Jesuit Priest and Poet (1844–1889)
Gerard Manley Hopkins was born in England to a prosperous Anglican family. Though he excelled at Oxford and seemed destined for a brilliant career, these expectations were dashed when he announced his decision in 1866 to become a Roman Catholic, and then a Jesuit priest. Hopkins was a gifted poet, but in becoming a Jesuit he presumed he must renounce his literary interests. In 1875, however, he read about a shipwreck off the coast of Kent. Among the victims was a group of Franciscan nuns escaping anti-Catholic persecution in Germany. When his superior casually mentioned it would make a good subject for a poem, Hopkins felt authorized to resume his writing. It was as if a dam had burst. The result was his epic “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” one of the most remarkable poems in the English language. In compressed, highly charged language, he used this event to describe the victory wrought by Christ through his passion and resurrection. Yet neither this nor any of his subsequent poems were published in his lifetime. His friends found his style bizarre and incomprehensible.
Hopkins spent most of his life wracked by doubts regarding his abilities and accomplishments. Only toward the end of his life did he seem to resolve the identity of his vocations as priest and poet. Poetry, he came to see, was his means of naming and replicating the sacramental character of the created world, his way of expressing his true being and returning praise to his Creator. He died of typhoid on June 8, 1889. His last words: “I am so happy.”
“For Christ lives play in ten thousand places, / Lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not his, / To the Father through the feature of men’s faces.” —Gerard Manley Hopkin
