Epiphanies and Ecstasy in Hopkins's Poetry

I think Hopkins expresses both Epiphanies and Ecstasy in these lines from St Winefred's Well:

‘The turmoil and the torment, it has, I swear, a sweetness
Keeps a kind of joy in it, a zest, an edge, an ecstasy,
Next after sweet success.

And again as he looks back in Portait of two Beautiful Young People (brother and sister)

A juice rides rich through bluebells, in vine leaves,
And beauty's dearest veriest vein is tears'.
And memory yes, as I look back in the poem Teagmhas ‘Meeting'.
The lake washes the shore of my memory,
rinses its mouth and gargles,
sucking the haze lying thickly on the mind,
restraining the taut music of the violin,
cleansing its varnished sorrow;
again I am back throwing stones of thought
into Lough Fay,
watching them break easily the surface
and fall slowly silently away,
swimming down to the quiet depth of the fish'.

When I think of it, I refer to the spirituality of music in a few places:

‘A girl playing a violin
In a sitting room-
Wet are her blood-painted-fingers
On the smooth sharpness of the strings'.

The musician's vision I will never experience, though I listen to his/her music. Alas the composer has even lost the vision. It lived in a moment of inspiration and departed. But my own imagination, working on that music, my own soul-memory mixing through it, means I am personalizing the music. There is that. And so it is with the composer now. And so it is with the poet's vision – I look back piteously on the vision:

Out of the desert of the ages she appears
Long slender body
Bare face with planed eyes
Slow revolving shadow
Classical look of the blind
And it is difficult to believe that she ever existed
That blood once beat in her veined streams
Bubbling up with the little beats of her heart,
That she once had the crouched shoulders of a girl
That her hands were as cold
As I imagine
As ice in a summer stream. (Teagmhas)

The vision is a moment of inspiration. There is a union. Then a parting. The artist gazes at his/her creation. The poem or the picture gazes back at the artist – like the girl in the poem Foilsiú i bPéint ‘Manifestation in Paint'.

‘Throw, as I said, throw everything at her, do not spare the paint
The fine day is over, futility is victorious
And she will be more alive! She will be independent!
Kind of proud
Free and far above our dejection
Full of disdain for our poor strangeness'.

Again the epiphany, the moment of inspiration, come and gone – we feel our earthly finitude:

ICARUS

Out of the heart of the sun
The sea
Erupted, exploded, burst
Upon the human world,
Souls broke upon the cliffs,
The green stacks
The waves of froth,
The shadows running
Over the feet of time.

The wave rider
Who rose from out the ocean
Against the sun
Hovered
An eternal moment
And went out
In a blaze of light.

Walk around an art gallery. Look at the pictures. It is always so quiet in an art gallery! The right atmosphere. The pictures set you meditating. Read poetry. Listen to a poem. Give it your full attention. Why ask a question about this piece of music, or about that picture, or about a poem? Will it do any good when you are not the artist? Does anybody understand the self-creation of the other person? Can you relate your meditative vision to another? In artificial language? Tell an untruth? Or go beyond ordinary speech – ah! Then you have a poem – needing a meaning to explain a meaning. Is that the way it is with everybody? The poet escaping through the door, the poet in territory beyond human knowledge.

One listens to a poet, even solemnly, at a poetry reading. Call out to the children and they will open their poetry books. But did you ever try to solve a poetic vision at dinner time? Expect a screech of laughter as if you were a right idiot, or you might be thought of as a very funny person. Fun and more fun. Yes the bardic recitation is permitted. But the reason for the fun is something else.

A little simple story. One day I bought a record The Greek Sound music by Mikis Theodorikis. The names of the tunes were on the sleeve … Bread on the Table … a poetic phrase … in Irish Arán ar an Tábla, also a poetic phrase. ‘Bread on the Table', said I, meditatively, to the girl in the kitchen. She began to laugh. There was material then for a poem.

‘Bread on the Table',
said I to her in poetic fashion,
‘Bread on the Table'.
She began to laugh,
She thought it was funny,
Bread on the Table'.

A table beside the sea,
I began to laugh,
A table beside the sea,
Bright tablecloth of sand,
Salt on the tongue,

A table beside the sea.
Bread on the table,
Dry health-giving bread,
We began to laugh,
We thought it was funny,
Bread on the Table.

To write poetry is an act of will. It is not that the poet is lazy but the poet is backward. He is a farmer, a banker, a priest, she is a teacher, a bank manager, a nun, whatever they are, but in the case of poetry they let their oars go with the current. They haven't always time, even for dissipation, or even to lie on their back on the hilltop looking at the sun setting! ‘Unforeseen times', as Hopkins would say – ‘as skies Betweenpie mountains – lights a lovely smile' and again he says

‘After the sunset I would lie,
And pierce the yellow waxen light
With free long looking ere I die'.
—The Alchemist in the City

Welcome the organizers of the poetry festivals, Viv and company. True patrons of poetry. Their invitations are an encouragement. One cannot refuse. Having received the invitation, the poet comes alive, begins to read poetry again, becomes emotional, is now expecting mystery, love, a recognition of something, a phrase, a word, an eye you might say looking into the back mirror.

Then it happens suddenly – the jolt, the vision, the epiphany, the beating of the heart. The theme, the theory of a poem is there – it will be born, immediately perhaps, tomorrow, or at the end of a year. But that first revelation, that is the great satisfaction, the artist's great heart-lift, and it is only a moment's inspiration. But even when the poet has completed the work, the poet is not satisfied. Whether it is juvenilia or sentimentality or whatever, in the end the work is paltry – that is what I mean in these lines:

And I saw the insignificance of the little painter
And the eyes of the saints
And the hands of the saints
Could not easily teach me
For I was without understanding itself'.

What if the artist could make a gigantic effort and break the boundaries, would he/she not then reveal the bare truth? But that is not possible, and if it was that would be the end for the artist. Without the ‘without understanding' the artist would not be engaged in the conflict that reigns between heaven and earth. That is a constant thought with me in some early poems: Ceachtanna, The Artist, Comhairle, Gráscar Méin. Do Rimbaud – purposely there is an intensity of effort in these poems:

Here are two examples:

‘Birth?' said the poet
And paused in his work.
‘I'll break a stone with an angry blow
And I'll sculpture a woman's head,
With streaks of black I'll outline a rose
To pull the soul right out of a flower,
My poetic work is still unborn
And the eye of its womb is blind.
— The Artist

and

I pray you Rimbaud,
Raise up, lower down the poetic art,
Let it fall in a faint to break once more the senses' fence,
Tear in two the colour complexion
Tear apart the melody's range
Add a stitch to inconceivable thought.

In free verse the poem's appearance is natural, the rhythm and wording are within. Freedom – the poem grows as natural as a tree; no matter how twisted the branches are the distant vision of the tree is beautiful; one is not wholly aware of it till one steps back. The poem is a picture. It would remind you of a cloud shedding its rain, or it is a deep clear well or it is a little fountain gushing forth its thought. Would there be music in the poetry if it had no pattern? The pattern is a second inspiration – it part releases the first inspiration from its mystery. That is another satisfaction for the poet – like a picture clarifying in the mind, or a print appearing out of corrections on the parchment.

Now I'll mention act three. Back to music. Here we invoke the craft of the smith. Besides being a prophet, a teacher, the poet is a smith. Word smith is a favourite phrase of the critic. The rhythm of the words is beaten out in the mind, the words are tasted in the mouth. It is a nice thought to think of the word itself as a poem – ‘Dánfhocal'. As Hopkins said, ‘I have found my music in a common word' (from poem, ‘Let me be to Thee as the circling bird'). There is a meaning and there is another meaning in the word. There again, a matter of personalization. That is one reason why one can never understand fully a poem or ever expect to. Don't be worried, accept another language –even listen occasionally to poetry in a foreign language that you are not conversant in! But it is not accidental that a poet uses a certain word. ‘My obscure pen', ‘mo pheann doiléir' I said in the poem An File' ‘The Poet' foolishly trying to explain this other craft, word seeking:

A thread of word-song
Swam, no hope of threading
As I composed poetry
My head in the air'.
And here is a little poem merely on the wonder of a new word

NEW WORD

This morning I met you
You appeared in the doorway
In the gap between my upper front teeth
It was a miracle that you did not fall.
I met you again in the evening
As I was reading a magazine
You hauled me down on the paper.
Now where is the mystery?
I am taken up with each letter
Would you not have preferred romance?
A humble admission. Sometimes the poet fails in vision and word.

DÁN

An dán a shíl mé bheith slán
a bhí umhal
soiléir
simplí
glan
d'éirigh sé trom
doiléir
casta
cam.

Fuair sé bás.
ghasáil sé é féin.

POEM

The poem I thought was safe and sound
that was pure and humble
clear
simple
bright,
grew heavy
obscure
complicated
distorted.

It died.
It gassed itself!

And a little ecstasy at MOONRISE

‘This was the prized, the desirable sight, unsought, presented so easily

Parted me leaf and leaf. divided me, eyelid and eyelid of slumber'. (Moonrise)

Ecstasy! Could we not arrange it! A chorus to speed in frenzy through some of his ecstasy poems, like To what serves mortal beauty? and Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves and That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of The Comfort of the Resurrection, rising to crescendos and climax – a chorus shouting out, accompanying ‘The Windhover' in his ecstasy, artists splashing recklessly ‘Pied Beauty' – what praise then for him who fathers-forth!

Have you had enough now?

‘Enough now; since the sacred matter that I mean
I should be wronging longer leaving it to float
Upon this only gambolling and echoing-of-earth note –
What is … the delightful dene?
Wedlock. What is water? Spousal love.'
—Epithalamion

You were invited by Gerard Manley Hopkins to share his epiphanies and occasionally break into ecstasy, you were invited to understand that you and all in heaven and earth are infiltrated by God and enlivened by Christ. Now Hopkins sends you away with a command:

‘Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty's self and beauty's giver'.
—The Golden Echo

Yes, yes,

‘The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt, ah! to fleet
Never fleets more, fastened with the tenderest truth
To its own best being and its loveliness of youth: it is an everlastingness of,
O it is in all youth!'
— The Golden Echo

And can the poet be a prophet? Since I quoted the Maiden's Song from St Winefred's Well, here is the prophecy from the drama - paradoxically one could say that the fragmented play was completed:

‘As sure as what is most sure, sure as that spring primroses
Shall new-dapple next year, sure as to-morrow morning,
Amongst comeback again things, things with a revival,
Things with a recovery.
Thy name Winefride will live.

Hopkins's prophecy of a revival of interest in the saint's story, the pious teenager who resisted unwanted advances by a suitor who then cut off her head – brought back to life by her saintly uncle Beuno – a spring arose from the spot where her severed head fell – yes H, the pilgrimage from 660AD uninterrupted to this day – even today some 30,000 pilgrims a year still come to Winefred's shrine. I like to mention it in memory of my mother – Kathleen Winifred! For me a beautiful golden echo!

A care kept.
Where kept?
Do tell us where kept, where.-
Yonder.
What high as that! We follow, now we follow.-
Yonder, yes yonder, yonder,
Yonder.

Hopkins Festival Literary Lectures 2010

New Testament influences Hopkins' Poetry

The 'Terrible' Sonnets

Seamus Heaney and Gerard Manley Hopkins

The Kingfisher Symbol in Hopkins' Poetry

Lectures from GM HOPKINS FESTIVAL 2023

Links to other 2012 Hopkins Literary Festival Lectures

• Clinical Analysis and Gerard Manley Hopkins
• Hopkins in Dublin
• As Kingfishers Catch Fire
• Hopkins and Hiberno English
• Hopkins's Sermons

Lectures from Hopkins Literary Festival July 2022

Overall View of The GM Hopkins Literary Festival since 1987

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