Gerard Manley Hopkins – Page 2 – Interesting Literature

A Short Analysis of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection’ is a sonnet, but not as we know it. Or rather, it isn’t strictly a sonnet but the rhyme scheme puts us in mind of the sonnet. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) was probably Victorian poetry’s greatest innovator, and ‘That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection’ is a good example of his metrical and linguistic innovativeness. But such unconventional language and metre require some close analysis. (In 1977, in fact, Stephan Walliser published a book-length analysis of the poem.) Here, first, is the poem, followed by some commentary on it.

That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection

Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
Built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs | they throng; they glitter in marches
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, | wherever an elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle ín long | lashes lace, lance, and pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous | ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
Of yestertempest’s creases; | in pool and rut peel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed | dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks | treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, | nature’s bonfire burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest | to her, her clearest-selvèd spark
Man, how fast his firedint, | his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned. O pity and indig | nation! Manshape, that shone
Sheer off, disseveral, a star, | death blots black out; nor mark
Is any of him at all so stark

A Short Analysis of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘Thou art indeed just, Lord’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend’ is the first line of a poem that is variously titled ‘Thou art indeed just, Lord’ or, in Latin, ‘Justus quidem tu es, Domine’. It was written in March 1889, only a few months before Hopkins’s untimely death.

Justus quidem tu es, Domine, si disputem tecum; verumtamen
justa loquar ad te: Quare via impiorum prosperatur? &c.

A Short Analysis of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘Spring’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Spring’ is not as widely known as some of the other sonnets written by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89), which is a shame: it’s a powerful evocation of the beauty of spring. It is that season, Hopkins reminds us, ‘When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush’. Here is ‘Spring’, followed by a brief analysis of it.

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

A Short Analysis of Hopkins’s ‘Binsey Poplars’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Binsey Poplars’ is one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s best-known lyric poems. It was written in 1879 shortly after he revisited the small hamlet of Godstow near Oxford, a few miles north of Binsey, to find that ‘the aspens the lined the river [Thames] are everyone felled’. Here’s this wonderful poem along with a few words of analysis.

A Short Analysis of Hopkins’s ‘The Starlight Night’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Starlight Night’ is not a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem whose title is on everyone’s lips. Nevertheless, it’s a vivid example of his idiosyncratic writing style, and its theme – a starry night – is a perennial one for poets. But of course, Hopkins being Hopkins, he gives this age-old poetic theme the Gerard Manley Hopkins treatment, making the familiar unfamiliar and the unfamiliar familiar. Here is ‘The Starlight Night’ and a few words of analysis about this cryptic poem.

The Starlight Night

Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!