Gerard Manley Hopkins's poetry, when you first read it, is a jolt of lightning - and then, it's as if that lightning stayed in the sky, perfectly natural, the true daylight of things. I found making a choice extremely difficult. The major poems are almost all 'anthology' pieces: also, for me, they are associated with studying poetry at a Catholic grammar school where Hopkins was prized more for his religious message than his amazing technique. Finally, I decided to go for some slightly less well-known fragments - a little miscellany from one of the brilliant literary 'sketchbooks.' These poetic notes de-familiarise Hopkins: they lose the religious context and the leaping rhythms which are part of that great, original Magnificat he sings, but foreground the descriptive genius, and recapture the sheer surprise of a first reading. Because they are incomplete, the sketches resonate like haiku - and perhaps there really is something a little haiku-like in Hopkins: that intense, devoted concentration on the thing as it is, and the natural sense of economy which is most obviously apparent in his use of the curtal sonnet.
In fact, his writing never flaunts verbal pyrotechnics for the sake of it. He was a visual artist as well as poet, and I believe his theories of instress and inscape originate as much in an artist's sense of the clean, undecorated line as in the teachings of John Duns Scotus. (This isn't to underestimate the wonderful textures and tonalities his poetry contains). Hopkins's line becomes infused with and energised by its subject - almost as if the subject had been trusted to wield the paintbrush. That's the effect - but of course, contrary to the essentially unobtrusive verbal technique associated with 'the haiku spirit', a richly-stocked individual mind, a mind brimmed with Shakespeare and the Bible and the Greek, Latin and Welsh languages he studied, is an endlessly active 'mediator' in his poetic picture.
From 'Sundry Fragments and Images'
i
The wind, that passes by so fleet,
Runs his fingers through the wheat,
And leaves the blades,
where'er he will veer,
Tingling between dusk and silver.
iii
Like shuttles fleet the clouds, and after
A drop of shade rolls over field and flock;
The wind comes breaking here and there with laughter:
The violet moves and copses rock.
vi
- now the rain,
A brittle sheen, runs upward like a cliff,
Flying a bow.
vii
- and on their brittle green quils
Shake the balanced daffodils.
xxii
How looks the night?
There does not miss a star.
The million sorts of unaccounted motes
Now quicken, sheathed in the yellow galaxy.
There is no parting or bare interstice
Where the stint compass of a skylark's wings
Would not put out some tiny golden centre.
xxxiv
The sun just risen
Flares his wet brilliance in the dintless heaven
xxxv
We live to see
How Shakespeare's England weds with Dante's Italy.
xxxvi
The moonlight-mated glowless glowworms shine.
xxxix
Glazed water vaulted o'er a drowsy stone.
xl
They are not dead who die,
but they are lost who live.
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
(From The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Fourth Edition, Ed WH Gardner and NH MacKenzie, OUP, 1970).