Gerard Manley Hopkins Archives

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Remembering a Martyred Saint

I write this on the evening of St. Valentines Day. While we celebrate it as the holiday of romantic love, the day actually marks the martyrdom of the original Saint Valentine in 269 AD. Valentine was kind and he was courageous in testifying to his faith, even in the face of a death sentence. We know little more than that about him.

While imprisoned awaiting death, Valentine wrote notes to encourage his friends, tying them with twine, signing them “from your valentine.” So that’s where the practice of all those “valentines” I had to take and exchange each year at school came from! Seriously, it is an amazing act of selfless kindness for one about to die.

As the story goes, the “valentine” he sent on the day of his death went to a formerly blind girl. A judge in one of his cases gave him a challenge. If his God was so powerful, then ask that God to heal the judge’s blind daughter. Valentine prayed and God healed the girl through him. She lived to see while he died.

Reading fiction is supposed to develop empathy. But empathy is only a feeling if it is not converted to acts of kindness. Of late, our cultural life consists more in threats and harsh words than in kindness. Perhaps it is up to us readers to be the modern Valentines, speaking and acting with kindness in an increasingly coarse world. We may never know those we heal by our kindness. And it could cost us dearly. But if that’s the cost to be kind in a cruel world, I’d choose that in a heartbeat over cold cruelty.

Five Articles Worth Reading

Many of us thought Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead one of the best novels we read, chronicling the deadly opioid epidemic in Appalachia. Kingsolver is an example of turning empathy into action. In “‘Demon Copperhead’ Explored Addiction. Its Profits Built a Recovery House,” we learn Kingsolver has used her royalties from the book to start a center for Appalachian women in recovery.

The empathy evoked from literature often comes from its exploration of suffering. In “Beyond the Cage and Fog,” Mary Grace Mangano explores the contrasting ways Gerard Manley Hopkins and Sylvia Plath addressed mental suffering.

Tove Jansson is best known for the Moomins cartoons. Lauren LeBlanc, in “The Outsider Who Captured American Loneliness” reviews a new book by Jansson, Sun City. The setting of the book is a senior community in St. Petersburg, Florida. It explores the loneliness of many who are elderly in America.

Then there is Ross Douthat. Often, the most interesting reads in The New York Times are the op-eds, and Douthat’s are among those. I appreciate his voice as a person of faith, Now, he has a new book out titled Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. “Accidental P i lgrim” adapts content from the book to describe Douthat’s own faith journey.

Finally, it is National Library Lovers Month! Of course, isn’t that the case every month for booklovers. Sadly, not all share our library love. Katie McLain Horner offers practical tips for ways we can support our libraries in “How to Stand Up for Your Local Library by Getting Involved.”

Quote of the Week

I’m a fan of the mysteries of Georges Simenon. It just so happens he was born February 13, 1903. Consider this pithy observation, with which most of us will identify:

“I adore life but I don’t fear death. I just prefer to die as late as possible.”

Miscellaneous Musings

I’ve learned of so many good books through other readers. There is one who not only introduced me to the writing of William Kent Krueger but also to a book I am reading right now. It is And There Was Light, an interesting title for a memoir by a blind French resistance hero, Jacques Lusseyrand.

A Cargo of Eagles is the last of the Albert Campion books by Margery Allingham. I just began it. Whereas I loved the Brother Cadfael series and was sad to come to the last of the books, I honestly feel more relieved to finish Allingham. Convoluted plots, lots of people to keep track of, and an enigmatic sleuth make her books a challenge. Of the Queens of Crime, I rank Sayers, Christie, and Marsh ahead of her, in that order.

I’ve long wanted to read through my grandmother’s Bible. She was a woman of faith who had a profound influence in my life for the few years I knew her. I now have outlived her but I’m curious what her Bible will tell me about her. It is an old Scofield study Bible in the King James Version with tissue thin pages. I began reading it this week.

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: Jeremy Lundgren, The Pursuit of Safety

Tuesday: Phoebe Farag Mikhail, Hunger for Righteousness

Wednesday: Jill Lepore, The Story of America

Thursday: Archibald A. Alexander, The Log Coillege

Friday: Megan Henning, Nils Neumann, eds., Vivid Rhetoric and Visual Persuasion: Ekphrasis in Early Christian Literature

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for February 9-15, 2025!

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page

The Gospel in Gerard Manley Hopkins, Margaret R. Ellsberg ed., Foreword by Dana Gioia. Walden, NY: Plough Publishing House, 2017.

Summary: An exploration of the life and faith of Gerard Manley Hopkins through commentary and a selection of his poetry, letters, journal entries, and sermons.

The life of Gerard Manley Hopkins seems to me a life of startling contrasts. He writes wonderfully vibrant poetry using innovative rhythms–poems that often are celebration of the glory of God evident in the creation. At the same time, he is a devout Jesuit, whose submission to the order meant largely a life as priest and academic examiner in slums of Liverpool, Glasgow, London and Dublin. He died of typhoid contracted from antiquated plumbing. We follow the man who burnt his early poems when he converted to Catholicism and entered the Jesuits, whose life was shaped by the Exercises of St. Ignatius, whose passion was God’s glory, and the incarnation of Christ, revealed afresh in every Eucharist. We also see a man deeply torn between his artistic sensibilities and the physically and psychically crushing routines of most of his life as a Jesuit, to which he seemed ill-suited, that comes through in the anguished “Terrible Sonnets.”

Margaret Ellsberg weaves the narrative of Hopkins life and faith through a combination of commentary, and selections of poetry, letters, sermons, and journals throughout the course of his short life. Because there are only 49 of his poems extant, many of these are included in this selection, set in the context of his life. It is fascinating that Robert Bridges, who subsequently published his works, struggled to make sense of them and found at least one sufficiently difficult that (in Hopkins words) “you wd. not for any money read my poem again (“The Wreck of the Deutschland”). Ellsberg’s work gives us clues, sometimes from Hopkins himself, to the understanding of his poetry, and that is what makes this work most attractive, along with the selections of his poetry.

As much as I love Hopkins poetry (my favorite is “As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame”), the title of this work (part of a series sharing “The Gospel In…”) mystifies me in some ways because the gospel may have evoked praise and wonder with regard to God’s work in the world but mostly despair with regard to his own life. Wonder and devotion there is in great measure, but a sense of peace, of wholeness seems lacking. There is the dutiful fulfillment of assignments that seem poorly fitted to who he is, which makes one wonder why he chose the Jesuits and the priesthood. Compounding his struggle was physical weakness, and perhaps a melancholy character. But gospel also implies “good news”, hope for us in our fragile humanity. Only on his deathbed does he find some peace, as he whispers over and over, “I’m so happy, I’m so happy.”

Perhaps there is something of temperament in all of this, an artist not fully at home in his world, torn by the tension between “God’s Grandeur” and the ugliness of much of what he endured around him. One wonders if different choices or different assignments might have made a difference. Or was it something “unreconciled” in his “gospel” that seemed to result in a life of great devotion but little contentment or peace?

Yet we have this great poetry, much of it an effervescing abundance captured in the fourteen lines of a sonnet. Hopkins life remains an enigma to me, but I can thank his Maker and mine for the gift of his writing. I leave you with “God’s Grandeur”

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs–
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher through the LibraryThing Early Reviewer Program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.