Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Jesuit priest and English poet whose posthumous, 20th-century fame established him among the finest Victorian poets. His experimental explorations in prosody (especially in regard to sprung rhythm) and his vibrant use of imagery established him as both an original and daring innovator in a period of largely traditional verse.

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• It is a happy thing that there is no royal road to poetry. The world should know by this time that one cannot reach Parnassus except by flying thither.
  • Diary (April 1864)

• For I think it is the case with genius that it is not when quiescent so very much above mediocrity as the difference between the two might lead us to think, but that it has the power and privilege of rising from that level to a height utterly far from mediocrity: in other words that its greatness is that it can be so great.
  • Letter to A.W.M. Baillie (September 10, 1864)

• Do you know, a horrible thing has happened to me. I have begun to doubt Tennyson.
  • Letter to A.W.M. Baillie (September 10, 1864)

• I think that the trivialness of life is, and personally to each one, ought to be seen to be, done away with by the Incarnation.
  • Letter to E.H. Coleridge (January 22, 1866)

• I am surprised you should say fancy and aesthetic tastes have led me to my present state of mind: these would be better satisfied in the Church of England, for bad taste is always meeting one in the accessories of Catholicism.
  • Letter to his father, Manley Hopkins (October 16, 1866)

• I thought how sadly beauty of inscape was unknown and buried away from simple people and yet how near at hand it was if they had eyes to see it and it could be called out everywhere again.
  • Journal (July 19, 1872)

• All the world is full of inscape and chance left free to act falls into an order as well as purpose.
  • Journal (February 24, 1873)

• No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness. I hope in time to have a more balanced and Miltonic style. But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music, and design in painting, so design, pattern, or what I am in the habit of calling inscape is what I above all aim at in poetry. Now it is the virtue of design, pattern, or inscape to be distinctive, and it is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer. This vice I cannot have escaped.
  • Letter to Robert Bridges (February 15, 1879)

• The poetical language of an age should be the current language heightened, to any degree heightened and unlike itself, but not...an obsolete one.
  • Letter to Robert Bridges (August 14, 1879)

• Our Lord Jesus Christ, my brethren, is our hero, a hero all the world wants.
  • Sermon (November 23, 1879)

• For myself I make no secret, I look forward with eager desire to seeing the matchless beauty of Christ’s body in the heavenly light.
  • Sermon (November 23, 1879)

• Religion, you know, enters very deep; in reality it is the deepest impression I have in speaking to people, that they are or that they are not of my religion.
  • Letter to A.W.M. Baillie (May 22, 1880)

• I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.
  • Letter to Richard Watson Dixon (October 17, 1881)

• I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like my own than any other man’s living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession.
  • Letter to Robert Bridges (October 18, 1882)

• By the by, if the English race had done nothing else, yet if they left the world the notion of a gentleman, they would have done a great service to mankind.
  • Letter to Robert Bridges (February 3, 1883)

• You do not mean by mystery what a Catholic does. You mean an interesting uncertainty: the uncertainty ceasing, interest ceases also.... But a Catholic by mystery means an incomprehensible certainty: without certainty, without formulation there is no interest;... the clearer the formulation the greater the interest.
  • Letter to Robert Bridges (October 24, 1883)

• It kills me to be time’s eunuch and never to beget.
  • Letter to Robert Bridges (September 1, 1885)

• That is the great end of empires before God, to be Catholic and draw nations into their Catholicism. But our empire is less and less Christian as it grows.
  • Letter to Coventry Patmore (June 4, 1886)

• A great work by an Englishman is like a great battle won by England. It is an unfading bay tree.
  • Letter to Robert Bridges (October 13, 1886)

• It seems then that it is not the excellence of any two things (or more) in themselves, but those two things as viewed by the light of each other, that makes beauty.
  • On the Origin of Beauty: A Platonic Dialogue

• Beauty ... is a relation, and the apprehension of it a comparison.
  • On the Origin of Beauty: A Platonic Dialogue

Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

• I have desired to go
  Where springs not fail,
  To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
  And a few lilies blow.
  And I have asked to be
  Where no storms come,
  Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
  And out of the swing of the sea.
  • Heaven-Haven, lines 1-8

• Elected Silence, sing to me
  And beat upon my whorlèd ear,
  Pipe me to pastures still and be
  The music that I care to hear.
  • The Habit of Perfection, lines 1-4

• Thou mastering me
  God! giver of breath and bread;
  World’s strand, sway of the sea;
  Lord of living and dead;
  Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh,
  And after it almost unmade, what with dread,
  Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?
  Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.
  • The Wreck of the Deutschland, lines 1-8

• Hope had grown grey hairs,
  Hope had mourning on,
  Trenched with tears, carved with cares,
  Hope was twelve hours gone.
  • The Wreck of the Deutschland, lines 115-118

• Abel is Cain's brother and breasts they have sucked the same.
  • The Wreck of the Deutschland, line 160

• The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
  It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
  It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
  Crushed.
  • God's Grandeur, lines 1-4

• Generations 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 soil
  Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
  • God's Grandeur, lines 5-8

• There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.
  • God's Grandeur, line 10

• Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
  O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
  • The Starlight Night, lines 1-2

• Nothing is so beautiful as Spring—
  When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
  Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
  Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
  The ear, it strikes like lightning to hear him sing.
  • Spring, stanza 1

• I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
  dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
  High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
  In his ecstasy!
  • The Windhover, lines 1-5

• Glory be to God for dappled things—
  For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
  For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim.
  • Pied Beauty, lines 1-3

• All things counter, original, spare, strange;
  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
  With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
  He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
  Praise him.
  • Pied Beauty, lines 7-11

• Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise
  Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
  Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
  Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?
  • Hurrahing in Harvest, lines 1-4

• I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
  Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour.
• Hurrahing in Harvest, lines 5-6

• Lovely the woods, waters, meadows, combes, vales,
  All the air things wear that build this world of Wales.
  • In the Valley of the Elwy, lines 9-10

• Ask of her, the mighty mother:
  Her reply puts this other
  Question: What is Spring?—
  Growth in everything.
  • The May Magnificat, stanza 4

• My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
  Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
  All felled, felled, are all felled;
  Of a fresh and following folded rank
  Not spared, not one
  That dandled a sandalled
  Shadow that swam or sank
  On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.
  • Binsey Poplars, lines 1-8

• O if we but knew what we do
  When we delve or hew—
  Hack and rack the growing green!
  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,
  When we hew or delve:
  After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
  • Binsey Poplars, stanza 2

• When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I’ll not play hypocrite
  To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
  That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows
  Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?
  • Peace, lines 3-6

• Felix Randal the farrier, O he is dead then? my duty all ended,
  Who have watched his mould of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome
  Pining, pining, till time when reason rambled in it and some
  Fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended?
  • Felix Randal, lines 1-4

• Poor Felix Randal;
  How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years,
  When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers,
  Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!
  • Felix Randal, lines 11-14

• Margaret, are you grieving
  Over Goldengrove unleaving?
  • Spring and Fall, lines 1-2

• Ah! as the heart grows older
  It will come to such sights colder
  By and by, not spare a sigh
  Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
  And yet you will weep and know why.
  • Spring and Fall, lines 5-9

• Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
  What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
  It ís the blight man was born for,
  It is Margaret you mourn for.
  • Spring and Fall, lines 12-15

• 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.
  • Inversnaid, lines 13-16

• How to keep—is there any any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or catch or key to keep
  Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, ... from vanishing away?
  • The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo: The Leaden Echo, lines 1-2

• Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty's self and beauty's giver.
  • The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo: The Golden Echo, line 19

• Wild air, world-mothering air,
  Nestling me everywhere,
  That each eyelash or hair
  Girdles; goes home betwixt
  The fleeciest, frailest-fixed
  Snowflake; that’s fairly mixed
  With, riddles, and is rife
  In every least thing’s life.
  • The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe, lines 1-8

• I say that we are wound
  With mercy round and round
  As if with air.
  • The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe, lines 34-36

• World-mothering air, air wild,
  Wound with thee, in thee isled,
  Fold home, fast fold thy child.
  • The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe, lines 124-126

• Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
  Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
  In me or, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
  Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
  • Carrion Comfort, lines 1-4

• That night, that year
  Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.
  • Carrion Comfort, lines 13-14

• No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
  More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
  • No Worst, There Is None, lines 1-2

• O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
  Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
  May who ne'er hung there.
  • No Worst, There Is None, lines 9-11

• Here! creep,
  Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
  Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
  • No Worst, There Is None, lines 13-15

• I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
  What hours, O what black hoürs we have spent
  This night!
  • I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day, lines 1-3

• I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree
  Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
  Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
  Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
  The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
  As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.
  • I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day, lines 9-14

• Natural heart’s ivy, Patience masks
  Our ruins of wrecked past purpose.
  • Patience, hard thing! the hard thing but to pray, lines 6-7

• My own heart let me have more have pity on; let
  Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
  Charitable; not live this tormented mind
  With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
  • My own heart let me have more have pity on, lines 1-4

• I am all at once what Christ is, ' since he was what I am, and
  This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ' patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
  Is immortal diamond.
  • That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection, lines 22-24

• Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
  With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
  Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must
  Disappointment all I endeavour end?
  • Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend, lines 1-4

• Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.
  • Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend, line 14

• The widow of an insight lost she lives, with aim
  Now known and hand at work now never wrong.
  Sweet fire the sire of muse, my soul needs this;
  I want the one rapture of an inspiration.
  • To R. B., lines 7-10

• The best ideal is the true
  And other truth is none.
  All glory be ascribed to
  The holy Three in One.
  • Summa, lines 1-4

The Principle or Foundation

An address based on The Spiritual Exercises, written by St. Ignatius of Loyola, the Spanish founder of the Society of Jesus.

• He is so great that all things give him glory if you mean they should. So then, my brethren, live.

• Any day, any minute we bless God for our being or for anything, for food, for sunlight, we do and are what we were meant for, made for—things that give and mean to give God glory.

• It is not only prayer that gives God glory but work. Smiting on an anvil, sawing a beam, whitewashing a wall, driving horses, sweeping, scouring, everything gives God some glory if being in his grace you do it as your duty.

Comments on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola

• When I compare myself, my being-myself, with anything else whatever, all things alike, all in the same degree, rebuff me with blank unlikeness.

• I find myself both as man and as myself something more determined and distinctive, at pitch, more distinctive and higher pitched than anything else I see.

• Searching nature I taste self but at one tankard, that of my own being.

• I consider my selfbeing ... that taste of myself, of I and me above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnutleaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to another man.

• For human nature, being more highly pitched, selved, and distinctive than anything in the world, can have been developed, evolved, condensed, from the vastness of the world not anyhow or by the working of common powers but only by one of finer or higher pitch and determination than itself.