I have been reading more of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poetry lately. I find that it is never sedate. It is never sentimental. It surprises in flashes, and ripples like water over rocks. It cries out. It exults until you feel as though your soul would explode with the effort of too great a praise for its smallness. You either get to the end of his poems completely bewildered and flummoxed or you fall back in your chair completely at peace and filled with awe. I always feel the latter.
Who is the person who wrote like this? I rummaged through my books in the basement and found an old biography of Hopkins that I started in my early twenties but never finished. I began reading it again. It reveals an ardent, emotionally charged young man who never showed that fact on the outside. Most people never knew of the tumbling emotions he held within. He carried the scars and baggage thrust upon him by the ugly and unsavory aspects of English boarding school life when he was younger. He expected greatness and beauty from people and they often left him sad and disappointed. He was one for whom “God alone suffices” would be a goal long fought for and struggled over.
I think his poetry saved him. I think nature saved him. He could revel and let his emotions flow to paper and find the glory and power and explosion of God’s love in water, flowers, birds, wind. The words soaked up his ardor and flew to the pages leaving him in peace and quiet before God. His long walks saved him. They gave him the beauty that he longed for. They gave him peace. His poetry reveals him. I “get” him, so to speak. And in a real way he reveals me to myself. That’s what poets do! And I am filled with gladness that God gave him the grace to see Him so clearly among the brooks and trees. Letting him experience what it is like to be “charged with the grandeur of God”.
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