Sárospataki Füzetek 18. (2014)
2014 / 1. szám - TANULMÁNYOK - Frank Sawyer: Gerard Manley Hopkins: "Christ plays in ten thousand places"
Frank Sawyer His poems remain difficult because of his compilation of such intense thoughts and feelings into woven poetic tapestries, for which the reader needs time to understand both the smaller details and the wider motifs of the tapestry. But the effort is well rewarded. Gerard Manley Hopkins grew up in an Anglican family in Essex, England, in which poetry and painting were encouraged. At that time during the second half of the 19th century, industrial development was changing the environment and work situations. During his university studies Hopkins converted to Roman Catholicism. After graduation he taught at Newmans school near Birmingham and decided to enter the Society of Jesus the following year as a Jesuit priest. After studying theology for five years his life became one of on-going study, continuously changing pastoral assignments and strenuous teaching posts, whereby things were not improved by his tendency to overwork, and though he wrote a number of good poems, he despaired of really accomplishing what he would have liked to in literary matters. He died at the age of 45 of typhoid. II. Style and themes Hopkins wrote about religious attitudes, nature, and the anguish of suffering. Central in his worldview is that God is continually revealed in the whole creation, on the macrocosmic and microcosmic levels. Similar to the biblical Psalms, the poet sees divine manifestations in the beauty, power, light and darkness, peace and storms of the world around us. But, as we might guess, Hopkins is also fully aware of the painful questions that accompany life's sufferings. We could say that nature is regenerative1 for Hopkins. The beauty, colours, quietness and freshness of nature restore the soul - mind and body. This is the poet's theological anchor point: the whole of realty is cosmonomic (divine-law-fully-composed), and therefore immanent reality always has a skylight toward transcendence. Perhaps that is why some of his poetic works are so musical. The majority of his poems are in the form of sonnets, in which the first eight lines portray some observed phenomena, whether personal experiences or some part of nature or some happening. The final six lines turn to a theological and moral-philosophical statement, evaluation, or reflection about the theme of the first eight lines. His poems are complicated by obscure classical and theological allusions, as well as by the use of invented words and a kind of contra-punctuated syntax. As one literary analyst states it: “Although rhythm is Hopkins’ chief aural concern, it is by no means the only one. He uses alliteration to an extent that no poet has ever ventured; and internal rhyme; and assonance; and subtle, planned progressions and modulations of vowel sounds.”2 He fits things together in an emphatic, often improbable and startling way. 1 Cf. Spark Notes, Hopkin s Poetry (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2002), p.4. 2 Lionel Trilling, The Experience of Literature (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1967), p.915. 82 Sárospataki Füzetek 17. évfolyam I 2014 I 1
