FOR those who love poetry, this is an ideal Lent book. Carys Walsh takes a poem a day, sets it in its context, and then draws out its meaning in a close reading of particular phrases and words. Each section is just the right length, giving the reader time to reflect on the poem itself and then be taken more deeper into it by the commentary. Gerard Manley Hopkins’s long, most ambitious poem, “The Wreck of the Deutschland”, is broken up and considered over three days.
For those who are not familiar with poetry or do not know the work of Hopkins, this will be a stimulating new development. It will not always be easy, as Hopkins developed new forms of rhyming and word order which give an energetic musicality to the verse, but sometimes challenge the understanding. So, it is good to have the author’s explanations of more testing lines.
The most obviously uplifting of the poems comes from the time when Hopkins was based at St Beuno’s in North Wales. He relished the quiet and countryside:
Lovely the woods, waters, meadows, combes, vales,
All the air things wear that build this world of Wales.
This is reflected in poems where the glory of God is celebrated in all its forms. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”
Hopkins’s time in Dublin, however, was very difficult. He had to spend his time teaching and marking scripts at an elementary level, and the place was unhealthy. Out of this came his heart-rending “Terrible Sonnets”, which try to hold to faith in the midst of despair:
I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me.
The poetry of Hopkins was shaped by the philosophy of Duns Scotus, which led him to emphasise the unique individuality of every element in the universe. For him, the glory of God was not in vague abstractions, but in each unique particular, especially when they did not fit neat categories: “all things counter, original, spare, strange”. He thought that human beings had the capacity to recognise and grasp each individual element and characteristic. In this, he is unlike any other poet, and this is why he continues to inspire. As nearly all his poetry is in the form of a dialogue with God, or a religious reflection, it is particularly valuable as a spur to the reader’s own spiritual life:
Thou mastering me
God! Giver of breath and bread
In beautiful countryside and depressing Dublin alike, he sought to bring his life under that mastering.
The Rt Revd Lord Harries of Pentregarth is a former Bishop of Oxford. He is the author of Hearing God in Poetry (SPCK, 2021).
Dappled Beauty: Through Lent with Gerald Manley Hopkins
Carys Walsh
Canterbury Press £12.99
(978-1-78622-527-6)
Church Times Bookshop £10.39
