Father Hopkins

Somewhere around here I've got my own "Visiting Hopkins' Grave" poem, a moment in my life I'll always remember: walking from tourist Dublin out to the north part of town, getting horribly lost, the woman putting together bouquets from the graves, the gravel and unassuming headstone for Hopkins and a dozen or so other Jesuits, then getting stranded in the countryside after getting lost on the way back. I should find that poem. Wrote it around 2002, I believe.

page from Hopkins' journal (via gerardmhopkins.org)

Stanely Kunitz recites "God's Grandeur"

Below is a Charles Wright's poem "Jesuit Graves," and a link to an audio recording of him reading the poem. Also, a favorite section from Berryman's "Eleven Addresses to the Lord" which mentions Father Hopkins.

But first, a favorite Hopkins poem:

The Caged Skylark

As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage,

Man's mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, dwells —
That bird beyond the remembering his free fells;

This in drudgery, day-labouring-out life's age.
Though aloft on turf or perch or poor low stage

Both sing sometímes the sweetest, sweetest spells,
Yet both droop deadly sómetimes in their cells

Or wring their barriers in bursts of fear or rage.

Not that the sweet-fowl, song-fowl, needs no rest —
Why, hear him, hear him babble & drop down to his nest,

But his own nest, wild nest, no prison.

Man's spirit will be flesh-bound, when found at best,
But uncumberèd: meadow-down is not distressed

For a rainbow footing it nor he for his bónes rísen.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Jesuit Graves

Midsummer. Irish overcast. Oatmeal-colored sky.
The Jesuit pit. Last mass
For hundreds whose names are incised on the marble wall
Above the gravel and grassless dirt.
Just dirt and the small stones

how strict, how self-effacing.

Not suited for you, however, Father Bird-of-Paradise,
Whose plumage of far wonder is not formless and not faceless,
Whatever you might have hoped for once.
Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, 3 July 1995.
For those who would rise to meet their work,

that work is scaffolding.

Sacrifice is the cause of ruin.
The absence of sacrifice is the cause of ruin.
Thus the legends instruct us,
North wind through the flat-leaved limbs of the sheltering trees,
Three desperate mounds in the small, square enclosure,

souls God-gulped and heaven-hidden.

P Gerardus Hopkins, 28 July 1844-8 June 1889, Age 44.
And then the next name. And then the next,
Soldiers of misfortune, lock-step into a star-colored tight dissolve,
History's hand-me-ons. But you, Father Candescence,
You, Father Fire?

Whatever rises comes together, they say. They say.

Charles Wright
from Black Zodiac

Click here to hear the audio recording of Wright reading the poem.



from Eleven Addresses to the Lord

10

Fearful I peer upon the mountain path
where once Your shadow passed, Limner of the clouds
up their phantastic guesses. I am afraid,
I never until now confessed.

I fell back in love with you, Father, for two reasons:
You were good to me, & a delicious author,
rational & passionate. Come on me again,
as twice you came to Azarias & Misael.

President of the brethren, our mild assemblies
inspire, & bother the priest not to be dull;
keep us week-long in order; love my children,
my mother far & ill, far brother, my spouse.

Oil all my turbulence as at Thy dictation
I sweat out my wayward works.
Father Hopkins said the only true literary critic is Christ.
Let me lie down exhausted, content with that.

John Berryman

from Collected Poems