Hopkins Gerard Manley - Gerard Manley Hopkins : a life

Table of Contents

ALSO BY PAUL MARIANI

Hopkins in Ireland for the Jesuit community at Boston College

Above the bluebleak priest the brightblue fisher hovers.
The priest notes the book upon the table, the lamp beside the book.
A towering Babel of papers still to grade, and that faraway look
as once more the mind begins to wander. Ah, to creep beneath the covers

of the belled bed beckoning across the room. He stops, recovers,
takes another sip of bitter tea, then winces as he takes another look
at the questions he has posed his students and the twists they took
to cover up their benighted sense of Latin. The fisher hovers

like a lit match closer to him. The windows have all been shut against
the damp black Dublin night. After all these years, his collar chokes
him still, in spite of which he wears it like some outmoded mark
of honor, remembering how his dear Ignatius must have sensed
the same landlocked frustrations. Again he lifts his pen. His strokes
lash out against the dragon din of error. The fisher incandesces in the dark.

Paul Mariani

First of all, to Oxford University Press, granted on behalf of the Society of Jesus, for permission to quote from the writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins that still remain in copyright. Then those members of the Society who have helped me over the past forty years in my understanding of the poet, especially the tykish, stalwart, generous Father Joseph Feeney, as well as his coworkers in the field, Fathers Philip Endean and Noel Barber. Then the staffs at the Bodleian, Campion Hall, and Lower Leeson Street, Dublin, for their help when I was starting out forty years ago, researching what would become my yeomans Commentary on the Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. More recently I would like to thank the staff at the Burns Library at Boston College, where I have been privileged to teach these past eight years.

Then several members of the Hopkins Society, whooutstanding and industrious scholars that they areform the nexus of much of the most advanced scholarly research on Hopkins, and who have been unfailingly generous with their time and support: those earlier pioneers, Fathers Anthony Bischoff and Robert Boyle, both S.J.s, as well as John Pick, Warren Anderson, and the indefatigable late Norman H. Mackenzie. Then his daughter, who has carried on in his footsteps, Professor Catherine Phillips. Also: Kelsey Thornton, Lesley Higgins, Jude Nixon, Michael Moore, Jerome Bump, Bernadette Waterman Ward, James F. Cotter, and Joaquin Kuhn, among others. A special word of thanks to Father Frederic Schlatter, S.J., whose piece-bright essays on Hopkinss classical scholarship, as well as on Hopkinss friends and associates, have proven models of their kind.

Perhaps my deepest debt of gratitude is to my dear friend Ron Hansen, who led the way in things spiritual years and years ago, when we were both teaching at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, when he first surprised me by reading from the manuscript of his then novel-in-progress, Mariette inEcstasy, to a largely uncomprehending audience, much as Hopkins was misunderstood a century earlier, and I thought, yes, yes, this is what I should like to do as well, work of this dimension and seriousness. A forty-plus-year debt of gratitude to my former mentor and champion at the Graduate Center of New York at Hunter and throughout my teaching career: Allen Mandelbaum, who in my twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh years led me through the havoc and the glory of attempting a commentary on Hopkinss sonnets.

Deep gratitude too to Carolyn Carlson as Executive Editor at Viking, for her astuteness and kind care, and most especially to Beena Kamlani, the one who saw this projectdaunting as it so often seemedthrough to its successful completion, and who not only step by step oversaw a veritable linguistic maze of data morphed into something like a living presence at the heart of it all, but who watched over this project from its alpha to its omega, once going so far as to toss her varicolored scarf across the editors table to say that thesethese blues and soutane blacks, ivory whites and gold glimmerswere the colors that should serve as paradigm for the forgd features of this mans life. And to my agent, Tom Grady, a Virgil leading his erstwhile pilgrim through the underbrush and malebolges of publishing the life of a poet who in his own time could publish nothing.

Thanks too to so many of my students over the years, who have accompanied me, often opening new doors to discover glittering gold in the nooks and gewgaw crannies that make up the splendid memory palace of this proto-Modern, amazing Victorian Catholic poet. Colleagues too, on the long journey that seems now, in retrospect, as one stands like some bedazzled Prospero on the shore facing the vast waters of the primordial dark which are but a wink in eternity: Vince DiMarco, John Sitter, Ben Birnbaum, the late Father Bob Barth, S.J., Judith Wilt, Father Joe Marchese, John Mahoney, Joe Quinn, Jack Neuhauser, Bert Garza, Pat Maney, and especially Father Bill Leahy, S.J., who leads as I imagine U. S. Grant led through the vast Wilderness, in this case of higher education. Then those who stood by me through the terrifying, comforting phases of the Long Retreat, through which I came to understand Hopkins in a wholly and holy different light, among them Larry Corcoran and J. J. Bresnahan, both S.J.s.

And, finally, a tender bow to my wife, Eileen, whom I have known for nearly fifty years, lifes partner and dearest friend, who has steadied her obsessed husband as he composed and decomposed page after page after page, rings growing by increments into book and book and book, employing first his scratchy pen and pencil, and then his two forefingers on that old Olivetti whose metal teeth he wore down to the bone, and then the generations of computers, so many he has ceased to care to count. A bow too to my three sons, John, Mark, and my oldest, Paul, to whom I dedicate this book, and who to my delight and awe has followed in the footsteps of Fathers Ignatius and Xavier, Ricci and Rodriguez and Hopkins, that little one who stared balefully up at me uncomprehending from his babys seat in that tiny apartment there on Booth Memorial Boulevard in Flushing all those years ago, while his doting father pored over the poems of the one poet who would most deeply change their lives.

PART I

WE ARE SO GRAFTED ON HIS WOOD 1844-1868

Robert Bridges and Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1863.