THE WORLD CHARGED BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS 101wildly in front of a waterfall, dipping his hand and rolling rocks down its face,
then sitting and staring at the falls for minutes on end.
A small water-born event rivets Hopkins on the Isle of Man, between England
and Ireland, and also prompts a notebook sketch. “We passed the beautiful little
mill-hamlet of Balaglas in the glen and started a shining flight of doves,” his
account begins. They climb up a forceful brook where
Round holes are scooped in the rocks smooth and true like turning: they look
like the hollow of a vault or bowl. I saw and sketched as well as in the rain I
could one of them that was in the making: a blade of water played on it and
shaping to it spun off making a bold big white bow coiling its edge over and
splaying into ribs.Hopkins had “jumped into one of the pools above knee deep,” so when he got
home in heavy rain, “Mr. Sidgreaves covered me under his plaid.”
Those round scooped holes catch his gaze, they’re “smooth and true like
turning,” as if turned on a lathe. In his sketch, Hopkins is looking downstream
at a “blade” of rushing water playing against the hollow and the “bold big white
bow coiling its edge.” Again and again his verbs enliven nouns, force animates
form, proving “nature is never spent.” His sketching hand works hardest on the
rock’s scooped bowl, especially how its dark hue shows through the spun-off coil
of spray, a constant bow shape formed from flow. We ’ve all spotted such events
in a creek, brook, stream, or river—Coleridge saw a “white rose of Eddy-foam”
in the River Greta—but seldom with such exact passion for their inscape and
instress, design and energy. Nature lives this way, and so does poetry.
All this is not to say that Gerard Manley Hopkins spent his days exploring.
Wed to the Society of Jesus, he studied, taught, preached, and ministered in
England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. His duties and sometimes his doubts,
on top of poor health, wore on him, and in 1885 what are known as the Terrible
Sonnets emerged. They deal with agony, wrestling: “No worst, there is none.
Pitched past pitch of grief.” Despite—and because of—despair, he reaches
for what language can do, risking a rich pun on “pitch” (throw, slope, height
or depth, black tar). The same verve Hopkins gave to God ’s grandeur and the
windhover’s ecstasy takes the Alps as psychic terrain:
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne ’er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.Two lines here strain endurance by drumming on ten monosyllables. And words
get cramped in “mind, mind... Life death,” like a tense snare about to be sprung.