally Christian. Christ is at its center and holds this chaotic world together, providing hope.

Like everything else Hopkins wrote, this poem explodes. He carried compactness and preciseness of language to their utmost limit. Although a first reading of his poetry may leave gaps in understanding, further study yields more and more meaning.

Hopkins now felt “free to compose” but not “to spend time upon it.” His conscience, and the strictness of the Jesuit order, permitted him little respite from duty; his mature output, consisting largely of sonnets of gemlike beauty, is relatively small. But it makes up in quality what it lacks in quantity.

The work that Hopkins did in the slums of industrial England and as a teacher in Ireland taxed him and ruined his health. Anxiety and nervous prostration kept him from accomplishing much besides his duties.

Earlier, in Wales, Hopkins had written many sonnets of uplifting joy and beauty, carrying us on their crests into the presence of Christ. Chief among these was “The Windhover.” But his psalms have their lamentations. The “dark sonnets” reveal the despair he often felt but to which he never completely succumbed: “Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee.…”

Hopkins asserted his victory in 1888 with the poem “That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection.” According to the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, all things in nature are composed of one element—fire. This explains the constant state of change in created things. Hopkins begins his poem with the imagery of clouds, shifting light and shadow under windblown trees, and wind eroding the shapes left on the earth by previous winds (“yestertempest’s creases”). He bewails that man, nature’s “clearest-selved spark,” is also subject to death. He concludes:

… O pity and indignation! Man-shape, that shone

Sheer off, disseveral, a star, death blots black out; nor mark

Is any of him at all so stark

But vastness blurs and time beats level.

Enough! the Resurrection,

A heart’s clarion! Away grief’s gasping, joyless days, dejection.

Across my foundering deck shone

A beacon, an eternal beam. Flesh fade, and mortal trash

Fall to the residuary worm; world’s wildfire, leave but ash;

In a flash, at a trumpet crash,

I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and

This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,

Is immortal diamond.

Here Hopkins returns to the theme of shipwreck, the desperate situation where God’s mercy most shows.

Hopkins had other “dark nights,” one of the darkest recorded in the sonnet “To R. B.” At his death in 1889, however, he left us a remarkable unfinished poem, “Epithalamion.” It returns to the joyful sense of Christ in nature typical of the “bright sonnets” of 1877. This is a fitting prelude to Hopkins’s reported deathbed cry, “I am so happy,” repeated three times as Hopkins saw the approaching reward of being in Christ.

Matthew R. Brown is a poet living in Midland, Michigan.

Words of Life

Occasionally I run across a novelist who makes me long to write fiction—long, rich stories filled with unique, everyday people. Stories that seem out of date and out of character today. Wholesome, old-fashioned, interesting—stories to appreciate on their own, with well-paced plots and carefully constructed structures. Stories in which the large questions of life melt away resolutely because the simple, daily decisions are right.

Zane Kotker is such a novelist. Her first novel, Bodies in Motion, received high critical acclaim. She detailed the life of a young woman moving from a preoccupied city life to a different kind of life as a mother and, at the end of the story, a suburban houseowner. A Certain Man (Knopf), just published, is more ambitious in both plot and structure. And it’s more successful.

Kotker chronicles three generations of a New England family through the eyes of “Arley” Minor, sixth and youngest child of a hardworking undertaker/farmer father. The family attends an evangelical Methodist church and the father maintains strict family rules. Kotker understands the culture of a small town that is predominantly Christian. And she knows the culture of a large family, with its jokes and anecdotes told periodically when the family gathers around the Sunday roast-chicken dinner.

Arley looks forward to those family stories; they hold his identity when he is small. As he grows older his identity centers on being “a Methodist, a town boy.” Much of his thinking revolves around theological matters—the incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection. He commits himself to Jesus, joins the church, and eventually chooses the ministry as his life’s work. But he does not do so without a struggle: “The fear that had licked at his heels all day and followed beneath them as he climbed the back stairway to his bedroom finally planted itself firmly against the soles of his extended feet, in perfect match. With his inner eye he saw Jesus twisted on the cross: his eyes held Arley’s, his lips moved: ‘Follow me.’ … ‘All right,’ he said in a whisper.”

Arley’s faith never leaves him, though he often wonders how well he is serving his Lord. His ambition to have a city church sometimes clouds his vision, as does the dissatisfaction of his wife. He is not as successful as some of his fellow seminary graduates, nor as good a preacher. But he understands his flock and in each successive church leads more and more people to Jesus through his patient pastoral calls and loving concern. At his death, this judgment is repeated countless times: “A fine man.… The finest I ever knew.”

Kotker structures her story around holidays—Thanksgiving, 1909; Christmas, 1913; Palm Sunday, somewhere in the middle twenties. Throughout the narrative she intersperses snatches of hymns as well as bits of entries from Arley’s diary, a present from his sister at his mother’s suggestion: “How had Mama known he wanted it, when he had not known it himself?” He keeps it throughout his life.

The hymns aptly suggest Arley’s thoughts, or the events crowding his life. Half a phrase is enough to start the music in the minds of readers familiar with such songs as “Were You There?” and “Are Ye Able?” The hymns enrich the novel and help to slow it down to a lifelike tempo. Kotker uses the technique most evocatively at the end of the story.

Kotker captures the tensions and wit of daily life. And she loves words and knows their power. How does a farmer feel about land? She tells us: “The land was his sons’ only competitor for Joseph’s commitment: the way he fitted into and rose up out of the land that was his.… There was no longer any mystery. He would go back into the land here in Judaea, he would be sucked at by the roots of trees and carried upward in long liquid filaments. He would be spit from the stomachs of bees, beaked at by birds, engulfed and eliminated by earthworms.… There was nothing at all wrong with moldering.”

Daily disappointments and family squabbles—each of us remembers them, but with humor? Arley wants to play ice hockey on a Sunday. Arguing with his father doesn’t help, and as the final insult his father “handed Arley the bowl of peas but Arley hated winter peas, mushed up over the months and grown too sweet.”

Kotker is a young novelist to watch. Whether she is describing a Christmas Eve service, as near the end of A Certain Man, or the bulge of pregnancy, as in Bodies in Motion, she writes with power and sensitivity, her words carefully chosen but not belabored. In a sense A Certain Man is like Arley’s diary, his thoughts about writing hers: “Words would hold time forever. But since written words belonged to God, he would have to be careful. Nothing selfish could be put down, nothing angry. The diary would have to be like an Indian’s knotted string, tied to remind only him of what unspoken things were meant. He longed for the New Year, so that he might begin his recorded life.” And for such a writer, recorded words are life.

CHERYL FORBES

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