17 G. M. Hopkins and Thomas Hardy

Dr. Ratan Tilak Mohunta

Introduction

Gerald Manley Hopkins (1844 – 1889) and Thomas Hardy (1840 – 1928) are two very important Victorian writers who, though belonging to an age that had moved beyond romanticism, carried a sense of the romantic while trying to comprehend the real yet mystical appeal of nature. Hardy is better known as a novelist than a poet; Hopkins is better known as a Jesuit priest than a poet. If one were to ask “what is common between them?” the answer would be; both had a passionate desire to understand the power of nature and its influence on human beings. Hardy’s disappointment with human will led him to his belief in fate; he experimented with naturalism seeking an alternative theology in nature. Hopkins, in spite of his theological training, was caught in a bind between aesthetic truth and the truth offered by Christian theology. If Hardy attempted to find in nature an alternative to God, Hopkins tried to find God in every aspect of nature. This module will try to explore the literary styles of these two Victorian poets by examining major preoccupations in their poetry.

Poetry of G.M Hopkins

Born on 28th July 1844 to Anglican parents, Hopkins converted to Roman Catholicism in 1866 under the influence of John Henry Newman who he met at Oxford. His tutors at Oxford were Walter Pater and Benjamin Jowett. He was greatly influenced by the “aesthetic theories of Pater and John Ruskin and the poetry of devout Anglicans George Herbert and Christina Rossetti.” His spiritual search landed him in the religious order of Jesuits in 1868. Initially, he believed that his poetic interests may run into conflict with commitment as a Jesuit priest. Interestingly, except for a few less known poems scattered here and there in journals, his poems never got published in his own lifetime. He used send his poems to Robert Bridges, his friend at Oxford, who “arranged for their publication in 1918.” Among the better known poems of Hopkins are Windhover (1877), The Wreck of the Deutschland (1875), The Caged Skylark (1877), God’s Grandeur (1877), Pied Beauty (1877) et al.

Hopkins invented his own style of poetry by experimenting with sounds and rhythm. He created his own terms of poetic style with ‘inscape,’ ‘instress’ and ‘sprung rhythm.’

Inscape and Instress 

Hopkins used these terms, which are by no means easy to understand, in his journals. Inscape is supposed to mean “the unified complex of characteristics that give each thing its uniqueness and that differentiate it from other things,” and “instress” is supposed to be “the force of being which holds the inscape together.” Glenn Everett opines that the concept of inscape has much to share with “Wordsworth’s ‘spots of time,’ Emerson’s ‘moments’ and Joyce’s ‘epiphanies’.” If one looks at inscape and instress from the point of view of logic, they seem more like differentiation and integration in calculus; both mutually contradictory and complementary at the same time.

Sprung rhythm

Sprung rhythm was Hopkins experiment with metrical pattern of English poetry. He used the term to refer to “a complex and very technically involved system of metrics which he derived partly from his knowledge of Welsh poetry.” Consider these lines from the poem Pied Beauty, for example:

For skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;

And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

Here, he uses a stress-timed rhythm rather than a syllable-

timed rhythm making it sound more

like a conversation; also perhaps like rap music.

Understanding Hopkins’ Poetry: God, Nature and Hopkins

Born in Stratford near London, Hopkins spent most of his childhood days in Oakhill, Hampstead. The green surroundings of his growing up years had a lasting influence on him so that; nature became a recurring motif in many of his important poems. Bob Blaisdell quotes Norman White to reiterate this point: “Hopkins had the advantages of the countryside and the largest city in the world. He could go to the galleries, special exhibitions, museums, churches, meetings, open-air spectacles, the London parks, and theatres. As a country boy he became accustomed to trees and open skies” (Blaisdell vii). After joining the Jesuits, however, he decided to burn his old drafts “without being asked to do so” (ix) and devoted himself more to his new religion.

His priestly profession continued to pull him in a different direction, even as the memories of Oakhill; full of “fields of oak, hawthorn and elder trees, and wild rose and woodbine, where the family walked and sketched” (101), haunted him for the rest of his life. While at the University in Oxford, Hopkins frequently walked “around the Thames valley” to fill “empty afternoons,” “enjoying the countryside on an array of possible routes” (101). Nevertheless, much of his walking also “involved visiting churches and manor houses” (102). Like most of his Victorian contemporaries, Hopkins was obsessed with minute aspects of the external world that led him to a “conception of nature and society that anticipated ecological theory” (105). His interest in art, John Parham suggests, helped him develop “A Ruskinian aesthetic of nature” (105) and his interest in architecture led him to conservatism of his religious and political beliefs” (105). The latter also shaped his understanding of how “Victorian society was re-shaping its natural and human environments” (105).

Dennis Sobolev in his article titled “Being and Contemplation,” observes that “The tripartite relation between God, man and nature is the cornerstone of both Hopkins’s philosophy and his poetics” (Sobolev 37). He goes on to add that “the exact structure of this relation still awaits slow and detailed analysis” (37) though, many scholars have dwelt upon the subject for a long time. According to him, Hopkins believed that poetry should avoid general “trans-existential” (38) descriptions, on the contrary, the world should be described “in its uniqueness and singularity, with close attention to the details of its shapes and colors” (38). Hopkins’ interest in the “singularity of the world” (38) is a characteristic feature of his poetry and thought. Sobolev observes that both his poetry and “the verbal landscapes of the journal”(38) exemplify Hopkins’ desire to catch “as he says in ‘The Windhover’, the most exact vision of the world in all its transient singularity” (38).

A deeply insightful criticism of Hopkins’ poetic practice comes from none other than the famous Cambridge critic; a leading figure of new criticism, I.A Richards. Joseph Pizza remarks that the inherent problem of reading and understanding Hopkins poetry stems from what “I.A Richards termed the ‘belief problem’” (Pizza 47). Pizza, justifiably so, agrees with Richards that the “central difficulty” (47) of Hopkins’ poetry was the deep schism he saw between “priestly convictions and poetic ambitions’ (47). For Richards, the emotive form of poetic language was of different kind than “the referential beliefs of science and religion” (47). Richards would prefer to keep poetry in a referential frame different from the two prominent, though problematic, domains of the 20th century; whereas Hopkins, writing in the previous century, tried to bring all three under a single frame. For the deeply religious Hopkins, aesthetics, religion, nature and science had to coexist altogether under a single, unitary God.

The Wreck of the Deutschland: An Analysis

Hopkins moved to “St Beunos’ in North Wales” in 1874 to continue his priesthood studies; he loved the natural environment surrounding Beunos’, and here he also set out to master the “musicality of the welsh language”( Blaisdell ix) which later became “characteristic of his ‘chiming’ verse” (ix). He was encouraged to give a new lease of life to his poetic talent and in the midst of studies he ventured to write his first long poem Deutschland.

What prompted Hopkins to write Deutschland?

On 4th December 1875, a passenger ship SS Deutschland set sail from Germany to New York via Southampton with “123 emigrants,” which included five Franciscan nuns “exiled from Germany” (ix). The ship ran into rough weather on 6th December and “ran aground on the Kentish Knock; a shoal off Harwich.” The nuns were “among the many who drowned” (x) and Hopkins, overwhelmed by an ebbing sentiment of religiosity, began to meditate over the issue. Balisdell refers to Elizabeth Schneider’s study to suggest that the main theme of the first part of the poem “is his own conversion;” of the second part, “his hoped-for conversion of the whole of signal” (x).

The theme of the poem makes it an elegy, though some would like to call it an ode. Peter Cash, analyzing the poem in English Association Bookmarks, suggests that “Hopkins encounters acute difficulties in understanding God’s ways” (Bookmarks 4) despite being a devout catholic, and struggles to resolve them in this poem. According to him, the poem is a “theodicy” (trying to prove the existence of god based on a “prior natural theology”) that sets out, like Milton inParadise Lost, “to justify the ways of god to man”.

The poem has two parts; the first part consists of ten stanzas of “lyrical self-analysis’ (4) and the second part has twenty five stanzas where “Hopkins narrates events” (4). The narrations of events, with no sequential or logical connections pose great difficulty for readers unfamiliar with the politico – religious context of the times. In the first part of the poem, Hopkins takes the reader “inside his priest’s cell” and confesses “his innermost thoughts” (4). Cash proposes that ‘it is helpful to imagine” (4) Hopkins’ “consternation” upon reading “The Times report” on the wreck “in his lonely cell” (4). At first, He reacts with agony upon hearing that “god has permitted such a catastrophe,” next, ‘his agony intensifies” on learning about the death of the five Franciscan nuns who had boarded the ship only to escape “Protestant persecution in their homeland (the Falck Laws)” (4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falk_Laws . “God’s harsh treatment of his own true followers” seems to have unsettled the Roman Catholic convert Hopkins.

His reflection upon the incident becomes an exegesis where he tries to understand the meaning  of God. The first part begins with his doubt about god’s ways; in the opening lines, he wonders how a merciful god can also be a “taker away” of lives committed to religious service. Through the rest of the rest of stanzas, we find a further complication of the problem of faith, though finally it is resolved with the understanding that such sacrifice is necessitated by God’s will. In Part the second, Hopkins embarks upon a description of the shipwreck. Stanza 12 that marks the opening of the second part begins as a factual description though, the rhetorical question why god didn’t “reeve them in;” save the souls of those he drowned, continues to trouble him. Nevertheless, as we proceed further, it becomes clear that Hopkins’ desire is to see the wreck of the ship more as a “physical manifestation of god’s terrifying power and tender mercy” (Cash 8- 9), than as a mere accident that turned fatal.

Thomas Hardy’s Poetry

Readers who are more familiar with Thomas Hardy’s novels will certainly know about his approach to the mystery of the universe. The underlying tone of what most critics of his fiction referred to as devout pessimism continues to reverberate even in his poems. However, Hardy strongly “objected to being called a pessimist” (Bailey 569) during his later years and preferred to call himself “an evolutionary meliorist” (569). Meliorism is a philosophical term which means a “belief that the world can be made better by human effort.”

Hardy began writing poetry in the 1860’s; he soon turned to writing novels and established himself a major Victorian novelist. However, the suffocating orthodoxy of Victorian religious institutions was too much for Hardy to bear; the public outrage against his novel Jude the Obscure (1895) and the charge of obscenity disappointed him so much that he decided to stop writing novels the same year. Public controversy over the novel was matched by “private hostility as he became “estranged from his increasingly evangelical wife Emma,” who felt betrayed by the novels “bitter reflections on marriage and religion.” “The bulk of his poetry was thus produced between his fifty-fifth birthday and his death at the age of 87.” At the age 58 “he published his first collection of poetry, Wessex Poems (1898).”

Hardy’s most moving poems were however written after “his wife Emma’s death in 1912.” Once he established himself as a poet, he refused to admit that his “poetic career was secondary in any sense.” He even claimed later that he was only returning to what was “his original impulse.” Although many critics suggested that he should have stuck to his original trade of novel writing, there is enough evidence to show “how seriously Hardy took his second career.” His disappointment with reviews of his poetry, and his use of poems on significant public events such as “the Boer War, the turn of the century, the death of the Queen, even the Titanic disaster; his research into prosody in the British Museum,” all suggest that Hardy was as much passionate about poetry as with fiction.

Bailey identifies three phases in the development of Hardy’s poetry. According to him, the first phase reflects Hardy’s views of the world that echo his reading of “Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, and J. S. Mill” (570). Hardy read Darwin’s theory of evolution “about 1862” and began reading Schopenhauer “about 1866”; this period approximately marks the first phase of his development. Poems of this phase express “the pessimistic view that insensate natural law rules the world” (570). The second phase “extends from about 1886” until the completion of The Dynasts, which Hardy himself called “an epic-Drama” in verse of the Napoleonic wars, in 1908” (570). Bailey suggests that the poems of this phase reflect his philosophic speculations borrowed from the “metaphysics of Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard Von Hartmann” (570). He tended to personify natural law as “universal will” along the lines of Schopenhauer, or as “unconscious mind, postulated by Von Hartmann” (570). However, in the third phase that Bailey identifies as beginning after 1908, Hardy’s works clearly stand testimony to an “interpretation of natural law that he called evolutionary meliorism” (570).

Phase the First of Hardy’s Poems: Agnostic Pessimism

Hardy didn’t turn an agnostic overnight; he was as religious as anybody else, “he had taught Sunday school,” learned Greek on his own to read “old testament in the original” (570). However, when he moved to London in 1862 to work in architect’s office, he read many books that “undermined his faith” (570-571); the most destructive of them all was Darwin’s Origin of Species. By mid-1860’s he has given up faith in god. Renouncing faith in a society steeped in dogma was not easy; he grieved the loss in the poem “In Tenebris” (1895-96)” that his eyes “have not the vision in them to discern what to [others] is so clear” (571).Here he seems to regret his inability to believe, just as in another poem “Impercipient” (1898), he cries out to those who labeled him a “willful agnostic”:

“0, doth a bird deprived of wings/ Go earth-bound wilfully!”

Nevertheless, despite such desire to believe, Hardy rejected faith both in god and “in any discoverable purpose in the Universe”.

His early poems express deepest pessimism as seen in his novels. The poem “Discouragement” dated “1863-67” attacks “human folly and social convention rather than injustice in natural law” (571) in the same way his first novel The Poor Man and the Lady did. In the poem, “Naturing Nature, operates in the processes of birth, the pivots of mutation” (571). Hardy’s thought, as Bailey rightly suggests is that human beings mate for “caprice, social convention, and bodily appetite,” (571-572). But, Mother Nature “striving towards perfection” (572), finds:

“Her loves dependent on a feature’s trim,

A whole life’s circumstance on hap of birth,

A Soul’s direction on a body’s whim”

The poet is struck with “visions ghast and grim” as he observes the Mother being defeated, “racked and wrung by her unfaithful lord.

The same thought is reinforced in “At a Bridal” (1866), where Hardy questions if nature has any purpose in uniting “an idealist young man,” desiring to father “a stolid line.” And, Nature’s answer would be “That she does not care/ If the race all such sovereign types unknows.” Mother Nature would not guide her creatures through whom the whole process of reproduction operates, though she “might improve the race” (572). In the poem “Heiress and Architect” written in 1867, the architect answer all the queries of “an heiress of life” in a mode that sounds like the denial of a denial. When the heiress says “she wishes to live gaily and generously,” the architect says “the soul thrives on pain,” to her “plan for a lover’s paradise,” he “objects that love fades,” and about “meditative seclusion,” he states that “life is short and she will die” (572).

Phase the Second: Hardy’s Refuge in the Metaphysics of Schopenhauer

Bailey proposes that the second phase of Hardy’s poetics is largely influenced by the metaphysics of “Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea and later Eduard Von Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious” (573). Most of Hardy’s poems between 1886 and 1893 are “not dated,” probably because he wrote very few poems during these busy years when he was engrossed in reading. Almost all poems that treat the will “assume it to be a mental force, an unconscious mind” (574). Hartmann believed that the unconscious is “immanent in all creatures” (574), nevertheless, as consciousness begins to prevail throughout the universe, “the unconscious will may become conscious” (574). Hardy’s “metaphysical meliorism” that eventually developed into his “evolutionary meliorism” has its germ in the philosophical speculations of these two German philosophers.

In the poem “In a Wood” dated 1887, Hardy presents a city dweller “weary of city strife” (576), retreating to the woods in search of ‘sylvan peace.’ However, he decides to return to humankind when he observes “the Darwinian struggle among vines and trees: ivy chokes, drippings from one tree poison another, and cankers” all suggesting “black despair” (576). Terribly disillusioned by what he had imagined as the benevolence of nature, he turns back to where “now and then, are found/ Life-loyalties” (576). “Life-loyalties” suggests Hardy’s observation that only humans, by virtue of being higher creatures are capable of ethical responses.

In another poem “The Lacking Sense,” Hardy asks Time (Ancient Mind) why Nature’s works  are “joyless to her creation” and “why natural law causes ‘cramps, black humours, wan decay, and baleful blights’” (576). Time replies with “…sightless are those orbs of hers?-which bar to her omniscience Brings those fearful unfulfilments…,” suggesting that nature is blind “though it seeks to be perfect” (576). Thus, nature “unwittingly… wounds the lives she loves” (576).

In the poem “Doom and She,” Mother Nature who is the “World Weaver” talks with Doom “a symbol of process” (577). The Mother “is unlit with sight” (blind) while Doom is “vacant of feeling” (unfeeling), however the Mother becoming conscious says:

Methinks I catch a groan,

Or multitudinous moan,

As though I had schemed a world of strife,

Working by touch alone

Doom answers the doubt of the Mother with the questions “what is Grief? / And what are Right, and Wrong, / And Feeling . . . ?” (577) and also wonders why “weak” is worse than “strong.” The poem begins with speculation and ends with more questions and doubts as the Mother, without answering Doom “broods in sad surmise” (577).

Bailey suggests that Hardy found among Hartmann’s speculations the idea that “growth of consciousness in the Will might bring about remorse and discreation, or cosmic suicide” (577). In an exceptional poem “Before Life and After” (1909), Hardy debates the “birth of consciousness and therefore pain” (577) in a process that was “previously mechanical” (577). That was when “the disease of feeling germed, / And primal rightness took the tinct of wrong” (577). He hopes for an end to this disease “Ere nescience shall be reaffirmed” (nescience means ignorance) but wonders “How long, how long?” (577).

Phase the Third: Hardy’s Scientific Meliorism

Bailey argues that in the third phase of his development, “Hardy based his meliorism on science” (577). Interpreting the process of evolution better than he did in 1860’s, he arrived at his evolutionary meliorism. In this phase, Hardy continued to use symbols of “metaphysical images he developed in the period of The Dynasts” (582). In the poem “An August Midnight” (1899), on observing “longlegs, a moth, a bumblebee, and a fly on his writing table” (582), Hardy ponders why in spite of being “God’s humblest they!” these tiny creatures, “They know Earth’s secrets that know not I” (582).

Hardy introspects on “another aspect of the same thought” in the famous short poem “The Darkling Thrush” (1900). “An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,/ In blast- beruffled plume” breaks suddenly into “a full-hearted evensong/ Of joy illimited” on a bleak December evening when the “The ancient pulse of germ and birth/ Was shrunken hard and dry” (582). The poet who saw in the weather “little cause for caroling,” the outburst of the thrush which appeared as if “there trembled through/ His happy good-night air/ Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew/ And I was unaware” (583). The same theme recurs in “The Last Chrysanthemum” (1901) where the flower seems to deliberately delay “its lovely blossom till summer has gone” (583); it blooms “‘in witlessness’ in the tempests of winter” (583).

These three poems reiterate the “ecological aspect of evolution” (583); how plants and animals, through minute “differentiation and adaptation” (583) fit themselves to “the conditions of life” (583). The poems written during this phase show Hardy’s changed perspective on evolution. In an early reaction to evolutionary theory as expressed in the poems “Discouragement” and “At a Bridal” of 1860’s, Hardy imagined that man would “throw away” (583) the opportunity nature provides him. However, years later, in his final phase, Hardy placed his hope “on man alone”

(583) and believed that eventually “human intelligence may find the upward way” (583) in the natural process of ecological evolution. He states this idea in “A Commonplace Day” (1901) where he supposes that “here and there, in humble ways and places, men are making choices to improve the human lot” (583).

Bailey sums up Hardy’s preconditions for the world’s amendment as a three-tier approach: as a first step man must begin with a “darkened view of life as a basis for amendment;” second, he should accept the fact that “the forces of nature are indifferent to human hope…man must rely upon himself,” lastly and most surprisingly, “man must have a religion to guide his ethical choices” (584). Hardy stated the last point in his “‘Apology’ to Late Lyrics and Earlier” shortly after his discussion of evolutionary meliorism. It must be clarified here that by religion, Hardy did not mean “a religion of revelation and miracles” (586); on the contrary, what he meant is suggested in two significant poems “God’s Funeral” dated 1908-10 and “The Graveyard of Dead Creeds” published in 1925.

Reference

• Bailey, J.O. “Evolutionary Meliorism in the Poetry of Hardy.” Studies in Philology, Vol. 60, No.3 (Jul., 1963), pp. 569-587.Published by: University of North Carolina Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4173431 . Accessed: 19-05-2016 05:56 UTC.
• Blaisdell, Bob. “Introduction.” Selected Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. New York: Dover Pub, 2011. Print.
• Parham, John. Green Man Hopkins: Poetry and the Victorian Ecological Imagination. New York: Rodopi, 2010. Print.
• Sobolev, Dennis. “Being and Contemplation in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins.” Spring 2006, pp. 37 – 63, Vol. 55. Downloaded from http://english.oxfordjournals.org/ at INFLIBNET N List Project (College Model) on May 18, 2016.
• Pizza, Joseph. “Hopkins’ Counter Stress.” Literature & Theology, Vol. 25. No. 1, March 2011, pp. 47–63, Advance Access publication 18 January 2011. Downloaded from
• http://litthe.oxfordjournals.org/ at INFLIBNET N List Project (College Model) on May 18, 2016.