Selected Poetry

by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Catherine Phillips

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) is now recognized as a major poet of striking originality and is widely admired for his particularly vivid expression of feeling. This selection, chosen from the award-winning Oxford Authors critical edition, includes most of the larger fragments and all of his major English poems, such as The Blessed Virgin, No Worst, The Windhover, Pied Beauty and The Wreck of the Deutschland. The poems are illuminated further by extensive Notes and a useful Introduction to Hopkins's life and poetry.

Genres: Poetry, 19th Century, Classics

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1953

About the author

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) was an English poet, Roman Catholic convert, and Jesuit priest, whose 20th-century fame established him posthumously among the leading Victorian poets. His experimental explorations in prosody (especially sprung rhythm) and his use of imagery established him as a daring innovator in a period of largely traditional verse.

Reviews

[Melody Schwarting · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hopkins was an unusual poet for his time, and even today we haven't caught up to his use of rhythm. He swims in the English language unlike any other poet I've read. At once he appealed to historical forms of English poetry, and envisioned a future for it that no other conventional poet of his era was writing toward. He's just...Hopkins. After spending time indoors with Victorian Parlour Poetry, the winds of Hopkins's raw emotion were bracingly refreshing. He brought his whole self to his poetry, and that's what makes a good poem: honesty, love for language, and explaining emotion through sensory experiences.

This edition, with an introduction and notes by Catherine Phillips, is wonderful. It's easy to find poems in the index by first line or title. Her notes cover rhythm, definitions of words that were archaic even 150 years ago, connections in Hopkins's other writings, and more. Truly helpful for scholarly and personal use.

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"Easter Communion" (60)
Pure fasted faces draw unto this feast:
God comes all sweetness to your Lenten lips.
You striped in secret with breath-taking whips,
Those crookéd rough-scored chequers may be pierced
To crosses meant for Jesu's; you whom the East
With draught of thin and pursuant cold so nips
Breathe Easter now; you sergéd fellowships,
You vigil-keepers with low flames decreased,
God shall o'er-brim the measures you have spent
With oil of gladness, for sackcloth and frieze
And the ever-fretting shirt of punishment
Give myrrhy-threaded golden folds of ease.
Your scarce-sheathed bones are weary of being bent:
Lo, God shall strengthen all feeble knees.

"Let Me Be to Thee" (74)
Let me be to Thee as the circling bird,
Or bat with tender and air-crisping wings
That shapes in half-light his departing rings
From both of whom a changeless note is heard.
I have found my music in a common word,
Trying each pleasurable throat that sings
And every praisèd sequence of sweet strings,
And know infallibly which I preferred.

The authentic cadence was discovered late
Which ends those only strains that I approve,
And other science all gone out of date
And minor sweetness scarce made mention of:
I have found the dominant of my range and state--
Love, O my God, to call Thee Love and Love.

"Duns Scotus's Oxford" (127)
Towery city and branchy between towers;
Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarméd, lark-charméd, rook-racked, river-rounded;
The dapple-eared lily below thee; that country and town did
Once encounter in, here coped and poisèd powers;

Thou hast a base and brickish skirt there, sours
That neighbour-nature thy grey beauty is grounded
Best in; graceless growth, thou hast confounded
Rural rural keeping--folk, flocks, and flowers.

Yet ah! this air I gather and release
He lived on; these weeds and waters, these walls are what
He haunted who of all men most sways my spirits to peace;

Of realty the rarest-veinèd unraveller; a not
Rivalled insight, be rival Italy or Greece,
Who fired Fránce for Máry withóut spót.

"Peace" (134)
When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
When, when Peace, will you, Peace?--I'll not play hypocrite
To my own heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?

O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu
Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite,
That plumes to Peace thereafter. And when Peace here does house
He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,
He comes to brood and sit.

[Travis Timmons · Rating 4 out of 5]

I adore Hopkins, and when he’s on, he’s on and nearly unsurpassable; however, the sweep of his work is uneven and I found myself skimming and skipping a number of the poems in this collection.

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent poetry that feels about 50 years ahead of its time. Would highly recommend.

[Curt Hopkins Hopkins · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hopkins' early poems are operatically awful. Everything bad about Victorian poetry in one handy, ghastly package. It's almost like he rebelled against his own verse. His criticism is also pretty bad. Essentially, he went from hyper-regular fixed form to accentual verse with heavy alliteration, but felt he had to go bananas in justifying it. That said, his poems from The Wreck of the Deutschland on (which I eventually skipped to) are legitimately awesome. Everything old is new again. He's like Minutemen, no one's successfully followed from what he did. Also, his language -- at its best -- forced a poem out of me. No great shakes, but it's testament to the power of his discovered and created language.

Where has the grey goose god gone?
Trod off down the long gone trail
Through the down and crushed fern of deer beds
to sink beneath the Elwy's feathered traces.

Using ancient tools he fashioned for us
A new English from flights of falcons and plover,
Prayers. He's already constructed his rose,
This one's mine.

I love to live in certain people's sounds
Sometimes. Sometimes I lean and listen. Sometimes
I'm swept along, I'm swept aside, and stride
Sidelong the surf-rolled mole of their speech.

But in time, tongues reassert themselves,
Pulled back like tides in a change of charge.

[Juan Martínez-Miguel · Rating 4 out of 5]

La traducción tiene grandes aciertos. El amor de Hopkins por la aliteración logra encontrar buen equivalente en nuestra lengua.

[Isaac Fuller · Rating 4 out of 5]

The more I read and reread Hopkins, the more the canter of his metre haunts me. It takes some time to hear his voice in the poetry, but once you let the strange and ancient rhythms in his verse control you, the words take on dimensions I've only other experienced in Shakespeare, Herbert, and Eliot. If you like mixed drinks, don't bother with Hopkins; this is for single-malt scotch drinkers.

[Ioan Prydderch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Complex yes. Beautiful imagery of the natural world and pre-empting some of the modernist experiments that came later also enjoyably ambitious.