For Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Pied Beauty
Today is the feast day of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus.
In his honor, here are the words of the 19th century Jesuit priest-poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose heroism was in his quietly dealing with his own, unique oddities in a way that was for the greater glory of God.
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
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Nice, Mark.
“Ad majorem Dei gloriam”
Or was so commonly seen: AMDG
Mark, you have been an instrument of Grace.
Hopkins’s primary vocation (what he was “inscaped” for) was to be a poet, not a priest–or, at least, not the kind of priest that the English Jesuits were in the 19th century.
Most modern scholars of Hopkins’s poetry agree that his “vocation” was NOT to be as “quiet” as Jesuit restrictions on the exercise of his gifts required him to be. His priestly vocation limited his poetic output, which caused him a great deal of pain.
Of course, if the author of A Queer Chivalry is correct, his muse required that amount of pain in order to be productive.
Hopkins is a very great English poet–perhaps the greatest, after Shakespeare and Keats–but his is no model for younger poets to follow. I also think that, if a young British or American artist or poet tried to emulate him today, both in the fashioning of verse and in patterning a life, he would be driven very close to insanity.
Don’t you think that is true for most poetry — that the poets have to be unique, and imitation ends up with insanity?
The great ones have to be “unique,” yes, and they are, in a sense, chosen; I think that Hopkins mistook what he was “chosen” for at a very early age–thinking that he HAD to be a priest.
Frankly, I love this poet too much to criticise his choices, which DID, of course, eventually, somehow, help him to produce some of the greatest religous and “nature” poetry of the English language. However, I will also have to admit that I think that his radical suppression of his natural sexual orientation produced a religious poetry that isn’t as radically honest as it could have been.
If you read his Journals and his confessional notes,however, you can easily tell that he knew himself quite well–much better than his earlier biographers were willing to admit. Hopkins is the very model of what a “queer saint” should look like, but a “queer saint” should REQUIRE the open embrace of the WHOLE of himself by his Church.