by Mary Oliver
When he joined the Jesuit order, Hopkins destroyed whatever poems he had previously written; he intended to write no more. Only Hopkins knew how large was the pressure in him to be a poet; only he knew whether it interfered with the wholeheartedness of his decision to become a Jesuit. So to wonder about his decision is unavailing. We do know this: when an opportunity came to write again—a remark by a bishop, in his presence, that he wished someone would keep alive the memory of the Deutschland, a storm-wrecked ship on which five Franciscan nuns were drowned—Hopkins leaped to the task. "The Wreck of the Deutschland" is a long and difficult poem that did not win favor for Hopkins, but it was the prototype of all his further work, both in terms of technique and of its resolute logics and celebrations within the framework of his faith. From his rigorous interpretation of Christianity—that sacrifice is bliss, and self-indulgence is the real death—Hopkins never wavered. His one escape from a life of self-restraint, labor, and humility was his feeling for the natural world—landscapes and waterways and copses, and especially the yearly gift of spring—in which he read the proof of God. Here, only, he could "merely" rejoice. * The results are the poems we know and love: the amazing lyrics of passion and thanks, in which there is neither meditation nor questions but, always, an exhilarating commitment. They are prayers, they are ornaments. They are re-joicements.
A Hopkins poem, like a Frost poem, is unmistakable. Its tone, diction, rhythm, etc., have a reliable "signature." Unlike Frosts work, where the diction is so miraculously akin to speech, Hopkins's poems are not natural sounding at all. Hopkins desired a real difference from usual speech or writing, and avoided both metrical formation of lines and diction that would resemble consistent natural expression. He did not want his poems to be mistaken for anything other than fervent, opulent declarations, elevated from the ordinary world; not on the nerves of questions do they exist, but with the candles, the breathy rhetoric, the pomp of certainty.
Hopkins dedicated many hours to a description and explanation of his technique, whose mainstay was "sprung rhythm" and whose apparatus included such phrases as "hangers" and "outriders." Practically speaking, it is accentual verse and follows the course of logical intonation. There may be four or there may be five stresses to a line, and there are times when, to make this happen, one must compress a combination of words within a single emphasis, which adds to the density of the whole. The truth of the matter is that the poems do not require half the explanation Hopkins gave them, and to tell a further truth, he elaborates in such detail that it becomes finally obstacle rather than assistance. The poems are not hard to read. In their own way they are fluid, with obvious points of emphasis. There are unexpected lapses and ties and conjunctions within the syntax, but even with such moments the poems are readable and understandable. Also, as almost all poems do, they will occasionally, for a brief spell, make use of some familiar metrical pattern, that oldest obtainment of design.
If the explanations are overdone, still the form itself worked for Hopkins. Meditations, moving toward an answer, may well profit from simple language and a definite, reliable pattern, so that the reader may absorb carefully every step in the argument. Praise poems require no such step-by-step apparatus, but may come to the reader as they are felt by the writer—in a rush, in a spray, in a tumble and gallop, a pressure, a fulsomeness, an abundance, the sharp hooves of happiness lifting and flashing. A Hopkins poem is unmistakably joyful:
I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour....
But every life—even a short life, as Hopkins's life was—is full of pitfalls. The Hopkins we know best is the man who wrote "The Windhover" and "Hurrahing in Harvest" and "God's Grandeur." But Hopkins was also a man in turmoil. No doubt, as he put tremendous energy into each poem, he put a vast vocational energy into prayer and the various services he was called upon to perform. No doubt his daily faith was a deeply layered light. God, Christ, and Mary are ever in his poems, discovered and rediscovered out of some earthy, emblematic form. Still, even the most faithful man is in some sense passive, for a man receives grace and cannot make his own fortune altogether. It is in grace that one lives, or in hell—hell being, for a man of faith, that place, or those days, when the presence of God is withdrawn.
And such a trial and forlornness came to Hopkins. The energy with which he wrote his poems failed him. The presence of God withdrew from him. He wrote, during this time, what we now call his "terrible sonnets," and terrible they surely are. In his desolation he wrote them, and in an unusually simple diction; not with his usual long, jointless sentences but with the cramped and hinged hesitations of misery. If the praise poems seem sometimes like oversweet cake, these sonnets are the driest crusts.
Hopkins's nature was to live at either leaden depth or tumultuous height. This was certainly good for the poems, whose lavish density and upsweeps into exaltation create a world rarefied and glorious.
It is not unreasonable to imagine the intensity of Hopkins—Hopkins the poet, who was also Hopkins the religious—as the wish to transcend the mere words that listed the earth-evidences of God, and to merge with him completely. Such is the fierce desire of the mystic—impossible, yet ever present. Men live with it, as best they can.
Such men, and women too, do not of course need to be religious in the conventional sense (abiding, that is, by established tenets); many of them are not. For those who are, however, there is this difference: the nonreligious mystic generally has nothing to "work with" but intuition in the attempt to move nearer to creator, or mystical center, however one may define this core. While the religious person, a member of this or that church, this or that order, has a liturgy, a rule, an exact and exacting prescription of how to live, and what to do, and what not to do, in order to evolve a closeness—to earn a closeness—to God. Of all the religious orders, none is more rigorous than the Society of Jesus. The discipline of the Jesuits, their abstinence, their labors, are all severe. Indeed, Hopkins admitted that he found it a difficult life.
But my point is not simply that Hopkins found it difficult; rather, that in such a severe "program" of religious life there was every indication that nearness to God could be brought about by increasingly rigorous behavior, more prayer, more work, more abstinence. It was Loyola's way, and Hopkins chose it, and it wore him to the bone. That such behavior, born in humility, finally becomes a kind of self-exploitation rather than self-mastery, and therefore is no longer humility at all, of course complicates the issue. Hopkins, in the last years of his life, could not hide his weariness. At the age of forty-five he contracted typhoid fever, and it killed him.
For the poems that sprang so generously from Hopkins's mind we are deeply grateful. We are grateful also that, slowly, his forsakenness lifted, and in his final years he felt himself surrounded again by the light of heaven; he felt his "very-violet-sweet" God had returned. Indeed, his last poems seem, by comparison with the rest of his work, full of breath, confident, less afraid of uncertainty, almost stately. At last! "I am so happy, so happy," he said just before he died.
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, wilful-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 ea
rth for him off under his feet.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Some Thoughts on Whitman
1
IN The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James offers four marks of distinction that are part of a mystical experience. The first of these is that such an experience "defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words."*
All poets know such frustration generally; the goal of creative work is ever approachable yet unattainable. But Whitman as he worked on Leaves of Grass may have been grappling with a more splendid difficulty than the usual—there is in his work a sense of mystical thickness and push, and a feeling that the inner man was at work under some exceptional excitement and compulsion. Whether Whitman had an actual mystical experience or not,† his was a sensibility so passionate, so affirmative and optimistic, that it is fair to speak of him as writing out of a kind of hovering mystical cloud. Clearly his idea of paradise was here—this hour and this place. And yet he was, in his way, just as the mystic is, a man of difference—a man apart.
James's other marks of distinction concerning the mystical experience are as follows, and also feel much in accord with the emanations of Leaves of Grass: that mystical states "are illuminations, revelations ... and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after time"; that such a state "cannot be sustained for long"; and that the mystic feels "as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power."
Whitman published Leaves of Grass in 1855, twelve poems and a prologue which unite into a single work. For the rest of his writing life Whitman wrote no other verse but fed it into that ever-expanding book—that is, all the work of his "after life" was refinement, addition, inculcation. Except in the hope of better effect, he took up no new subjects, nor altered the rhapsodic tenor of his voice, nor denied any effort of catalogue, rhetoric, eroticism, nor trimmed his cadence, nor muted his thunder or his sweetness. His message was clear from the first and never changed: that a better, richer life is available to us, and with all his force he advocated it both for the good of each individual soul and for the good of the universe.
That his methods are endlessly suggestive rather than demonstrative, and that their main attempt was to move the reader toward response rather than reflection, is perhaps another clue to the origin of Whitmans power and purpose, and to the weight of the task. If it is true that he experienced a mystical state, or even stood in the singe of powerful mystical suggestion, and James is right, then he was both blessed and burdened—for he could make no adequate report of it. He could only summon, suggest, question, call, and plead. And Leaves of Grass is indeed a sermon, a manifesto, a Utopian document, a social contract, a political statement, an invitation, to each of us, to change. All through the poem we feel Whitmans persuading force, which is his sincerity; and we feel what the poem tries continually to be: the replication of a miracle.
2
The prose "Preface" that stands before the poems is wide-ranging and pontifical. Emerson lives here in both thought and word; actual phrases taken from Emerson's essays "The American Scholar" and "The Poet" are nailed down as Whitman's own. Whitman claims for his work the physical landscape and spiritual territory of America; in so doing he turns, like Emerson, from the traditions of Europe. He claims also, for the poet, a mental undertaking that is vast and romantic, and a seriousness that is close to divine.
The twelve poems of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass consist of one huge and gleaming Alp followed by a relaxed undulation of easily surmountable descending foothills. The initial poem, "Song of Myself" (sixty-two pages*), is the longest and the most critical. It is the Alp. If the reader can "stay with" this extended passage, he has made a passage indeed. The major demands of the poem are here established, the first and essential lesson given in the first half-dozen lines:
I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease....observing a spear of summer grass. (p. 27)
In these lines the great work is begun, and the secret of success has been given. And what is that great labor? Out-circling interest, sympathy, empathy, transference of focus from the self to all else; the merging of the lonely single self with the wondrous, never-lonely entirety. This is all. The rest is literature: words, words, words; example, metaphor, narrative, lyricism, sweetness, persuasion, the stress of rhetoric, the weight of catalogue. The detail, the pace, the elaborations are both necessary and augmentative; this is a long poem and it is not an argument but a thousand examples, a thousand taps and twirls on Whitman's primary statement. Brevity would have made the whole thing ineffectual, for what Whitman is after is felt experience. Experience only, he understands, is the successful persuader.
Logic and sermons never convince,
The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul (p. 56)
he says, and what would be prolongation or hyperbole in another man's book is part of the earnest and necessary equipage here.
The reader of Leaves of Grass, in this first section especially, is a major player, and is invited into this "theater of feeling" tenderly. "Song of Myself" is sprinkled with questions; toward the end of the poem they come thick and fast, their profusion, their slantness, their unanswerability helping the reader to rise out of familiar territory and into this soul-waking and world-shifting experience:
Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? Have you reckoned the earth much? (p. 28)
What do you think has become of the young and old men? (p. 32.)
Who need be afraid of the merge? (p. 33)
The souls moving along....are they invisible while the least atom of the stones is visible? (p. 34)
Oxen that rattle the yoke or halt in the shade, what is that you express in your eyes? (p. 37)
What is a man anyhow? What am I? and what are you? (p. 45)
Shall I pray? Shall I venerate and be ceremonious? (p. 45)
and on and on. More than sixty questions in all, and not one of them easily answerable.
Nor, indeed, are they presented for answers, but to force open the soul:
Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs! (p. 50)
"Song of Myself" presents Whitman's invitation in a tone without margins—ecstasy, mysticism, urgency, seducements, open arms, and all those questions leave the reader plundered, exalted, and exhausted.
***
And so, amazingly, begins the long descent. The eleven poems remaining are various in tone and intention. In comparison with the sixty-two pages of "Song of Myself," each is surprisingly brief. In each section the author of "Song of Myself" continues to speak, but more comfortably, less extensively, less urgently, and at an increasing emotional distance from us.
Two of the poems are eleven pages long, another two are seven pages in length,* the last seven are all four pages long or less. If "The Sleepers" is almost palpably caressing, if "There Was a Child Went Forth" is flawlessly tender, if "A Boston Ballad" stands in its place with a surprising theatricality, still none of them measures anywhere near "Song of Myself," with its thunder and its kisses and its implications. So hot is the fire of that poem, so bright its transformative power, that we truly need, and Whitman knew it, each of the slow, descending chords that follow. There is a madness born of too much light, and Whitman was not after madness nor even recklessness, but the tranquility of affinity and function. He was after a joyfulness, a belief in existence in which man's inner light is neither rare nor elite, but godly and common, and acknowledged. For that it was necessary to be rooted, again, in the world.
3
One day as I wrestled with that long opening poem, the complaint burst from me: With Whitman it's opera, opera, opera all the time! I shouted, in something very like weariness.
It is true.
For long stretches Whitman's tone of summoning and import is unalleviated. But it is necessary to his purpose, which is so densely serious. Neither whimsy nor the detailed and opulent level of fun-terror, as Poe for example employs it, is found in Whitman. Poe understood the usefulness of entertainment and employed it, although he too was dead serious. Whitman did not, nor even the expansions of narrative. In "Song of Myself" and in passages beyond as well are page after page of portrait and instance; each opens in a blink and shuts on another. They are not stories; they are glances, possibilities. They are any of us, almost, in another life, and they expect of the reader a costly exchange; we cannot glide here upon narrative but must imaginatively take on other destinies:
The pure contralto sings in the organloft,
The carpenter dresses his plank....the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp.... (p. 39)
The bride unrumples her white dress, the minutehand of the clock moves slowly.... (p. 41)
The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm...
The deacons are ordained with crossed hands at the altar...
The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirmed case.... (p. 39)
All are unforgettable, even, or especially:
...the little child that peeped in at the door and then drew back and was never seen again.... (p. 78)
Along with such portraits and moments of quickness and essence, Whitman turned upon the least detail of the manifest world such a fussy and diligent attention that the long lines lay down not so much ethereal as palpable. These lines with their iambic cadence and their end stops are like speech, yet not quite. They lack what speech so readily has—an uncertainty, a modesty, a feeling of attempt toward expression rather than reiterated exactitude. Which is what Whitman has in such abundance: certitude, and a centering clarity of the least object.