Happy birthday, Gerard Manley Hopkins.
When I was a student at Wellesley College, I would sometimes take solitary walks around Lake Waban and think deep thoughts. As I walked, trampling the leaves, I would often recite out loud Gerard Manley Hopkins’ beautiful poem, “Spring and Fall to a Young Child.”
This description of Hopkins appeared on Garrison Keillor’s “The Writers’ Almanac.” Today is a big day, because it is also the birthday of Beatrix Potter (“The Tale of Peter Rabbit”), Jacqueline Kennedy, Karl Popper, and Earl Tupper, the inventor of Tupperware.
Today is the birthday of English poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844) (books by this author), born in Stratford, Essex. He won a poetry prize in grammar school and then received a grant to study at Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied Classics and continued to write poetry. His academic record was outstanding, earning him the approbation of one of his masters, who called him “the star of Balliol.”
While he was at Oxford, Hopkins (who had been raised in the Anglican Church) converted to Roman Catholicism. His experience was so profound that he decided to become a Jesuit priest in 1868, and he burned all his poetry, feeling it was not befitting his profession as a clergyman. He did continue to keep a journal, however, and in 1875, he returned to poetry. He was living in Wales, and found its landscape and its language inspirational. When five Franciscan nuns died in a shipwreck, he was moved to write a long poem, The Wreck of the Deutschland.
Once he was ordained in 1877, he worked as a parish priest in the slums of Manchester, Liverpool, and Glasgow. He lived in Dublin from 1884 until his death of typhoid fever in 1889. Overworked, exhausted, and unwell, he wasn’t happy there, and his poetry reflects his unhappiness. Called the “terrible sonnets,” they show the poet’s struggles with spiritual and artistic matters.
Most of his poetry wasn’t published in his lifetime, and it was so innovative that most people who did get to read it didn’t understand it. As he wrote in a letter to Burns, “No doubt, my poetry errs on the side of oddness …” But it influenced such 20th-century poets as W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, and Charles Wright.
Here is one of my favorite poems, “Spring and Fall to a Young Child”:
Márgarét, are you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
I was just reading some of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetry today!
“The world is charged with the grandeur of God…”
I even left a bookmark for my friend to read it, too. But I had no idea it was his birthday!
Happy birthday, Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Good afternoon Diane and everyone.
Thank you for that poem. I have so many favorites and I’m sure you do too. I love this one by C.P Cavafy.
Ithaka
As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn’t have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
Thank you, Mamie! I love that poem too. I remember that Jackie Kennedy asked to have that poem read at her memorial service.
Wow. That’s moving, Diane!
Hello Diane,
You’re welcome. So many great poems it’s hard to decide on favorites. Here’s a funny story. One year I memorized Poe’s poem The Raven. On Halloween Day, I dressed as a friendly witch and went around to the English classes and recited the poem and handed out candy to all the students!! What fun!!!
“Quoth the Raven: ‘Nevermore.'”
What fun for you and the students!
Wonderful, Mamie!This is the thing that your students will remember most from high school! They will tell of it in their 90s!
Oh yes, yes, yes, Diane! Here, in celebration, this draft:
Forget Me Not | Bob Shepherd
on Hopkins’s Birthday
The Word was charged anew with the grandeur of Gerald
Hopkins’s bold bald conjugal rhythms that sprang so
springingly sprung across the page and marveling mind
like one of those flowers–noli me tangere—that blows then bursts
raining dappled down such confettilike windfall seedpod
images that you might drown in their festive falling,
their scattering round about in lambent Monet-made lily-light
making you wonder bebrindled, seduced, fallen again,
whether to win such a world were worth the fell first fall
after all. Our first father’s, mother’s Eden lost to gain
another. If this be sin, go and sin some more, beautiful brother.
cx: “making you” should be “as to make one”
as I said, a draft
OK. Here’s the revised version
Forget Him Not
(on the birthday of Gerard Manly Hopkins)
for Diane Ravitch
The Word was charged anew with the grandeur of Gerald
Hopkins’s bold bald conjugal rhythms that sprang so
springingly sprung across the page and marveling mind
like one of those flowers–noli me tangere—that blows then bursts
raining dappled down such confettilike windfall seedpod
images that you might drown in their festive falling,
their scattering round about in lambent Monet-made lily-light
as to make one wonder bebrindled, seduced, fallen again,
whether to win such a world were worth the fell first fall
after all. Our first father’s, mother’s Eden lost to gain
another. If this be sin, go and sin some more, beautiful brother.
and the revised revised version, lol: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2020/07/29/forget-him-not/
“As he wrote in a letter to Burns,” in Keillor’s post, should be “as he wrote in a letter to Robert Bridges.” Burns died before Hopkins was born and scoffed at religion, but I like the idea of their passing letters to and fro, from earth to beyond to grave, to discuss one another’s poetry. That would be quite the conversation.
Good catch!
I love this post, Diane. The picture of you as a girl at Wellesley, walking around the lake and reciting that powerful poem, is so vivid!!!
Two people, not regular commenters here, sent me their favorite Hopkins’ poems, which they too had memorized.
I was too busy yesterday, on Hopkins’ birthday, to give this post attention, but this morning, I have some time to sit down and think about Hopkins poetry. Hopkins’ widely popular poems are grand; they speak of grandeur. I, however, like one of his less popular poems best, Inversnaid. It rocks! No seriously, it sounds like a rock song. It’s about roughness and darkness, but the speaker is cheerful and hopeful about the fearsome landscape. That speaks to me, especially today.
Inversnaid
This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.
A windpuff-bonnet of fáawn-fróth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.
Degged with dew, dappled with dew,
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.