Institute for Christian Teaching
Education Department of Seventh-day Adventists
THE SEARCH FOR INTEGRATION:
A STUDY OF THE FAITH JOURNEY
IN THE POETRY OF GERARD MANLEY
by
Penny Mahon
Prepared for the 33rd International Faith and Learning Seminar
held at
January 30 – February 11, 2005
Introduction:
Like nesting
Russian dolls, my paper will move from the larger to the smaller, from broad
context to specific case study. First I will talk about how we at
The
At Newbold, we
offer two distinct types of degree programme: one is accredited by Adventist
bodies in the
The first element we emphasise is that each course is intended to encourage an awareness of the spiritual nature of humanity and a commitment to personal faith. This is a vital aspect of the underpinning course rationale and is an attempt to highlight the value of exploring belief as part of the learning process. We state that it is the department’s intention to produce graduates who not only have a body of knowledge and skills but who have also given thought to personal beliefs and values and are sensitive and committed to the broader community of which they will become a part.
Second, we commit to including in all three disciplines specific content which reflects on the role of religion in human experience. This would be expected in theology classes perhaps but we have also ensured that not only do all the literature and history classes foster an environment where spiritual themes can be comfortably discussed but also where specific courses, such as Religion and Violence in Early Modern Europe, Church and People in Nineteenth-Century England or Milton’s Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, have been developed in order to allow major debate on issues surrounding religious events, texts and experience.
The course Faith
and Doubt in Victorian Literature:
It is one of these classes in the literature strand of the degree, called Faith and Doubt in Victorian Literature, that I have been teaching from the degree’s inception. This is a class which I have structured in a number of ways and with a number of texts over the years but the approach is always the same: basically I look at some of the possible choices made by a selection of nineteenth-century writers to the challenge of faith in what was a radically changing and challenging society. I include writers who continue to maintain their faith throughout their lives such as John Henry Newman and Christina Rossetti, writers who make some kind of accommodation between faith and doubt, such as the deism of Thomas Carlyle or the religious humanism of George Eliot; and writers who completely lose their faith, as in the case of Algernon Swinburne and Thomas Hardy.
I always preface my first lecture by advising the students that some of the texts and ideas we will be exploring may well cause them to ask serious questions about their own faith, questions they may not have asked before. I suggest the students will be surprised how the personal journeys of faith made by those Victorian man and women writers can connect with roads travelled by 21st century Christians. Their texts may influence the students’ faith negatively or positively but as Holmes argues, ‘the educated Christian must be at home in the world of ideas and people.’[1] Our aim is to create educated Christians with self-knowledge and with reasons for belief. We have a responsibility to influence our students to become critical thinkers, and that sometimes means taking risks. The quality of discussions in that class would certainly indicate that serious reflection has taken place.
Gerard Manley Hopkins - the context:
There is one
writer whose poetry never ceases to elicit a positive response from the
students even though few of them will have read his poetry before. Gerard
Manley Hopkins, the poet in question, will be the main focus of my paper. I
have always included his poetry because in it he explores a unique and
compelling journey from faith through deep despair and doubt back to faith
again.[2]
Because I look at Hopkins close to the beginning of the semester, and then usually conclude with texts by authors of a more sceptical bent, I spend a final session reminding the class of Hopkins’s courageous faith journey, contrasting him for instance with Thomas Hardy, a near contemporary, who was perhaps more typical of his time. He wrote a poem called ‘God’s Funeral’, an end-of-century lament over what many saw as a defunct deity. In that same concluding class, I also look briefly at another twentieth-century Christian poet who scrutinised and preserved his own faith in a similar way to Hopkins, the Welsh poet R.S Thomas.[5] It is important to remind students that faith is always an option despite the challenges of rationalism and scepticism, and to show them that that option is still being chosen by artists and intellectuals, by those who think and create, who shape and influence.
Gerard Manley Hopkins - the poetry:
Our
Society values, as you say, and has contributed to literature, to culture; but
only as a means to an end. Its history and its experience shew that literature
proper, as poetry, has seldom been found to be to that end a very serviceable
means.[7]
My subsequent analysis
of this faith journey indicates a suggested approach to the discussion of
For the purposes
of this paper, I will look at five poems from distinct periods in his life. I
would encourage the reader to read each poem aloud since
‘Pied Beauty’:
The first poem is ‘Pied
Beauty’.
No
single sentence better explains the motives and directions of
Glory be to God for dappled things -
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh fire-coal chestnut falls, finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced - fold, fallow and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise Him.[12]
The wide selection of natural objects he includes in the condensed octave are all characterised by variety, contrast, difference: whether it be the couple-colour of clouds or the variegated colours of birds’ wings, all nature reflects God’s glory. ‘What all things share with all others is the fact of their differences, their individuality. More importantly they all share one Creator, who fashioned them and infused into them His being.’[13] In the condensed sestet he meditates on a range of contrasting adjectives – ‘swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim’ – which more abstractly describe the diversity of creation. And finally that diversity is shown to emanate from God the Father who never changes. As Alison Sulloway notes,
‘Pied Beauty’ quite naturally begins and ends with a salute to God, the changeless origin of beauty in all its flux and its variety. The first line…and the last line of the poem with its coda… places the apotheosis of flux within a framework of stability…The sonnet begins in exhilaration and ends in solemnity’.[14]
There are several
other poems of this period which emphasise
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;
And 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 eastwards, springs –
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.[17]
Yet for all this, there still, in Hopkins’s inimitable alliterative style, ‘lives the dearest freshness deep down things’ and God’s spirit continues to watch over the world despite man’s lack of perception. The concluding image of the Holy Ghost as dove, maternal, nurturing, and life-giving, warmly protecting the earth through her constant presence, is full of trust and faith and Hopkins’s characteristic use of the emotional ‘ah!’ heightens the affective quality of his faith response.
For Hopkins, it is vital that each part of Nature must ‘selve’, must be true to its self, must reveal its inscape, in order to most fully reflect its Creator. In [As Kingfishers catch fire] he captures the distinctive inscapes of the bird, the dragonfly, the stone, the bell, ordinary objects of nature, all of which speak their selfness, remain true to the character and place the creator gave them in creation. ‘Each mortal being indoors each one dwells;/Selves –goes its self; myself it speaks and spells.’ For Hopkins, it is vital too that humans also ‘selve’ and if man is to be true to his own being, and ‘Act in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is’ – then he will imitate Christ, ‘for Christ plays in ten thousand places,/Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his/To the Father through the features of men’s faces.’[20]
The Dark Sonnets:
The sonnets just
explored which acknowledge God’s general revelation in nature reveal
The melancholy I have all my life been subject to has become of late years not indeed more intense in its fits but rather more distributed, constant and crippling….I see no ground for thinking I shall ever get over it….[21]
It is also true that he was at that period an exhausted teacher, something we may have some sympathy with! In 1883 he writes to his friend Alexander Baillie:
I like my pupils and do not wholly dislike the work, but I fall into or continue in a heavy weary state of body and mind….I make no way with what I read, and seem but half a man. It is a sad thing to say. I try, and am even meant to try.…to write some books; but I find myself so tired and so harassed I fear they will never be written.[22]
One biographer comments that while Hopkins was teaching classics at University College, Dublin, from 1884, his depression was exacerbated by the exhaustion brought on by his enormous work-load: ‘setting and marking six examinations a year, which on one occasion produced 557 scripts from one examination alone!’[23]
It was in this state that he found himself writing a series of six sonnets, which have come to be known as the sonnets of desolation or the dark sonnets. He said of them that they came to him ‘unbidden and against my will’, that they were ‘written in blood’. They are perhaps some of the most intimate, compelling and honest poems ever written, revealing a deep loneliness of mind and spirit.[24]
There is some
division amongst
Other critics do
not see the experiences recorded in the sonnets in quite so positive a light;
for them, the dark sonnets express a real loss of faith rather than a predictable
spiritual rite of passage. Even if one bears in mind the ‘dark night of the
soul’, a state described originally by the mystic St John of the Cross and
later referred to by Ignatius Loyola as one of the fundamental experiences of
the seeker after religious truth, the experience still seems to be one in which
Hopkins is lost and alone. It may be that
And this is much more true when we consider the mind; when I consider my selfbeing, my consciousness and feeling of myself, that taste of myself, of I and me above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnut-leaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to another man.[27]
It seems that one of the issues he is struggling with in these sonnets of desolation is that his sense of self is stronger than his sense of God. But, as Robert Goldsmith comments, to ‘purg[e] the soul of self-love or self-hate’ is a necessary step to spiritual growth.[28]
‘I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day’:
The dark sonnet I have chosen to address is one of the bleakest, emphasising as it does the speaker’s acute sense of isolation from God.
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hoữrs we have spent
This night! What sights you, heart, saw, what ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.
I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves, but worse.[29]
The strong sense
of self, of selving, that
The other sonnets of desolation are equally dark. In [No worst, there is none], the very first line, including as it does the superlative rather than the comparative, indicates that he is looking at an experience beyond which there is nothing more extreme. There is nowhere he can go for consolation.
No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief-
Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing –
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked ‘No ling-
Ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief’.
O the mind, the 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.[32]
He has clearly lost all hope of support from divine sources. The intense sensitivity of his own mind is unable to deal with this unspecified grief – possibly ‘world-sorrow’ or grief for the pain and suffering of mankind in general – and loses itself in depths of despairing thought. His only ‘comfort’ is that sleep and ultimately death, will silence his inner pain. He is nothing more than a ‘wretch’ who, like the animals he has implicitly been comparing himself to throughout, can only hide from the elements in hollow shelter. Cotter reads the word ‘comfort’ as an echo of the previous ‘Comforter’ and so sees this final line as marking ‘the beginning of wisdom; it returns us to the prosaic cycle of everyday life…the trivial too is charged with Christ’s presence.’[33] However, it could equally well be read as an ironic reference back to that other Comforter who has seemingly betrayed him, and so leaves the sonnet in muted despair rather than wisdom.
In another sonnet
[Carrion comfort], again the idea of false or dead comfort appears as he wrestles
with the idea of suicide, and challenges himself to ‘not choose not to be’.[34]
This sonnet is full of ambivalence and
obscurity. Who is the ‘terrible’? Who is he wrestling with? The ending may open
out the possibility of God’s reality as He apparently wrestles with His
creature but the reality of
Ultimately, these intense sonnets show a speaker experiencing deep psychological suffering, struggling with an almost solipsistic view of reality. They reveal a raw honesty, an awareness of deep need, and in a sense they become desperate prayers though without apparent hope of reply.
‘Thou art indeed just, Lord’:
In his last years however,
(
Justus
quidem tu es, Domine, si disputem tecum; verumtamen justa loquar ad te: quare
via impiorum prosperatur? Etc. (Jer. 12:1)
Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners’ ways prosper? And why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?
Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes
Now, leaved how thick! Laced they are again
With fretty chervil, look and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build – but not I build; no, but strain,
Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.[35]
The image of the eunuch, which conjures associations of impotence and infertility, is one he had used in a journal entry from a retreat the year before:
What
is my wretched life? Five wasted years almost have passed in
But despite the depressive state of mind revealed in this journal entry, the sonnet itself is a statement of faith rather than doubt. It is about faith because the speaker is willing to talk to God, get angry with Him, express to Him his confusion and frustration over those words of Jeremiah 12, at the paradox of sinners prospering and the just suffering: why should this be? In the very fact that here we have one side of a dialogue, a conversation with God, not the desperate monologue of the previous poems, we can see that he seems to have progressed from his previous state of hopelessness into some sort of rekindling of relationship with his God. Ellsberg expresses it in terms of his idea of selving. He appears ‘to have synthesized his relationship with God and his own need to selve’.[37] She goes on to express the optimistic tone of the sonnet perfectly:
This
is not a poem of despair. It is not wretched, writhing, restless, or anxious,
as was the tone of the previous dark sonnets. Emphasis falls on the word
“Mine”, implying
So the poem ends with a ‘moving request for some kind of fertility of spirit…Christ, the maker of the universe, is asked to bring [him] renewal’.[39]
Hopkins and the Psalms:
This expression of
a man approaching the edge of the abyss and finally returning with hope to the
reality of himself and his relationship with God has valuable parallels with other
literature including the biblical. There is a fruitful correspondence between
The psalms of
disorientation (for instance, Psalms 13, 35 and 88) express ‘terror, raggedness
and hurt’.[43] In
Psalm 13, the initial verses express the same intense feelings of loneliness
and separation from God that can be found in
Finally there are the
psalms of new orientation which ‘bear witness to the surprising gift of new
life when none had been expected. That new orientation [for instance, 30, 34,
40 and 138] is not a return to the old stable orientation, for there is no such
going back.’[46] The
tone of Psalm 30 reflects the fact that the writer has survived the experience
of desolation. Even though he can now sing a psalm to the Lord, he can never be
carefree again because ‘Lord, it was thy will to shake my mountain refuge;/
Thou didst hide thy face and I was struck with dismay’.[47]
Conclusion:
Literature is an
ideal discipline for the integration of faith and learning because its subject
matter so frequently involves spiritual or religious topics, and is, despite
the challenges of some postmodern literary theory, directly concerned with the
exploration of truth claims, of values, of personal faith journeys.[50]
The power of
Enough! The Resurrection,
A heart’s clarion! Away grief’s gasping, joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; world’s wildfire leave but ash;
In a flash, in a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.[52]
Bibliography
Armstrong, Isobel, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993)
Brueggemann, Walter, Spirituality of the Psalms (
Cotter, James Finn, The Christology and Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (US: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972)
Ellsberg, Margaret R., Created to Praise: The Language of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Oxford: OUP, 1987)
Endean,
Philip, SJ, ‘The Spirituality of Gerard Manley Hopkins’, Hopkins Quarterly, vol. 8 (Fall
1981), pp.107-129
Fowler,
James, Stages of Faith (USA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995)
Goldsmith, Robert H., ‘The Selfless Self:
Holmes, Arthur, The Idea of a
Ong, Walter J. SJ, Hopkins, the Self, and God (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 1993)
Roberts, Gerald, Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Literary Life (
Macmillan, 1994)
Slakey, Roger L., ‘“God’s Grandeur” and Divine Impersoning’, Victorian Poetry, vol. 34 (1996), pp. 73-85
Steiner, George, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989)
Sulloway, Alison, Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Temper (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972)
The
Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed.
by Humphry House and Graham Storey (
The New English Bible (Oxford: OUP, 1970)
The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. by Norman H. Mackenzie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990)
[1] Arthur Holmes, The Idea of a
[2] I am aware that it is problematic to make a direct connection
between the author and the speaker of a poem but I will be doing so during this
paper because of what I see as the intensely autobiographical nature of
[3] Alison Sulloway, Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Temper (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1972), p.3.
[4] Sulloway, p. 2.
[5] Poems such as ’Threshold’, ‘Petition’, ‘The Other’, ‘The Absence’ and ‘The Coming’ are examples of poems I use by Thomas.
[6] For a stimulating discussion of the particular tension between poet and priest in Hopkins’s life, see Philip Endean, SJ, ‘The Spirituality of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ in Hopkins Quarterly, vol. 8 (Fall 1981), pp.107-129.
[7] Letters, vol 2, p. 88 in Ellsberg , p. 37.
[8] Margaret R.
Ellsberg, Created to Praise: The Language
of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Oxford:
OUP, 1987), p.11.
[9] Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 430.
[10] The
Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, ed. by C.C. Abbott ,
vol.1 (
[11] Humphry House ed., Notebooks
and Papers (
[12] The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. by Norman H. Mackenzie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 144.
[13] Robert H. Goldsmith, ‘The Selfless Self:
[14] Sulloway, p. 107.
[15] Goldsmith, p. 68.
[16] Roberts, p. 65.
[17] MacKenzie, p. 139.
[18] Roger L. Slakey, ‘“God’s Grandeur” and Divine Impersoning’, Victorian Poetry, vol. 34 (1996), pp. 73-85, p. 79.
[19] James Finn Cotter, The Christology and Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (US: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), p. 171.
[20] [As kingfishers catch fire, so dragonflies draw flame] in Mackenzie, p. 141, lines 7, 11-14.
[21] Letters, vol 3, p.256 in Ellsberg, p.33.
[22] Further Letters of
[23] Roberts, p. 126.
[24] Ellsberg, p. 38.
[25] Walter J. Ong, SJ, Hopkins, the Self, and God (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 1993), p. 152.
[26] Goldsmith, p. 70.
[27] Sermons
[28] Goldsmith, p. 72.
[29] MacKenzie, p. 181.
[30] Ellsberg, p. 41.
[31] Cotter, p. 227.
[32] Mackenzie, p. 182.
[33] Cotter, p. 224.
[34] [Carrion Comfort] in Mackenzie, p. 183, line 4.
[35] Mackenzie, p. 201.
[36] The Journals and Papers of
Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. by Humphry House and Graham Storey (
[37] Ellsberg, p. 42.
[38] Ellsberg, p. 44-45.
[39] Cotter, p. 237.
[40] I acknowledge the work of a previous student, Jon Larssen, who wrote extensively on this topic for an extended essay while taking the humanities degree at Newbold.
[41] Walter Brueggemann, Spirituality
of the Psalms (
[42] Psalm 106: 2, 19 (The New English Bible).
[43] Brueggemann,, p. 29-30.
[44] Psalm 13: 1.
[45] Brueggemann, p. 26-27.
[46] Brueggemann, p. 47.
[47] Psalm 30: 7.
[48] Ibid., p. 27.
[49] Goldsmith, p. 72.
[50] For a valuable discussion from a spiritual perspective of the limitations of some postmodern literary theory, see George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
[51] James Fowler, Stages of Faith (USA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), p. 187.
[52] In Mackenzie, p. 197-8, lines 16-23.