Sárospataki Füzetek 18. (2014)
2014 / 1. szám - TANULMÁNYOK - Frank Sawyer: Gerard Manley Hopkins: "Christ plays in ten thousand places"
Gerard Manley Hopkins Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men's faces. There is another well-known and much-loved sonnet which illustrates Hopkins at his best, uniting the spiritual quest and the states of affairs we find in the world: Pied Beauty Glory21 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 dll 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; addzzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change: Praise him. The first line offers praise to God and the following lines continue to list examples of dappled’ realty. There is a multitudinous reference to skies, trout, chestnuts, finches and to landscapes and trades. They are all marked by qualities that are unique and idiosyncratic, both beautiful and strange, blemished but worthy - a glory that comes from God, who does not change, or who in other words is unblemished. It has been said: “The strikingly musical repletion of sounds thoughout the poem (dappled,’ ‘stipple,’ ‘tackle,’ ‘fickle’ ‘freckled,’ ‘adazzle,’ for example) enacts the creative act the poem glorifies: the weaving together of diverse things into a pleasing and coherent whole.”22 In noting the beauty of “dappled things” Hopkins reacts against the uniformity and standardization which reduces life to a collectivity in which uniqueness is suppressed and lost. So he is thinking not just of unique colours but also the individual qualities and deeper identity of things - including we should say, his poetry, which had been called dappled. Similar thoughts are found in Hopkins’ poem The Leaden Echo and The Golden Echo, where he says in one sweeping line: “Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver”. Religious feeling and beauty, life’s transience and a kind of hope beyond all hoping, are typical of Hopkins’ wrestling 21 The Jesuit order emphasizes that everything should be approached "to the greater glory of God", and that we should "give praise to God always". 22 Spark Notes, 11. Sárospataki Füzetek 17. évfolyam 20141 1 89
