APPARENTLY the title seems contradictory. But then such is the tenor of the life and works of Hopkins.
A devoted Jesuit, a profound poet, a realist in mind, a romantic at heart he was a different individual. Hopkins was fascinated by language and rhythm. He was also enchanted by the distinctness between form and colour, between sounds and tranquillity and between man and nature.
Hopkins is never at struggle with the contradictory affairs of the world and religion, opposite claims of paganism and religionizm. The easy flow with which he reconciled himself with apparent contraries is simply admirable. But it is not always convenient for him to adjust his poetic genius with his religious vocation.
This was the modern age of social futility, inadequacy, religious and spiritual barrenness and subsequently that sense of emptiness and nothingness which overwhelms a man. Hopkins used the deep and profound desperation, of listless failures and spiritual desolation as a road to the religious fulfilment. This mood-like dark-night of the soul has been expressed in the so-called Terrible Sonnets written between 1885 and 1889.
It is, however wrong to assume that Hopkins was like the rest of the modern writers. Frustration and desperation sought to overpower him but they ended in empowering him with a force to fend them off. Thus his poetry shows the amalgamation and combination of desire to fight frustration off. It is a rare but well-knitted pattern of the most passionate and particularized apprehension of the sounds, shapes and colours. On the whole he endeavours to infuse the light of religion into the worldliness. His efforts to incorporate best of the both worlds can be best seen in these lines:
No I’ll not, carrion comfort, despair not feast on thee
Not untwist-slack-they may be-these last stances of man
In me or most weary, cry I can no more, I can
The reconciliation between this and that world is achieved by rejuvenating the language of poetry. Sometimes he placed an old and much used world in a new and startling context to bring out a lost aspect of its original meanings (addressing God as Sir in Thou Art Indeed Just Lord). Sometimes he refreshes ancient words into memories of the young readers. The moral he brings home is easier to understand if we consider that his objective was to enable the new to see the beauty of the nature through prayer. However contradictory or opposite beauty and prayer may look (the former is pagan and the latter religious) to Hopkins they were akin to each other. This is for the simple reason that through beauty we learn to see God and through prayer we actually perceive God.
Modernism is individuation. What may be called a clue to the nature of reality, Hopkins incorporated that modern element in his works to give exact and arresting expression or an idea or combination of both. This individuation is visible from his use of imagery. Instead of using imagery to achieve an expansion outward into a generalized mood, as the Victorian poets used it, he used it to refer continuously back to the poem until a total structure of the meaning was contained in the poem. This use of imagery is entirely modern as the idea is that the meaning to which a specific image refers should explode with immense force once it becomes known. It means that like the modern poets obscurity is Hopkins’s hallmark. His poetry underlines those meanings whose inferences and implications cannot be clear to the uninitiated readers. His endeavour was to achieve unique and essential meaning of the experience he was embodying inscape. The individual and distinctive charges and design were for him the true reality and the whole essence of the poem. It was extraordinary in those days and that is why he wrote to Bridges that his poetry was inclined towards oddness. By virtue of design pattern or inscape his poetry became strange and queer.
Hopkins is seen stranded between in individuality and immediately in the opening of The Wreck of Deutschland:
Thou mastering me
God givers of breath and bread
World’s strand, sway of the sea
Lord of living and dead
Here the fact that he has not used the usual word order implies that he was a modern before the Moderns arrived. He employs words as instruments to describe his conventional poetic meter.
Despite his touch with modernism he retained his original vigour and freshness as a clergyman it is visible in almost all of his poems. Religion and worldliness go side by side in his view and that is why he changes the meanings of the worldly words like ‘concerned’, ‘lovely’, ‘behaviour’ to suit his religious subjects.
Thus in every respect, he was a pioneer in his every poetic gesture, allusion or description. He never allowed himself to be moulded in the cast of Tennysonian or Wordsworthian tradition and that is what earned him esteem, credit and distinction as the modern before the moderns.
