Life and Art in Hopkinss poems :

The Windhover ,Carrion Comfort and Binsey Poplars

The purpose of this essey is to analyse and compare life and art in three of Gerard
Manley Hopkins The Windhover ,Carrion Comfort and Binsey Poplars. According to
Hopkinss theory of inscape, all living things have a constantly shifting design or pattern that
gives each object a unique identity.
Hopkinss early poetry praises nature, particularly natures unique ability to regenerate
and rejuvenate. Throughout his travels in England and Ireland, Hopkins witnessed the
detrimental effects of industrialization on the environment, including pollution, urbanization,
and diminished rural landscapes. While he lamented these effects, he also believed in natures
power of regeneration, which comes from God. In Gods Grandeur, the speaker notes the
wellspring that runs through nature and through humans. While Hopkins never doubted the
presence of God in nature, he became increasingly depressed by late nineteenth-century life
and began to doubt natures ability to withstand human destruction. His later poems, the so-
called terrible sonnets, focus on images of death, including the harvest and vultures picking at
prey. Rather than depict the glory of natures rebirth, these poems depict the deaths that must
occur in order for the cycle of nature to continue. Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord (1889) uses
parched roots as a metaphor for despair: the speaker begs Christ to help him because Christs
love will rejuvenate him, just as water helps rejuvenate dying foliage.
According to Hopkinss theory of inscape, all living things have a constantly shifting
design or pattern that gives each object a unique identity. Hopkins frequently uses color to
describe these inscapes. Pied Beauty praises God for giving every object a distinct visual
pattern, from sunlight as multicolored as a cow to the beauty of birds wings and freshly
plowed fields. Indeed, the word pied means having splotches of two or more colors. In
Hurrahing in Harvest, the speaker describes azourous hung hills (9) that are very-violet-
sweet (10). Elsewhere, the use of color to describe nature becomes more complicated, as in
Spring. Rather than just call the birds eggs blue, the speaker describes them as
resembling pieces of the sky and thus demonstrates the interlocking order of objects in the
natural world. In The Windhover, the speaker yokes adjectives to convey the peculiar,
precise beauty of the bird in flightand to convey the idea that natures colors are so
magnificent that they require new combinations of words in order to be imagined.
Many of Hopkinss poems feature an ecstatic outcry, a moment at which the speaker
expresses his transcendence of the real world into the spiritual world. The words ah, o,
and oh usually signal the point at which the poem moves from a description of natures beauty
to an overt expression of religious sentiment. Binsey Poplars (1879), a poem about the
destruction of a forest, begins with a description of the downed trees but switches
dramatically to a lamentation about the human role in the devastation; Hopkins signals the
switch by not only beginning a new stanza but also by beginning the line with O (9).
Hopkins also uses exclamation points and appositives to articulate ecstasy: in Carrion
Comfort, the speaker concludes with two cries to Christ, one enclosed in parentheses and
punctuated with an exclamation point and the other punctuated with a period. The words and
the punctuation alert the reader to the instant at which the poem shifts from secular concerns
to religious feeling.
To express inscape and instress, Hopkins experimented with rhythm and sound to
create sprung rhythm, a distinct musicality that resembles the patterns of natural speech in
English. The flexible meter allowed Hopkins to convey the fast, swooping falcon in The
Windhover and the slow movement of heavy clouds in Hurrahing in Harvest. To indicate
how his lines should be read aloud, Hopkins often marked words with acute accents, as in As
Kingfishers Catch Fire and Spring and Fall. Alliteration, or the juxtaposition of similar
sounds, links form with content, as in this line from Gods Grandeur: And all is seared
with trade; bleared, smeared with toil (6). In the act of repeating red, our mouths make a
long, low sound that resembles the languid movements of humans made tired from factory
labor. Elsewhere, the alliterative lines become another way of worshiping the divine because
the sounds roll and bump together in pleasure. Spring begins, Nothing is so beautiful as
Spring / When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush (12).
 Bibliography:

MacKenzie, Norman H. (Ed.), 1991. The Later Poetic Manuscripts of Gerard Manley
Hopkins in Facsimile (New York: Garland Publishing.)
Martin, Robert Bernard, 1992. Gerard Manley Hopkins A Very Private
Life (London: Flamingo/HarperCollins Publishers)
Kaylor, Michael M. Secreted Desires: The Major Uranians: Hopkins, Pater and Wilde.
Brno, CZ: Masaryk University Press, 2006. p. 401
Jump up^ Edge, Simon (18 May 2017). The Hopkins Conundrum. Lightning
Books. ISBN 978-1785630330.