Gerard Manley Hopkins's Life as a Preacher

It's always nice to see some attention paid to Gerard Manley Hopkins. At LARB, Brett Beasley considers how the poet's background as a preacher influenced his poetry. Beasley combs through a new collection, The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins—Volume V: Sermons and Spiritual Writings (Oxford University Press), edited by Jude V. Nixon and Noel Barber, S.J. From "The Poet in the Pulpit":

One especially striking feature of the text is that it preserves Hopkins’s cancellations, additions, underlining, et cetera, rather than reproducing the final text only. As a result, we witness Hopkins in the heat of composition — as well as in fits of dissatisfied revision. We detect in the uneven, shifting textures of the text Hopkins’s ongoing struggle as a poet in the pulpit.

After Hopkins left St. Beuno’s, his struggles continued at London’s Farm Street Church, in what would be his only fashionable assignment as a parish priest. Hopkins, who had been the “Star of Baliol” during his Oxford undergraduate career, might have seemed like an ideal preacher for high society congregants. But in one sermon, he chose to present the Church as a great milk cow’s udder, the seven sacraments being the teats by which we receive spiritual nourishment. The comparison proved a bit too homely for Victorian sensibilities.

“Homely” is, in fact, a word Hopkins himself used to describe his strange images that leap from the mundane to the holy in unexpected ways. (He uses the word in the British sense, meaning “unpretentious” rather than in the American sense, meaning “ugly.”) In a sermon on the Holy Spirit or “Paraclete,” he writes, “One sight is before my mind, it is homely but it comes home,” and he then proceeds to compare the Paraclete to a player in a cricket match crying, “Come on, come on!” He explains...

Learn all about the paraclete at Los Angeles Review of Books.