Paying Attention To The Sky

G. M. Hopkins

A poem I hadn’t noticed until Anthony Esolen introduced it in his chapter on Hopkins from Ironies of Faith. The interpretation that follows is so true and rather sad in some ways but in the end deeply affirming of our Catholic faith.

Before the poem, a short bio on the poet written by Fr. Joseph J. Feeney, S.J.

Hopkins the Poet, Hopkins the Jesuit
The major, the finest, poets of Victorian England were Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Yet Hopkins was almost unknown until 1918 when his book Poems was first published, as edited by his friend Robert Bridges, then Poet Laureate.

Born on 28 July 1844 in London suburb of Stratford, Essex, Gerard Hopkins grew up in the London’s Hampstead, among a comfortable family talented in word, art, and music. In 1863 he went up to Oxford where he did brilliantly and anguished over religion. With the counsel of John Henry Newman, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church on 21 October 1866, and after finishing Oxford in 1867 he taught for some months at Newman’s Oratory School near Birmingham.

Hopkins entered the Society of Jesus on 7 September 1868, and did his novitiate in London and his philosophy in Lancashire. After a year of teaching in the Jesuit Juniorate, he began theology at St. Beuno’s College in beautiful North Wales where, in the winter 1875-76, he flashed into poetic splendor with the long, great ode “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” His annus mirabilis as a poet was 1877, the year of his ordination, when he wrote eleven sonnets including “God’s Grandeur,” “The Starlight Night,” “As Kingfishers catch fire,” “Spring,” “The Windhover,” “Pied Beauty,” and “Hurrahing in Harvest.”

In October Hopkins left Wales, his “Mother of Muses,” to teach and minister variously in Derbyshire, London, Oxford, Bedford Leigh, Liverpool, Glasgow, and (after tertainship) Stonyhurst College. In these middle years Hopkins wrote fine prose sermons and such excellent poems as “Duns Scotus’s Oxford,” “Henry Purcell,” “Felix Randal,” and the poignant, wonderful “Spring and Fall.”

In 1884 Hopkins went to Dublin as Professor of Greek at University College and examiner in the Royal Univeristy. But on Stephen’s Green his chronic depression was magnified by bad eyesight, political irritation, spiritual desolation, and exhaustion from grading hundreds of examination papers.

In 1885-86 he wrote seven sonnets, the “Terrible Sonnets” or “Dark Sonnets,” which scream with pain amid technical perfection. But other poems express patience, even jubiliant hope in Christ, though his final poem describes a “winter world ” in which his “sweet fire” of poetic inspiration has waned. A few weeks later, on 8 June 1889, he died, a victim of typhoid fever.

Hopkins’ poems, first published in 1918, grew into fame after the second edition of 1930. Hailed as experimental and strikingly modern, they display rich music, novel rhythms, clustered words, craggy strength, and poetic power. Later, Hopkins had distinguished followers: notably such important modern poets W.H.Auden, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, David Jones, and Dylan Thomas.

The Lantern Out of Doors
Sometimes a lantern moves along the night
That interests our eyes And who goes there?
I think; where from and bound, I wonder, where,
With, all down darkness wide, his wading light?

Men go by me whom either beauty bright
In mould or mind or what not else makes rare:
They rain against our much-thick and marsh air
Rich beams, till death or distance buys them quite.

Death or distance soon consumes them: wind
What most I may eye after, be in at the end
I cannot, and out of sight is out of mind.
Christ minds: Christ’s interest, what to avow or amend
there, eyes them, heart wants, care haunts, foot follows kind,
Their ransom, their rescue, and first, fast, last friend.

We think we love, but how slow and lukewarm our hearts are! How fortunate that salvation depends not on our love, but on God’s. Hopkins seems to have been as naturally curious about other people as anyone alive, but he is honest about how far this love of neighbor takes him:  not far.

Many a man would not travel with the lantern carrier to the end of the first stanza. But we are each of us that lantern carrier, traveling the darkness alone. And more: we are that darkness, too. For the physical or intellectual beauty of a man has to fight its way to us: it has to “rain” “rich beams” “against our much-thick and marsh air.” Then we notice him, we of the dismal marsh: a beautiful man with a lantern, going somewhere.

Where does he go? The way of all flesh. He fades into death or, what serves as well for the speaker, into distance. With that, the speaker loses all interest. The metaphor is financial as well as psychological. Death or distance buys up everything we have invested, and then “out of sight is out of mind.” Thus Hopkins says, with sadness, that even friendship is little more than the flickering interest kindled in us by a lantern swinging in the hand of a night traveler.

No, we do not know love from ourselves. That is the affront Christianity delivers to the sentimentalists who divorce the dignity of man from God. The sentimentalist will make a god out of love; Christianity asserts that you do not even know what love is unless in some fashion you know God, for it is God who is love, the Creator and no other. He chose us that we might choose him. We do not say he is our friend, deriving the image by analogy from human friendship. Rather we say that all human friendship is the far and shadowy reflection of God’s true love for us.

For here in a world of night foundered wayfarers, there is yet one who seeks us out. We may “wind our eye after” someone in whom we are interested, but we do not follow. Christ follows. Moving among us mind-misted people of the marsh, who half forget even as we begin to love, is one who not only remembers, but who loves and amends what he sees.

We think we enjoy fellowship, says Hopkins, but that is but an interruption of our solitude. Yet in the same solitude, unseen by us and unsuspected, walks Christ. His interest does not flag, because His is the creature, as His are the winnings. He buys us back from death and distance; He loses, so to speak, that He may win. He alone is our “ransom” and “rescue.” In the beginning, now, and evermore, Christ is ours before we know we are His, closer to us than we are to ourselves, our “first, fast, last friend.”