THE WORLD CHARGED BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS 103The deep-down freshness even in painful turns of speech helped Hopkins
pass through this agony: “leave comfort root-room,” he tells himself, and his
next poems touch on workingmen and the unemployed. One sonnet he liked
particularly praises Harry Ploughman:
Hard as hurdle arms, with a broth of goldish flue
Breathed round.Plowmen were growing scarce even in Hopkins’s day, and anyway we ’ve for-
gotten his metaphors’ rural sense: “hurdle,” a wood frame used in fences, and
“flue,” a light down or fluff. But he had misgivings in evoking Harry’s
rack of ribs; the scooped flank; lank
Rope-over thigh; knee-nave; and barrelled shank—These bodily shapings, tracing the inscape of God ’s creature—do they get too
intimate, touching the plowman’s “barrowy brawn”?
He leans to it, Harry bends, look. Back, elbow, and liquid waist
In him.“I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like my own than
any other man’s living,” Hopkins said once. “As he is a very great scoundrel
this is not a pleasant confession.”
What else there was of Whitman in him, Hopkins needn’t have regretted
either: a fearless way with words that broke and sowed new ground for mod-
ern poetry. Though the American’s long breath lines and ceaseless democratic
“Song of Myself ” have little in common with the Briton’s taut sonnets and God-
struck humility, they do share a mortal love and vital touch for even the meanest
earthly matter. “And what is Earth’s eye, tongue, or heart else, where / Else,
but in dear and dogged man?” Hopkins, but it could be Whitman speaking.
Both poets owned great nerve, “Crying What I do is me: for that I came” and
sounding “the dearest freshness deep down things.”
Like Emily Dickinson, who had that nerve and oddness too, Hopkins honed
earthbound things to a spiritual edge. And like her, he published almost no po-
ems during his lifetime. Dying of typhoid at forty-four, he composed a psalmlike
lament: “See,” the thickets are rife with crisp green herbage “and fresh wind
shakes / Them; birds build—but not I build.” Yet he did, in spading language
to pray this way: “Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.” Eventually
the poems came out, and their wakening, their delight-delivering force is never
spent.