Gerard Manley Hopkins, an Environmentalist Poet with a Trinitarian Dimension and Even Trinitarian Humor

Abstract

Abstract Hopkins’s environmental poem “Ribblesdale” (1882) shows his creative processes as it celebrates nature and language. It even visualizes God the Father creating the world as a fisherman casting his line and making the River Ribble flow through Lancashire—a river beautiful at Hopkins’s Stonyhurst College, but downriver, treeless and grassless, polluted and surrounded by factories. As a child and young man, Hopkins loved nature, later cherishing even nature’s shapes and selfhood and celebrating nature in his poems. But he grieved for the environment, presenting the earth as a huge nest on which a very large Holy Ghost still sits, warming and protecting her earth-egg. Hopkins mourns earth’s loss of trees and grass, of a clear sky, of “a rural scene,” even of “the weeds and the wilderness.” And Christ, as a human, was implicated in this loss, and as human was just a “Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood.” Yet, as Trinitarian God, he is an “immortal diamond” and, grandly, offers and shares this bright sparkling life with his fellow humans. Such is Gerard Manley Hopkins, lover of God and God’s earth—and grieving environmentalist poet.