THE WORLD CHARGED BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS 97Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with bright wings.Why bent? With toil, humility, ruin of God ’s creation? The last line alone
works wonders. Earlier accents on wandb, “West went” and “brown brink,”
return threefold and interwoven: the “World broods with warm breast and
with bright wings.”
But wait! One syllable ’s missing, so Hopkins adds a stress to fill out the line:
“with warm breast and with ah!bright wings.” Sheer craft makes this happen.
An astonished indrawn breath turns meter into revelation.
You can hear that breath when the American poet Stanley Kunitz, at ninety-
five, reads aloud “God ’s Grandeur” because in his twenties he ’d found it “so
fierce and eloquent.... I knew that it was speaking directly to me and giving
me a hint of the kind of poetry that I would be dedicated to for the rest of my
life.”
Can we subtract divinity and still feel the full charge, in Hopkins’s world?
“Spring,” another sonnet, starts “all in a rush / With richness”:
Nothing is so beautiful as Spring—
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing.Pure mundane ecstasy, though more slips through: “thrush’s eggs look little low
heavens.” They don’t just look like blue sky, the eggs looklittle low heavens,
we see heaven throughthem.
Especially while Hopkins was abstaining from poetry, the journals teem with
his surroundings. He never tires of spotting, and often sketching, the “horned
waves” of a glacier, “spray-end” of an ash stem, “silver bellies” of flouncing
fresh-caught mackerel, noticing then noting the organic shape, pattern, color,
sound, movement of things, now and then exalting them. One fall night, the
Northern Lights’ “soft pulses” rising upward “wholly independent of the earth”
in space and time gave “a new witness to God and filled me with delightful fear.”
Yet even then he thrives on detail.
Steaming across the Irish Sea from Isle of Man to Liverpool, only Hopkins
on board could have seen crests “ravelled up by the wind into the air in arch-
ing whips and straps of glassy spray and higher broken into clouds of white
and blown away. Under the curl shone a bright juice of beautiful green. The
foam exploding and smouldering under water makes a chrysoprase green”—
chrysoprase being a semiprecious quartz. Or take the opening of a brilliant
sonnet,