Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) was an English poet of the Victorian era. Hopkins was born at Stratford near London into a middle-class family of nine children. After attending Highgate School for most of his youth, Hopkins entered Oxford in 1863, where he was exposed to both secular and religious teachings. He was particularly interested first in the High Church movement represented at Oxford by Edward Pusey, and then in Roman Catholicism. Influenced by John Henry Newman's conversion to Rome, Hopkins entered the Roman Catholic Church in 1866.

At Oxford in the early 1860s, Hopkins wrote many poems, but after his conversion, he burned many of these works, believing that his his writing, was incompatible with his beliefs. He considered his poems "personal satisfactions" which had nothing to do with his spiritual life. Only after his superiors in the church encouraged him to do so did he continue to write poetry. In 1876, he wrote The Wreck of the Deutschland, a long ode about the wreck of a ship in which five nuns were drowned. The poem is widely considered a masterpiece.

His poetry, which features originality in rhythm and a focus on alliteration, was only collected and published after his death. After studying Old English ad Welsh poetry, Hopkins invented his own theory of metre, using what he called "sprung rhythm" combined with pervasive alliteration, composite words and lavish use of adjectives. The result is an intense, often rapturous evocation of nature and its moods. Perhaps his most well-known poem is "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;

And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

Personal Life and Spiritual Struggle

Many critics have concluded that Hopkins was a repressed homosexual, who experienced but did not fulfil desire for young men and boys. In Secreted Desires: The Major Uranians - Hopkins, Pater and Wilde, Matthew Kaylor argues that Hopkins “sublimated most if not all of his paederastic desires”. In a letter of 1887 Hopkins refers to the “charm” of beautiful young boys who provide him with temptation. He is according to Kaylor “tantalizingly close to the object of his paederastic desires”. At Oxford he fell in love with a boy aged 17, whose death in a drowning accident devastated him.

These tendencies are visible in his poem "The Bugler's First Communion", which describes a boy "tender as a pushed peach" and wishes he could always remain innocent.

In his poem "Epithalamion" (which means a celebration of marriage) he describes a man being thrilled watching boys swim naked in a stream.

However critics and biographers agree that Hopkins did sublimate his desires and remained faithful to his Jesuit vows.