Hopkins

[Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges]


8 Salisbury Street, Liverpool.


June 18, 1880.


Dearest Bridges,


I hear you are going to be married. Is this so? who is she?


The Academy had a notice of Wet Days. It blamed its cynical spirit but praised the nobility of the thought and quoted Courcy in instance. You are surprised that I found no fault with this same cynicism. It is over sour, I think; but your brother's dislikes seem to be much the same as mine and I do not mind hearing someone else say what I feel more strongly than I mean myself to say it


When you shall next call at Oak Hill I want you to hear my music to the Spring Odes, to which Grace has set accompaniments, which accompaniments I have not myself seen yet. I sorely wish I knew some harmony. And say whether you like them and they suit your meaning in the words. I have also a feeling air for 'I have loved flowers that fade', but that is not quite fixed yet, still less written out. I wish I could pursue music; for I have invented a new style, something standing to ordinary music as sprung rhythm to common rhythm: it employs quarter tones. I am trying to set an air in it to the sonnet 'Summer ends now.'


. . . . When you see Mr. Gosse ask him what were those works on Keats which he speaks of as having lately appeared, in a notice by him of a book by some lady on the same subject.



I will enclose a sonnet and a little lyric, the only things I have written in nine months.


Believe me your affectionate friend.
Gerard M. Hopkins S. J.



-from The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges edited with notes & an introduction by Claude Colleer Abbott (London: Oxford University Press, 1935) p. 102-03.

Hopkins and Ship Wrecks

Mount St. Mary's College, Chesterfield.

April 2, 1878.

My Dearest Bridges,--Your last letter was very kind indeed, but I should have lost all shame if under any circumstances I had allowed such a thing to be as for you to come hundreds of miles to cure me.

I am overjoyed to hear of your and Mrs. Molesworth's intercourse with Oak Hill.

It was pleasing and flattering to hear that Mr. Pater remembers and takes an interest in me.

My muse turned utterly sullen in the Sheffield smoke-ridden air and I had not written a line till the foundering of the Eurydice the other day and that worked on me and I am making a poem--in my own rhythm but in a measure something like Tennyson's Violet (bound with Maud); e.g.--

They say who saw one sea-corpse cold

How he was of lovely manly mould,

Every inch a tar,

Of the best we boast seamen are.

Look, from forelock down to foot he,

Strung by duty is strained to beauty

And russet-of-morning-skinned

With the sun, salt, and whirling wind.

Oh! his nimble finger, his gnarled grip!
Leagues, leagues of seamanship

Slumber in his forsaken

Bones and will not, will not waken.

I have consistently carried out my rhyming system, using the first letter of the next line to complete the rhyme in the line before it.

Well, write those things that 'will tickle me'.

The Deutschland would be more generally interesting if there were more wreck and less discourse, I know, but still it is an ode and not primarily a narrative. There is some narrative in Pindar but the principal business is lyrical. This poem on the Eurydice is hitherto almost all narrative however.

And what are you doing?

From notices in the Athenaeum it would appear that Gosse, Dobson, and Co. are still fumbling with triolets, villanelles, and what not.

Believe me your affectionate friend.

Gerard M. Hopkins S. J.

-from The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges edited with notes & an introduction by Claude Colleer Abbott (London: Oxford University Press, 1935) p.47-49.