Two Poems By Gerard Manley Hopkins

By Robert Hass March 28, 1999

(As kingfishers catch fire . . . )

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying, What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is –
Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

(I wake and feel the fell . . . )

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light's delay.

With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.

I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decrees
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.

Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves, but worse.

I once heard someone describe spirituality as "the vertical longings of the soul." I liked the definition; it brought to mind a shaft of cathedral sunlight or the soaring lift of a classic spiritual. But I also didn't like it because of the conventional idea of heaven as up above. Religion is always a collective enterprise – a religion is communal worship centered on shared ideas of the sacred. Spirituality is always more individual. It has to do with the individual soul's struggle with its own meaning; it can even take the form of resistance to religion. Hopkins was certainly a religious poet; he submitted his work to his spiritual superiors and was in that way a faithful servant of his church. But, as these poems show, his spirituality was his own; he struggled with meaning on his own terms. In the first poem the soul's longings find a place on earth, or, in a flash of delight, he wants them to; in the other they can't. In both – and this is what makes him such a remarkable poet – he wrings language out to speak the being that dwells, as he says, "indoors each one" of us.

Robert Hass, former U.S. poet laureate, is the author, most recently, of the collection "Sun Under Wood."