When Gerard Manley Hopkins and WB Yeats were lost for words
In 1886 a small house party in Dublin hosted two of the greatest poetic voices in the history of the English language. Gerard Manley Hopkins and WB Yeats were worlds apart in terms of demeanour, stature, temper and outlook, but both bridged the artistic accomplishments of the Victorian era to the Modernist age, and propounded their own theories and preferences about religion, beauty and the mysteriousness of life via their verse. Hopkins and Yeats inspired and/or intimidated almost every major English-language poet in the 20th century, but what did these giants actually talk about? Absolutely nothing, apparently. They barely even acknowledged one another.
After Hopkins’s conversion to Roman Catholicism, he ministered in Manchester, Sheffield and Glasgow before crossing the Irish Sea to teach Greek and Latin at Dublin University. He was an intense and reserved man. A walking testament to the virtues of Christianity. The seriousness of his faith caused what atheists might deem a gratuitous self-loathing. It carpet-bombed his natural thoughts with stern and stinging self-criticisms. Religious poets often have concerns about whether their habits of self-expression are indulgent or sinful. Hopkins at times stopped composing poetry completely. In fact, not long after becoming a Jesuit priest, he burned his poems during a strange purifying ritual which he described as a “massacre of the innocents”.
But his reliance on religious orthodoxy didn’t mean he was an idle thinker. He was an incredible inventor of poetic theories and forms. His admiration for Dun Scotus’s concept “haecceitas” (the uniqueness of all things or thisness) became what he christened “inscape” – the idea that “each being in the universe ‘selves’” and “enacts its identity”. In addition to theory, he contributed to our understanding of poetic structure with Sprung Rhythm – an acrobatic exercise of alliterative measure which has in jest been branded “boingy” by serious Hopkins scholars. He individuated himself with his style to an enviable extreme and explored the furthest limits of our language so as to praise the ineffable power of his God. When you peruse stanzas like “Glory be to God for dappled things –/For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;/For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;/Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;/Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;/And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim”, you are acutely aware that these lines belong to him and can belong to no one else.
Despite his exceptional gifts, he died with less than six people on earth knowing that he wrote poetry. In Dublin, the young Yeats had no idea he was in a room with the most original poet alive. He simply saw Hopkins as a “querulous scholar” and continued to enlighten other guests with his own artistic aims which would one day change a whole epoch’s approach to poetry.
Like Hopkins, Yeats was a pioneer of composition and a progenitor of principles. Unlike his Modernist kin, he wrote primarily within the parameters of traditional forms, but reinvigorated their effect by using them as vessels for a curious kind of symbolism. His mystical investigations compelled him to create a formal and private religion based partly on paranormal speculations, but as with Hopkins his theological inclinations should not suggest any kind of unoriginality. His esoteric beliefs allowed him to write some of the most beguiling bits of literature ever put to paper. He altered the traditional invocations of iambs by having them signify strange sentiments. He flashed the appearance of strict structures but always prioritised the precision of his visions over the obligations of a form. His efforts are now iconic and instantly recognisable: “Had I the heaven’s embroidered cloths, /Enwrought with golden and silver light, /The blue and the dim and the dark cloths/Of night and light and the half-light;/I would spread the cloths under your feet:/But I, being poor, have only my dreams;/I have spread my dreams under your feet;/Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”
A pair of the most profound poetic thinkers for a hundred years lazed their Sunday afternoon away in total ignorance of each other’s worth. However, Hopkins did once read Yeats’s poem Two Titans, finding it forced yet vivid. Three decades on from Hopkin’s premature death his verse was finally widely read but Yeats held no high feeling for his work. Perhaps their mutually mild respect for one another means they would have had little to discuss. I disagree. Between them, they advanced the ailing art of poetry beyond the expectations of criticism and instilled an excitement for the future. Had they spoken, they might have exchanged some insights or have at least disagreed constructively, but fate did not favour that outcome.
In 1924, Nabokov wrote a poem called Shakespeare. He imagined the Bard on the continent changing horses at an inn and sharing an hour’s respite with Cervantes. That meeting almost certainly never happened, but the idea alone is enough to stir the imagination with enticing prospects. When you consider the intellectual collaboration that could have transpired, the non-occurrence of that great event becomes haunting.
Most poets secretly wish they were composers or philosophers, but it is their privilege to fuse the richness of philosophical thought with the melodious beauty of music. Two men who achieved more in that regard than any of their contemporaries encountered each other and had very little to say. It is a tantalising shame which makes you wonder what might have been had they truly known the company they kept.