I am going to focus on the importance that religion had in William Blake and Gerard Hopkins’ life and try to relate it through a poem by each of these, let us call them, artists, the first a Romantic author and the second a Victorian. Anyway, before starting to talk about these two poets, it would be pertinent to know a little bit about their lives so that a better understanding of the paper could be achieved.

 

William Blake:

 

William Blake was an English poet, painter and engraver who was born 1759 and died and died in 1827 in London, England. Before studying at the Royal Academy of Art, William Blake studied painting and became and apprenticed, working along with John Basire. He began working as an engraver showing since very early his boundless imagination and a certain tendency over the mystic and imaginary world. In fact, al his work is rather imaginative and strange since it is full of images and symbolisms quite hard to interpret. There is a narrow relation between his visual works and his literary creation. He married an illiterate woman called Catherine Boucher in 1782 and taught her to write. She also helped him with his paintings. Blake reached the high point of his career in 1787, when he began to put into practice a new printing system for his own poems known as “illuminated printings”. He engraved himself various designs which bore a relation to his poems, often accompanied with these illustrations. Even though his efforts, his poetry was not enough to make a living and, as many artists, he began to be well recognized after his dead. 

 

Gerard Manley Hopkins:

 

He was born in 1844 in Stratford, Essex, England and died in 1889 in Dublin, Ireland. He was a Jesuit priest and a poet who since very young had been encouraged by his father to write poetry. He studied at Balliol College, Oxford from 1863 to 1867, where he became Catholic and burned all the poems he had written since then. From 1872 to 1877 studied theology at St. Bueno’s, Wales, where he learned Welsh. “The Wreck of Deutschland”, written in 1875, was his first masterpiece. He used techniques that would improve later on. His structure of the verse, which he called “sprung rhythm” because of its abruptness in contrast to the typical verse in the poetry of the time, is very similar to the accents of speech. In 1877 Hopkins became a Jesuit and acted as a preacher and also worked as a Greek and Latin teacher in England and Scotland until he became Greek Literature teacher at University College Dublin. In Ireland he became writing some poems in which he describes his spiritual tediousness. He barely published poems during his lifetime; his poems were mainly read by his friends. He was not well recognized until his friend Robert Bridges (1844-1930) began publishing Hopkins’ poems in 1918.

 

Once we know a little bit about their lives let us analyze a poem, first by William Blake and later on the poem by Gerard Hopkins:

 

THE LAMB by WILLIAM BLAKE

Little Lamb who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life and bid thee feed
By the stream and o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing whooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice.
Little Lamb who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

Little Lamb I'll tell thee,
Little Lamb I'll tell thee;
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a lamb.
He is meek and he is mild;
He became a little child.
I a child and thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
Little Lamb God bless thee.

 

(Poem extracted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lamb)

 

This poem by William Blake was first published in 1789 in his poetry book “Songs of Innocence”. This book, along with another book called “Songs of Experience” formed a poetry collection in which Blake expressed many of his worries such as slavery, religion, children’s exploitation, politics, and so on.  It is divided into two stanzas composed by ten verses and 6 to 7 syllables each. The rhyme pattern used in this poem is AAAABBCCAA /AADEFFEDAA. The poem is in 1st person singular and is written as if the narrator was talking to a second person present in the poem but who does not speak. As in the great majority of William Blake’s poems the way it is written and composed makes the poem perfect to be sung, and, in fact, it has been made into a song by Vaughan Williams and also set to music by Sir John Tavener.

This poem begins with a child asking to a lamb “who made thee?” He continues asking to the lamb if he knows who did give it life and who the one who feeds it is. If we have read something about William Blake we will immediately know that he refers, most probably, to God. In line 6 the child refers to the lamb’s fur as “clothing of delight” and more concretely to the lamb’s white wool as “softest clothing whooly bright”. The poem as a whole is structured as the question in the first stanza and the answer in the second stanza. In the first one we are introduced to a child asking simple questions but later the poem becomes in a certain way more philosophical concerning theories about life and creation when the child begins to answer to his own questions. He begins to answer by saying “Little Lamb I’ll tell thee” and then states that its creator “is called by thy name”. At this very point of the poem is when we realize who made the lamb, it is God. There is here a direct reference to Jesus Christ since he is very commonly known as The Lamb of God. It is then God who made him, as well as the child. At the beginning of the poem we do not know who is addressing to the lamb, but it is in line 17 where we realize it is a child when we read “I a child and thou a lamb”.

In my opinion, this poem seems to be mainly about God’s love show in his care for the lamb and the child, using the paradox that God came back as a lamb and a child referring clearly to Jesus Christ. It also embodies, in a certain way, every human’s curiosities about creation and the origins of human existence since the child questions the lamb about its nature and also its creation.

 

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.

 

(Poem extracted from http://www.dundee.ac.uk/english/wics/gmh/gmh4.htm#p6)

 

This poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins was written in 1877. This sonnet is made up of two stanzas; the first one composed by eight verses and the second one by 6 with 10 syllables almost every line. The rhyme scheme used is ABBAABBA / CDCDCD. The poem is not in a “sprung rhythm”, which he invented and from which Hopkins is so famous, it varies somewhat from the iambic pentameter lines of the conventional sonnet. It has a heavy alliteration and the use of the internal rhyme makes it also, as in many of Blake’s poems, perfect to be a song.

The poem begins with a description of the natural world in which the presence of God is throughout. Then he describes the state of human life at that time describing the blind repetitiveness of the industrialization and daily hard work, the “trade” and “toil” as we can read in line 6. It seems that Hopkins tells us that nobody cares about God nowadays due to the work in this metaphor; “the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod”. The foot is like the human being that cannot feel God because his mind is blurred by work, which would be the shoe. Thus, he tries to tell us that even the landscape and nature have been damaged due to industrialization when he says that “the soil Is bare now”. People have prioritized their economic interests over the spiritual and have robbed the beauty in the landscape. In the final six lines is where Gerard Hopkins asserts that even though his contemporaries, or people throughout the world, have caused such a disaster, nature will always heal with God’s help. In a certain way he tells us that God’s power will always increase more than we can imagine, or more than our destructive power. This is seen in lines 11 and 12 where Hopkins writes that this power of God can be contemplated in the way the morning is always waiting on the other side of dark night, or “the black West”. The final image we get of the poem is that of a God who embraces a corrupted world, “bent World”, with his “bright wings” so that it heals and recovers from all the wickedness.

 

COMPARISON BETWEEN BLAKE ANS HOPKINS:

 

William Blake and Gerard Manley Hopkins are two men who since very young have been really close related to religion through their parents. It may seem the contrary but there are some aspects in Blake and Hopkins’ lives that capture our attention due to their similarities. To start with, it would be interesting to mention that both poets’ parents supported and encouraged their artistic abilities and ambitions. This is quite irrelevant but a little bit more interesting is the fact that they both were interested in painting. Two of Hopkins’ brothers became professional painters and as the Victorian Web states, “at one time he wanted to be a painter-poet like D. G. Rossetti […]and he was strongly influenced by the aesthetic theories of Pater and John Ruskin […]” (1). However, Blake’s attempts at painting were more productive than Hopkins’ since his whole work consists of many paintings and engraved drawings. In some way, Blake achieved Hopkins’ dream of becoming a painter-poet since he indeed ended up producing his own paintings and reliefs for poems by him like Songs of Innocence (1789) or Jerusalem (1804-1820). His passion by painting and engraving was such that, at the end of his life, he did not stop his task when he was working on Dante’s Inferno. “Even as he seemed to near death, Blake's central preoccupation was his feverish work on the illustrations to Dante's Inferno; he is said to have spent one of the very last shillings he possessed on a pencil to continue sketching” (2).

But dealing with the religious aspect, it is well known that these two poets had a very deep religious feeling that steeped their poetry and marked their lives. They both were Protestants and so were their parents. It is believed that Blake’s parents belonged to the Moravian Church, “a mainline Protestant denomination […] (whose) religious heritage began in late 14th century Bohemia, now in the Czech Republic, […] (and) places a high premium on Christian unity, personal piety, missions and music” (3). However, Gerard Hopkins’ conception of religion seems to have changed due to the influence of his friend John Henry Newman who had already converted to Roman Catholicism in 1845. What Gerard Hopkins was looking for, as The Victorian Web states, is “a religion which could speak with true authority” (1), that research was what influenced him and made him adopting a new religion. A year before his conversion Hopkins entered the Society of Jesus and became a Jesuit priest. His family did not support his choice but some other people like Newman, of course, encouraged him and he once wrote to him  "I think it is the very thing for you ... Don't call 'the Jesuit discipline hard', it will bring you to heaven" (4). Due to the individualistic and self-indulgent character that poetry had, as Hopkins thought, he ended up burning all his first poems because as a Jesuit he could not allow himself practicing such a self-purposed art. On the other hand, Blake had always been a Protestant but also an “anarchist”, in a certain way, because he was against slavery and racism and wanted all the people to be equal. In fact, he participated in many struggles against power and also supported the French Revolution. He had a very modern and tolerant mind since he was also in favor of sexual equality and against the forced marriages that used to take place at that time. But religious fervor always marked Blake’s poems and life; he even is said that from an early age used to have some spiritual visions, which are believed that “fired his imagination, enabling him to produce his wonderfully colourful and emotive paintings” (5). This may be the reason why William Blake was so interested in painting and the reason why he thankfully did it. But he was also critic with religion, and as we can see in Songs of Experience (1794) he rejected what he thought were oppressive values in the Old Testament and supported the values exposed in the New Testament. He was even sometimes forced “to resort to cloaking social idealism and political statements in Protestnat mystical allegory” (2). In some way, Gerard Hopkins also thought that some aspects of religion were not fair since he adopted another religion and since he finally decided to start writing poems again, even though he once believed that this practice was not permitted in the Jesuit order. He finally arrived at the conclusion that his poetry not necessarily had to conflict with the Jesuit moral, influenced by the Medieval “theologian, philosopher, and logician” (6) Duns Scotus (1265-1308), as the wikipedia website points out.

Taking all this into account and as we have seen in the two poems above, religion was a topic in their poems, be it to criticize some of the most Orthodox aspects of religion, as William Blake did, or to criticize the lack of faith and abandon of religion for work and material purposes, as we have just seen in Hopkins’ poem God’s Grandeur.His poems were alse full of Biblical allusions. However, it is clear that in Blake’s poem The lamb what he does is giving us his personal vision of God, how he conceives God’s love and how he interprets the religion. I think then that, even though these two poets were not contemporaries and were rather different in mind and heart, they both have some aspects which can be related to and which make me think that very deep inside they shared some principles and ideals.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY  AND REFERENCES:

 

-         (1) Glenn Everett, Ph. D. "Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Brief Biography" The Victorian Web.  15 Jan 2008, <http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/hopkins/hopkins12.html 3 January 2008>

-         (2)"William Blake." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 13 Jan 2008, 04:32 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 15 Jan 2008 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=William_Blake&oldid=183980079>.

-         (3) "Moravian Church." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 3 Jan 2008, 23:15 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 17 Jan 2008 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Moravian_Church&oldid=181983443>.

-         (4) Beth Randall, 1996 “Gerard Manley Hopkins”, 2 Jan 2008, http://www.mcs.drexel.edu/~gbrandal/Illum_html/Hopkins.html.

-         (5) “The Revolutionary Mysticism of William Blake”, 7 Jan 2008 <http://www.redflag.org.uk/frontline/six/06blake.html>

-         (6) "Duns Scotus." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 16 Jan 2008, 00:37 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 17 Jan 2008 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Duns_Scotus&oldid=184614364>.

 

-         "Gerard Manley Hopkins." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 14 Jan 2008, 04:32 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 14 Jan 2008 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gerard_Manley_Hopkins&oldid=184196995>.

-         "The Lamb." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 16 Nov 2007, 20:12 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 16 Jan 2008 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Lamb&oldid=171949539>.

-         R.J.C. Watt. “Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins” University of Dundee. 10 Jan 2008,  <http://www.dundee.ac.uk/english/wics/gmh/gmh4.htm#p6>

-         “Illuminated Printing and Other Illustrated Books, 1789-1792” The William Blake Archive .Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick and Joseph Wiscomi  2 Jan 2008, <http://www.blakearchive.org/saxon/servlet/SaxonServlet?source=/blake/documents/biography.xml&style=blake/shared/styles/wba.xsl&targ_div=d3&targ_pict=1&render=text&clear-stylesheet-cache=yes>