The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (PenguinCritical Studies )

This is a very good study of the poetry of Hopkins. It considers his life, character and poetry, his religious belief, his techniques and poetic language, his major poem "The Wreck of the Deutschland",his spring poems of 1877, Creation Destruction and Religious Poems, 1877-79 , People and Places Poems 1879-1882 The Terrible Sonnets,Four Late Poems, . Here are Watson's concluding lines on my favorite Hopkins' poem "Thou Art Indeed Just". "This is one of the most affecting of Hopkins' later poems.Itis a beautifully- controlled and very moving expression of the sense of failure ,and it is a very good example of the way in which Hopkins religious beliefs deepened and gave significance to his poetry. This sonnet could have been just a grumble about failure and sterility, or a bitter poem about those who seemed happier,more careless and more successful from himself. But the passage from Jeremiah, and the allusions to his own dedication and to God the righteous judge, raise the poem and give it the status of a theological problem as well as a private dilemna. The word which occurs twice in line 3 is the word ' why':it is a cry which has been made by many suffering servants from Jeremiah until now, a cry which is a question from a fallen world. And if Hopkins later poems can be said to have anything in the way of a meaning which underpins them. It can be seen to be an acute awareness of his own others' unhappiness.He rescues moments, attitudes, pictures, places from this( a boy bugler taking communion,a man ploughing, a stream tumbling over rocks), but the note steadily deepens as Hopkins becomes more and more aware of the unhappiness of the world (or the transience of happiness)in his own experience".