designed to induce maudlin despair. His versions of the 15th-century criminal poet
Villon have lasted better. The octosyllabics of the original curb the translator’s
fluency, fatally evident in his elegy to his idol, the French poet Charles Baudelaire
(1821–1867).
Masochism and alcohol led to Swinburne’s collapse. In his last thirty years, under
voluntary restraint, he poured out verse, plays, pornography, prejudiced literary crit-
icism and an odd novel. ‘We Poets in our youth begin in gladness’, wrote
Wordsworth, ‘But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.’ Swinburne’s
heirs flowered and fell in the 1890s.Gerard Hopkins
The poetry ofGerard Hopkins(1844–1889) – he disliked his middle name, Manley- was first published by his friend Robert Bridges in 1918. Converted at Oxford (and
cut off by his family), Hopkins was received into the Catholic Church by J. H.
Newman, and entered the Society of Jesus in 1868. Courageous, sensitive, often ill,
he worked in industrial parishes, then as a conscientious Professor of Greek at
University College, Dublin, dying of typhoid.
Hopkins put aside his early verse, but in 1877 a casual remark by his Rector
prompted him to write The Wreck of the Deutschland, and to submit it to a Jesuit
journal.It was rejected. Hopkins thereafter thought that the Society might regard
poetry as inconsistent with his profession. He exchanged poems privately with
Robert Bridges and R. W. Dixon; his were extremely unconventional in style. Even in
the 1930s they seemed experimental and modern – The Wreck of the Deutschland
begins The Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936) – and were imitated. The shock has
worn off, the astonishing achievement remains.
‘A horr ible thing has happened to me’, Hopkins wrote in 1864, ‘I have begun to
doubtTennyson.’ His instinct, he said, was ‘to admire and do otherwise’. Hopkins
avoided smooth movement and harmony of language in order to make the reader
see and think.He believed with Coleridge that Nature is ‘the language that thy God
utters’. His tutor at Balliol, Walter Pater, would have encouraged a scrupulous artic-
ulation of moments of perception. Hopkins believed further that the Incarnation
meant that ‘the world is charged with the grandeur of God’, and he tried therefore to
catch the selfhood of each created thing in matching words. To do this in an age slip-
ping into what Blake called ‘single vision and Newton’s sleep’, he had to awaken the
forces in language – spring in rhythm, grasp in syntax, quickness in diction – to
sharpen its apprehension of reality.
God creating nature is his first theme, as in ‘Hurrahing in Harvest’:
Summer ends now;now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?
I walk, I lift up, lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour:
And éyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?
The flour of cloud-fragments is gleaned for a reply to the priest’s uplifted heart.
Nature-mysticism becomes almost eucharistic. This transforming intensity is such
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