1

Hopkins as a Poet of Nature and Religion

Hopkins used poetry to express his religious devotion, drawing his images from
the natural world. He found nature inspiring and developed his theories of inscape
and in stress to explore the manifestation of God in every living thing. According
to these theories, the recognition of an object’s unique identity, which was
bestowed upon that object by God, brings us closer to Christ. Similarly, the
beauty of the natural world—and our appreciation of that beauty—help us
worship God. The problem of concentricity is another concern of his poetry.
Hopkins view of the canon is a decentred one in which the work and aesthetic
style of each original artist radiates from and so coheres around – its own centre,
its own distinctive character and convictions.

The problem in examining the religious crisis in Hopkins’s poetry lies in a correct
definition of the term. A religion implies a specific system of faith and worship.
In nineteenth century England the generally accepted religion was a carefully
defined dogma characterized by many features. Broadening the definition to
‘religious’ encompasses further entities such as an individual’s piety, his
devotion, his sense of belonging to a specific order and particularly in Hopkins’
case the need to adhere to certain vows. A crisis carries connotations of urgency,
danger and possibly represents a turning-point or re-evaluation of what had
previously been accepted as the norm. Hopkins’s religious crisis covers all these
entities. It remained throughout a dilemma of choice. He was acutely aware of
the needs of his religion, yet he sought to compromise those needs with an innate
sensuousness which was expressed in his poetry.

Many poems, including “Hurrahing in Harvest” and “The Windhover,” begin

with the speaker praising an aspect of nature, which then leads the speaker into a
consideration of an aspect of God or Christ. For instance, in “The Starlight
Night,” the speaker urges readers to notice the marvels of the night sky and
compares the sky to a structure, which houses Christ, his mother, and the saints.
The stars’ link to Christianity makes them more beautiful.

Hopkins’s early poetry praises nature, particularly nature’s unique ability to

regenerate and rejuvenate. Throughout his travels in England and Ireland,
Hopkins witnessed the detrimental effects of industrialization on the
environment, including pollution, urbanization, and diminished rural landscapes.
While he lamented these effects, he also believed in nature’s power of
regeneration, which comes from God. In “God’s Grandeur,” the speaker notes the
 2

wellspring that runs through nature and through humans. While Hopkins never
doubted the presence of God in nature, he became increasingly depressed by late
nineteenth-century life and began to doubt nature’s ability to withstand human
destruction. His later poems, the so-called terrible sonnets, focus on images of
death, including the harvest and vultures picking at prey. Rather than depict the
glory of nature’s rebirth, these poems depict the deaths that must occur in order
for the cycle of nature to continue. “Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord” (1889) uses
parched roots as a metaphor for despair: the speaker begs Christ to help him
because Christ’s love will rejuvenate him, just as water helps rejuvenate dying
foliage.
Many of Hopkins’s poems feature an ecstatic outcry, a moment at which the
speaker expresses his transcendence of the real world into the spiritual world. The
words ah, o, and oh usually signal the point at which the poem moves from a
description of nature’s beauty to an overt expression of religious sentiment.
“Binsey Poplars” (1879), a poem about the destruction of a forest, begins with a
description of the downed trees but switches dramatically to a lamentation about
the human role in the devastation; Hopkins signals the switch by not only
beginning a new stanza but also by beginning the line with “O” (9). Hopkins also
uses exclamation points and appositives to articulate ecstasy: in “Carrion
Comfort,” the speaker concludes with two cries to Christ, one enclosed in
parentheses and punctuated with an exclamation point and the other punctuated
with a period. The words and the punctuation alert the reader to the instant at
which the poem shifts from secular concerns to religious feeling.
Consider these lines from 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;
The poem's very first line establishes the profound connection between God and
nature that the speaker explores throughout "God's Grandeur." God is not
connected to nature merely because God created nature. Rather, the speaker
describes God as actively suffused within nature, as an ever-present "charge"
running through it. Further, by describing God's grandeur as being something that
will "flame out," or as being something as tangible as the oil that oozes from a
crushed olive, the speaker makes an additional claim: that human beings can
perceive, contemplate, or even interact with God through nature. The speaker
reveres nature not only because it is a divine creation, but also because it is a
direct conduit between humanity and God.
 3

The belief in such a deep link among God, nature, and humanity explains the
speaker's despair about how humanity is ruining the natural world. In destroying
nature humanity is destroying God's creation and severing its own connection to
God. Even worse, humanity is not only destroying nature, but replacing the
pristine sights, sounds, and smells of the natural world—and God's "charge"
within it— with the "smudge" and "smell" of human beings. At the same time,
nature's connection to God gives the speaker hope: because it is the creation of
an omnipotent God who continues to watch over the world, nature can never be
obscured or ruined by human beings. The natural cycles of life and death (implied
by the references to sunset followed by sunrise), and the fact that God is still
fulfilling his "charge" to protect nature (the way a mother bird "broods" over an
egg), give the speaker confidence that nature will endure humanity's plundering
and be reborn. Yet the speaker seems unsure about humanity's own place within
nature's endless cycles: it's unclear if the speaker's vision of a reborn world
includes humanity or not.

Consider these lines from Pied Beauty:

Glory be to God for dappled things –

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and
plough;

As with a number of poems by Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied

Beauty” is a kind of song of praise to God. It takes a beautifully detailed look at
the world in all its variety, and sees in this variation and abundance the glory of
God’s creation. In particular, the poem admires God’s capacity for creating
opposites. The poem celebrates God’s work and invites the reader to do the same.
“Pied” means having two or more colours, and it is this quality of variety that the
speaker most admires about God’s work. This is primarily expressed through a
close look at the natural world, but the poem also sees it in the “trades” of
humankind and in more abstract categories. The first stanza, which opens with a
prayer to God that praises “dappled things” (another way of saying pied), is
mostly about the natural world. The speaker marvels at nature, seeing in it God’s
majestic teleological design (which just means that God made the world as it is
with intent and purpose). The speaker lists some of these more visual examples
of “piedness”: skies of two colors (specifically the appearance of a gathering
storm), the spotty pattern on fish, the contrast of chestnuts with their green
coating, the coloring on birds’ wings. All of these are part of God’s design and
deserving of attention and praise. But it’s not just the natural world that shows
 4

God’s glory—it’s also human activity. Pied beauty can be found in the way that
people work the land—think of green turf contrasted with the color of brown
soil—as well as within the labors of humanity more generally. Here the poem
sees the sheer variety of human work as a type of pied beauty. It’s not possible to
say for sure what “gear and tackle and trim” represent, but whether they relate
specifically to farm-based labor or more varied “trades” like fishing and cloth-
making, they are certainly meant to build this sense of beauty in variety.

Indeed, part of the poem’s aim is to argue that beautiful evidence of God’s design
is everywhere—not just in the natural world. The second stanza makes this point
with forceful persuasion, by shifting the focus from concrete examples of “pied”
beauty to a more abstract list of opposites: “swift” and “slow,” “sweet” and
“sour,” light and dark. In other words, it’s not just the obviously beautiful things
in the world that showcase God’s majesty—it’s also the world’s limitless variety,
the way in which contradictory categories can exist in complete harmony. In this,
the speaker sees God’s paternal love for the world (his “fathering-forth”).

The imagery of Hopkin’s poem draws upon both the geometrical and musical
arrangement of the spheres and the harmony they generate. God is the geometrical
centre that radiates, and the ‘dominant’ note that reverberates, outwards in the
universe of the poem, just as the utterances and actions of ‘the circling bird’ and
the bat move outwards from their ‘changeless note’ in the form of both resonant
sound waves and their circling flight, which are punningly referred to herein the
bat’s ‘departing rings’. Hopkins extends Pythagoreanism, which originally
described planetary and other astronomical relations, to the organic nature. The
bird’s and the bat’s patterns of sound and flight enact a microcosmic version of
the harmony of the spheres. As Hopkins’ poems demonstrates, Pythagoreanism
lends itself to such efforts to describe the universe as theocentric, God centred.
The Pythagorean ideas of number and harmony are amongst the earliest principles
of philosophical idealism, which argues against the common sense view that
identifies appearances(that which wesee, hear, and otherwise perceive through
the senses) with reality by asserting that, on the contrary, eternal thoughts or ideas
are the ground of the world, the ultimate reality.
The ‘Terrible Sonnets’ represent a high point in Hopkins's art and exposition of
his religious crisis. Their importance lies in the removal of anything extraneous
from his focus on his own personal spiritual survival. As such the sonnets
represent a summing up of his religious, artistic and secular achievements. It is in
this balancing that Hopkins could derive a sense of his progress as a priest and
possibly as an artist. One needs to remember that throughout Hopkins remained
a Jesuit priest. He never relinquished his priestly duties or his commitment to
 5

God. It was this marriage that coloured most of his later poetry. At no stage did
he consider separating from his religion to ease his suffering. It is for this reason
that one can continue to maintain that the dynamic underlining the greater part of
his art remains a chronic unfolding religious crisis. It was the varying forms that
this crisis took which served to mould his spiritual and secular life. The crisis
Hopkins experiences and expresses in his Art is an amalgam of all the approaches
alluded to in my introduction. It borrows from his surroundings, his
contemporaries, his formal religion and his aesthetics, but it remains a
fundamentally religious crisis - a crisis that seeks to define the limits of the
validity of worship and the validity of the self. His epitaph is aptly penned in one
of his last poems, an extract from ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire.’