Oh, Hopkins.

     At some point in my early teens a thick, hardback poetry anthology found its way into my home, picked up by my mom for general family consumption from a book sale. Commandeered it shamelessly, I claiming it as companion through many of the slow Summer afternoons following.

It was during one such Summer perusal, as cicadas raised their rattling cry far above the sound of any human speech, and the pale, bright sky stared down into defeat all who dared venture out under its domain, that I first stumbled upon Gerard Manley Hopkins. Halfheartedly turning pages, letting each one flutter like a great cream moth onto the one before it, I nearly missed him. But a few bright words caught my eye, and I stopped.

“Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.”

Looking back now, I feel certain the cicadas stopped along with me, creating one of those odd, pooled moments when all of Summer is silenced and brought round to attention, it’s intensity magnified ten fold in its stillness.

That poem, my doorway to the world as seen through the breathless, ardent eyes of Hopkins, was “The Windhover”. I flipped the next page with high hopes for more and in the pair of poems waving and dancing across it like merry pinions, “God’s Grandeur” and “Pied Beauty”, I found great treasure indeed.

Here was a world “charged” and “ready to flame out”, a world in which the “dappled”, the “strange, sweet, sour” things were held up and praised as things of great worth, showing as they did the “grandeur of God”. And the poems just grew in richness from there, telling tales of a world bright and near bursting with the tangerine tang of a loveliness whose presence hinted of things beyond this world even as it quickened and brought to life the one before me. The Medievals spoke of “the music of the spheres”, of a world held together in dance. In Hopkins, I felt certain I could catch snatches of that old melody, thrumming through the heart of this world, setting everything “aflame with the glory of God”. “Yes”, Hopkins seemed to say, “the world is as quirky and odd and merry and mismatched and, though now rent nearly apart, threaded through with as much enchantment as you ever dreamed it to be. And yes, it is God who made it to be so.” To read Hopkins is to be grabbed by both hands and set twirling until you ask yourself, “What is all this juice and all this joy?”along with him. There’s a hands clasped anticipation of something growing upon the edges of his vision even as he stands in the darkness I grew to understand haunted him.

Haunted him, and yet never won him. For here too, oh wonder, was a world in which it was possible to hold questions in one hand and adoration in the other. I know the term “bright sadness” applies to something else entirely, and yet I can’t help thinking of it as applying to Hopkins; his poems hold the same feeling as fresh, limpid sunlight hitting raindrops ready to drip off the roof. A clear, keen vision was his, holding in it’s gaze the twin facts of both the dance the universe was meant to be, and the curse and shadow which had spread across it. Yet that shadow which he felt so keenly and had him cry “I can no more” found also in him the reply “I can; can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.” For if ever there was poet who taught me to tussle with the great gales blowing about the realms of both my own soul and the one beyond, it was him. Tussle with them, and send them soaring towards God. Here find your kin, ye kindred spirits of the Jacob who wrestled with God. Anguish and accusation and wonder and thanks tumble through his poems side by side, clashing into each other at times yet never seeming incompatible; what better friend could a young girl make as she steps into adulthood, with all it’s nuance and shadow?

For to wrestle so desperately as he did, it begged the answering of a yet more vital question; what sort of God was this to be worth such a fight for? Surely it was no dull, lackluster being which he so fought. In Hopkins poems I found the God of grim steel skies and sharp starlight, the God of passion flowers and kinkajous and wild, fitful, sprightly winds. Here was the God teenage me so wanted, and did truly believe, to exist and yet Who I had but rarely glimpsed in church or chapel. A kind and gallant and vivid God who “fathers-forth” all the “strange”, “fickle”, “dim” things of this world. Here was a light Hopkins seemed to think bright enough to follow through any darkness.

Long ago, in the cool, carpeted rooms of our study, hidden away from the glare and mirages of a southwestern Summer, Hopkins told me that “our Savior” was “as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet”. Find for me, if you can, a better description of Christ in all the many lands of literature than those winsome words.

Before you do, though, make sure you take a wander through some of Hopkins words. They offer a grand view indeed.