Silences (27 page)

How ineradicably his creations lived on in him; notebook entries of incidents, or people seen, reminding him of them;
other instances of recalling. And the old, old Hardy, close to eighty-six, at a special performance in his home of
Tess of the D’Ubervilles,
sitting there with tears in his eyes, his lips mutely repeating by heart the words he had written thirty-seven years before; after the performance, “insisting on talking to us until the last minute. He talked of Tess as if she was someone real.” He spoke
of her so to Virginia Woolf, too, when she visited him: “I used to see women now and then with the look of her.”

But the great poetry he wrote to the end of his life was not sufficient to hold, to develop, the vast visions which for twenty-eight years had had expression in novel after novel. People, situations, interrelationships, landscape—they cry for larger life in poem after poem.

Gerard
Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
^▴

It was not visions shrinking with Hopkins, but a different torment. For seven years he kept his religious vow to refrain from writing poetry, but the poet’s eye he could not shut, nor win “elected silence to beat upon [his] whorled ear.” “I had
long
had haunting my ear the echo of a poem which now I realised on paper,” he writes of the first poem
permitted to end the seven years’ silence. But poetry (“to hoard unheard; be heard, unheeded”) could be only the least and last of his heavy priestly responsibilities. Nineteen poems were all he could produce in his last nine years—fullness to us, but torment pitched past grief to him, who felt himself become “time’s eunuch, never to beget.”

In briefest summary, the making of that torment:

       
—Years in which poetry begged to be written, had to be denied.

       
—Scarcely ever the slightest circumstances for writing—a life of sheer, hard, tasking work.

       
—When he did write, the sense of it as sin—betrayal of his highest convictions and responsibilities as a Jesuit priest.

       
—The crushing burden of the terrible circumstances for “common humanity” felt during his work
in Liverpool, Glasgow, Dublin.

       
—The sense of exile: “
To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life Among strangers.”

       
—Lonely knowledge of his great and original achievement—unvalidated outside himself.
To hoard unheard.

       
—Aborted hopes for publication in his lifetime; ineradicable hunger for esteem, recognition of his achievement, if only in the form of comprehending appreciation
of his work by a selected few poets of standing.
To be heard, unheeded.

Each selection that follows could be multiplied many times over. All are from letters to those selected few poets of standing.

In each case, Hopkins initiated, and maintained, the correspondence.
^*

1876, when he began to write poetry again, to 1879 were years of favorable circumstances for Hopkins. He was stationed in Wales,
which he loved and where he created almost with his early fluency—twenty-five poems in three years. It was in this time that he began to send work to the poet Robert Bridges; having to explain and defend it, he began writing to Richard Watson Dixon as well.

1877, to Bridges

            
There is no conceivable license I shd. not be able to justify. . . . With all my licences, or rather laws,
I am stricter than you and I might say than anybody I know. With the exception of the Bremen stanza, which was, I think, the first written after 10 years’ interval of silence, and before I had fixed my principles, my rhymes are rigidly good to the ear. . . .

1878, the year Hopkins was ordained, to Dixon

            
. . . if I had written and published works the extreme beauty of which the author
himself the most keenly feels and they had fallen out of sight at once and been . . . almost wholly unknown; then, I say, I should feel a certain comfort to be told they had been deeply appreciated by some one person, a stranger at all events, and had not been published quite in vain. Many beautiful works have been almost unknown and then have gained fame at last. . . but many more must have
been lost sight of altogether. . . .

1878, also to Dixon

            
When I spoke of fame I was not thinking of the harm it does to men as artists: it may do them harm, as you say, but so, I think, may the want of it, if “Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise To shun delights and live laborious days”—a spur very hard to find a substitute for or to do without. . . .

            
      
What I do regret is the loss of recognition belonging to the work itself. . . .

                  
. . . For disappointment and humiliations embitter the heart and make an aching in the very bones.

1878, also to Dixon

            
You ask, do I write verse myself. What I had written I burnt before I became a Jesuit and resolved to write no more, as not belonging to my profession, unless
it were by the wish of my superiors; so for seven years I wrote nothing but two or three little presentation pieces which occasion called for. But when in the winter of ’75 the Deutschland was wrecked in the mouth of the Thames and five Franciscan nuns, exiles from Germany by the Falck Laws, aboard of her were drowned, I was affected by the account and happening to say so to my rector he said that
he wished someone would write a poem on the subject. On this hint I set to work and, though my hand was out at first, produced one. I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm which now I realised on paper.

1880, the beginning of heavy duties in Manchester, Liverpool, and Glasgow, to Dixon

            
I do not think I can be long here; I have been long nowhere yet. I am brought face
to face with the deepest poverty and misery in my district. . . .

            
. . . The parish work of Liverpool is very wearying to mind and body and leaves me nothing but odds and ends of time. There is merit in it but little Muse, and indeed 26 lines is the whole I have writ in more than half a year, since I left Oxford.

1881, to Bridges

            
Every impulse and spring of art seems
to have died in me, except for music, and that I pursue under almost an impossibility of getting on. . . .

1881, also to Bridges

            
. . . The vein urged by any country sight or feeling of freedom or leisure (you cannot tell what a slavery of mind or heart it is to live my life in a great town) soon dried and I do not know if I can coax it to run again. One night, as I lay awake in a
fevered state, I had some glowing thoughts and lines, but I did not put them down and I fear they may fade to little or nothing. I am sometimes surprised at myself how slow and laborious a thing verse (now) is to me. . . .

1881, to Dixon

            
My vocation puts before me a standard so high that a higher can be found nowhere else. The question then for me is not whether I am willing (if
I may guess what is in your mind) to make a sacrifice of hopes of fame (let us suppose), but whether I am not to undergo a severe judgment from God for the lothness I have shewn in making it, for the reserves I may have in my heart made, for the backward glances I have given with my hand upon the plough, for the waste of time the very compositions you admire may have caused and their preoccupation
of the mind which belonged to more sacred or more binding duties, for the disquiet and the thoughts of vain-glory they have given rise to. A purpose may look smooth and perfect from without but be frayed and faltering from within. I have never wavered in my vocation, but I have not lived up to it. I destroyed the verse I had written when I entered the Society and meant to write no more; the Deutschland
I began after a long interval at the chance suggestion of my superior, but that being done it is a question whether I did well to write anything else. However I shall, in my present mind, continue to compose, as occasion shall fairly allow, which I am afraid will be seldom and indeed for some years past has been scarcely ever. . . .

1881, to Bridges

            
My Liverpool and Glasgow experience
laid upon my mind a conviction, a truly crushing conviction, of the misery of the poor in general, of the degradation even of our race, of the hollowness of this century’s civilisation: it made even life a burden to me to have daily thrust upon me the things I saw. . . .

1883, to Bridges

            
Some of my rhymes I regret, but they are past changing, grubs in amber; there are only a few
of these; others are unassailable. . . .

               
. . . Some others again there are which malignity may munch at but the Muses love.

1884, to Bridges

            
Mr. Patmore [Coventry Patmore, the poet] did not on the whole like my poems [which had been sent him], was unconverted to them. . . .
AND WHAT DOES ANYTHING AT ALL MATTER
? . . . I am in great weakness.

1885, to Baillie

   
         
The melancholy I have all my life been subject to has become of late years not indeed more intense in its fits but rather more distributed, constant, and crippling. One . . . is daily anxiety about work to be done, which makes me break off or never finish all that lies outside that work. It is useless to write more on this: when I am at the worst, though my judgment is never affected,
my state is much like madness. I see no ground for thinking I shall ever get over it or ever succeed in doing anything that is not forced on me to do of any consequence.

1885, to Bridges, enclosing fragments of a poem, “St Winefred’s Well”

            
. . . I once thought well of the pieces, I do not know that I do now. But A and B please me well enough. You will see that as the feeling rises
the rhythm becomes freer & more sprung. I think I have written nothing stronger than some of these lines. . . .

                  
. . . if I were otherwise than I am it would brisk me up and set me to work, but in that coffin of weakness and dejection in which I live, without even the hope of change, I do not know that I can make, or, making, could keep up the exertion of learning better. . . .

1885, also to Bridges

            
Dearest Bridges—I must write something, though not as much as I have to say. The long delay was due to work, worry, and languishment of body and mind—which must be and will be; . . . I think that my fits of sadness, though they do not affect my judgment, resemble madness. Change is the only relief and that I can seldom get.

                  
. . . we compose
fragmentarily and what I had here and there done I finished up and sent as samples to see if I cd. be encouraged
to go on—and I was encouraged; that is by your last [letter], for before you thought they wd. not do. There is a point with me in matters of any size when I must absolutely have encouragement as much as crops rain; afterwards I am independent. However, I am in my ordinary circumstances
unable, with whatever encouragement, to go on with
Winefred
or anything else. I have after long silence written two sonnets . . . if ever anything was written in blood one of these was. . . .

1885, also to Bridges

            
If I could but get on, if I could but produce work I should not mind its being buried, silenced, and going no further; but it kills me to be time’s eunuch and never to
beget. After all I do not despair, things might change, anything may be; only there is no great appearance of it. Now because I have had a holiday though not strong I have some buoyancy; soon I am afraid I shall be ground down to a state like this last spring’s and summer’s, when my spirits were so crushed that madness seemed to be making approaches—and nobody was to blame, except myself partly for
not managing myself better and contriving a change. . . .

1886, to Dixon

            
. . . I have written a few sonnets; that is all I have done in poetry for some years.

                  
. . . It is not possible for me to do anything, unless a sonnet, and that rarely, in poetry with a fagged mind and a continual anxiety: but there are things at which I can, so far as time serves, work, if
it were only by snatches.