Along with biography as theology, and poetry in relation to theology, I've long made a habit of reading biographical studies of poets! The latest one recently arrived, Paul Mariani's Gerard Manley Hopkins. A Life. I've read two earlier and major biographies of Hopkins, both published a decade and more ago. The argument and thesis of Robert Bernard Martin I found unconvincing in its psychological analysis of Hopkins as a man of anguished spirit and troubled sexuality. Its sub-title A Very Private Life suggests more can be established as fact than is the case. Martin's speculative reconstructions, however well informed and meticulously documented, remain one person's reading of widely acknowledged and major gaps in the data of Hopkins' inner life. The other biography by Norman White is what it says it is, a literary biography laden with literary analysis, just the kind of biography you expect and enjoy from Oxford University Press – long, detailed, erudite. But the danger, not avoided here, is that the scholarship is so overdone, the essential mystery of the person is obscured by a too conscientious thoroughness.
But I learned a lot from these two writers, especially about what happens when poems are read from different perspectives informed by largely unexamined assumptions. Presuppositionless exegesis, according to Bultmann is impossible – that's as true of poems as biblical texts. Neither biography got to the heart of the man, perhaps because neither took with sufficient seriousness one of the most obvious and definitive facts about Hopkins – he was a man of profound religious devotion, whose poetry gave high expression to some of his hardest questions and most moving confessions. With that as an acknowledged presupposition Paul Mariani has written a quite different biography – resulting in a quite different interpretation of the poems.
Mariani has read and written about Hopkins throughout a long career as a scholar of English Literature in general, poetry in particular, and Hopkins' poetry as a special focus of long attentive study. Hopkins is understood (both empathetically and intellectually), as a religiously intense man, and as a poet whose gift is applied to the mystery of God, the world, the human soul and the woven ambiguities of human existence, and these great truths glimpsed in their frighteningly complex inter-relationships, whether as developing or unravelling pattern. Here is one example – simple, and I think reminiscent of George Herbert in interrogative mood, conscience haunted by assumed failure, longing for assurance yet the longing unresolved – not even by a closed parenthesis and full stop at the end of the poem.
Poem 94
Trees by their yield
Are known: but I –
My sap is sealed,
My root is dry.
If life within
I none can shew
(Except for sin),
Nor fruit above-
It must be so –
I do not love.
Will no one show
I argued ill?
Because, although
Self-sentenced, still
I keep my trust.
If He would prove
And search me through
Would he not find
(What yet there must
be hid behind
. . . .
Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, W H Gardiner (Ed.), Oxford: OUP, 1938, p. 144.
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