‘One day when I was twenty-three or twenty-four this sentence seemed to form in my head, without my willing it, much as sentences form when we are half-asleep, ‘Hammer* your thoughts into unity’. For days I could think of nothing else and for years I tested all I did by that sentence [...]”* William Butler Yeats, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (*cited in Frank Tuohy, Yeats, 1976, p.51 )

*hammer images "Thor's Hammer is a symbol of the struggle against chaos and evil. It's the weapon used by Thor against giants, monsters, and other trollish folk who threaten the common good. It seems particularly appropriate in these troubled times" (http://www.ragweedforge.com/ThorsHammer.html). See especially http://www.mackaos.com.au/Articles/Mjol.html

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"Hopkins's Tragic Vision," from Gerard Manley Hopkins

  by Jerome Bump

 

For most of Hopkins’s Victorian contemporaries, nature existed only to be exploited. As Hopkins put it in "God's Grandeur," the shod feet of modern men "have trod, have trod, have trod; / And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; / And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell. . . ."

 

The anguish that Hopkins and other nineteenth-century writers felt because industrial man not only failed to respond to the forms of nature, but in fact seemed dedicated to their annihilation should not be underestimated. One of Hopkins's journal entries reads, "The ashtree growing in the corner of the garden was felled. It was lopped first: I heard the sound and looking out and seeing it maimed there came at that moment a great pang and I wished to die and not see the inscapes of the world destroyed any more" J, 230.

 

The pervasiveness of this unusual sensitivity to the environment and the tragic vision it produced in the nineteenth century may be suggested by Hardy's ascription of the "weakness of character," ultimately even the death wish, of his nineteenth-century man, Jude, to a similar sensitivity: "He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his infancy" Jude the Obscure, pt. 1, chap. 2. Earlier, Thoreau had written, "Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath . . . if any part of the forest was burned . . . I grieved with a grief that lasted longer and was more inconsolable than that of the proprietors. . . . I would that out farmers when they cut down a forest felt some of that awe which the old Romans did when they came to thin, or let in the light to, a consecrated grove (locum conlucare) that is, would believe that it is sacred to some god."20 It was both the immediate loss, and the fact that the "After-comers cannot guess the beauty been" ("Binsey Poplars") that led Hopkins to plead in "Inversnaid" (1881), "What would the world be, once bereft / Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, / O let them be left, wildness and wet; / Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet."

 

Industrialization continued to consume the wilderness as it still does, however, whole landscapes like those around Oxford were destroyed by what Hopkins called "base and brickish" suburbs. Finally in 1882 he wrote of the Ribble river valley:

 

 

 

. . . strong

 

Thy plea with him who dealt, nay does now deal,

 

Thy lovely dale down thus and thus bids reel

 

Thy river, and o'er gives all to rack or wrong.

 

"Ribblesdale"

 

Though in 1882 Hopkins felt that nature's plea was still strong with God, that nature was still somehow "never spent," in this poem he at first puts God's rule over the river in the past tense--"dealt"--and concludes the octet replacing the image of God brooding protectively over nature ("God's Grandeur") with a new image of God giving all of nature over to "rack or wrong."

 

The source of this wrong being done to nature was, as the sestet reveals, the egoism of the stewards of the earth:

 

 

 

And what is Earth's eye, tongue, or heart else, where

 

Else, but in dear and dogged man?--Ah, the heir

 

To his selfbent so bound, so tied to his turn,

 

To thriftless reave our rich round world bare

 

And none reck of world after. . . .

 

Hopkins discovered anew the aptness of the motto that Ruskin chose for the title page of Modern Painters: a citation from Wordsworth on how Nature and Truth revolt "offended at the ways of man" who

 

 

 

prizes

 

This soul, and the transcendent universe

 

No more than as a mirror that reflects

 

To proud Self-love her own intelligence.

 

A chief cause of this proud self-love according to Wordsworth was increasing urbanization. In The Prelude Wordsworth focused on the dangerously narcissistic introversion of city life, where the self is "Debarr'd from Nature's living images. / Compelled to be a life unto itself" 6:313-14. Hence it is not surprising that it was in Hopkins's first extended comparison of the city and the country, "The Sea and the Skylark" (1877), that his tragic vision of environmental degradation received its first full expression. Hopkins tried to suggest that an Edenic purity was there, just outside the cities and towns, that other men also could feel how the cleansing song of the thrush could "rinse and wring" the ear ("Spring"). He admired the sea and the skylark because they had "the cheer and charm of earth's past prime," they were as "rash-fresh" and "pure" as if they were still in Eden.

 

But when he turned from this "freshness deep down" in nature to urban civilization symbolized by the nearby town of Rhyl, he felt the vulnerability of man and nature to each other. The town seemed "frail" both because its temporal existence seemed so negligible beside the apparent immortality of nature itself, and because the seemingly infinite power of the sea that roared around its edges could crush it. Yet man also posed a serious threat to nature's frailty: Hopkins's "Our make and making break, are breaking, down" suggests not only that man's basic structure, his make, is disintegrating, but even his attempts at construction, his making, is itself a breaking. This paradox is defined more fully in "Binsey Poplars":

 

 

 

Since country is so tender

 

To touch, her being so slender,

 

That, like this sleek and seeing ball

 

But a prick will make no eye at all,

 

Where we, even where we mean

 

To mend her we end her,

 

For Ruskin in "The Two Paths" it was the names "of great painters" that were "like passing bells" of decaying civilizations 16:342. For Hopkins it was the sounds of the sea and the skylark that ushered out like bells at the end of the year his own "sordid turbid time." Hopkins's representation of this "sordid turbid" time breaking down to man's last "dust," draining fast toward man's first "slime," recalls similar accounts of dust, slime, and pollution in the works of Tennyson, Dickens, Ruskin, and others.21