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Views from the Choir Loft

Gerard Manley Hopkins & Beauty

Fr. David Friel · October 27, 2013

NE OF THE THINGS that I found most memorable in the recent papal interview was his off-the-cuff response to a question about his preferences among artists and writers. The Holy Father gave a rather detailed, albeit spontaneous, response, which indicates to me that he has a truly wide appreciation for culture and the arts. Off the top of his head, he named (and even quoted) the following favorites: Dostoevsky, Hölderlin, Manzoni, Hopkins, Cervantes, Caravaggio, Chagall, Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, and Wagner. In some instances, he even specified particular recordings, singers, or conductors.

It thrilled me to read that Pope Francis is a lover of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the imitable Jesuit poet of nineteenth-century England. It also surprised me greatly. It seems apparent that our Holy Father has little facility in the English language, and poetry such as Hopkins’ could never be successfully translated. His reliance on assonance, alliteration, and sprung rhythm would make the work of translating Hopkins nearly impossible. The pontiff doesn’t explain how he came to be a Hopkins fan, but I do find that revelation encouraging.

O MANY OF HOPKINS’ POEMS treat of beauty that the subject could rightly be considered a recurring theme. Two poems, in particular, make an interesting point about the intended direction of beauty. For Hopkins, beauty is something to be rendered unto God. He never denies that the Lord is the source of all things bright and beautiful, yet the poet proposes beauty as something to be simultaneously & mysteriously returned to Him. This work of handing over beauty to God appears, in a number of poems, to be one of the duties of man.

Consider first the opening stanza of Morning, Midday, and Evening Sacrifice:

The dappled die-away
Cheek and the wimpled lip,
The gold-wisp, the airy-grey
Eye, all in fellowship—
This, all this beauty blooming,
This, all this freshness fuming,
Give God while worth consuming.

The stipulation “while worth consuming” reminds me of the Gospel story about the widow’s mite, wherein the Lord instructs us to give not only from our surplus, but even from our need. We are to offer the beautiful things of this world to God now, while they are still beautiful, not sometime in the future when all their beauty has faded away. In Hopkins words, “What death half lifts the latch of, What hell hopes soon the snatch of, Your offering, with dispatch, of!

Another masterful poem, The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo, opens with a search for how to retain beauty. In a world of “ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death’s worst, winding sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay,” how does one “keep back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, . . . from vanishing away?”

Later on, the one whose voice speaks in the poem (presumably Hopkins?) changes focus. No longer does he ask how to “keep back beauty.” The question becomes how best to give beauty back.

Hopkins uses the image of gorgeous hair to make this point:

Sweet looks, loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace—
Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath,
And with sighs soaring, soaring sighs, deliver
Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death
Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver.

What a lovely appellation for God: “beauty’s self and beauty’s giver.” When we make this fundamental shift—from retaining beauty to giving it away—the extraordinary happens:

See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair
Is, hair of the head, numbered.

One of my prized books is the complete poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. In every poem, Hopkins proves himself both a master of the craft and a man of keen Christian insight. They have nourished me, along with so many other Hopkins fans—including even the pope.

As Hopkins once said in a dialogue with an Oxford scholar: “Beauty therefore is a relation, and the apprehension of it a comparison.” The poetic mind is one capable of drawing and elucidating those comparisons. Glory be to God for the poetic mind given to Hopkins!

Opinions by blog authors do not necessarily represent the views of Corpus Christi Watershed.

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Beauty, Pope Francis Last Updated: January 1, 2020

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Fr. David Friel

About Fr. David Friel

Ordained in 2011, Father Friel served as Parochial Vicar at St. Anselm Parish in Northeast Philly. He is currently a doctoral candidate in liturgical theology at The Catholic University of America.—(Read full biography).

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Surprising Popularity!

One of our most popular downloads has proven to be the organ accompaniment to “The Monastery Hymnal” (131 pages). This book was compiled, arranged, and edited by Achille P. Bragers, who studied at the Lemmensinstituut (Belgium) about thirty years before that school produced the NOH. Bragers might be considered an example of Belgium “Stile Antico” whereas Flor Peeters and Jules Van Nuffel represented Belgium “Prima Pratica.” You can download the hymnal by Bragers at this link.

—Jeff Ostrowski
15 February 2021 • To Capitalize…?

In the Introit for the 6th Sunday after Pentecost, there is a question regarding whether to capitalize the word “christi.” The Vulgata does not, because Psalm 27 is not specifically referring to Our Lord, but rather to God’s “anointed one.” However, Missals tend to capitalize it, such as the official 1962 Missal and also a book from 1777 called Missel de Paris. Something tells me Monsignor Knox would not capitalize it.

—Jeff Ostrowski
15 February 2021 • “Sung vs. Spoken”

We have spoken quite a bit about “sung vs. spoken” antiphons. We have also noted that the texts of the Graduale Romanum sometimes don’t match the Missal texts (in the Extraordinary Form) because the Mass Propers are older than Saint Jerome’s Vulgate, and sometimes came from the ITALA versions of Sacred Scripture. On occasion, the Missal itself doesn’t match the Vulgate—cf. the Introit “Esto Mihi.” The Vulgate has: “Esto mihi in Deum protectórem et in domum refúgii…” but the Missal and Graduale Romanum use “Esto mihi in Deum protectórem et in locum refúgii…” The 1970s “spoken propers” use the traditional version, as you can see.

—Jeff Ostrowski

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— Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

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