Arts Culture
Faith And Culture Lecture At Villanova University
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| Gerard Manley Hopkins. |
By TOM ANDERSON, For The Bulletin
On September 17 Villanova University and its Department of Humanities presented its annual Faith and Culture Lecture. The speaker was Boston College Professor Paul Mariani, author of six volumes of poetry and five biographies of other poets. His most recent biography, Viking, 2008, is titled, Gerard Manley Hopkins, A Life, and it has received wide acclaim as the definitive and magisterial telling of the life of this enigmatic Victorian poet, a contemporary of Walt Whitman and Thomas Hardy, virtually unknown in his own time in Victorian England, and now recognized as one of the towering and most influential voices in modern poetry.
Mr. Mariani began by reading from the first pages of his biography, summarizing the turning points of the short life of this very idiosyncratic man, in poetic language very evocative of Hopkins’ own imaginative and uniquely rhythmic language;
“‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God,’ Hopkins believed. He believed it from his undergraduate years at Oxford as an Anglican seeker. Believed it so strongly that it led in large part to his conversion to the Roman Catholic Church….All that was wanting he believed was the beholder. And when the beheld and the beholder once met, when the essential nature of the thing was instressed upon the eye ear tongue and mind, the heart could not help but rise up at a sudden unheard symphony, a dance, the heart growing ‘bold and bolder’ as it hurled itself after its Creator, the One who bode there and abided.”
In these pages Mariani highlights the curious turns of Hopkins career: son of a respectable middle-class Victorian Anglican household, top-honors student at Oxford, opening to the influence of the Oxford Movement (John Newman and others at Oxford developing new focuses on what they perceived as the Catholic background of Anglicanism), conversion to Catholicism, entering the Society of Jesus and being ordained a priest, teaching Greek and Latin for a number of years at Jesuit schools, and finally dying at the age of 44, virtually unknown at the time for the poems which posthumously established him as one of the greatest and most influential poets of the Nineteenth Century.
When Hopkins became a Catholic, and especially when he became a Jesuit, he also became virtually estranged from his family. They rejected his conversion, and he never had a visit from his parents until his was on his deathbed in Dublin, where perhaps they listened to his last words, repeated over and over: “I am so happy. I am so happy. I am so happy.”
When Hopkins entered the Jesuits he burned all of the poems he had written as a young man, and it was not until he was near the end of his seminary training that he very spontaneously decided to write what is now recognized as one of his truly monumental works, The Wreck of the Deutschland, commemorating the deaths of five Franciscan nuns who were drowned in a maritime disaster in the mouth of the Thames River. The Jesuit superiors did not think his poem was worthy, or at least understandable enough, for publication in their own journal. Indeed, most of his known poems were only published years after his death by Poet Laureate Robert Bridges, a friend from the Oxford years who faithfully encouraged Hopkins to continue to write verse, while also candidly admitting that he frequently found him difficult at best to understand.
Professor Mariani continued his talk by reading three Hopkins poems: God’s Grandeur, Carrion Comfort and That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire, and of the Comfort of the Resurrection, each written at a different point in Hopkins life as a priest, and each embodying and hymning different aspects of his convictions as a believing Christian. The first poem is a celebration of the blazing and variegated beauties of all creation as proclaiming the glory of the Creator The second was written when he was living in the slums of Liverpool , surrounded by poverty and misery, and experiencing a “dark night of the soul” And the third was penned just about a year before his death, embodying both the glories and grimness of creation, and perceiving the Resurrection of Christ as the only reality which can give honest, uncompromising and unflinching meaning to both.
Professor Mariani actually “intoned” each of the poems, colorfully illustrating Hopkins’ vast panoply of rhythmic stresses and techniques, and “unpacked” each of them, as only another poet can do, by revealing the meaning of much of the imagery and verbal play which is so densely characteristic of Hopkins verse.
Finally, Mr. Mariani recited one of his own poems, Eurydice, an evocation of his experiences of searching and insecurity when he was a young professor in Manhattan. His own verse is very different in tone and style from that of Hopkins – much more use of every-day phrasing and a down-to-earth tone, but the mysteries he confronts are very much the same, as they are in the verse of most great poets.
This appearance of Paul Mariani was a superb presentation of Villanova’s Faith and Culture Forum, and considering the superior lectures already sponsored by this group, one can only hope that there will be many more talks like this. High as Villanova has set the bar, there is a great need in all of our local colleges and universities for increased exploration and understanding of the critical civilizing nexus of religious belief and culture.
Mr. Mariani began by reading from the first pages of his biography, summarizing the turning points of the short life of this very idiosyncratic man, in poetic language very evocative of Hopkins’ own imaginative and uniquely rhythmic language;
“‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God,’ Hopkins believed. He believed it from his undergraduate years at Oxford as an Anglican seeker. Believed it so strongly that it led in large part to his conversion to the Roman Catholic Church….All that was wanting he believed was the beholder. And when the beheld and the beholder once met, when the essential nature of the thing was instressed upon the eye ear tongue and mind, the heart could not help but rise up at a sudden unheard symphony, a dance, the heart growing ‘bold and bolder’ as it hurled itself after its Creator, the One who bode there and abided.”
In these pages Mariani highlights the curious turns of Hopkins career: son of a respectable middle-class Victorian Anglican household, top-honors student at Oxford, opening to the influence of the Oxford Movement (John Newman and others at Oxford developing new focuses on what they perceived as the Catholic background of Anglicanism), conversion to Catholicism, entering the Society of Jesus and being ordained a priest, teaching Greek and Latin for a number of years at Jesuit schools, and finally dying at the age of 44, virtually unknown at the time for the poems which posthumously established him as one of the greatest and most influential poets of the Nineteenth Century.
When Hopkins became a Catholic, and especially when he became a Jesuit, he also became virtually estranged from his family. They rejected his conversion, and he never had a visit from his parents until his was on his deathbed in Dublin, where perhaps they listened to his last words, repeated over and over: “I am so happy. I am so happy. I am so happy.”
When Hopkins entered the Jesuits he burned all of the poems he had written as a young man, and it was not until he was near the end of his seminary training that he very spontaneously decided to write what is now recognized as one of his truly monumental works, The Wreck of the Deutschland, commemorating the deaths of five Franciscan nuns who were drowned in a maritime disaster in the mouth of the Thames River. The Jesuit superiors did not think his poem was worthy, or at least understandable enough, for publication in their own journal. Indeed, most of his known poems were only published years after his death by Poet Laureate Robert Bridges, a friend from the Oxford years who faithfully encouraged Hopkins to continue to write verse, while also candidly admitting that he frequently found him difficult at best to understand.
Professor Mariani continued his talk by reading three Hopkins poems: God’s Grandeur, Carrion Comfort and That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire, and of the Comfort of the Resurrection, each written at a different point in Hopkins life as a priest, and each embodying and hymning different aspects of his convictions as a believing Christian. The first poem is a celebration of the blazing and variegated beauties of all creation as proclaiming the glory of the Creator The second was written when he was living in the slums of Liverpool , surrounded by poverty and misery, and experiencing a “dark night of the soul” And the third was penned just about a year before his death, embodying both the glories and grimness of creation, and perceiving the Resurrection of Christ as the only reality which can give honest, uncompromising and unflinching meaning to both.
Professor Mariani actually “intoned” each of the poems, colorfully illustrating Hopkins’ vast panoply of rhythmic stresses and techniques, and “unpacked” each of them, as only another poet can do, by revealing the meaning of much of the imagery and verbal play which is so densely characteristic of Hopkins verse.
Finally, Mr. Mariani recited one of his own poems, Eurydice, an evocation of his experiences of searching and insecurity when he was a young professor in Manhattan. His own verse is very different in tone and style from that of Hopkins – much more use of every-day phrasing and a down-to-earth tone, but the mysteries he confronts are very much the same, as they are in the verse of most great poets.
This appearance of Paul Mariani was a superb presentation of Villanova’s Faith and Culture Forum, and considering the superior lectures already sponsored by this group, one can only hope that there will be many more talks like this. High as Villanova has set the bar, there is a great need in all of our local colleges and universities for increased exploration and understanding of the critical civilizing nexus of religious belief and culture.
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