Hopkins: Language as Life

Based on an admissions essay prompt from UChicago; on one piece of art to represent humanity

Confined alone on the tip of Ireland, stranger in a land without church, romance, or family, racked with bipolar depression, months from the typhoid that would end his life, Gerard Manley Hopkins composes a poem. That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection is, above all else, a reflection of an academic life well lived. In twenty-four lines, Hopkins synthesizes a thousand years of human thought and worldview, conversing with influences from folk prosody to Anglican Bible scholarship. The title alludes to Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher who explained the universe as a perpetual ‘Fire’ of fluctuation and inconstancy. Hopkins’ poem paints a bleak picture of the vast inconsequence of this nature, then presents faith, Christ’s resurrection, as a literal deus ex machina.

Of course, if a well-researched story of salvation from mortality is enough to represent humanity, that paragraph might itself suffice. That Nature is an ideal representative because Hopkins doesn’t just regurgitate the ideas and forms of his philosophical ancestors, but interrogates them. Every aspect of Hopkins’ work is subject to the titular impermanence of nature. Throughout the poem, his formal and academic influences appear and reappear, are recycled, intertwined, and, crucially, forced to evolve. In pushing the boundaries of existing means of self-expression, Hopkins achieves a product radical in its uniqueness, one which outlines a path to self-salvation through knowledge and agency.

Hopkins bakes his influences into syntax and syllable, allowing verbiage and aural juxtaposition to convey meaning. This means despite the heavy influences, there is no prerequisite knowledge necessary to understand his sentiment. Take Hopkins’ opening section, which embodies a nature Heraclitus described as ‘an ever living Fire, with measures of it kindling, and measures going out’. Clouds are ‘torn tufts, tossed pillows’, the shade of an elm ‘shivelights and shadowtackle’. Abrasive stresses are employed in tandem with imagery throughout, reflecting the Fire’s incandescence.

Indeed, Hopkins creates an overwhelming linguistic ecosystem to be a microcosm of the vivacity and flux of the Fire. I fell in love with this poem when I read it out loud. Syllables rub and clash against one another, assonance and alliteration run wild. Words like ‘manmark’ and ‘bonfire’ reoccur broken into their constituent parts, syntactic examples of Heraclitean flux. Vibrant turns of phrase flash past and disappear like the flickering edges of a flame. There is no rest in That Nature; instead a rhythmic propulsion forward that mirrors the vastness of time by which ‘all is in an enormous dark drowned’.

If Hopkins was able to capture the inconsequence of nature, it was due to decades of experience living with it. A devout Jesuit ascetic, Hopkins wrote in meditation on death that, whether in pain or not, in good times and in bad, ‘it is terror enough that life is ebbing away’. This constant anxiety is inherent to the human condition, as is the question of how to derive personal meaning from a chaotic universe. Hopkins was plagued with depression throughout his life, and leading up to writing That Nature was physically sick for months at a time. The poems Hopkins composed during this period are known as the ‘sonnets of desolation’, grappling with unanswered questions of religion and death. That Nature stands out in his late oeuvre as a poem presenting comfort, actually providing a response to one of these doubts. The end near, facing the yawning maw of an unfathomable dark, how did Hopkins answer that fundamental question?

The apparent answer is faith. The first 14 lines of That Nature are identical in form to the desolation sonnets, bleak in their vision and arranged in the classic Italian structure. In an act representing the divine intervention it describes, Hopkins breaks free of that form with three tercets in crystalline, repetitive language which stands out against the broiling vocabulary of the earlier section. Through Christ, Hopkins says, one can escape the erosive grip of time, become immortal, pure, diamond.

However, the language and structure of the final tercets suggest a different story of salvation from the religious presentation. The rhyme scheme and syllabic count both contract as the poem moves through the sonnet and salvation sections, creating a momentum through the fire. Hopkins’ salvation is not an escape from the bonfire, but an embrace of it. Having accepted an inconstant world, Hopkins allows the defined forms of his poem—the rhythm, the sonnet form, conventional descriptions of nature—to evolve and be redefined. This quality is the brilliance of this work, reflecting the desire of humans to push beyond the boundaries of what comes before them.

In each of his choices, Hopkins exercises agency, leaving his mark on the form. It is not God who breaks free of the centuries-old sonnet, or constrained rhythm, to save us. It’s Gerard Manley Hopkins. When he dies soon after of typhoid fever, Hopkins leaves behind a blueprint for salvation disguised as a poem. That Nature is a shining example of the same innovative humanity that inspired contemporaries like Tchaikovsky, Monet, and Darwin to deconstruct and rebuild their own modes of expression. Their pioneering efforts are the vehicle by which they’ve achieved true resurrection and celebration centuries after their deaths.

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection

Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-

Built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs | they throng; they glitter in marches.

Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, | wherever an elm arches,

Shivelights and shadowtackle ín long | lashes lace, lance, and pair.

Delightfully the bright wind boisterous | ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare

Of yestertempest’s creases; | in pool and rut peel parches

Squandering ooze to squeezed | dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches

Squadroned masks and manmarks | treadmire toil there

Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, | nature’s bonfire burns on.

But quench her bonniest, dearest | to her, her clearest-selvèd spark

Man, how fast his firedint, | his mark on mind, is gone!

Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark

Drowned. O pity and indig | nation! Manshape, that shone

Sheer off, disseveral, a star, | death blots black out; nor mark

Is any of him at all so stark

But vastness blurs and time | beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,

A heart’s-clarion! Away grief’s gasping, | joyless days, dejection.

Across my foundering deck shone

A beacon, an eternal beam. | Flesh fade, and mortal trash

Fall to the residuary worm; | world’s wildfire, leave but ash:

In a flash, at a trumpet crash,

I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, and

This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,

Is immortal diamond.