For two days I have written about the sacramental poetic reflections of the nineteenth century English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Today I want to quote from several of his poems and append a few modest comments of my own.

God’s Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and share man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest deep down things;
And thought the last light off the back […]

Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Victorian Jesuit priest who found release from deep anxiety and pain through writing poetry. He learned how to express the tremendous power of the human heart through language that moves those who read his work with reflection. His priestly vocation gave a special vocabulary to the language he used. His deep inner struggle was eloquently chronicled in a verse where the very first lines he wrote as a priest captured this by saying: “Thou mastering me/God!”

What Hopkins was able to accomplish is rare, whether in a poet or any other Christian writer. He used sacramental language to celebrate the particularities of grace in nature. His voice, writes one student of his work, “was perfectly pitched at praise.” In the last few years of his life Hopkins wrote what are called his eight “Terrible Sonnets.” Here his authentic voice no longer uses indirect speech. He addresses God without formality and writes “O thou my friend.” […]

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) was an English poet disposed to great personal intensity and a type of stubbornness that Margaret R. Ellsberg (Created to Praise: The Language of Gerard Manley Hopkins. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) says, “Ultimately molded itself as discipline.” Born in 1844 to a wealthy high Anglican family he was the first of nine children. He went to Highgate School where Samuel Taylor Coleridge once taught. He was a brilliant student but often challenged the system. He began to display strong tendencies to self-discipline and stringent moral ideals. Critics believe these tendencies can be seen in the poems he wrote over the course of his last five years of life.

Hopkins won a poetry prize at Highgate, was considered a superb scholar of the Classics, and then went to Oxford in 1863. While at Oxford he began an earnest search for perfection. To call him a “perfectionist” (in the modern sense) is an understatement. He wrote poems with titles like […]