Hopkins to Bridges, December 11, 1886 :  

I mean to enclose my long sonnet, the longest I still say, ever made: longest by its own length, namely by the length of its lines: for any thing: can be made long by eking, by taking, by trains, tails. and flounces.... Of this long sonnet above all remember what applies to all my verse, that it is, as living art should be, made for performance and that its performance is not reading with the eye but loud, leisurely, poetical (not rhetorical) recitation. This sonnet shd. be almost sung: it is most carefully timed in tempo rubato.[1]

No study of Hopkins would be complete without a discussion of this poem, Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves, of which F.R. Leavis once said that “if it represents a less difficult undertaking than The Windhover, it is more indubitably a complete success. It is one of the finest things that he ever did.”[2] Yet Hopkins ’s postulate is hardly possible; Harold Whitehall explains why:

What critical standards can contemporary (critical) experience suggest for verse written by a metrical virtuoso for virtuosic performance aloud? … The generations of easy-to-read poets have taken their inevitable toll.[3]

This reservation is made to account for limitations in the analysis of this sonnet. The present study has to, however, include even an imperfect discussion of Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves, as its relevance to aestheticism and asceticism in Hopkins is unquestionable. As early as in 1926, I.A. Richards found this poem to be an expression of “asceticism which fails to reach ecstasy” of beauty.[4] The importance of this sonnet is “heightened” by the time in which it was completed: at the very beginning of the 1885 crisis (1884 according to Peters[5]; Gardner [6] places it a year later). Although this poem is not usually referred to as one of the “terrible” ones ,it is clearly a portent of the coming of desolation. In a way it is “terrible” – it shares some of its imagery with other 1885 sonnets (e.g. All life death does end and each day dies with sleep); yet it can be argued that there is still some ascetic discipline and assertion left. According to David Downes, Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves “amounts almost to a spiritual exercise” and “is a good example of the Ignatian exercise poeticized.”[7] This approach, however, which seems to insist that there is nothing wrong at this stage in Hopkins , would be probably rejected by most commentators on this poem. Whatever could be the evaluation of Hopkins’s attitude presented in Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves the state of mind of the poet is of particular interest: this is neither the affirmative “middle Hopkins”[8] of his “nature poems” nor the despairing “wretch” of the original “terrible sonnets,” nor the mature philosopher of Heraclitean Fire. So much for what he is not. The present chapter will try to establish some more positive statements on the form taken by Hopkins ’s ascetic aestheticism in one of his richest works. It begins:

Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, vaulty,

voluminous, ... stupendous

Evening strains to be time’s vast, womb-of-all,

home-of-all, hearse-of-all night.  

The passage from evening to night described in this fragment emphasizes the gradual nature of this process, using both meaning and form. The transition of evening is amplified by the changes of the initial sound in 1. 1: e-e-i-ə-v-v-…-s. The process is slow at first, then it accelerates, and the sequence of seven adjectives ends with one containing a new initial sound; thus the effect of final change in the aspect of the evening is preserved. According to F.R. Leavis,

This progression is associated with, and hardly distinguishable from, the development of meaning in the sequence of adjectives: evening is first sweetly solemn, serene, etherealizing and harmonizing, then becomes less tranquilizing and more awful, and finally ends in the blackness of night.[9]

Typically for Hopkins, this transition is full of tension: evening’s inscape becomes that of night in a painful metamorphosis. Slowly, the evening achieves qualities compatible with those of the night: “vault” has a well-known; Freudian association with the womb: “home” can be modified by all three final adjectives of l. 1. The modifiers of “night” symbolize, as Morton Zabel has remarked, “man’s life-cycle”[10] and those of “evening” also in a way correspond to the same process. One might speculate further on the “earnestness” of childhood. the evolution of the self to the “stupendous” realisation of the immortality of the soul (the “heart’s clarion” in Heraclitean Fire). Finally, “vaulty, voluminous, stupendous” of the evening become “vast” (the common quality of the three adjectives) in the night. This last quality of the night, vastness, appealed to another 19th century poet already mentioned in this study: after all, Baudelaire’s “ténébreuse et profonde unité” of sensations is “vaste comme la nuit.”[11] 

The serene beauty of the evening (the hit parade of its poetic representations is probably headed by Milton ’s Il Penseroso[12], Collins’s Ode to Evening[13], and Wordsworth’s It is a Beauteous Evening[14]) gives way to a “stupendous,” or formidable and absolute night. Yet the beauty remains in these two lines and even more so in the next two. I.A. Richards could not “refrain from pointing to marvellous third and fourth lines. They seem to me to anticipate the descriptions we hope our contemporary poets will soon write. Such synaesthesis has tempted several of them, but this is, I believe, the supreme example.”[15]

Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, her

wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height

Waste: her earliest stars, earl-stars, stars principal,

overbend us

Fire-featuring heaven.

The conventional image is that of the day receding before the night, which is the active element of the process. Hopkins , on the contrary, gives an idea of the active efforts of the evening, which strains, undergoes a change, to become night; this change is an immanent quality of the evening. Hopkins ’s mastery of the sound enhances the “strange beauty of the effect,” which “justifies sprung rhythm as practical and successful art.”[16]

His art is even more successful in the lines quoted above. Rhyme, internal rhyme, repetition, alliteration, assonance, grammatical similarity, pun – all combine to make this fragment one of the most poetic in English verse. They express a very Hopkinsean image of contrast-based effect. Here, “hornlight” (crescent moon) and “hoarlight” (stars) “heighten” the blackness of the night. Again, a reversion of the natural perception can be noticed: usually, an observer’s attention is drawn by the light (one of Hopkins ’s own poems begins with an ecstatic “Look at the stars! Look, look up at the skies!”); here. the “beholder” is looking, contrary to the intuitive human behaviour, at the darkness, and not at the warm light of the moon or the cold starshine. This emphasizes the immensity of the Universe; Hopkins ’s unusual perception differentiates the moon’s proximity (“fond yellow”) from the remoteness of the stars (“wild hollow”). The horn of the crescent is “wound,” or blown, in the direction of  the west: the hollow starlit vault of the night echoes with its summons for the Riders of the Apocalypse (c.f. Andromeda: “but she now hears roar / A wilder beast from West than all were.” It is interesting that the two poems by Hopkins which so clearly use mythological concepts should both carry this apocalyptic image). The beast-like quality of the starlight is strengthened by its being called “wild” and “hoary” - the reference probably not so much to a wolf as to Grendel of Beowulf, who comes to attack by night. The Anglo-Saxon context is also visible in Hopkins ’s elaborate pun in 1. 4. “Earliest” becomes (again, a gradual transition) “earl” (prince) and, in turn, “principal.” Astronomically speaking, the earliest stars are principal: their light is strongest, so they can be visible already at the end of the evening. They hang above, outlining the vault of the “fire-featuring heaven:”

For earth her being has unbound,

her dapple is at an end, as-

tray or aswarm, all throughter, in throngs; self

in self steeped and pashed - quite

Disremembering, dismembering all now.

The falling night is now clearly more than the end of a particular day. It is the end of the earth (“unbound” – c.f. The Wreck of the Deutschland: “Thou hast bound bones and veins in me”), of Nature. Its “piedness,” the chief source of its beauty, blends into one: colours and qualities mingle with each other (“throughter”). Nature is “dismembering” – decaying. This symbolism of death reminds irresistibly of a later, “terrible” sonnet, which brings about - though not as clearly as this one - the idea of “carrion.” This decaying wasteland (which the once - individualised. beautiful world has become) is so unusual for Hopkins that his reader is by now under an impression that Hopkins must have read French symbolists (his associations with Fleurs du mal has already been suggested here). Yet of course there is nothing to prove it; quite on the contrary, his exchange of literary letters with Bridges does not contain a single reference to Baudelaire or to anyone else of this kind. This can have only one reason: in his own, paradoxically heartening way, Hopkins himself invented decadent poetry – at least in this one sonnet of 1884/85. The appearance of the Cumean Sibyl in this poem (as stated by W.H. Gardner[17]) is not unlike a more famous part played by the same oracle in T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land: in ll. 10-11 of his sonnet (“let life, waned, ah let life wind off her once skeined stained veind variety”). Hopkins refers to the same quandary of the Sibyl as does Eliot in his motto to his arch-modernist poem.

Hopkins ’s heart “rounds” – warns him of the doom brought about by the night. The only shape contrasting with its blackness is that of trees, no longer “aspens dear,” of an earlier poem – the “dragonish,” “beak-leaved” aspect of the “boughs” completes the apocalyptic image. Apocalyptic or satanic: F.R. Leavis, in his analysis of this poem[18], quotes Eliot’s Dante: “Hell … is a state which can only be thought of, and perhaps only experienced, by the projection of sensory images.”[19] This “projection,” in its slightly different meaning, is used here: the shape of the looming trees is projected against the shadow of the night – which last phrase, if placed within inverted commas, would connote immediately with Blake’s vision of “decadent” experience.[20]

Indeed, Hopkins is now a long way from the joyous affirmation of his nature poems. On the other hand, there is an affinity with the devilish quality of the bird in The Windhover as described in Chapter 1 of the present study. The Adversary’s “dangerous” presence, inscape, is actualized, instressed, in Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves. 

The apocalyptic vision resolves itself in the Day of Judgement, a Dies irae rather than the glorious transubstantiation of human “ash” into “immortal diamond” that was discussed in Chapter 3. It is the time of the merciless and Holocaust-like selection (“part, pen, pack” of beings – humans, but also qualities, values, sensations – into

two flocks, two folds – black, white;

right, wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind

But these two.

This is a terrible realisation for Hopkins . His world of individual variety, contrast. piedness. is doomed to become an arbitrary and binary system of “Yea, yea; nay, nay.”[21] In this way the sense of defeat, mentioned by I.A. Richards in his study of this poem,[22] may be true. On the one hand, Hopkins is conscious of Nature’s beauty in variety: on the other, he is painfully aware of its mortality (this has been mentioned before here) and of the final Evaluation, where the only contrast permitted is the ultimate one between right and wrong. Though the poem is sombrely black-and-white, the thoughts which “against thoughts in groans grind” are those of an aesthete – to be more precise, a dejected (decadent?) ascetic aesthete. He knows the “Mortal Beauty,” he knows its end: and the interpretation of this knowledge has for the first time appeared to him as jarring. Hopkins ’s agony in basically aesthetically-motivated: in order to achieve “God’s better beauty, grace,” one has to agree to forsake, in the end, the dazzling variety of the world’s contrasting patches of colour, quality, nature. In this respect, this poem is far darker, more terrible, than the later “carrion” sonnets of 1885. Also, of the poems of this period, only this first one can be compared to modern, or modernist, poetry. 

Indeed, the dark mood of Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves, and especially its truly terrible last line:

…selfwrung, selfstrung. sheathe- and

shelterless, thoughts against thoughts in groans grind,

together with the image, or symbol, of decay earlier in the poem, strengthen the association of the sonnet with The Waste Land. The “thoughts” which “grind” against each other irresistibly suggest the sound of dry stones rubbed together – the dominating sound in “What the Thunder Said:”

Here is no water but only rock

Rock and no water and the sandy road[23]

Both poems speak of barrenness; Eliot’s of that of civilisation, Hopkins ’s of that of individual and personal despair. At the same time, Hopkins ’s symbol of the falling night carries general meanings as well and as such becomes surprisingly close to that of Eliot.

Yet there is a difference, obviously, between Hopkins and Eliot in their treatment of the Salvation. In the outcome of The Waste Land, “salvation,” according to Daiches, “is problematical.”[24] If it exists, it might take the form of nihilistic “Shantih shantih shantih.”[25] [26]. In Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves, Hopkins does not for a moment doubt the Salvation. It is the result of the Salvation, surprisingly, that he fears. His is an individual agony of an aesthete, who, accepting the End, is nevertheless grieved by the lost of God’s own making, his beloved “mortal beauty.” This might be combined with the fear that God might lose a part of His Divinity when “swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim” become “bleared” and blurred into the ultimate distinction between black and white.

In a way. this extreme poem sheds new light on the aesthetic/ascetic balance in Hopkins ’s philosophy. It finally negates the too-common belief that this dichotomy should be compatible with that of good and evil in Hopkins . Some critics maintained that Hopkins felt compelled to impose asceticism on aestheticism, and that he had a sense of guilt because of his “succumbing” to the latter (early lay criticism is an example of such an approach). Other commentators would insist that, on the contrary, aestheticism was Hopkins ’s fundamental nature (and as such, good) while asceticism was a bizarre limitation, a result of his “Catholic guilt” and his Jesuit vows. Both views, equally unsatisfying, seem to be irrelevant when confronted with the poet’s suffering as presented in Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves. It can be clearly seen from this sonnet that the relation between this two aspects of Hopkins ’s oeuvre is much more complicated. The term “ascetic aestheticism” has already been applied here in relation to a later poem, Heraclitean Fire, separated from the one here discussed by the crucial period of crisis. In the analysis of the poem of 1888, it has been stated that the fusion of the two poles of Hopkins ’s philosophy seems to have matured finally in his last nature poem. This belief is still maintained. 

In fact, Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves constitutes a crucial step on the way to this fusion. Hopkins persuades himself (for his poetry was primarily egotistic and egoistic - of himself and for himself) and his critics that the two attitudes are perfectly compatible: that when occurring in a man full of joy, they both bring affirmation and grace to the same degree, in unison, not in conflict – that, also, when existing in a man in desolation, they equally make his suffering harder. Both may be sources of further grief. Hopkins ’s state of mind at the composition of this sonnet does not need any other description (unconscious or conscious conflict, incompatible antitheses, etc.) than that of Ignatius’ desolation,[26] already discussed in Chapter 1. This feeling, it must be stressed, does not result from the conflict between aestheticism and asceticism. If it did, the Franciscanesque nature poems would be basically insincere and irrelevant. Other, simpler causes could have contributed to the feeling of desolation. Graham Storey suggests some which occurred in 1884:

Hopkins ’s main tasks (at University College , Dublin ) were to conduct six examinations a year, of up to 500 candidates a time, and to take classes in Latin and Greek. For a man of his weak health and intense scrupulosity, the load of examining was crushing. It caused him severe eye-strain and drove him at times to near-prostration.[27]

In April 1884, Hopkins complained to Bridges that he had had “a deep fit of nervous prostration: I did not know but I was dying.”[28] In July the same year, he explained to his friend:

The weakness I am suffering from - it is that only, nervous weakness (or perhaps I ought not to say nervous at all, for I am not in any unusual way nervous in the common understanding of the word) - continues and I see no ground for thinking I can, for a long time to come, get notably better of it.[29]

As this letter also makes allusion to Bridges’s recent betrothal, adding that “the reason of course why I like men to marry is that a single life is difficult, not altogether a natural life,”[30] perhaps this consequence of his vows was disturbing the forty-year-old poet. 

Another reason for Hopkins ’s crisis in that period was the fact that, for the first time in his life, he seriously suffered from writer’s block and uncertainty about his talent. He later called himself “Time’s eunuch,” referring first of all, but perhaps not solely, to the fear of never being able to write anymore. Heraclitean Fire of 1888 proved this fear to be unfounded; at the time of Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves, however, Hopkins must have felt a great tension; John Robinson insists that work on this sonnet was often interrupted for considerable periods of time.[31]

Yet the strength of this poem may lie precisely in the strain and time it took to be achieved. It differs from later “inspirations unbidden” in its elaborateness and originality of form, unsurpassed even by Hopkins himself. In this sense at least it represents not a “conflict (between priest and poet) temporarily resolved through a stoic acceptance of sacrifice,” nor a manifestation of “an asceticism which fails to reach ecstasy and accepts the failure,” as Richards saw it.[32] The tension was probably on another plane. If “ Hopkins ’s poems are … poems of defeat,”[33] it is in spite of, rather than because of, his unique combination of asceticism and aestheticism.