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Margaret Ellsberg’s volume contains her own biographical, critical, and indeed spiritual understanding of Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet whose brilliant lines were not appreciated in his time and whose life included both the glory and agony of the Christ he served.

The Gospel in Gerard Manley Hopkins: Selections from His Poems, Letters, Journals, and Spiritual Writings, edited by Margaret R. Ellsberg, with a foreword by Dana Gioia (255 pages, Plough, 2017)

A friend asked me recently, “Is there any publication that reviews books that aren’t new?” I told her proudly that we do that here at The Imaginative Conservative. Our conservative imagination is such that we don’t believe that “new” equals better or more worthy nor does “old” mean worse or unworthy. Books are not like jugs of milk; they don’t have to be thrown out at a certain date. They can be read and reviewed at any time. And they can be reviewed by more than one person since any review will likely be partial. So it is that I am reviewing a book that is not new (2017) and has been reviewed before. I do so proudly and also usefully, since Christmas is coming and you may be hunting for gifts. This is an ideal one.

When The Gospel in Gerard Manley Hopkins initially appeared, Fr. Dwight Longenecker wrote about it in this space. His focus was on Hopkins’s own philosophical outlook, derived from the Blessed John Duns Scotus, which focused on haecceitas or “thisness.” It is Scotus’s understanding of this particularity in all created things that inspired Hopkins’s mystical vision, which saw the mark of the Creator and Redeemer God everywhere. “Christ plays in ten thousand places,” Hopkins wrote in his famous poem “As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame.”

When I read the book this fall in order to teach parts of it, I certainly took note of Hopkins’s philosophy in order to help students understand his vision. But what was more fascinating to me was the biographical aspect of the book. Ellsberg’s volume is, as the subtitle indicates, a selection of Hopkins’s own writings that puts his poetry beside his letters, journals, sermons, and other spiritual writings.

But it is more than an anthology. Professor Ellsberg’s volume contains her own biographical, critical, and indeed spiritual understanding of this poet whose brilliant lines were not appreciated in his time and whose life included both the glory and agony of the Christ he served. A lecturer at Barnard College and author of a scholarly volume on Hopkins’s language, Professor Ellsberg authoritatively wields primary and secondary sources, showing she is a real scholar, while writing with the love that befits the amateur.

The book is arranged in five sections. The first consists of a ten-page introduction to Hopkins’s life and work by the editor, titled “Incompatible Excellences.” In it she summarizes how Hopkins, though dying not that far from his birthplace, “had traversed vast theological paradigms, revolutionized poetic language, and called down the thunder and lightning of God onto the written page.” What gives dynamism to her account is the paradoxical quality of that action. It was only after conversion to Catholicism, leaving Oxford, and “entering the Jesuit order, known for its insistence on quasi-cadaver-level obedience, did Hopkins boldly take on the visceral Anglo-Saxon two-beat foot that runs through English speech, mix it prodigally with Welsh and Latin and French, mold his lines to Greek forms, and concoct stanza after stanza and sestet after octet of nerve-shocking genius.”

That’s some really fine writing.

It also captures his genius. Ellsberg’s other four sections begin with her own powerful introductory essays and proceed to give us those greatest hits of poetry alongside the prose and the personal writings that make us see the man in full. In all of them, the paradox of Hopkins’s religious vocation to “quasi-cadaver-level obedience” is always placed next to his poetic independence despite the criticisms and incomprehension of his poetic friends who were themselves being rewarded in their time. “He flatly rejected everyone’s attempts to correct him,” Professor Ellsberg writes, adding: “His opinions and practices were stubborn to the verge of arrogance and compulsion; in other words, he was coherent. He did as he wished while cloaked in a mantle of obedience.”

That last line may make it sound as if there were something devious or hypocritical about him. But what makes Professor Ellsberg’s account so interesting is that she sees how exactly the paradox worked in his life. Absolute obedience in what was necessary did not interfere with Hopkins’s working out of his own free and independent artistic work. It gave it its power.

That perspective was and perhaps is still unusual. His good friend Robert Bridges, a future Poet Laureate of England, spent years fruitlessly trying to “fix” his friend. Upon Hopkins’s death, he wrote a mutual poetic friend, Canon James Dixon, about how Hopkins “seems to have been entirely lost and destroyed, by those Jesuits.” This was not an uncommon vision then or now.

It’s true that the Society of Jesus did not cover themselves in glory in the way they treated a scholar whom the legendary Benjamin Jowett had called “the Star of Balliol.” Not allowed to teach theology because of his preference for Scotus over St. Thomas Aquinas, Hopkins ended up in Ireland, assigned to teaching classics in Dublin to university students of limited capacity and good intellectual will, and, as an Englishman, being treated somewhat coldly by the Irish Jesuits with whom he lived. Oh, and they were no more eager to publish his poems in their own periodical, The Month, than anybody else was—though they took a few.

Yet Professor Ellsberg sees that, though all this outrageous fortune bothered Hopkins at a number of levels, at the deepest level he was at peace. “In fact, though Hopkins suffered deeply, he insisted throughout that he felt himself in accordance with God’s will, and that this feeling was to him better than ‘violets knee deep.’”

Not only that, but, in a way perhaps unbeknownst to the poet, it was the immense pressure of perpetual illness (he likely suffered from Crohn’s disease, among other ailments), mistreatment, loneliness, and seeming failure in scholarship, ministry, and even poetry that, combined with his own faithfulness to the hidden God, that formed in him something that he had written about: an “immortal diamond.” Professor Ellsberg thinks “that though Hopkins may well have been personally unsuited to his religious vocation, that same vocation outfitted him with a vocabulary and a discipline that combined to create ultimate greatness.” She cites Jesuit Philip Endean’s judgment that “Ignatian spirituality enabled him to find a sacramental vision that led to great religious poetry in a way that no other religious influence in Victorian England could have done. It is possible to see [in his texts] God drawing him toward himself.”

Indeed, it was the last miserable five years of his life in which Hopkins wrote his “terrible sonnets,” which the reader can read in this last section. The man who wrote to Bridges that he had “long been Fortune’s football” continued to take the kicks but never forsook crying out to the Master of Fortune, one who promised his followers both a cross and a crown. The cross might have been most visible to both the onlookers and to Hopkins himself, who could not help but think himself a failure, “Time’s eunuch,” as he put it in “Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend.”

Yet anyone who takes up the cross has already assumed the crown. Hopkins’s faithfulness was itself the gold of the crown. That it was not seen in his time was itself a sharing in the passion of his Lord, whose glory was only recognized afterward. Though at Hopkins’s death, Bridges believed his friend “would never have done anything great” even apart from the Jesuit treatment, it was he who published the first edition of Hopkins’s poems in 1918. The glory of Hopkins’s crown had finally shone through.

The careful reader of those terrible sonnets will note that Hopkins himself had the awareness of that crown that comes by faith but is experienced only sporadically. “Carrion comfort” has a feeling of jubilation even from the first lines:

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.

Professor Ellsberg gives us letters in this section that indicate Hopkins had thought of untwisting his own last strands. A friend, Hopkins recounts in a letter, did indeed commit suicide. And yet he did not. No doubt his power came from the recognition in the last lines that in the time of struggle recounted “Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my/God.” One could call him Israel, for as much as Hopkins had been wounded, he had struggled with God and prevailed gloriously.

In teaching Hopkins, I found this book immensely helpful. True, Professor Ellsberg doesn’t provide line-by-line help in deciphering Hopkins’s “revolutionized poetic language.” The reader (and especially teacher) will have to do a lot of work with commentaries and dictionaries to be able to fully enter into his lines. But her selections of letters and her own account make one see what the title indicates: the Gospel in Hopkins. For if the Gospel begins as bad news to most people, it promises the greatest happiness for those who are in Christ and seek righteousness for his sake. One of my students said he was glad we read the end of the book because he had thought Hopkins a failure himself. Thanks to the commentary and the spiritual writings, he could indeed see that, in Christ, Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins was not a failure; he was more than a conqueror.

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