Paying Attention To The Sky

Gerard Manley Hopkins asserted with great ardor that man could approach his Lord by the inconsiderable trifles of the world, a love for irises and moths and falcons. His notebooks are crammed with the canniest descriptions, born of love, of what he called the “inscapes” of the things he saw, the peculiar inner fingerprint of a thing that made it itself and no other:

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells;
Crying What I do is me: for that I came
(“As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” 5-8)

His term inscape is well chosen. It suggests a creation that delves deep within a thing, to its essence. The term is derived from the German schoepfen (to create) and -schaft (knowledge, as of a craft), and from the Anglo-Saxon scieppan (to shape or fashion) and scop (a shaper of verses, that is, poet) Hopkins says the finding of inscapes is precisely what the world is for, all things are for man’s beholding, that he may learn of his Maker and sing his praises.

Hence the typical irony of Hopkins’s poetry. Knowledge is everywhere to be gleaned, but only by those who love. The fault line severs those who can read the signs, often in the most unexpected places, from those who cannot, because their love does not beat warmly enough. The double identity of the world — as heaven penetrates this smallish portion of the world that we misconstrue as the whole — comes across quite nicely in the following notebook entry, describing the first time Hopkins saw the northern lights:

Mv eye was caught by beams of light and dark very like the crown of horny rays the sun makes behind a cloud. At first I thought of silvery cloud until I s aw that these were more luminous and did not dim the clearness of the stars in the Bear. They rose slightly radiating thrown out from the earthline.

Then I saw soft pulses of light one after another rise and pass upwards arched in shape but waveringly and with the arch broken They seemed to float, not following the warp of the sphere as falling stars look to do but free though concentrical with it.

This busy working of nature wholly independent of the earth and seeming to go on in a strain of time not reckoned by our reckoning of days and years but simpler and as if correcting the preoccupation of the world by being preoccupied with and appealing to and dated to the day of judgment was like a new witness to God and filled me with delightful fear.
(Sept. 24, 1870)

Note that Hopkins senses a time-within-time, independent of the clicking minutes whereby we calculate our days in the countinghouse. But it is also a time above that time, steering it, leading it from the nothingness whence it came to the eternity whither it is going. He experiences the fearful sense of the provisionality of time, of its being embedded in God’s time — against which our minutes seem to clash.

BUT IF OUR HEARTS are open, we will see. Then it will be as if the veil of creation had been torn in two. We will not see beyond creation, leaving it behind in disdain, but into creation… We will see even unto the dangerous and loving Creator who awaits within and beside and beyond. God is no mere object of love, but the Lover who will tear through cloud and sky to grip the heart of man That explains the ironic reversals in one of Hopkins’s loveliest hymns to natural beauty:

Hurrahing in Harvest
Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, willful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And, eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

And the azurous hung hills are his world wielding shoulder
Majestic as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet! –
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet

The first line of the poem leads, or misleads, the reader to believe that he is about to hear of the “barbarous” beauty of late summer. Hopkins echoes Shakespeare’s famous line describing the sheaves brought in for the harvest, “Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard” (Sonnets 12 8 ) The “stooks” or ricks of baled corn are bearded and bristly — in that sense barbarous, punning on the Latin barbatus (bearded) — and of a rough and rustic thrusting into the sky

But that is the last sight of an autumn harvest we have in the poem. For Hopkins casts his eye upward. Dante had called the world “this little winnowing floor” (Paradise, 22 151), alluding to Jesus’ warning that it the Last Judgment the wheat would be winnowed from the chaff. Hopkins instead looks to the physical heavens — there is the harvesting, unbeknownst to the men who shock the grain on earth. The skies are “wind-walks” where the horses of the air march round (and there, not simply round and round but in the wildest streams) to power the fan to blow the straw free; the clouds are silky sacks grain a-bursting; they spill the meal, flowing away in sudden runnels and siftings and scatterings.

It is no mere physical description. A real gleaning is going on, with the poet as gleaner, walking through the rows of grain: and his instruments are his heart and eyes. He is gleaning the Savior. That image is meant to evoke a theology of love. In most of the New Testament passages that refer to the harvest; Jesus is comparing the grain to the souls of the blessed (e.g., Luke 8:4-15). In at least one place the souls’ enjoyment of the kingdom of God is compared to a bumper crop at the harvest, “good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over” (Luke 6:38). And why not? Since the life of Christ is the feast: he is the manna from heaven, the food that brings eternal life.

This is the paradox of Hopkins’ poetics of love. God loves a world whose beauty should stir man to fall in love with it and with Him. The more truly I love the meal-drifting clouds, the more truly I love God, because unless I see God in them, I do not fully see what they are. In the same way, Christ gives himself the Eucharist that we may be gleaned by our gleaning our taking Him in is His own taking us up to Himself, so that Aquinas properly says of the sacrament that it is not heaven that descends to us, but we who are raised to heaven.

No earthly love can match the fullness, even the violence, of God’s love for man, when man lifts up his heart to God. Christ’s is a “real” and a “round” reply, a halloo more reverberating than any man’s shout of joy, a kiss more real and warm than the most passionate lover’s embrace. Worship is not for the faint of heart. The hills above are the world-wielding shoulder of this hero — this God and man who is as “stalwart” (and as self-willed!) as a “stallion,” yet mysteriously as sweet as “very-violet.” Very God and very man, says The Book of Common Prayer; but Hopkins combines both natures in those superb images of royalty and approachable beauty.

Just as the northern lights seem to keep a time fixed upon eternity — a real time, a rounder time than what we know — so too the beauty of the harvest is and has always been ready for our seeing. Not the harvest of an Irish countryside, but in that harvest the harvest of oneself, in harvesting Christ. What is wanting? Only our attention: “the beholder.” But we are here to behold it. Then it is our love that is wanting. But if that heart should once move in love, it will find ravishment, swept away by and from the beauty of the earth to the beauty of Christ. For ‘they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles” (Isaiah 40:31).