Gerard Manley Hopkins Trivia Quiz

Answer: Oxford

Hopkins won a poetry prize in 1860 while studying at Highgate School. None of this early work however has survived. Later he read classics at Balliol College, Oxford, from 1863-1867. He became known as 'the Star of Balliol' after he got a first. He was very much influenced by Cardinal Newman and the Oxford Movement. He changed his religion and became a Roman Catholic in 1866.

Answer: Shipwreck

Hopkins believed he could not combine his vocation with poetry and burned most of his work on entering the religious life. He did not return to writing until 1875, when his superior suggested it as an outlet for his depression. He wrote 'The Wreck of the Deutschland' in memory of 157 victims of a shipwreck on the Thames. It was very unpopular and considered too obscure.

Answer: Farrier

The poem shows us two sides to Hopkins. Firstly, the religious man giving comfort and the Last Rites to a parishioner who was suffering from dreadful diseases. Secondly the human side, 'Thy tears touched my heart'. Hopkins chose to remember Felix as a healthy strong man in the forge when he 'didst fettle for the great grey horse his bright and battering sandal'.
The poem was written in Lancashire in a small, poor town where Hopkins was working on parish duty.

Answer: Spring

Hopkins had an artist's eye and loved nature. The octet is a glorious celebration of Spring.
'The glassy peartree leaves and blooms,
they brush the descending blue'.
The sestet provides a prayer to Christ to protect the innocence of young people still in the springtime of their lives.

Answer: Scotland

Hopkins made a trip to the Scottish Highlands. This delightful little poem shows us his wonderful control of language as he captures the colour, texture, movement and music of a mountain stream.
'The darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down.
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.'

Answer: Christ

The subtitle is 'To Christ Our Lord'.
This is a complex poem which shows us Hopkins love of intricate imagery and compression. It opens with a description of a falcon(windhover) in flight in the dawn sky. Hopkins is awestruck by the bird's mastery of flight and its environment.
'Kingdom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon'.
His thoughts move then to Christ whose achievements and glory are a billion times greater than the falcon.

Answer: TheTerrible Sonnets

They explore Hopkins' attitudes to God, his despair, and his desolation. He feels 'pitched past pitch of grief'; that God does not hear him 'Mary Mother of us all where is thy relief'?; his life is worthless 'time's eunuch'. Yet at the end comes his humble prayer 'O Thou Lord of Life send my roots rain'.

Answer: Unemployment

This was one of his last poems and dates from the same time as the 'Terrible Sonnets'. It was written in Ireland, where he was most unhappy. Hopkins was essentially a patriotic Englishman and could not understand Irish nationalism or the hostility of some Irishmen to England.

Answer: Inscape

Just take a look at this for a description of white clouds on a bright breezy day.
'Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, flaunt forth, then chevy on
An air built thoroughfare: heaven's roysterers'.
from Nature is a Heracletan Fire.

Answer: Welsh

Hopkins learned Welsh especialy poetry. Cynghanedd, an arrangement of sounds in a line, fascinated him. This appeared most close to the rhythm of everyday speech and depended for its success on repeating sounds.
'Degged with dew dappled with dew are the groins of the braes
That the brook treads through'.
Sources: 'The Wordsworth Companion to Literature in English' by Ousby.
'New Discovery' by Murray.