that the alliteration on mouldand meltand on gloryand glean, and the extraordinary
rhyming on Saviour, seem functional. He liked things ‘original, counter, spare,
strange’, but his idiosyncrasy never became predictable. His diamond condensation
makes Browning seem an Ancient Mariner. Pascal’s apology, for writing a long letter
as he had not time to write a short one, is not required for Hopkins’s poetry. Only
four of his fifty-three completed poems are of more than two pages in length, and
few of them are less than intense. Even the musical ‘Binsey Poplars felled 1879’ ends
with a significant discor d on ‘únselve’. He has a higher proportion of outstanding
poems than any contemporary; he must rank as a poet with Tennyson and
Browning.
Hopkins began his adult writing with the words ‘Thou mastering me / God!’
The Wreck of the Deutschland, to the happy memory of five Franciscan nuns exiled by
the Falck Laws drowned between midnight and morning of Dec. 7th, 1875is a terrify-
ing work. His often lyrical vision of the world as incarnating divine glory includes
tr agedy and suffering at its centre. His ecstatic vision ‘The Windhover’ ends: ‘and
blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, / Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion’.
The late ‘terrible’ sonnets (addressing God as ‘O thou terrible’) wrestle bitterly with
God and with despair. ‘No worst, there is none’ is out of the world ofKing Lear.‘I
wake and feel the fell of dark, not day’ is a Christian nightmare. It is wrong, however,
to see these anguished poems outside a tradition of spiritual conflict which goes
back to Donne and Her bert and to the Old Testament Book of Job. Hopkins’s range
is not wide, but he touches the depths and the heights.
VICTORIAN ROMANTIC POETRY 283Gerard Hopkins, S.J.
a late photograph. Hulton Archive/Getty
Images.