MATTHEW ARNOLD, ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE, GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
Writing in 1848 to his dear friend the poet Arthur Hugh Clough, the author of the witty and beguiling verse novel Amours de Voyage (1858), Matthew Arnold dismisses Browning as “a man with a moderate gift passionately desiring movement and fullness, and obtaining but a confused multitudinousness.” Browning’s ideas are not sufficiently strong: the world’s multitudinousness prevails and imposes fragmentation. To his mother he wrote twenty years later: “It might be fairly urged that I have less poetical sentiment than Tennyson, and less intellectual vigor and abundance than Browning; yet, perhaps because I have more of a fusion of the two than either of them, and have regularly applied that fusion to the main line of modern development, I am likely enough to have my turn, as they have had theirs.”
But Arnold never quite had his turn as a poet, partly because of the deliberate way he conceives his role, partly because Arnold the critic frightens readers off. The faint praise even of so sympathetic a reader as Robert Graves sells him short: “He was so capable, honest and humourless a monumental mason that he deserves more honour than most of his energetic and vainglorious contemporaries—the Brownings, Tennysons and Rossettis.” Max Beerbohm realized that there was a less somber, less grandiloquent side—not only the man who elegized his dogs and a canary along with Wordsworth and Goethe, but a man whose good humor occasionally bursts forth in the letters. Auden early in his career takes the measure of Arnold’s moral feeling—what sets him apart from his contemporaries is a sense that ideas matter, actions are to be judged by motive rather than effect. A hunger for order is part of his hunger for truth. But this diminishes him in Auden’s eye to being something of a ventriloquist’s dummy for the values of his father, the educationalist.
His gift knew what he was—a dark disordered city;
Doubt hid it from the father’s fond chastising sky;
Where once the mother-farms had glowed protectively,
Stood the haphazard alleys of the neighbours’ pity.
—Yet would have gladly lived in him and learned his ways,
And grown observant like a beggar, and become
Familiar with each square and boulevard and slum,
And found in the disorder a whole world to praise.
But all his homeless reverence, revolted, cried:
“I am my father’s forum and he shall be heard,
Nothing shall contradict the holy final word,
Nothing.” And thrust his gift in prison till it died,
And left him nothing but a jailor’s voice and face,
And all rang hollow but the clear denunciation
Of a gregarious optimistic generation
That saw itself already in a father’s place.
This is near Lytton Strachey’s cruel verdict, which makes Arnold (also through paternal legacy) provincial, repugnant to that assertive commissar’s cosmopolitan morality, and rather risibly unsophisticated. From his shrill perch Strachey misreads the real achievements of the father and forgets that the impact of father on son was not the impact of just any teacher and preacher, but of a very particular one, on a son who was able to write “Dover Beach” and “Sohrab and Rustum.”
Lionel Trilling gets a proper purchase on Arnold. Against the mellifluousness of his Victorian contemporaries, “Arnold breaks into melody only occasionally, but through all his verse runs the grave cadence of the speaking voice... His very colloquialism... is one of Arnold’s charms; it is the urbanity of the ancient poets... which assumes the presence of a hearer and addresses him—with a resultant intimacy and simplicity of manner that is often very moving.” Arnold is set beside the more copious, less earnest, Landor, as central to that other nineteenth-century line, which seemed to perish in the 1890s but emerged once more in the teens of the next century.
Though Swinburne later changed his tune, he wrote of Arnold’s New Poems (1867): “The majesty and composure of thought and verse, the perfect clearness and competence of the words, distinguish this from other poetry of the intellect now more approved and applauded.” He had in mind Tennyson’s and Browning’s intellectually unburnished instruments beside Arnold’s antique lyre. Swinburne’s rhetoric is not altogether empty: New Poems included “Thyrsis,” “Heine’s Grave” and “Rugby Chapel.” The best work shows composure, if not “majesty”: a dignity suited to Arnold’s moral seriousness. He balances feeling and thought—feeling not in excess of thought. Arnold has the seriousness, if not the certainty, of Johnson. Virgil’s Aeneid is pervaded—he says—by a brooding melancholy, “the haunting self-dissatisfaction” of the poet’s heart. Arnold in his lyrics, elegies and poems of action is self-dissatisfied: with his poetry, his life, his society, his sense of time—a universalized pathos, a vision of the human condition in his century that combines the negative clarity of an Old Testament prophet with the manners of a classical patrician: resignation tempers vehemence. He sees things as they are and will be. In “Dover Beach,” the greatest single poem of the Victorian period, a moment of happiness regards itself in the context of history. Gazing at the sea, the poet calls his beloved to watch and listen with him. He hears the tide on the shingle. Sophocles heard in that sound “the turbid ebb and flow / Of human misery.” He finds thought there too. The Sea of Faith is ebbing, and with it the certainties of faith. He hears
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and fight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Negative vision emerges from a particular situation: “Come to the window, sweet is the night air.” Beside Browning’s dramatic monologues this grows even taller in its technical and intellectual accomplishment. Tidally, the lines contract and expand; enjambements heighten the tone, counterpoint the rhythms, which have the variety and hesitancy of a speaking voice, rising to the open cadence of the concluding lines.
Arnold was not invariably so intimate, severe or good a writer. Many poems are drab or sententious. If his best are sober in tone and elegiac in manner, so are his worst. There are reasons for this, not all of them personal. Tennyson and Browning enjoyed relative financial independence; Arnold, son of the educationalist Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby, had to earn a living conventionally. Work took him away from writing. The world he moved through as a schools inspector—and he knew more at first hand of conditions in the social and political world than any of his Victorian contemporaries—was hard to square with the cultural world he possessed. His social criticism and his poetry flow from this gaping disparity between the actual and the potential. His criticism suggests that change is possible, while his verse acknowledges—in its classical and heroic subjects and elegiac mode—a steady decline from the past to the materialist, philistine Victorian present he inhabits. In his own life, there was a decline as well, a fall from grace. He never achieved the great poem he believed he could write.
He was born in Laleham, Surrey, in 1822. He had crooked legs and spent two years in leg braces to correct the deformity. The family moved to Rugby in 1828. Arnold’s early education was, unhappily, at Laleham for two years, under his uncle’s supervision; then at Winchester; and finally at Rugby itself, where he made friends with Clough, and with Thomas Hughes, author-to-be of Tom Brown’s School Days. Fox How, near Grasmere, close by the Wordsworths’, was the family holiday retreat and remained Arnold’s bolt-hole for the rest of his life.
He won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1840 (as did Clough) and a year later his father became Regius Professor of Modern History at the university (while remaining headmaster of Rugby). He wrote poems, won prizes, developed his friendship with Clough, attended John Henry Newman’s (still Anglican) sermons, and got a reputation as a not-over-the-top dandy and dependable student. His father died suddenly of heart illness in 1842, and this bereavement cast a shadow over Arnold’s thought. He took the Newdigate Prize for poetry and in 1844 received a second-class degree. He taught briefly at Rugby and in 1845 was elected fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. Friends and family considered him a dilettante and were unprepared for the seriousness of his poems published anonymously in 1849. The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems contained “The Forsaken Merman” and the famous sonnet to Shakespeare. By this time he had traveled to France and Switzerland and was on his way to becoming a modest man of the world.
In 1851 he was appointed inspector of schools, responsible for the primary and secondary establishments run by nonestablished Protestant denominations. On the strength of this employment he got married. The next year, again anonymously, Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems appeared, as did his first son. Among the “other poems” was “Tristram and Iseult.” In 1853 Poems, A New Edition (this time with his name on it) was published, with a selection from earlier books and “Sohrab and Rustum,” “The Scholar-Gipsy” and “Memorial Verses to Wordsworth,” one of the best elegies in the language. Poems: Second Series (1855) includes the disappointing poem of action, “Balder Dead.” Merope: A Tragedy (1858) was unsuccessful. His final collection, New Poems (1867), was hardly new. Apart from “Thyrsis,” dedicated to the memory of Clough and composed in 1864–65, most of the work dated back to his best years as poet between 1845 and 1857, but particularly 1848 and 1852. He resembles the great Romantics in that he is essentially a young poet, composing his best work in his late twenties and early thirties, the force of his gift then slackening. He suffered a series of appalling bereavements, culminating in 1868 when he lost his eldest and youngest sons. In 1869 a two-volume edition of collected poems appeared.
Arnold was elected Oxford Professor of Poetry in 1857. He was reelected and served until 1867. Critical activity may have curbed his poetic impulse, though Merope shows the impulse already in decline. He had the will, but no longer the integrating imagination: middle age belongs to the great prose work, on translating Homer, the Essays in Criticism, and his best-known work of social criticism, Culture and Anarchy (1869). He was promoted to senior and later chief inspector of schools. He engaged in educational campaigns, and the range of his criticism is wide. He made a lecture tour of the United States and retired from the inspectorate in 1886. In 1888, on his way to meet his daughter on her arrival from America, he died in Liverpool.
The last thirty years of his life he spent preeminently as critic and public man. He did not like the role. The bitterness of “Growing Old” is an oblique reply to Browning’s dewy-eyed “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” for whom old age is a time of rich fulfillment. “What is it to grow old?” Arnold asks. He lists the answers, the last containing a “self-dissatisfaction” turned on the world:
It is—last stage of all—
When we are frozen up within, and quite
The phantom of ourselves,
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
Which blamed the living man.
“The Last Word” is equally uncompromising. The terrible distance between youthful hope and the reality of age also provides the dramatic tension in Empedocles on Etna. The young poet Callicles confronts Empedocles: he has been young. In “Youth and Age” the theme is reenacted: age acquires calm as its crown—that is certainly not the crown youth hankered after.
“In Culture and Anarchy, in Literature and Dogma,” writes T. S. Eliot, “Arnold was not occupied so much in establishing a criticism as in attacking the uncritical.” Eliot understands better than any reader what cultural and intellectual isolation mean to a critical mind: it is compelled to affirm the value of criticism, to seek resistance and opposition in order to fortify and define itself. For Arnold, with few intellectual and imaginative peers, the activity became like shadow-boxing. Elsewhere Eliot says, “Arnold—I think it will be conceded—was rather a propagandist for criticism than a critic, a populariser rather than a creator of ideas.”
If Eliot is right about the social essays, his strictures do not apply to Arnold’s writings on literature. Or to his poetry. He evolved a theory of the art so exacting that—except in “Sohrab and Rustum”—he could not live up to it himself. He undervalues lyric and elegy—modes natural to him—and stresses the importance of a suitable, large subject, preferably heroic. “Action” he strives for: excellent actions appeal “to the great primary human affections,” which do not change. He comments, “It is a pity... that the poet should be compelled to impart interest and force to his subject, instead of receiving them from it.” There are few common subjects to turn to in an age whose art wanted sanity. The classics teach balance and proportion: sanity is the virtue of ancient writers, its lack the vice of the moderns. Arnold’s is a normative, civilizing aesthetic, at a time when the wasting modern “dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced.” “To Marguerite,” from the “Switzerland” sequence, answers Donne: each man is an island; even love cannot change that condition:
Who order’d that their longing’s fire
Should be, as soon as kindled, cool’d?
Who renders vain their deep desire?—
A God, a God their severance ruled!
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea.
This is not spoken from behind a mask or by a persona, but by the poet’s own voice. He does not contrive a metaphysical apotheosis, the way Tennyson does in In Memoriam. He does nothing to deflect the apprehension: not “God” but “a God.” It is bold, uncompromising verse, the truest written in the Victorian period.
No wonder Algernon Charles Swinburne fell out of love with Arnold’s poems. They ask too much, and—from Swinburne’s point of view—exclude too much. Swinburne is another kind of phantom. In his work we look in vain for truths of the Arnoldian variety—indeed, for truth of any kind at all. His poetry is art and artifice, going out of its way to lose its occasion in prosodic extension and excess. “Look, you, I speak not as one light of wit, / But as a queen speaks, being heart-vexed...” T.S. Eliot is persuaded that a not quite namable something inheres in the melodious mush of the language. “We may take it as undisputed that Swinburne did make a contribution; that he did something that had not been done before, and that what he did will not turn out to be a fraud.” Eliot’s “something” and his double negatives back his sentence as far away from affirmation as it can go; but it affirms. Many argue that Swinburne is a fraud, using Eliot’s tempered advocacy to define that fraudulence, the sort we suspect in Edith Sitwell, in some of Dylan Thomas, and less certainly in the Louis MacNeice of Autumn Sequel and in Ted Hughes. Not that any of them sets out to deceive readers; they deceive themselves. They let the machine of rhythmic language run, it uses them to make poems; they abdicate to a treacherous dynamic which ought to require scrupulous control. Eliot, the master of concentration, celebrates—with reservations—Swinburne’s diffuseness.
He insists that Swinburne cannot usefully be called musical: there are sound values, but the poems are neither singable nor setable. Image and idea are unimportant: sound matters, sound in the vowels especially, sounds in the weave and cross-weave, the rhyme and dissonance of syntactical construction. Shelley is Swinburne’s master: he has “a beauty of music and a beauty of content.” “Now, in Swinburne the meaning and the sound are one thing. He is concerned with the meaning of the word in a peculiar way: he employs, or rather ‘works,’ the word’s meaning. And this is connected with an interesting fact about his vocabulary: he uses the most general word, because his emotion is never particular, never in direct line of vision, never focused; it is emotion reinforced, not by intensification, but by expansion... It is, in fact, the word that gives him the thrill, not the object.” And here is Eliot’s decisive reservation. “Language in a healthy state presents the object, is so close to the object that the two are identified.” Unhealthy though Swinburne is, Eliot praises him: “Only a man of genius could dwell so exclusively and consistently among words as Swinburne.”
There is something absurd about the image of Swinburne, aged thirty, kneeling before the Italian leader Mazzini and reading him “A Song of Italy.” There is much that is absurd about him: his enthusiasms, his life, his poems.
Swallow, my sister, O sister swallow,
How can thy heart be full of the spring?
A thousand summers are over and dead.
That first line is one of the more curious errors of taste in English poetry. In the Mazzini episode, so like a painting by one of his Pre-Raphaelite friends, we can read a great deal about the man: his passion for liberty and his desire for subjection; his ostentation; his naïve political and poetic idealism. Gesture! Gesture! Swinburne had every social advantage: education, access to the notables of his day, money, devoted friends. There were compensating psychological and social disadvantages, for it was late in the day to be a Romantic; the fin-de-siècle began well before the fin; gesture became what action had been for earlier poets. Vague thought and sentiment were confused with profound sensibility.
Swinburne reacted against the rigorous moral code of the time. His visit to Mazzini was an aspect of this reaction, his eager prostration before hired flagellants another. He was piqued when critics questioned the morality of his verses. There can be little doubt about his personal morality. A group of French writers gathered at Flaubert’s house one evening in 1875 to gossip about Swinburne. Alphonse Daudet mentioned that he was homosexual: “There are the most extraordinary stories told about his stay at Étretat last year...” Guy de Maupassant chipped in: it was he who almost saved Swinburne from drowning (a boat arrived first) and was invited to lunch the next day. “It was a strange place where they lived, a sort of cottage containing some splendid pictures... and a big monkey gambolling around inside.” His hosts would not name the meat he ate. There was no wine, only spirits. “As for Swinburne,” Maupassant added, “picture a little man with a forked chin, a hydrocephalous forehead, and a narrow chest, who trembled so violently that he gave his glass St Vitus’s dance and talked like a madman.” He spoke excellent French and was hugely, if diffusely informed. After lunch Swinburne and his friend got out “some gigantic portfolios,” including collections of obscene photographs taken in Germany, “all full-length and all of male subjects.” In Oscar Wilde’s view, expressed to the Goncourt brothers some years later, Swinburne set out to shock and prove himself a homosexual and bestializer without ever having done anything about either vice. It was merely a gesture, a plea for attention.
There is another Swinburne, articulate lover of the Elizabethans, of Landor, of the strict intellect and language of Johnson, of Blake (whom he did much to restore to favor), Whitman, Baudelaire, the Marquis de Sade. He stands opposite Hopkins. Hopkins is all decision and the human consequences of decision, Swinburne all indecision and its inconsequentiality. Each poet developed a language, two extreme approaches to syntax, diction, rhythm and form. Their successes and failures are complementary.
Swinburne was born in London in 1837, his father an admiral, his mother a cultured and titled lady. There were ancestral estates, holidays on the Isle of Wight, and in general a pampered childhood. Then Eton. He was presented to Wordsworth when he was twelve, and by his late adolescence he could take great poets in his stride. He was indulged, encouraged, and his emotional development was arrested in adolescence. There was promise in his poetic beginnings. At the age of twelve—already besotted with the Elizabethan playwrights and the sixteenth century generally—he wrote a four-act verse play based on Cyril Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy. In memory he embroiders even his worst excesses of imitation: “I had contrived to pack twice as many rapes and about three times as many murders as are contained in the model, which is not noticeably or exceptionally deficient in such incident.” He exaggerates: his play has only one rape and a modest death count. Its limpid verse makes perfect sense and is often beautiful in effect, especially the extension of syntax and the amazingly deft use of enjambements. “I am torn / From Life to happiness...” All that remains of this precocity in the later work is the prosodic skill.
The themes of the poetry hardly developed after 1866. Once it got into gear it stayed in that gear, uphill and down, for forty years. There is good writing and bad, but rhythms and approach remain constant, apart from increasing facility: acceleration, and a decrease in tension with the years. His earliest work is often best, the description of love from the verse drama Atalanta in Calydon, for example:
Thou art swift and subtle and blind as a flame of fire;
Before thee the laughter, behind thee the tears of desire;
And twain go forth beside thee, a man with a maid;
Her eyes are the eyes of a bride whom delight makes afraid;
As the breath in the buds that stir is her bridal breath:
But Fate is the name of her; and his name is Death.
Here are the fleeting themes: love, death, fate, fear, pain; the incantatory rhetoric, the end-stopped lines, the semicolons, the evanescent image. We seem to see, but it is the passage of phantoms in a hurry. They are not the “phantoms of ourselves.”
At Eton he fell in love with Sappho, Victor Hugo, Walter Savage Landor and Mary Queen of Scots. Later he wrote three plays about Mary. He left Eton for unspecified reasons and went on to Balliol College, Oxford, where he met the Pre-Raphaelites and fell under the spell of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris. He left Oxford without a degree and in London met, among others, Ruskin, Browning and Arnold. In 1864 he met Landor in Florence. His first book, Atalanta in Calydon (1863), is in classical tragic form. The choruses include many of his best-known poems. Ruskin called the whole effort “the grandest thing ever done by a youth, though he is a demonic youth.” Ruskin was forgetting recent history. There was, after all, Keats and before him Chatterton.
In 1866 his best collection, Poems and Ballads, appeared. Its prosodic range is formidable. The book was severely criticized on moral grounds and occasioned from the author the pompous and inconclusive “Notes on Poems and Reviews,” in which he characterized his book as “dramatic, many-faced, multifarious,” and stressed the overall unity of organization, refusing personal responsibility for any single statement wrenched from context. Most passionately he defends “Anactoria,” his adaptation of Sappho’s ode, as “the supreme success, the final achievement, of the poetic art.” He sought to “express and represent” the poet herself, not translate the poem. He played variations upon the sapphic theme, and the musical analogy is in place, for the poem follows a logic of the ear, as it were, not of thought. Still, the moral objection to Swinburne retains some force. Poems such as “Laus Veneris” cannot but raise qualms, and his later work asks to have a moral light turned upon it, not because it is immoral in subject matter and treatment, but because in aestheticizing experience it impoverishes moral and artistic judgment.
In 1871 Songs Before Sunrise appeared, poems about liberty that share a dullness with Songs of Two Nations (1875). There was another collection of moment still to come, Poems and Ballads: Second Series (1878). His life was increasingly disorganized and libidinous. His friend Theodore Watts-Dunton took him under his wing in 1879. They moved to Putney and lived there until the poet’s death in 1909. There were several later collections of poems, notably the third series of Poems and Ballads (1889). Swinburne wrote verse up to his death, but his imagination died young: the later work—including novels, plays and criticisms—came from a different zone of his imagination, or played at echo with the accomplished earlier work.
His originality of taste must be celebrated. To have read and appreciated Whitman in England in the 1860s was remarkable. To have admired and imitated Baudelaire during the poet’s own lifetime was even more so:
I know not how this last month leaves your hair
Less full of purple colours and hid spice,
And that luxurious trouble of closed eyes
Is mixed with meaner shadow and waste care
His enthusiasm for Blake reveals an original sensibility. He could be an excellent advocate. None of his contemporaries had a better sense of the Elizabethans than he. But from this we turn back to the verse. Ezra Pound valued his translations of Villon. Whatever their merits as translations, they were among the best verse he wrote. He had a substantial original to work from. In his own verse he is a poet of natural and unnatural forces, not of nature. He attempts to cast a spell with hypnotic repetition and exaggerated cadence. We are washed by a flow of words—not thought or evocation of image, but enchantment. There is seldom any specific content; emotion dilates over a wide area. It is hard to quote because the effect depends on taking large doses.
Edmund Wilson disliked the language: monotonous, without the vigor of speech, preponderantly monosyllabic. Swinburne’s is a language of disorientation. Words float free of their expected sense, serving an attitude or sentiment, losing reference. Nouns have no gravity, adjectives relate not so much to nouns as to the pervasive tone. “Sweet,” “light” and other filler words do overtime, but little work. Smooth rhythm neutralizes the natural force of language. Mixed metaphor, the heaping up of lush verbiage point to an alternative poetic order. Eliot showed how intellectually loose and metaphorically unconsidered the verse was. It can—the moral question again—make a corpse momentarily erotic in “The Leper.” A scribe’s necrophiliac passion impels him to fondle, kiss and otherwise molest a body, reflecting (in a monologue in Browning’s manner):
Nothing is better, I well know,
Than love; no amber in cold sea
Or gathered berries under snow:
That is well seen of her and me.
Something must be wrong with a style that can aestheticize and morally neutralize such a scene.
Six months, and I sit still and hold
In two cold palms her two cold feet.
Her hair, half grey half rusted gold,
Thrills me and burns me in kissing it.
Where tension exists, it is between simple polarities: pain and pleasure, life and death, love and death, love and time, youth and time. The enactment of such conflicts can hardly be called a poetry of ideas. It is a poetry of moods. Synesthesia, or the mixing of senses—audible sights, visible sounds and so on—is part of a reductive process, owing a superficial debt to the profound art of Baudelaire. Fingers, lips, the “pores of sense,” do the work eyes do in other verses. In a sense we ingest Swinburne, rather as the sea, a favorite image of his, ingests (as it were maternally) the swimmer and the shipwreck.
He raises fundamental questions about poetic language. How far can schemes of rhythm be usefully carried? What is the effect of sound patterning when intellectual control is in abeyance? What value has a poetry without ideas, with no specific content beyond mood and feeling—even when the subjects are ostensibly intellectual, like “liberty,” and the content almost perceptible? Can poetry hope in any valid sense to approach the condition of music in the terms of music? Was Swinburne struggling (like Arnold and Hopkins) at the end of an exhausted tradition, seeking in technical facility an energy not naturally his? The choruses from Atalanta and poems such as “Tristram of Lyonesse,” “Dolores,” “A Forsaken Garden,” “The Triumph of Time,” “Laus Veneris” and “A Nympholept” raise these—and the moral—questions. They do not answer them. Perhaps the power of the choruses from Atalanta is that they have a context and touch a specific theme at a specific season:
...winter’s rains and ruins are over
And all the season of snows and sins;
The days dividing lover and lover,
The light that loses, the light that wins;
And time remembered is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover
Blossom by blossom the spring begins.
Even here, all-purpose “all” is at work, adding nothing, the overtaxed “and,” the facile word spinning in lines four and five, behind which we grope for sense. Either readers have a taste for this sort of “magic,” or they stand back in mute astonishment. Yet when we read this and other choruses, we hear Swinburne’s effect on poets to whom his work was read in their infancy, Edward Thomas, Edgell Rickword, Charlotte Mew, Sylvia Townsend Warner and W. H. Auden among them. There was a magic in Swinburne, and the enchantment held, even against critics, for half a century after his death.
Not yet quite fixed on his religious vocation, Gerard Manley Hopkins saw Swinburne at Oxford when he returned to take his degree. Walter Pater, who had been Hopkins’s tutor, arranged to introduce him to Swinburne’s intimate friend, the exuberant painter Simeon Solomon. A month later he visited Solomon’s studio in Pater’s company. Solomon was an outspoken homosexual associated with the Pre-Raphaelites. In 1873 (well before Oscar Wilde) he was charged with buggery. His career destroyed, he became an alcoholic and died in a workhouse in 1905. Hopkins does not describe his visit to Solomon’s studio or his response to the painter’s later fate, but his own temperament at the time was unresolved and Solomon’s evident talent and lifestyle represented a kind of final siren call to the young poet about to become a novice in the Jesuit order. At Oxford Hopkins had fallen in love with a young poet called Digby Mackworth Dolben—Robert Bridges introduced them—and they exchanged poems. “It was probably from Dolben that Hopkins caught the habit of thinking of the manhood of Jesus Christ in distinctly physical terms,” writes Gregory Woods. In 1867 Dolben drowned, “and his influence on Hopkins became all the more lastingly intense in the refining fire of grief.” The influence was less on his poetry than on his spirit. He too “belonged to that culture of sentimental and erotic male friendships shaped by both Greece and (Catholic) Rome to which Newman and Faber had belonged before him.” His spirituality was carnal; was perhaps a way of dealing with and rendering transcendent what in a different man would have been a carnal choice, a spiritual abdication.
For Hopkins, sound and rhythm are quite as important as they are for Swinburne, but Hopkins develops areas of imagination and intelligence that Swinburne neglects altogether. His Paterlike aestheticism transcended itself into religious faith; his sexual ambivalence honed his chastity, so that at times his posture in relation to God is comparable to Donne’s, though his sense of the literal surrounding world, through which grace is manifest, is more solid than Donne’s, less deliberately dramatic. His faith breaks with the Anglican tradition; so too his poetry breaks with much that came before. His intolerable wrestle with the nature and language of verse is real, of a seriousness altogether deeper and more coherent than that of the poets of the Rhymers’ Club or of his major contemporaries.
He was not to be their contemporary: his poems were first published in book form twenty-nine years after his death. He is, in effect, a twentieth-century poet. Robert Bridges, the poet laureate who consistently supported, encouraged and misunderstood his work, took it upon himself to correct the poems in layout, diction and syntax for the 1918 edition. It was another thirty years before his texts were fully restored.
Hopkins left a small body of poetry. A handful of juvenilia escaped the fire; forty-eight mature and more or less finished poems, and a number of fragments survive. Letters, notebooks, sermons and other prose completed the oeuvre. Had he been published in his lifetime, as a younger contemporary of Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Swinburne, what might his work not have done to the disoriented final decade of the century? But had it been published, what would the pressure of a readership have done to him? As it is, he belongs to the nineteenth but his poetry to the twentieth century. Bridges’s 1918 edition appeared a year after Prufrock and Other Observations by T. S. Eliot. Bridges’s endorsement did little to recommend this unknown Jesuit to a modernist generation of writers and readers that might have understood him. Or not, given modernism’s secular bias.
Hopkins was born in Stratford, Essex, in 1844 into a well-to-do family. His mother was pious, his father wrote verse and encouraged his children to play music and draw. Hopkins never abandoned these pursuits. His first ambition was to be an artist. Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites prescribed his early world. Human figures are idealized and refined into representative types. Female figures generally embody purity and vocation. Male figures can be treated with greater freedom and ambiguity. Hopkins’s verse never outgrows what at first seems an adolescent sensualism but is in fact a chaste homoeroticism. He wrote “The Bugler’s First Communion” when he was a priest in his thirties; he evokes a communicant straight out of one of the more sentimental canvases of the time, charged with an energy quite alien to a man of the cloth and unsettling when he evokes it on such an occasion: the “Breathing beauty of chastity in mansex fine,” “limberliquid youth, that to all I teach / Yields tender as a pushed peach,” and so on. Yet this “witness” to manly beauty is of a piece with his other celebrations of the created world. It would have been prurient and dishonest for him not to have included it, whatever the properties of its inclusion. In 1882 he wrote to Bridges: “I might as well say what I should not otherwise have said, that I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like my own than any other man’s living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession. And this also makes me the more desirous to read him and the more determined that I will not.”
From a brilliant performance at Highgate School, Hopkins went to Balliol College, Oxford (in the wake of Arnold and Swinburne), in 1863. He secured a first-class degree in Greats (Classics) four years later. It was a time of intellectual activity and crisis. He struck up his friendship with Robert Bridges. He ruminated on language, setting down in a notebook that “the onomatopoeic theory,” as he calls it, “has not had a fair chance. Cf. Crack, creak, croak, crake, graculus, crackle.” The concerns of the mature poet start here. He progresses in a healthily assertive way toward the mimetic language he developed in later poems. He asks not only what language means but how it means to the senses, how it contains—in order to convey—what it signifies.
Walter Pater marked him. So did Arnold, then professor of poetry. Pater and Arnold spoke languages so different in style and earnestness as to be virtually antithetical. Dissatisfied with conventional Anglicanism and drawn by a love of ceremony and ritual in an Oxford where the Oxford Movement was in increasing disarray, Hopkins turned to the ceremonialism of the Anglo-Catholics and then succumbed to the Church of Rome. He was received into the Church in 1866 by John Henry Newman, who took a particular interest in him.
At university Hopkins’s discipline began: self-denial in the interest of the self. He evokes the effect of religious faith on the imagination. Imagine, he says, the world reflected in a water drop: a small, precise reflection. Then imagine the world reflected in a drop of Christ’s blood: the same reflection, but suffused with the hue of love, sacrifice, God made man, and redemption. Religious faith discovers for a troubled imagination an underlying coherence which knows that it cannot be fully or adequately explained. In its liberating, suffusing light, Hopkins could relish out loud the uniqueness of things, which made them “individually distinctive.” This he called “inscape”—an artist’s term. “Instress,” another bit of individual jargon, refers to the force maintaining inscape. Inscape is manifest, instress divine, the immanent presence of the divine in the object.
As he progressed further, he attended to the thirteenth-century Franciscan Duns Scotus, Doctor Subtilis, as it were, whose thinking went against the grain of Thomas Aquinas and orthodox Jesuit discipline. Scotus, in philosophy an extreme realist who rejected common notions of “natural theology” and questioned the possibility of a harmonious relationship between faith and reason, confirmed Hopkins’s version of particularism in his “principle of Individuation,” or haecceitas (“thisness”). Scotus licensed him to affirm his own individuality and gave him confidence and the philosophical sanction to write poems, one of them addressed to Scotus himself. The stress falls on the “I,” which Scotus (the “he”) had empowered him to use in this way:
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-veinèd unraveller; a not
Rivalled insight...
Veins—the unseen lines of inscape—Scotus unraveled, approaching “realty,” not “reality.” The old abstraction is elided into a new, unique term. Hopkins valued in his remote mentor precisely those qualities that had led the humanists to reject him, and religious reformers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to follow suit: his discrimination of unique entities and his insistence on distinction. Our word “dunce” derives from the vilification of the Dunsmen, or Dunces, a fact that may have amused Hopkins, who—Jesuit or not—insisted on retaining a mind of his own. The poem to Scotus, in its procedures and cadences, calls to mind the work of later isolated poets, David Jones and Geoffrey Hill in particular, who have attended to Hopkins with an analogous seriousness and spiritual integrity.
Taken together, a suffusing faith and particularism emancipated Hopkins from the panoramic, intellectualizing and abstracting Romantics and Victorians. Objects do not evoke nebulous sentiment. They point in a single direction, eliciting feeling not for themselves but for God. In this vertical vision things relate not among themselves but through God. The sonnets that express concern for social ills—“God’s Grandeur” and “The Sea and the Skylark”—suggest no political solution but see through or beyond industrial landscape to nature, through nature to God. “God’s Grandeur” makes original use of images of industrialism to magnify, by contrast, nature, which “is never spent,” despite what people have done to the environment. In his prose these experiences bring him near to utopian socialism; in his poems they bring him close to God:
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 eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
The adjective “bent” relates back to the octave of the sonnet, its metal images contrasting with images of the natural and human worlds.
After Oxford and some traveling, Hopkins was accepted into the Jesuit novitiate in 1868. He burned all his verse that he could find, though from his Oxford years three poems of interest survive: “Let me be to thee as the circling bird,” “The Habit of Perfection” and “Heaven-Haven.” They suggest that the poet accepted the Ignatian discipline in his imagination before the soul curbed itself. They are limpidly clear and simple compared with some of Hopkins’s later work.
Seven years passed before he wrote another poem. He mastered Welsh and Welsh prosody in that time, but vowed not to write original verse unless his superiors asked him to. In 1875 they consented to his memorializing a shipwreck in which a number of nuns perished. “The Wreck of the Deutschland” is dense with seven years’ concentration of religious experience and inevitable ruminations on language and poetic form. The poem is complex and forbidding. Bridges could not stomach it. He suggested that poetry requiring a “conscious effort of interpretation” was bad if that effort was expended on unraveling, not complexity of image, idea or metaphor, but syntax, syntax arranged in such a way as to distract from, rather than lead through, the poem. Bridges was right in general terms, but in poetry there are no valid general rules, and he simply could not respond to the essential dynamic of his friend’s verse. When he quoted a stanza of “The Wreck of the Deutschland” in his anthology The Spirit of Man, he smoothed out the syntax, did away with complexities of diction, and scrapped Hopkins’s scrupulous indentations, which are meant to indicate stress patterns. It is commonplace to sneer at Bridges, but it is worth remembering that he was a critic whose word Hopkins took to heart, and without his encouragement and effort the poems might never have reached us at all.
If we put ourselves in Bridges’s place and try to read the poem as if for the first time, we may agree with Hopkins that syntax is the line or vein of the poem’s “inscape,” making a unique object. But is anything gained by calling Christ “Mid-numbered He mid three of the thunder throne”? Is it not intolerable circumlocution? When the poem ends with a line containing six genitive cases, unpronounceably expressing dependent relations and coming perilously near mixed metaphor (“Our hearts’ charity’s hearth’s fire, our thoughts’ chivalry’s throng’s Lord”), the effort required of the reader is analytic, not imaginative—or imaginative in a scholastic sense.
The poem is in two sections, the first largely personal, the second dealing with the wreck and allowing digression. The singer in the first section reflects on the nature of and his relation with God, on faith and on nature. The fourth stanza is wonderfully achieved. It begins:
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...
God punishes—and grants grace: the storm at sea—and salvation. Man—the poet, the ship battered by the storm—learns by suffering to recognize grace. The ten stanzas of the first section possess remarkable unity of imagery. The ship makes haste to Christ the Host for succor. The force of individuation comes from Christ, God as man, and not from God Himself. Christ is “lightning and love”: first lightning, then love.
The second section recounts the events of the shipwreck in a verse full of mimetic sound and fury. There are digressions on Luther, on the poet’s stay in Wales. The initial conflict of sea and ship is narrowed down to Gertrude, the nuns, the sailors. But the concentration of the first part is inevitably dissipated. Hopkins’s mind is too full after seven years’ silence. “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” new in so many ways, has the air of having been unpacked rather than written.
In his verse Hopkins mixes two basic forms. The first is accentual—syllabic, or, as he calls it, running rhythm: a strict number of syllables and regularly placed stresses allow some variety of stress but little syllabic variation. The other form is what he calls “sprung rhythm,” in which the number of syllables varies but the number of stresses in each line remains constant. “Sprung Rhythm,” he writes, “is measured by feet of from one to four syllables, regularly, and for particular effects any number of weak or slack syllables may be used.” He develops the definition at length and applies the form with originality.
The influence of Welsh poetry on his alliterative and assonantal writing cannot be denied. He develops an English cynghanned, a patterned repetition of consonants. This provides another vein holding a poem together, and harmonizes often remote images through sound organization. The best example of this is “Pied Beauty.” “The Starlight Night,” too, with its Nativity scene, depends on close sound organization. Only controlled cadence resolves the difficult and perhaps technically incorrect syntax of “The Windhover.” Some poems, notably the unspectacular but good sonnet “The Valley of the Elwy,” have more conventional virtues, the syntax unfolding smoothly, the sonnet form held in tension with the spoken rhythm of the statement. It was necessary for him to ungarble his style in order to achieve the assured control of the “dark sonnets.” As he wrote to Bridges, “No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness... I hope in time to have a more balanced and Miltonic style.” The triumphs of the odd style at its oddest are “Peace,” “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo” and “Spring and Fall” (“Márgarét, are you grieving”), a poem that stays whole in memory after a couple of readings. We pardon Bridges for his unsympathetic handling of “The Wreck of the Deutschland” in his 1924 anthology, but what he did to “Spring and Fall,” altering diction and making substantial omissions, is a crime.
Neglect preceded the dark sonnets. “The Wreck of the Deutschland” was not printed. Nor, in 1877, was “The Loss of the Eurydice,” a lesser work, which is clearer than the earlier memorial poem. “And you were a liar, o blue March day,” and the last line, “Prayer shall fetch pity eternal,” show development toward a clearer voice, a more headlong approach to narrative and to God. In 1879 he wrote a letter to Bridges that puts his verse—its intentions, in any case—in an unexpected light: “It seems to me that the poetical language of an age shd. be the current language heightened, to any degree heightened and unlike itself, but not (I mean normally: freaks and graces are another thing) an obsolete one. This is Shakespeare’s and Milton’s practice and the want of it will be fatal to Tennyson’s Idylls and plays, to Swinburne, and perhaps to Morris.”
There were poetic aberrations, like the sonnet to Purcell. Still he was unpublished. It is hard to determine the unsettling effect that neglect had on his poetry. Nervous and physical illness, which began in 1874 and never left him, probably aggravated it. He prepared a preface for his poems. He wanted, he needed, more than a couple of readers so that his words would have context and provoke an echo. They are sacramental in nature, and Communion is a sacrament, sharing out and giving back. It was not to be. The poems accumulated in shadow. In 1884 he was appointed professor of Greek at University College, Dublin. In 1885–86 he wrote the dark sonnets, expressing a religious doubt far more bleak and self-searing than any before in English poetry. He profoundly disliked Dublin. In 1889 it killed him with typhoid from the polluted water supply.
The dark sonnets are his most astonishing work, for here ruptured syntax, inversions and sound patterning answer a violence of negative spiritual experience. In the work of George Herbert, which Hopkins loved, Christ is the wooer, the soul the wooed. In Hopkins, the soul, painfully aware of its own fallen nature, desperately woos Christ. There is almost despair, for a beautiful and vigorous Christ has withdrawn, grace is withheld. The earlier ease of loving faith—“I say that we are wound / With mercy round and round / As if with air”—is gone. After the dark sonnets there is silence.
Underlying one sonnet, “Carrion Comfort,” is the metaphor of eating; storm underpins the language of “No worst”; “I wake to feel the fell of dark” dwells on the disgusting nature of the body, its taste and smell. Whatever the psychological and spiritual motives of the poems, they are powerful statements of love and loss, of a desire that grace has not yet satisfied, of unfulfillment. The poet who step by step “individuated” himself here at last stands apart from even his God. To have become a Catholic against the wishes of his family; a Jesuit against the advice of his friends; a disciple of Scotus against the orthodoxy of his order: he had made himself alone. In his poetry, too, he developed a solitary, inimitable idiom. He aimed to create phrases from which the meaning would “explode” on the reader, and in the dark sonnets he achieves such phrases. His crisis came, by transposition, to mean a great deal to the audience he began to acquire thirty years after his death:
I wake to feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; 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.