Hopkins in Ireland (review)

Hopkins in Ireland is a troubled and troubling book. "A form of psychological biography" (x), it completes the larger biographical project Norman White originally intended for Hopkins: A Literary Biography (1992), tracing the onset of Gerard Manley Hopkins's presumed mental and physical deterioration beginning with his years at St. Beuno's, north Wales, and continuing after he moved to Ireland. The poetry Hopkins wrote in the period 1884 to 1889 reveals a growing depression and "disturbed consciousness," White argues, and conveys the sense that "Hopkins's mind is malfunctioning" (17). Hopkins went to Ireland a broken man, and Ireland only complicated things. White's study is a dirge to Hopkins, summed up in the opening two lines: "Gerard Manley Hopkins is buried in Ireland. His grave is emblematic of his isolation, alienation, and sense of lonely duty during the last five years of his life which he spent in Ireland" (ix). White is no Felix Randal amidst the grimy forge hammering for the great drayhorse a bright and battering sandal.

Oddly, White's reading of Hopkins ignores the vast corpus of critical engagement with the poet, chiefly John Robinson's In Extremity (1978), Michael Sprinker's A Counterpoint of Dissonance (1980), Donald Walhout's Send My Roots Rain (1981), Daniel Harris's Inspirations Unbidden (1982), Marylou Motto's Mined with Motion (1984), and Walter Ong's Hopkins, the Self and God (1986). This is no mere oversight, however. White has very little regard for the growing body of Hopkins scholarship indebted, ironically, to much of his archaeological work.

Hopkins's religion remains a source of "continuing incomprehension" to White (xi). The book is antipathetic to the Jesuits, members of "a propagandistic, not a contemplative, order," for whom "rhetoric, the art of persuasion, was their prime concern" (22). Hopkins's poems "written as a Jesuit before the 1885 Dublin sonnets... had as motivation and justification the Jesuit proselytising purpose" (23). Further, "his anachronistic faith-world did not contain adequate concepts, means of expression, or flexibility to deal with the reality of his troubles" (85). "Poor Hopkins," White laments, "seems more than once to have similarly progressed from despair along this course prescribed by his religion only to be struck by the hollowness of a merely conceptual remedy" (99).

Monasterevin offered the only escape from "the pressure of politics" (118). But while the flight from Dublin yielded "more optimistic, outgoing, and expansively formal poems" (133), "Monasterevin was never a true Arcadia for Hopkins" (130). The Irish experiment, due in large measure to the academic disarray and dilapidated conditions at John Henry Newman's Catholic University, was such a disaster that no single Hopkins poem really names Ireland. The Carlylean "Tom's Garland" (1887), with its idealistic portrait of agrarian labor, evinces the "limitations" of Hopkins's "social contacts and experiences" (153). The provocative "Epithalamion" (1888), Hopkins's nuptial to his younger brother Everard, is an "ill-starred venture" (137). White is alarmed that "a poet with such strong personal scruples ...could become, as an epithalamist should, a wholehearted participant in the series of wedding actions and liberal emotions" (138). Even the Monasterevin poem "On the Portrait" (1886), which White insightfully ties to William Wordsworth's great ode, shows "little fresh observation." Hopkins had employed the same themes "several times over in previous poems" (129), a claim that raises serious questions about thematic repetition, genius, and originality.

White's Hopkins is a poet few would recognize, which makes the book intriguing, though perhaps not compelling. Hopkins admitted that a large measure of his poems is autobiographical fact, and White attempts to treat them both as "poetry and autobiographical document" (106). But the critical distance from which Hopkins writes is altogether voided. "Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves" (1886) becomes a poem in which Hopkins "strung together pieces of his hell-like experiences...to spell out his inner autobiography," making him "neurotically indecisive" (38...