Sweet Sounds Together

It began one glorious May morning when I was 7, maybe 8. My mother and I were out for a walk in the woods when we came upon the broken shell of a bird’s egg, blue as the sky. Mum told me about a poem in which thrushes’ eggs ‘look little low heavens’, and when we got home she read me the whole thing, opening with a burst of joy: ‘Nothing is so beautiful as Spring/ When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush . . .’

She didn’t tell me that it was written by a Jesuit priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose short life – he died aged 44 – was wracked with suffering. Fast forward to my thirteenth birthday. I was the third of five children, and money was always short. We ate a lot of lamb’s liver and coley, and the heating was barely ever turned on (in the depths of winter my mother used to warm her nightie in the Aga and change into it in the kitchen before charging up to bed). At Christmas and on birthdays, presents tended to be modest and practical. But we were thoroughly spoiled by a kindly white-haired neigh bour – somewhere between the old gentleman in The Railway Children and Mr Carrisford in A Little Princess – who lived just beyond our back gate. Mr Todd had been engaged to a woman called Mary when he was taken prisoner early in the Second World War and incarcerated in a prisoner-of-war camp. By the time he was released, Mary had fallen in love with somebody else. Not one for self-pity, Mr Todd determined to live his life as fully and generously as possible. His house, Maryland, became a second home for us, and every school holidays he would bundle the five of us into his enormous grey Bentley and drive us up to London for treats: museums, plays, expensive restaurants. On our birthdays, he would invite us round and give us bags full of presents, very often cracking open champagne while we unpacked them. So it was that on 25 July 1977 he gave me – ‘To dear Maggie, with good wishes and love’ reads the inky inscription – The New Oxford Book of English Verse, chosen and edited by Helen Gardner. It took up residence on my bedside table, and I found myself dipping into it almost every night. Now, it lives on a special shelf reserved for my most precious books. I have never treasured a volume more. Because my convent school was quite dim, many of the poets Gardner had included – even some who are pretty much household names: John Clare, Matthew Arnold, Dylan Thomas – were new to me. And I loved letting the book fall open at random to find jewels that even my much more bookish siblings were unaware of, like the elegy written by Chidiock Tichborne on the eve of his execution, in September 1586, with its haunting refrain: ‘And now I live, and now my life is done.’ Gardner gives Gerard Manley Hopkins fourteen pages, and I read them over and over until I had many of the poems by heart. Seamus Heaney once described Hopkins’s poetry as ‘girdered’ – ‘you could hit it with a crowbar and it would still sing’ – and yet, Heaney said, it remained always tender, delicate. Nowhere are these contrasting qualities more perfectly balanced than in ‘Felix Randal’, Hopkins’s lament for a once mighty Lancashire blacksmith whom he accompanied in his last illness. First comes the sweetness:

Felix Randal the farrier, O is he dead then? my duty all ended, Who have watched his mould of man, big-boned and hardy- handsome Pining, pining . . .

Then a magnificent drumroll of vigour and vitality as he conjures up Randal in his working prime:

When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers, Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!

Scholars sinking their spades into every syllable that Hopkins ever wrote often analyse the poems in terms of inscape, instress, sprung rhythm. But when I read them, I think of Yeats, who believed that the point of poetry is chiefly to ‘articulate sweet sounds together’. Because that is exactly what Hopkins does. Writing in a country plunged into mourning for Prince Albert, he was, for the scholar Christopher Ricks, ‘the most original poet of the Victorian age’, breathing something new, robust and spirited into the language. He is modern, or perhaps simply timeless: such a magician with sounds that, though I had no audience, I felt the urge to savour his words by reading them aloud:

Glory be to God for dappled things For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow . . .

(‘Pied Beauty’)

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’)

Margaret, are you grieving Over Goldengrove unleaving? Leaves, like the things of man, you With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

(‘Spring and Fall’)

Not long after Mr Todd’s birthday present, and before we launched into the sweaty slog of set books and public exams, our English teacher Sister Maria told us we’d be spending some time on Hopkins. Not everybody was pleased: some found his poetry knotty and wearisome. But there were others for whom he became, that term, a lifelong companion. Half of the cheap, paperback Selected Works we were given – I have mine still, the yellowed pages crammed with notes and underlinings – was devoted to prose: sermons, letters, diary entries in which Hopkins’s observations of nature combine eel-quick intelligence with wonder. Of newborn lambs he writes: ‘They toss and toss, it is as if it were the earth that flung them not themselves.’ And of course there were thrilling – and new to me – poems that Helen Gardner had not had room for. Who has ever evoked a city with such a rush of gladness as Hopkins in ‘Duns Scotus’s Oxford’?

Towery city, and branchy between towers; Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd, rook-racked, river-rounded . . .

But at the heart of the book were six untitled poems – what are called the Terrible Sonnets – written by Hopkins in 1885–6 and not discovered until after his death. They make for painful reading. The man who has given himself to God feels torn between asceticism – as a Jesuit, he was encouraged to practise ‘the discipline of the eye’, resisting visual indulgence – and his overwhelming, sensual response to the natural world. Somewhere in this battle, God has forsaken him:

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief, More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring. Comforter, where, where is your comforting? Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?

The priest who quotes St Ignatius’s belief that fame is one of the most dangerous things to man yearns for his poetry to be recognized. ‘There is a point in me’, Hopkins wrote to his friend Robert Bridges, ‘when I must absolutely have encouragement as much as crops rain.’ Again, the contradiction is torture:

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed . . .

These sonnets might not ‘speak’ to us much as teenagers, Sister Maria suggested, but when we were older, some of us might turn to them. And this is what I did when, in my middle twenties, my life hit the buffers (a broken engagement, unemployment, not the first idea what to do with the years ahead). Whatever I was suffering, Hopkins’s chasms of despair were lonelier and more profound: I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me. And yet, casting around for comfort, he offers wonderfully wise counsel for those in mental distress:

call off thoughts awhile Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile ’s not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather – as skies Betweenpie mountains – lights a lovely mile.

Odd as it may sound, I turned not just to the poetry but to the man himself. One afternoon, in the midst of my black time, I found myself in St Aloysius’s Church in Oxford, where Hopkins had once been curate. I was there for a wedding, which was to be followed by a reception, a sit-down dinner and dancing till dawn. The hours ahead filled me with dread. So, on a whim, I found myself putting up an urgent prayer to Hopkins from the church where I knew he had himself been profoundly unhappy. And I believe that he heard that earth-to-heaven cry, and answered it. Slightly Foxed readers may think this mad, but others I’ve encountered think of Hopkins as more than just a poet. As you get to know his work, he ‘becomes in time a special kind of friend’, wrote his biographer Robert Bernard Martin. In 1989, the Orkney poet George Mackay Brown made his only ever visit to England, lured south by a centenary exhibition of Hopkins’s manuscripts at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. ‘No English poet ever fell upon the language with such skill, sweetness and daring,’ Brown wrote. Seeing the work ‘in the ink’ might help him to understand how Hopkins ‘forged and hammered and welded those resounding marvels’. Almost everywhere he turned in Oxford, he sensed Hopkins’s spirit, ‘sweet’ and ‘eager’. And on the centenary itself, he visited St Aloysius’s, and felt him ‘especially there in that little church . . . at evening Mass’. He travelled home to Orkney elated. Of course, the manuscripts Brown saw in the Bodleian represented only a fraction of Hopkins’s work. He was, in his lifetime, almost completely unrecognized. He shared his work with only eleven friends, and even Robert Bridges, who eventually brought it to publication, was deeply critical of much of it. On the day after his death in June 1889, an old man remembered passing the half-open door of Hopkins’s room in Dublin, and seeing ‘an old fellow, all in black’ removing armfuls of papers from a chest of drawers and heaping them into a blazing grate. It is terrible to imagine what went up the chimney, but a relief to think that Hopkins was by then beyond suffering. As he neared the end, and typhoid tightened its fatal grip, his mood lightened. ‘I am so happy, I am so happy,’ were his last words.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 88 © Maggie Fergusson 2025