Since my college days (in a Jesuit University
Gerard Hopkins ranks seventh among the most frequently reprinted English language poets surpassed only by Shakespeare, John Donne, Wm. Blake, Yeats, Dickinson, and Wordsworth. Amazingly enough his mature work consists of only 49 poems. According to Dana Gioia (poet Laureat of California), he was an influence on Dylan Thomas, W.H. Auden, Seamus Hearney and other great poets of our modern time.
While considered one of the major poets of Victorian England, along with Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Matthew Arnold, Gerard Hopkins
Born in 1844, in the London suburb of Stratford , Essex, Gerard grew up in London Oxford Oxford in 1867, he taught for some months at Bl. Newman’s Oratory School near Birmingham
Gerard entered the Society of Jesus on September 7, 1868, and did his novitiate in London and his philosophy in Lancashire . After a year of teaching in the Jesuit Juniorate, he began theology at St. Beuno’s College in the north of Wales
He was ordained in 1877 and in spite of his long studies he managed eleven sonnets.
 |
| Wm. Hart McNichols |
In October Hopkins left Wales , a place of great inspiration for him, to teach and minister in Derbyshire, London , Oxford , Bedford Leigh, Liverpool, Glasgow , and Stonyhurst, a Jesuit college in Lancashire .
In 1884 Hopkins went to Dublin as Professor of Greek at University College and examiner in the Royal University
In 1885-86 he wrote seven sonnets, the “Terrible Sonnets” or “Dark Sonnets,” painful, dark poems with technical perfection.” Yet at the same time he gave us poems expressing patience and hope in Christ, though his final poem describes a “winter world ” in which his “sweet fire” of poetic inspiration has waned. A few weeks later, on June 8,1889, he died, a victim of typhoid fever. At the end he considered himself a failure, yet his few poems were to change the course for
poetry we have today.
 |
| Vincent McDonnel |
One of my favorite’s- and a lesser known poem- is:
Heaven—Haven
A nun takes the veil
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.
A nun takes the veil
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.