Morning's Minion: Hopkins, Trees and Birds

Today I want to talk about Hopkins and his connection with trees and birds, and how in everything he wrote, he associates wild things with a state of rejuvenation. In a letter to Robert Bridges in 1881 about his poem “Inversnaid,” he says “there’s something, if I could only seize it, on the decline of wild nature.” It turns out that Hopkins himself--eye-witness accounts to the contrary notwithstanding--was rather wild.

I will try to open the subject of our own highly charged relationship with nature, here and now in the twenty-first century and call on GMH, a nineteenth-century birder, tree-hugger, and nature prophet. For Hopkins, and thus for us this morning, nature is not merely useful to help us experience “emotion recollected in tranquility”—probably Wordsworth’s best-known line. Rather, as we read Hopkins’ sonnets of 1877, we experience human consciousness completing an electrical circuit. As Hopkins instresses a falcon on the wing, he charges the world energetically upward. His poetry thus charged is like none other. In 1873, hearing the sound of an ash tree as it was “hacked” and “maimed” and “felled,” the electrical connection was so intense he actually said he wished to die¹

His most productive poetic year was 1877, his final year in Wales, where he was happy and where he resumed writing poetry. That year, he wrote 13 great poems, and the distinguished scholar Norman White points out that 11 of them feature birds—doves, kingfishers, thrush, skylarks, and one windhover. Dressed in clerical black, Hopkins identified himself as a crow. He was what our current vernacular calls a birder. I just lately learned that bird-watching occurs when you sit in your chair sipping your tea or a glass of perfectly chilled California chardonnay, passively watching birds swoop or eat breakfast at your feeder. A birder, on the other hand, actually hits the road before dawn to walk the woods and meadows and swamps actively searching for birds. Hopkins was the latter. At least once, an interesting bird came to him: he writes on October 5, 1870, when he was a new Jesuit Scholastic,

A golden-crested wren had got into my room at night and circled round dazzled by the gaslight on the white ceiling; when caught even and put out it wd come in again. Ruffling the crest… I smoothed and fingered the little orange and yellow feathers which were hidden in it. Next morning I found many of these about the room and enclosed them in a letter to Cyril on his wedding day.

The American poet Dana Gioia says of Hopkins,

No other poet has achieved such impact with so small a body of writing…. Invisible in his lifetime, he now stands as a major poetic innovator who prefigured the Modernist revolution.

Hopkins stretched the known limits of poetry. His strategy was to strike and shock, like lightning. In his greatest poem, “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” he literally calls down the thunder and lightning of God. His vocabulary corrected cliché, and his electrical up-charging reversed the banality of human experience. Despite his being described by critics as “effeminate and nervous,” his poems are muscular and masculine. His genius proved at once stunning and intrusive. He found that the sporting of strange traits—pied beauty, dappled things—gave exceptional glory to God. Helen Vendler says that the hammering stresses, all force and beat [“The down-dugged ground-hugged grey”; “and the sea flint-flaked black-backed”; “How a lush-kept Plush-capped sloe will, mouthed to flesh-burst/gush, flush”] that mark his poetry after 1876 represent his perception of “a universe of continual irregular shocks” [The Breaking of Style]. Norman White in GMH in Wales writes:

In ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ Hopkins wrote as he had never written before; he also wrote as he would never write again…. [The rejection of that great poem for publication, and thus of the poet who wrote it], show how unsuited the Society of Jesus at that time… was to the genius of Gerard Hopkins.

The Irish writer Vona Groarke, in an essay on Hopkins in LARB, wrote:

Looking for something to put on a wedding wish or get well card? You’ve come to the wrong 14 lines…. His language is glitzy and glam as a Hollywood red carpet. He obeyed a religious rule, technically, that had no notion of a mind like his.

Over and again, critics compare his product to one species of flash and glitz, namely, electricity. The divine, when acknowledged, throws fire. Things when instressed flame forth. In “The Windhover,” light flashes as the sun rises behind a falcon gliding. Hopkins personally thought that this poem, in which flames fly from a bird and embers gash themselves, was his best work.

Any reader today can acknowledge that Hopkins wrote Holy Texts. God’s glory suffuses God’s creatures without their consent or even their consciousness, like air we breathe. In the sonnet “Henry Purcell,” a large seabird waddles along the beach, and then takes flight, involuntarily displaying the subversive genius hidden under its wings. Hopkins calls this selving, and every creature including us is called to do it.

In The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben—a major figure in the art and science of forestry--remarks that trees enjoy “just hanging out.” He also claims that trees prefer to be left alone, not managed or pruned. In the wilderness, deciduous trees can live a thousand years. Apparently there is a spruce in Sweden that carbon-dates at 9,000 years old.  Trees are, he continues, living things who enjoy their days as much as we do. I used to argue to those around me that animals and trees engage in contemplative prayer, but I fear I always had the wrong audience.

Hopkins, however, would love Wohlleben’s book, and in his curtal sonnet “Peace” (1879), personifying peace as a gentle wo Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?

And when Peace here does house
He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo
He comes to brood and sit.

Do birds possess special spirituality? Coleridge’s albatross attended vespers every evening. Noah’s dove was entrusted with the reestablishment of civilization. Jesus himself assures us that God’s eye is on the sparrow. The eco-theologian Mark Wallace has published a whole book called When God Was a Bird. Wallace describes Jesus’s baptism in the River Jordan in the Gospel of Mark: Jesus emerges from the river, probably covered with mud and dripping weeds, and from heaven descends a dove—familiar symbol of the Holy Spirit, almost certainly in this case a common grey rock pigeon such as we see on the steps of every cathedral in the world—and a voice booms out “This is my Son.” After this announcement, you would think that Jesus would be born in a sedan chair to the High Temple and set upon a throne and outfitted with a crown and cloth of gold. But no, the dove drives him into the wilderness, where he will spend 40 days being tormented by demons and no doubt mosquitoes.

 Hopkins’ nature sonnets are so startling in their relevance. “What would the world be, once bereft/Of wet and wildness? Let them be left…” (“Inversnaid”) writes Hopkins. In his nature sonnets, the earth shows up as the body of God. Each sonnet contains a collision. Then, the sestet provides a consensus. These poems worship wildness. In “Hurrahing in Harvest,” nature is a stallion, brawny and masculine, but “very violet sweet.” By the way, who knew that Hopkins was an equestrian? He is moony about horses, and according to Norman White, grew up riding with his father and brothers.

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, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And, eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

Hopkins wrote to Bridges in the fall of 1877 that this extraordinary poem “Hurrahing in Harvest” was “the outcome of half an hour of extreme enthusiasm as I walked home alone one day from fishing in the Elwy.” The poem reveals the slight hypomania that Hopkins enjoyed during his three years in Wales. It admires barbarous beauty—the opposite of the refined enameling of many Victorian poems—and verges on hyperbole: “has anything ever moulded and melted across skies like these clouds?”

After the volta, our attention “downs” from the wind, the clouds, and the sky, to planet earth, whose hills are like a strong shoulder and a stalwart stallion.

And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder
Majestic—as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet!—
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.

And then, to my mind, one of the best conclusions in all of Hopkins’ work: “these things are here and but the beholder/Wanting.” When the beholder finally INSTRESSES this harvest-scape—walking back from fishing in the Elwy—the electrical circuit is completed. “The human heart rears wings/And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.”

Hopkins once wrote to R.W.Dixon that poetry was “a waste of time.” Reviewing Paul Mariani’s biography of Hopkins, Brad Leithauser said that surely no other major poet has ever said such a thing. Furthermore, these last two explosive lines not only complete an electrical current that runs through all of us, if but the beholder shows up to brood and sit, they also redeem eternity, all time, from waste.

^{1.  At the heart of Hopkins’s lifelong and persistent poetic reside the concepts of inscape and instress, which he thus identified when he was an undergraduate. By inscape he means pattern in nature and by nature he means not only oak leaves, but the more general reality of the universe, of the way things are. By instress I think he means the emphasis within.Jump back to footnote 1}

Lectures from Hopkins Literary Festival July 2023

• Vision and perception in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘The peacock’s eye’Katarzyna Stefanowicz

• Gerard Manley Hopkins’s diary entries from his early Oxford years are a medley of poems, fragments of poems or prose texts but also sketches of natural phenomena or architectural (mostly gothic) features. In a letter to Alexander Baillie written around the time of composition He was planning to follow in the footsteps of the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood who had been known for writing poetry alongside painting pictures ... Read more

• Morning's Minion: Hopkins, Trees and Birds Margaret Ellsberg

• Today I want to talk about Hopkins and his connection with trees and birds, and how in everything he wrote, he associates wild things with a state of rejuvenation. In a letter to Robert Bridges in 1881 about his poem “Inversnaid,” he says “there’s something, if I could only seize it, on the decline of wild nature.” It turns out that Hopkins himself--eye-witness accounts to the contrary notwithstanding--was rather wild. Read more

• Joyce, Newman and Hopkins: Desmond Egan

• Joyce's friend, Jacques Mercanton has recorded that he regarded Newman as ‘the greatest of English prose writers’. Mercanton adds that Joyce spoke excitedly about an article that had just appeared in The Irish Times and had to do with the University of Dublin, “sanctified’ by Cardinal Newman, Gerard Manley Hopkins and himself Read more ...