Hopeful Hopkins by Desmond Egan (review)

Abstract

Hopeful Hopkins, Desmond Egan (Newbridge: Goldsmith Press, 2017), 120 pages. What Desmond Egan brings to bear on Hopkins criticism is a refreshing, distinctively poetic, aesthetic lens, an approach and a reading which make the work alive and which may hope to make it more widely known and better understood. The first chapter opens with an epigraph from the great Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner: ‘Darkness can only be perceived by an eye which was created for light’. There is a story about Rahner that, every time he sat down to write, he contemplated three words written in large letters above his desk: ‘Nothing before Kant’. For him, in his theology the subjectivity of the stating subject must be taken seriously and fully accounted for. This is very apt for Hopkins, whose focus is the climate of the seasons of the heart, our ‘being indoors’. It is also apt that Rahner should echo Keats’s concept of ‘negative capability’, the capacity to live with uncomfortable questions and painful feelings without sinking into clinical depression. Is a tendency to sadness ‘incompatible with inner peace’, this first chapter asks. For Egan, supposedly depressive artists such as Kafka, Bergman, Becket or Brian Bourke exemplify the truth that ‘a tragic sense is by no means incompatible with a positive disposition’. Thus, although the poet’s time in Ireland was partly miserable, he nevertheless wrote twenty-eight poems in that period. For the author, the so-called sonnets of desolation are sonnets of hope, not despair. He argues cogently and, for me at least, persuasively that the sickly Hopkins was far from being a nervous wreck. Clearly the poet experienced what might be called Prufrockesque moments of self-doubt, but examples of his sense of humour can be uncovered as well. The author sets out to redress an incomplete perception of Hopkins, whose aliveness to the resources of language and whose metrical complexity in composition imply imaginative energy and inner spiritual space. A unifying thread in what is a collection of eight essays is the idea that poets, and Hopkins in particular, centre on what is concrete and individual, on the specifics of subjectivity, ‘the sensuous and the precise’, what Hopkins speaks of as inscape, without overlooking the objective thematic focus of the work and the inspiration of a topic which so preoccupies this poet, the humanity of Christ. One critic, Noel Barber SJ, has praised Egan’s reading of ‘As kingfishers Autumn 2018: Book Reviews Studies • volume 107 • number 427 395 catch fire’ as ‘the best study of that poem I have seen’. This poem contains the great cri de coeur, ‘what I do is me, for that I came’. That clarity of calling, it might be said, echoes something of Desmond Egan’s own sense of mission to redress the balance between the dark sonnets and the vitality and imaginative energy of Hopkins’s work as a whole. A view of the poet as the depressed, repressed prophet of doom and gloom is one-sided, hence Egan’s title and focus on ‘hopeful Hopkins’. It takes a poet to know a poet, as Robert Smart puts it in his heartwarming introduction, and Egan’s argument is wellsupported from the evidence of the poet’s life and poetic writing. His aliveness to the materiality of poetry is responsive to the exuberance of Hopkins’s images from nature and the metaphoric weight they carry. The metaphors are obvious enough, but Egan is alive to what might be called the metonymic dimension and draws the reader’s attention to the features of punctuation that keep the movement going, aided – in the case of ‘As kingfishers catch fire’ – by the twenty verbs that, as Egan notices with poetic alertness, mean that ‘every image is one of movement’. Egan is concerned not just to teach a subject but to evoke interest in the musicality and metaphoric layers of the poetic craft and art. Matisse said of his paintings that his aim was ‘to evoke and not to inform’. Like C S Lewis’s definition of a good book as one that invites good reading, Hopkins requires time to ‘get’ him; he is, in that sense, an acquired taste. Something similar...