Welcome to Dauphin Street, Philadelphia, where trash bags seal broken car windows and signs say “don’t even think about loitering.” If you turn onto Broad Street, you’ll find a store a few blocks up that advertises, “We Ship to Prisons.” I drive past Dauphin Street a couple of days a week on my way to teach. Its poverty sobers me. But I’m also startled by juxtaposition. I’m looking at a worried man limping along the crosswalk, but also thinking of a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem:
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding…
How many layers a word has! To some, a dauphin was a nation’s future. To others, a home; a block to defend; a place to shun once dusk falls. To another, a kestrel steadied in midair, first-born son of the morning.
Wouldn’t Hopkins, Jesuit priest and innovative poet of the mid 1800s, have loved these layers? He thought and wrote about all that a word encompassed: not just its various definitions, but its sound, its look, its application, and, as he put it, “all the concrete things coming under it.”
He hoarded words like each was an out-of-print LP. In one early diary, he wrote out: flick… fleck, flake. Said aloud, this collection rises in tone with each word. He looked for similarities between sound and meaning– “Flake is a broad and decided fleck,” he wrote. He positioned words according to their sound: “morning’s minion,” “daylight’s dauphin.”
But after he hoarded, he spent. His opulence stuns: rhymes where no poetic rule requires one, alliteration, assonance, all-out play. One feels gathered up into the ecstasy of it all and involuntarily begins reading aloud. “The Windhover,” quoted above, is a symphony of words, complete with a clash of symbols: “fall, gall themselves, and gash gold vermilion.”
Taken alone, a Hopkins poem leaves a reader woozy. But what’s really startling about Hopkins’s sensibility is the theory that created it. Literary critic David Sonstroem wrote in Modern Language Quarterly that Hopkins:
Deals out words according to their sound and then he expects them to turn up in the meaningful pattern that will serve as evidence of an unseen intelligence that is regulating them. He is…giving God a free hand, so that He can declare Himself. Chance is not really chance, because it is superintended by God.
A few weeks ago, on my way back from Dauphin Street, I stopped for dinner with a friend who is a ceramic artist and who showed me her latest ceramics. She held one piece behind her back, then presented it with a flourish. The bowl she held bore a delicate branch pattern crossing the center. My friend had been shocked when she pulled it out of the kiln because, unexpectedly, the fired green-white glaze lined the brown branches like snow.
How trusting, to take the art one has shaped and marked and glazed and transfer it to an oven not knowing the result. And how astonishing to think of Gerard Manley Hopkins creating poetry that left room for macchia–the moment when nature (or in his view, God) takes over the artist’s work so that, spontaneously, it becomes more than what the artist intended.
It’s astonishing because it would be easy for a religious writer to crave control. For one thing, it’s easy for any writer to grasp for control. A word’s connotation doesn’t fit the theme? Nix it! A character isn’t behaving? Kill him off! A stanza isn’t flowing right? Revise, rework, revise! For another thing, it would be easy for someone who believes that an “unseen intelligence” has created a regulated world to believe that the writer must also be the work’s unseen intelligence, regulating and ordering the work intensively.
But Hopkins didn’t buy that. He wanted readers to understand his poems but didn’t believe that, just by creating, an artist became a micro-version of God. Brad Leithauser notes in his preface to the Hopkins collection Mortal Beauty, God’s Grace that when a friend complained that Hopkins’ poems were too obscure, Hopkins wrote him a letter explaining the poems at length. This shows that he had fixed meanings in mind. He didn’t change a jot of the “obscure” poems themselves, though, believing “the only just judge, the only just literary critic, is Christ.” No matter a poem’s complexity or eccentricity, that literary critic would decipher it. And so, the artistic creator could remain a creature.
In my own time, I have found this balance difficult. A great many authors I love believe that at its core the cosmos is chaotic or absurd. But if, like Hopkins, one rejects this view, wouldn’t it follow that one’s writing would not be chaotic, that it would be a diorama of an ordered, though broken, world? And then wouldn’t one’s writing be precise, and mean exactly what the author intends it to mean? Following Hopkins’s aesthetics, a writer who believes in a meaningful universe would also sense his humble place within it, and know, with pleasure, awe, and playfulness, that good art involves letting go.
I imagine Gerard Manley Hopkins kneeling for final vows and realize that this kind of giving is not so different from firing clay in a kiln.