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Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W H Gardner, The Penguin Poets

Like many people of my generation I was turned on to poetry by
good ‘A’ level teaching. I had grown up thinking that poetry was a
class thing, like fine wines and haute cuisine, and the bits of poetry
I had been shown earlier in school, out on the margins of the
curriculum, hadn’t much changed this feeling. But at ‘A’ level poetry
was right at the centre of things, taught by people to whom it really
mattered.
  
   We did Chaucer and Milton, and the poetry that was imprinted
as a benchmark on my consciousness for ever was in the storm
scenes of King Lear. But the poems that opened new worlds of
linguistic possibility – and ultimately the completely new idea of
making a career out of literature – were in the W H Gardner
Penguin Poets selection of Hopkins. Hopkins and Arnold were set
together. I have no recollection whatever of studying Arnold: I’m
pretty sure the teacher was unenthusiastic (one of the great things
about my ‘A’ level teaching was that the teachers were completely
open about their likes and dislikes) but as far as I was concerned he
would have been blown away by Hopkins anyway.
  
   What interests me now, looking back, is that right from the start
I seem to have been aware that there is something problematic as
well as sublime about the way Hopkins writes. Lines such as

   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

seemed to me, and still do, comparable to Lear’s storm speeches.
But the first poem we were shown was ‘Felix Randal’: ‘Felix Randal
the farrier, O is he dead then? My duty all ended.’ I can remember
struggling to persuade myself that the casual‑colloquial tone of the
second phrase is subtly poignant, or in some inscrutable way ironic,
but I couldn’t rid myself of the suspicion that it is simply inept. And
I was never in doubt about the awfulness of the rhyme‑driven final
word of the poem, in which Hopkins calls a horse‑shoe a ‘sandal’.
even in one of his greatest poems, ‘The Windhover’, he is guilty of
‘My heart in hiding/ stirred for a bird’.
  
   But all this made Hopkins curiously and endearingly accessible.
He was obviously a genius, with unsurpassed linguistic gifts and an
intense, near‑visionary awareness of the natural world, but he was
capable of falling flat on his face. For a fifteen‑year old in the early
1960s, it helped that Hopkins’s peculiarities included a gauche,
apparently unfocused sexuality –

                             How a lush‑kept, plush‑capped sloe
                Will, mouthed to flesh‑burst,
   Gush! –

and a Christian‑inspired self‑loathing:

                  God’s most deep decree
   Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me.

   Later, at university, a sceptical tutor made me read Yvor Winters’
essay on Hopkins, in which he says that the poet only appeals to the
very young. I was a bit disturbed by this, and aware that I was still
very young even then. I probably did over‑identify, especially with
religious aspects of Hopkins’s work, but now that I am in my late
fifties I hope I can attest that a liking for Hopkins is not necessarily
immature.
  
   What was formative for me about reading Hopkins was nothing
to do with adolescent religion and sexuality, but a conviction
that poetry is essentially about the body of language, and at least
implicitly the speaking voice. One of my revelatory moments at
‘A’ level was when a teacher read out the opening of ‘The Leaden
Echo and the Golden Echo’:

   How to kéep – is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere
        known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or
        catch or key to keep
   Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty,… from vanishing
        away?

   The reading demonstrated to me how rhythm, internal
rhyme, assonance and alliteration are not discrete devices but
work inseparably from each other, in this case to sustain a sense
of metrical unity over an implausibly long line. This then enabled
me to appreciate the extraordinary rhythmic effects that Hopkins
accomplishes with the stanza of ‘the Wreck of the Deutschland’,
especially in the first part:

                             I am soft sift
                      In an hourglass – at the wall
                Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift,
                     And it crowds and it combs to the fall;
        I steady as a water in a well, to a poise, to a pane,
        But roped with, always, all the way down from the tall
                Fells or flanks of the voel, a vein
   Of the gospel proffer, a pressure, a principle, Christ’s gift.

   But even this, wonderful as it is, isn’t what I was most affected
by in Hopkins’s poetry. This is expansive, as it were architectural
poetry. You can read the plan through it. What I came most to look
for, and to be gripped by, in poetry is in one way the opposite of
these, though equally a matter of the body of language:

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

The first sentence condenses into five words Edgar’s lines,

   And worse I may be yet; the worst is not
   So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’

   I have come to accept that in the second phrase Hopkins
probably intended a musical metaphor, but to me it seemed the
ultimate in poetic language because it simultaneously drew on at
least four metaphorical suggestions: musical pitch, pitch as to throw,
pitch darkness and pitch as tar. The resulting confusion is itself an
objective correlative of the anguished experience of lost meaning
that is at the heart of the poem. There is a complementary effect a
few lines later:

   My cries heave, herds‑long, huddle…

Again the effect of compression, and of supercharged poetic energy,
in this case stemming from the inexplicitness of the metaphor, and
the fact that the metaphor derives at least partly from the body
of the language – the alliterated aspirates suggesting the crowded
breath of cattle, and the spondaic metre the massing of heavy
bodies – as well as from visual imagery.
  
   When I was at school I had only the most abstract interest in
‘nature’ and had no idea what a kestrel looks like. What interests
me is that now I am very much better informed about the natural
world, but the ‘Windhover’ is still, essentially, a creature of language:

                                             …in his riding
               Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
     High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
     In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
               As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow‑bend: the hurl
                                             and gliding
               Rebuffed the big wind.

   I couldn’t honestly say that the hours I have since spent watching
kestrels much enhance my enjoyment of these lines, in which
language almost seems a plastic art.

   Pound admired Eliot for having ‘modernised’ himself entirely
on his own. I wouldn’t say Hopkins seems exactly ‘modern’ now,
though he did when he was first published in 1918 and even when I
first read him in 1961. But he certainly did something extraordinary
with poetry on his own, without being a part of any avant‑garde,
unappreciated, unpublished and hardly read, just because of the
urgency of what he had to say.