Words I Love: Gerard Manley Hopkins

I finally ordered myself a copy of Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works, which I have been coveting for weeks. Hopkins is my favorite poet (except when my favorite poet is Tennyson. They trade off) but very few people have read him. He was a Victorian, but he wasn’t published until the twentieth century, partially because his poetry hardly resembles any of his contemporaries’. He wrote primarily using “sprung rhythm,” a rhythm system he made up himself, using stressed and non-stressed syllables to determine line length. Much of his poetry was about “inscape,” also a term he invented, which concerns the true nature and purpose that lies inside everything, from animals to sunsets to people. 

One of the reasons I love Hopkins is that his poems are incredibly dense. He chooses words that can have multiple meanings in the context he shapes. Take the first few lines of “No worst, there is none”:

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief, 

More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.

“Pitch” conjures up a number of images: the act of throwing; a note of music or the act of tuning a musical instrument; tar/resin; the phrase “pitch black.” Hopkins wraps these images into a single phrase, layering them, giving his words an incredible richness. It may take a while to unpack all the meanings, but the effort is well worth it.

The sound of his words is wonderful, too. He uses lots of alliteration and internal rhyme; his words taste like honey on the tongue, warm and slow and thick. Try reading some Hopkins aloud and see if it doesn’t make you want to write better!

Hopkins’ poetry ranges between ecstatic joy and blackest despair (yet another reason to love him—the acuity with which he portrays a range of emotion). I'll leave you with one of his “Bright sonnets,” my current favorite.

God’s Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; 

All is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

What do you think? Do you like Hopkins’s poetry? Who is your favorite poet?