Poet, priest, prophet

Too often we forget the powers of the imagination. Stuck in traffic or in a supermarket aisle, the visionary side slips away. The world seems empty, and every object hopelessly ordinary -- even that bird you saw in the dawn sky becomes unimpressive. Just a stupid bird. But then, of that bird, someone else might declare: “I caught this morning morning’s minion, king- / dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon.”

For Gerard Manley Hopkins, who wrote this in “The Windhover,” nature wasn’t stupid or ordinary. To those who didn’t find meaning in the world, Hopkins countered that all things presented “News of God, if only one were willing to pay things the attention they ask for,” writes Paul Mariani in his splendid biography, “Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life.”

Mariani strives for objectivity, though his language is personal, impassioned, and his choice of tense -- the present -- is startling: “Hopkins returns to Oxford. . . . That same evening, he writes his parents . . . with the news that he is going over to the Catholic Church. . . .Their answers, he writes [John Henry] Newman at once, are terrible. . . .They have begged him at least to wait until he takes his degree eight months from now. But that is no longer a viable option. Hopkins is already a Catholic in his heart. . . . “

The present tense immerses us in Hopkins’ world, conveying the urgency he felt, like many young men of his generation, at leaving the Church of England to become a Roman Catholic. Hopkins’ family was horrified. Born in 1844, Hopkins became a Catholic in 1866 while at Balliol College, Oxford. His father thought his son was simply engaging in hotheaded rebellion. His mother pleaded in a letter: “O Gerard my darling boy are you indeed gone from me?”

The book’s early sections are heady, filled with intimate details of a poet whose sprung rhythms and emphasis on inscape -- the “thisness” of objects -- make him a precursor of 20th century verse. Nicknamed Skin (a play on his last name), the young Hopkins was a hotshot in Greek, argumentative, a little too righteous. Consider his family’s motto: “Esse quam videri” (to be, not to seem). No Hamlet-like indecision there.

Though he had sworn off writing poetry after becoming a Catholic (he entered the Society of Jesus in 1868), Hopkins broke his silence to commemorate a shipwreck in 1875. The book’s first half culminates with the writing of “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” Mariani is at his best here, taking us into the act of composition and showing how the shipwreck affected Hopkins on a deeply personal level. The deaths of five German nuns among the passengers, he realized, were an act of submission to God’s will like his own: “I did say yes / O at lightning and lashed rod; / Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess / Thy terror, O Christ, O God.”

“Wreck,” Mariani says, changed poetry. And yet, the poem was rejected by a Jesuit periodical; so was another later shipwreck poem, “The Loss of the Eurydice,” even though its narrative was far more conventional than “Wreck.” Until his death in 1889, his poetry stayed a private affair (a published edition appeared in 1918, thanks to his friend, poet Robert Bridges). Hopkins continued to write, believing that his best days were still ahead and struggling between the desire to have his talent recognized and the humility of his vocation. Ensuing section titles -- “The War Within,” for instance -- suggest how he struggled with his duties, his teaching assignments (his loneliest, final posts were in Ireland) and the relentless pace of it all. The view that he was a poor instructor, though, found in other biographies, is unfair. What teacher hasn’t complained about the grind of grading exams? Mariani shows how Hopkins worked with great care, sometimes with a wet towel around his head to ease his migraines.

Hopkins died of typhus, and it is terrible to read one of his last poems, “Justus quidem tu es, Domine,” because it suggests he had no sense of his accomplishment: “. . . birds build -- but not I build; no, but strain, / Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes. / Mine, o thou lord of life, send my roots rain.”

Mariani doesn’t end on defeat; in a coda he describes Bridges’ preservation efforts, a plaque installed in 1975 at Westminster Cathedral to honor Hopkins and Hart Crane’s reaction to reading Hopkins in 1928. Crane was “willing to pay a month’s rent” for a book of Hopkins, Mariani says, unable to get over how words could “come so near a transfiguration into pure musical notation . . . What daring!” If only Hopkins could have known.

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nick.owchar@latimes.com