Christian Poet

A HOPKINS READER (308 pp.)--Edifed by John Pick--Oxford ($4.50).

Gerard Manley Hopkins thought of himself as a priest rather than a poet. In his Victorian lifetime, he never saw his poems in print. Ironically, today, when a shelf full of books have been written about him, it is the poet and not the priest that the world chiefly remembers.

A Hopkins Reader, the latest tribute to him, links Poet Hopkins and Jesuit Hopkins by assembling selections from his letters, journals and sermons as well as 33 of his best poems. Those who want the full story of his life and work must turn to one of the biographies, but A Hopkins Reader is a fine introduction to a poet's poet--and to an intellectual Christian who cut a bright, if often steep, path of his own in searching the love of God.

"After My Death." Hopkins' background was solidly High Anglican, and by the time he was an undergraduate at Oxford, he was so caught up in religious fervor and asceticism as to note in his diary: "For Lent. No pudding on Sunday.

No tea except if to keep me awake and then without sugar . . . No verses in Passion Week or on Fridays." It was not long before Undergraduate Hopkins followed famed John Henry Newman into the Roman Catholic Church, and within a year of graduation he entered the Jesuit novitiate. He had written poetry at Oxford, but before he took his vows he made a bonfire of his manuscripts. Worldly fame, he decided, was "a great danger . . . as dangerous as wealth . . . and as hard to enter the kingdom of heaven with." For seven years he wrote no poetry.

Then one day a German ship with five nuns aboard foundered in the Thames estuary and the nuns were lost. At 31, with the approval of his rector, Hopkins went back to poetry to write a commemorative ode, The Wreck of the Deutschland. When the editor of a Jesuit periodical rejected it, Hopkins decided never again to ask for publication. But he sent many of his poems to his friend and fellow poet, Robert Bridges, and in 1879 he wrote Bridges: "If anyone shd. like, they might be published after my death."

Exploding Verse. In the age of Tennyson, Hopkins' poetry no doubt seemed strange and obscure to the Jesuit editor who turned it down. It is not easy reading today. One reason is Hopkins' abrupt rhythm--"sprung rhythm," he called it, which he chose "because it is the nearest to the ... natural rhythm of speech." Another barrier between the casual reader and Hopkins' verse is his strange construction. He often used words out of their natural order, omitted connectives altogether. He also made up words (inscape, scapish, instress).

He did not feel that poetry must always be immediately intelligible. He wanted his poetry "to explode" into meaning after several readings. And he realized that his, like all good poetry, should be read aloud: "Take breath and read it with the ears . . . and my verse comes all right." As a Jesuit priest, Hopkins held down half a dozen posts before being assigned, in the last years of his life, to Dublin's University College as professor of Greek.

The letters and poetry of these years show a saintly man whose failing health and introspective mind gave him little earthly happiness. "All impulse fails me," he wrote. "Nothing comes: I am a eunuch --but it is for the kingdom of heaven's sake." He took comfort in reflecting on the life of Christ, who, he observed, was "doomed to succeed by failure." His last words, uttered at 44, as he lay dying of typhoid fever, were: "I am so happy, I am so happy, I am so happy."

A GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS SAMPLER

Pied Beauty

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-firecoal 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.

Duns Scotus's Oxford

TOWERY city and branchy between towers, Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmed, lark-charmed, rook-racked, river-rounded; The dapple-eared lily below thee; that country and town did Once encounter in, here coped and poised powers; Thou hast a base and brickish skirt there, sours That neighbour-nature thy grey beauty is grounded Best in; graceless growth, thou hast confounded Rural rural keeping--folk, flocks, and flowers.

Yet ah! this air I gather and I release He lived on; these weeds and waters, these walls are what He haunted who of all men most sways my spirits to peace; Of realty the rarest-veined unraveller; a not Rivalled insight, be rival Italy or Greece; Who fire France for Mary without spot.

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; 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 On. morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings,

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