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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
A restrained longing haunts the story of a priest-poet,
By A Customer
This review is from: A Holy Struggle: Unspoken Thoughts of Hopkins (Wheaton Literary Series) (Hardcover)
It is important to refer to poetry of another era in a time when poetry is often trivial, written by poets who have little regard for form for readers schooled in deconstructionism and for whom sex has been debased to political power mongering. Margaret Smith's encounter with Gerard Manley Hopkins reflects the constraints imposed by religious vows on the poet she follows through his alien terrain. She voluntarily observes the meter of the sonnet form. Readers who can still comprehend why a poet would accept such discipline or imagine a theology that would inspire mortification of the flesh will glimpse innocence in the landscapes and longings of these biographical extrapolations from journals and poems Hopkins didn't consign to the flames. The work seems capable of eliciting tenderness from the toughest postmodernist. Acknowledgement of the literary licentiousness of the present era doesn't compel a reversion to abhorrence of the flesh or formal order that stifles the imagination, as this book makes clear. There is often more passion in restraint than in indulgence and a great deal more imagination. The blush of innocence is born of freedom found only where civility is cultivated. Hopkins' virtue, in particular his vows and his chastity, are not congenial. It helps to notice that his self-denial set him free to serve the humblest needs as a priest. Making religion the domain of specialists is certainly problematic. A heroic demonstration of virtue, like arrogance, doesn't prove anything. Still, astonishment attends the open expression of innocence. In this apocryphal rendition, Hopkins loved a nun of the Poor Clares. She may have loved him. He could not, in good conscience, indulge even his gift for verse in celebration of her physical being. The traces he left of what remains when nearly everything is denied provided sufficient impulse that a hundred years later Margaret Smith could feel it and write powerfully of its impact.
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