Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J.

(1844-1889)

Gerard Manley Hopkins S.J. a native of England, came to Ireland in 1884 as professor of Classics, University College Dublin, 86, St. Stephen’s Green (Newman House). It was a period when Charles Stewart Parnell was leading the national movement towards self -government and William E. Gladstone pursued unsuccessful attempts to carry a Home Rule Bill for Ireland.
The country was still recovering from the far reaching devastion of the Famine (1844 - 1847) with the resulting decimation of it’s population due to deaths and emigration and it is no wonder that Hopkins found the Dublin of that period a ‘joyless place’, and wrote that Newman House had ‘ fallen into a deep dilapidation’. His appointment to the fellowship of Classics was in the midst of controversy: ‘There was an Irish row over my election’ he wrote to Robert Bridges on 7th March 1884. Despite this, he made many friends and acquaintances such as the McCabes of Donnybrook and visited Judge O’Hagan’s house in Howth.
He also visited the studio of the artist John B. Yeats, at No. 7, St. Stephen’s Green, where he met his son, the poet W.B. Yeats and Katherine Tynan. But Hopkins time in Ireland was destined to be short. He contracted typhoid fever and died on 8th June 1889. He is buried in the Jesuit plot, Glasnevin cemetery, Dublin.

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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Pied Beauty
 
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.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
    With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                  Praise him.