Literary relations: Pater, Hopkins, and me

American Poetry Review, The, Sep/Oct 2002 by Weiss, Theodore

Bridges, thinking he detected Whitman in some of Hopkins's lines, prompted Hopkins to reply that he had read only a handful of Whitman's poems in a recent English review of Leaves of Grass. But he went on to admit an extraordinary kinship with Whitman:

I always knew in my heart Wait Whitman's mind - to be more like my own than any other man's living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession. And this also makes me the more desirous to read him and the more determined that I will not.

What does he mean by "always" if he had read only a few poems in a review? Still, after such a strong admission of similarity, Hopkins can aver that Bridges would, on further reading of Whitman, realize there was no real resemblance in their work!

What provoked Hopkins to such a startling confession? No doubt, he objected to Whitman's overt sexuality. Elsewhere he writes Bridges, "I think then no one can admire beauty of the body more than I do, and it is of course a comfort to find beauty in a friend or a friend in beauty, but this kind of beauty is dangerous." Knowing full well the inebriation of the senses, the slippery little step between the sensuous and the sensual, he also grew uneasy before beauty in general. The objects and the world God created, alluring as they are, in their very success may so engross us that we forget their maker.

Nevertheless, whatever Hopkins's reservations, he could not altogether reject beauty. But, alas, as his story, going on, tells, his looking, dimmed by time, shed less and less looking back at him. And the grinding, incessant within his frail body, finally crushed him. This happened during the eight years (1877-1885) that separated the exultant poems, clustered around "Pied Beauty," from the later set Hopkins himself called "the terrible sonnets." The struggle in him always growing stronger, he could not break free short of death.

But first, when he exploded out of his long Jesuitical years of public silence in his massive, tempestuous "The Wreck of the Deutschland," he exhibited a veritable catalog of most of the poetic devices he had developed during that silence. So he set prose-- like exposition (See his direct citing of the newspaper report of the wreck of the Deutschland.) cheek by jowl with loftiest, fiercely compressed rhetoric. The poem leaps from a tropical passage (perhaps a little overripe),

How a lush-kept plush-capped sloe Will, mouthed to flesh-burst, Gush!-flush the man, the being with it, sour or sweet,

Brim, in a flash, full! to lines remindful of Shakespeare's compacted power:

And the sea flint-flake, black-backed in the regular flow

Sitting eastnortheast in cursed quarter, the wind;

Wiry and white fiery and whirlwind-swivelled snow

Spins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps.

"The Wreck of the Deutschland," and the poems that it released proved that Hopkins could still balance and combine the two worlds he lived in: the tormented, outrageous, material world and the spiritual realm glancing through. Consequently, "The Starlight Night," "Spring," "Hurrahing in Harvest," "Pied Beauty," and especially the epic sonnet, "The Windhover" (according to Hopkins "the best thing I ever wrote"), are sheer praise and enthusiasm. Through images of nature Hopkins believes still that he can glean our Saviour: "And, eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a / Rapturous love's greeting of realer, of rounder replies?" (That greeting will shortly be gainsaid.)