THE WORLD CHARGED BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS 95He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.Maybe “dappled” is familiar enough, and “couple-colour” will make sense, but
much else sounds odd. The best Hopkins anthology explains only one word,
“brinded” as archaic for “brindled” (a cow’s tawny coat flecked with darker
color). But “stipple,” small dots, or “pied,” meaning speckled? For an orthodox
believer bound to religious rule, Hopkins nourishes an unorthodox love of
what ’s idiosyncratic. His poetry wrestles language into fresh revealings.
Not only the pied, dappled, brindled, stippled particulars of the created world
arouse Hopkins, but speaking them does too. He treasured the word hoard En-
glish inherits from its native Anglo-Saxon rather than its Latin base. He ’ll charge
a line with seven stresses: “Frésh-fírecóal chéstnut-fálls; fínches’wíngs,” or inter-
weave their rhymes: “things/cow/swim, wings/plough/trim, strange/how/
dim, change/him.” He ’ll set vowels resonating and consonants ticking. All this
music, as Hopkins said of the composer Henry Purcell, “throngs the ear.”
Now what—to borrow his question about Spring—“What is all this juice and
all this joy,” this revel in earthly beauty, doing in the mouth of a priest who vows
fleshly abstinence? Is it all AMDG, as the Jesuits say, ad majorem Dei gloriam,
for the greater glory of God? After all, “Pied Beauty” frames the natural scene
between “Glory” and “Praise.” But to sense only sacral energy in him reduces
Hopkins. Before converting to Catholicism, at age eighteen he was composing
Keatsian verse about Summer’s “lusty hands, in gusts of scented wind / Swirling
out bloom till all the air is blind,” verse thirsting for sweetness: “Plum-purple
was the west.” Later this avid spirit would have him fusing nature ’s earthly
and divine radiance.
When Hopkins entered Oxford University in 1863, the Austrian botanist
and Catholic priest Gregor Mendel’s cross-breeding of peas was starting up
modern genetics, and Darwin’s Origin of Species exciting the Oxford debate
between science and religion. God ’s presence in nature Hopkins certainly held
dear, and why shouldn’t that belief support a passionate naturalist, even an
environmentalist?
Turning Catholic at twenty-two, then Jesuit, Hopkins committed to an ascetic
existence. He burned his early poems (so he thought) as too worldly, yet nothing
quenched his gusto for earth’s material glories. Britain’s finest religious poet
was also the “finest of English poets of nature,” as Robert Lowell called him.
That mix, which later spurred Denise Levertov among others, fuels the sonnet
“God ’s Grandeur,” written when Hopkins broke a long poetic silence. Its first
line echoes Psalm 19, “The heavens declare the glory of God,” but shifts that
focus from heaven to earth: