The ease and beauty with which Hopkins synthesizes his poetic and religious themes and convictions in his work belie the sometimes-intense difficulty he had in reconciling his two great passions in his life. Hopkins was always very clear, at least after his conversion to Catholicism, that he saw poetry as a subordinate concern to religion and faith. Rather than an end in itself, the purpose of poetry, its meaning, came from praising and drawing attention to the multifarious beauty and splendor of God's creation.
There are some indications, however, that the devout man in Hopkins was occasionally perturbed by the force of his passion for poetry. For example, spurred by reasons that remain somewhat obscure, after converting to Catholicism and deciding to become a Jesuit priest, Hopkins, then 24, burned all of his poems and did not write poetry again for many years. Though he continued to write prose, Hopkins' poetic silence was absolute. He only began to write again seven years later in 1875, after his superiors in the Jesuit order asked him to produce a poem commemorating the sinking of the SS Deutschland, in which, among others, five Franciscan nuns fleeing the anti-Catholic Falk Laws in Germany drowned at sea. Hopkins complied, and during 1875-76 he wrote “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” a 35-stanza ode now considered one of his masterpieces. Unfortunately for Hopkins, the daring experimental poetics for which he has come to be revered were not amenable to the taste of the Jesuit hierarchy, and they refused to publish it.
And despite all his religious fervor, it wasn’t only in terms of his poetics that Hopkins rebelled against the Catholic establishment. In fact, Hopkins failed his final examination at St Beuno’s—the seminary in Wales where he wrote, among other poems, “The Windhover.” Rather than lack of ability, which would be difficult to imagine, Hopkins' failure was due to his insistence on defending his allegiance to the ideas of the “incarnationalist” medieval theologian Duns Scotus (1265/66-1308), contra his examiners, all of whom (along with the entire Jesuit hierarchy) came down firmly on the side of Scotus’s opponent, Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). Virginia Muller, in Gerard Manley Hopkins and Victorian Catholicism, argues convincingly that Hopkins knew full well what the consequences of this rebellion would be, citing his decision not to share any of the many poems he wrote during that period, which demonstrated a clear Scotist influence (Muller, 71).
Failing his theological examination was just as thoroughly destructive to Hopkins’ prospects in the Jesuit church as his conversion to Catholicism had been to his prospects for a career in his native England. There, basic civil liberties for Catholics, such as the right to vote and hold public office, had, after centuries of exclusion, finally been restored by the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829, just fifteen years before Hopkins was born. But, as history invariably demonstrates, formal equality is no guarantee of equal treatment, and for a young man from a good family like Hopkins converting to Catholicism was tantamount to career suicide and left him estranged from his family, up till then a consistent source of love and support.
Why, then, having already experienced the pain of becoming an exile from his own family and social milieu, would Hopkins choose a course of action that he knew, more or less definitively, would leave him, essentially, an exile within his own church? Besides the poet’s apparent penchant for rebellion—his relish at being “original, spare, strange”—his other lifelong passion, poetry, provides us another avenue of explanation. Duns Scotus, as suggested above, had as much or more influence on Hopkins’ theory of poetics as on his theological thinking. The eminent Welsh scholar and philosopher John Llewelyn (1928-2021) devoted an entire book, Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Spell of Duns Scotus, to elaborating the complex relations between Scotus’s philosophical exploration of the nature of being, immanence, presence (what he called haecceity) and the key terms and concepts that came to define Hopkins’ poetics and sense of his own poetic practice, most notably the neologisms “inscape” and “instress,” but also “aftering,” “oftening,” among others. Note the significance Hopkins ascribed these terms: “poetry is speech which afters and oftens its inscape, speech couched in a repeating figure, and verse is spoken sound having a repeated figure” (Rothenberg and Robinson, 742); and also, in a letter to his friend Robert Bridges in 1879: “What I am in the habit of calling inscape is what I above all aim at in poetry” (Selected Letters, 117).
Abstruse philosophical questions of essence (one meaning of “inscape”), presence (the key analog for “instress”) and the like aside, the affinity of Hopkins' poetry with Scotus's insistence, contra Aquinas, on the primacy of intuition is self-evident. Most importantly, in Scotus’s thought Hopkins appears to have found, finally, the materials he needed to reconcile his art and his faith, to fuse together his two consuming passions, which had in the past threatened to split his very being in two, into one, beautiful whole. The result is poetry, as “The Windhover” shows as well as anything he ever wrote. For Hopkins, poetry is itself a way—the best way he has found—to know God. That is, in terms drawn from Duns Scotus, poetry is the best way he knew of to experience the immediacy of God’s presence, and to be fully present to God in turn. Perhaps, then, it was once again Hopkins’ poetics that brought him into conflict with his superiors in the Jesuit hierarchy. Rather than hardheadness, perhaps Hopkins demonstrated profound courage when, having just recovered, after so many years of denial, this integral part of his being and his faith—poetry—the voice of authority ordered him to, in effect, renounce it again.
