Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 – 1889)
Jesuit priest and English poet whose posthumous, 20th-century fame established him among the finest Victorian poets.
Any day, any minute we bless God for our being or for anything, for food, for sunlight, we do and are what we were meant for, made for — things that give and mean to give God glory.
I am surprised you should say fancy and aesthetic tastes have led me to my present state of mind: these would be better satisfied in the Church of England, for bad taste is always meeting one in the accessories of Catholicism.
Ask of her, the mighty mother:
Her reply puts this other
Question: What is Spring?—
Growth in everything.
For myself I make no secret, I look forward with eager desire to seeing the matchless beauty of Christ’s body in the heavenly light.
Our Lord Jesus Christ, my brethren, is our hero, a hero all the world wants.
I consider my selfbeing ... that taste of myself, of I and me above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnutleaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to another man.
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.
Abel is Cain's brother and breasts they have sucked the same.
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hoürs we have spent
This night!
No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness. I hope in time to have a more balanced and Miltonic style. But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music, and design in painting, so design, pattern, or what I am in the habit of calling inscape is what I above all aim at in poetry. Now it is the virtue of design, pattern, or inscape to be distinctive, and it is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer. This vice I cannot have escaped.
Lovely the woods, waters, meadows, combes, vales,
All the air things wear that build this world of Wales.
It kills me to be time’s eunuch and never to beget.
Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me or, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.
Natural heart’s ivy, Patience masks
Our ruins of wrecked past purpose.
Every true poet, I thought, must be original and originality a condition of poetic genius; so that each poet is like a species in nature (not an individuum genericum or specificum) and can never recur. That nothing shd. be old or borrowed however cannot be.
It seems then that it is not the excellence of any two things (or more) in themselves, but those two things as viewed by the light of each other, that makes beauty.
Felix Randal the farrier, O he is dead then? my duty all ended,
Who have watched his mould of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome
Pining, pining, till time when reason rambled in it and some
Fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended?