August 5, 6, and 7: Elaborate and Tricky, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Nephew's Birthday

Merton recovering from gangrene . . .

The big gift God gave me was that I got well. They bundled me up and put me on a stretcher with blankets all up around my face and nothing sticking out but my nose, and carried me across the stone quadrangle where my friends were playing “quad-cricket” with a sawed-off bat and a grey tennis ball. They stood aside in awe as I passed on the way to the school sanatorium. 

I had explained to the doctor about my foot, and they came and cut off the toenail and found the toe full of gangrene. But they gave me some antitoxin and did not have to cut off the toe. Dr. McTaggart came around every day or two to treat the infected place in my mouth, and gradually I began to get better, and to eat, and sit up, and read my filthy novels again. Nobody thought of prohibiting them, because nobody else had heard of the authors. 

It was while I was in the sanatorium that I wrote a long essay on the modern novel—Gide, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Jules Romains, Dreiser, and so on, for the Bailey English Prize, and won a lot of books bound in treecalf for my efforts. 

Two attempts were made to convert me to less shocking tastes. The music master lent me a set of records of Bach’s B Minor Mass, which I liked, and sometimes played on my portable gramophone, which I had with me in the big airy room looking out on the Headmaster’s garden. But most of the time I played the hottest and loudest records, turning the vie towards the classroom building, eighty yards away across the flowerbeds, hoping that my companions, grinding out the syntax of Virgil’s Georgics, would be very envious of me. 

The other loan was that of a book. The Headmaster came along, one day, and gave me a little blue book of poems. I looked at the name on the back. “Gerard Manley Hopkins.” I had never heard of him. But I opened the book, and read the “Starlight Night” and the Harvest poem and the most lavish and elaborate early poems. I noticed that the man was a Catholic and a priest and, what is more, a Jesuit. 

I could not make up my mind whether I liked his verse or not. 

It was elaborate and tricky and in places it was a little lush and overdone, I thought. Yet it was original and had a lot of vitality and music and depth. In fact the later poems were all far too deep for me, and I could not make anything out of them at all. 

Nevertheless, I accepted the poet, with reservations. I gave the book back to the Head, and thanked him, and never altogether forgot Hopkins, though I was not to read him again for several years.

I remember the first time I encountered Gerard Manley Hopkins.  Much like young Thomas Merton, I was around 14 or 15 years of age, and I didn't know what to make of Hopkins, with his sprung rhythm and strange language and imagery.  I think it was "The Windhover," and it was unlike any other kind of poetry I had ever encountered.  However, I was more intrigued by his life as a Jesuit priest/poet than his actual verse:

The Windhover

by:  Gerard Manley Hopkins

To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning's minion, king- 

     dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding 

     Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding 

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing 

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, 

     As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding 

     Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding 

Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing! 

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here 

     Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier! 

     No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion 

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, 

     Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

See what I mean?  So strange and beautiful.  It confounded by teenage mind.  A Jesuit priest writing about Jesus Christ in a way I'd never experienced before.  The priests I had known up to that time in my life tried to bludgeon me with purity and sin.  This guy was gashing gold-vermilion all over the page.  I was drawn to him and his writing, but I didn't fully comprehend it.  That came in another five or six years.  Yet I always carried Hopkins around with me, kept returning to his poems, reciting them like weird psalms.

These last three days have been steeped in poetry.  Wednesday evening, I attended a socially-distanced open mic and read some of my new work.  Pandemic poetry and blog posts.  Last night, I led a socially-distanced poetry workshop, sitting by a lake in a public park, writing about peace on the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.  And then today, no work.  I took a vacation day to clean my house and write a poem for a memorial service that's being held this weekend.  Poetry leading into poetry culminating in poetry.

I had been working on that poem for about two weeks, struggling with it, as a matter of fact.  Then, somehow, last night, It fell into place during the poetry workshop.  It was as if my mind had worked out all the difficulties, and I just had to sit and take notes.  I gashed gold-vermilion all over the pages of my Moleskine.

Now, tonight, I'm beat.  I attended my nephew's birthday party earlier, and got to spend a few hours with some of the people I care about most on this planet.  It felt like a gift from the Windhover--joy and laughter and love.  No worries or fears.  And I felt free.  Hurl and gliding.

For the miracle of three days of poetry, a new poem, and his nephew's birthday celebration, Saint Marty gives thanks.