The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins Quiz

Answer: sprung rhythm

Gerard Manley Hopkins claimed to have discovered this type of rhythm, which is used to imitate the rhythm of natural speech, in the patterns of English folk songs and the works of Milton and Shakespeare. He used diacritical marks to let readers know which syllables should be stressed when the stress was unclear.

His poetry keeps the number of feet per line consistent across each of his works, while allowing variation in the number of syllables per foot.

Answer: The Sonnets of Desolation

"The Sonnets of Desolation" were written in the 1880s while Hopkins was living in Ireland and struggling with depression. These sonnets are sometimes also called "The Terrible Sonnets". They depict the poet's struggle with religious doubt. Hopkins may have been in the midst of what St. John of the Cross called "The Dark Night of the Soul".

Answer: dark

Here, Hopkins employs alliteration with "feel" and "fell" and "dark" and "day." The poem continues:

"What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light's delay."

This is one of his "terrible sonnets" or "sonnets of desolation" and was written in the 1880s.

Answer: Curtal sonnet

In a curtal sonnet, the Petrarchan sonnet is "curtailed". The usual octave (8-lines) becomes a sestet (6-lines), and the sestet (6-lines) becomes a quatrain (4-lines) with what is called a "tail piece" (a half-line as its last line). Hopkins used the form in his poems "Peace", "Pied Beauty", and "Ash Boughs".

For example, in "Ash Boughs", you have a sestet to start:

"Not of all my eyes see, wandering on the world,
Is anything a milk to the mind so, so sighs deep
Poetry to it, as a tree whose boughs break in the sky.
Say it is ashboughs: whether on a December day and furled
Fast ór they in clammyish lashtender combs creep
Apart wide and new-nestle at heaven most high.
They touch heaven, tabour on it; how their talons sweep"

Then you have the quatrain:

"The smouldering enormous winter welkin! May
Mells blue and snowwhite through them, a fringe and fray
Of greenery: it is old earth's groping towards the steep"

And the quatrain concludes with a half-line:

"Heaven whom she childs us by."

Answer: True

When Hopkins became a Jesuit priest in 1868, feeling his poetry writing to be too self-indulgent, he burned all of his youthful poems and did not write again for some years. In 1874, however, he was encouraged by his superior to begin writing again. His work was not published until thirty years after his death, by his friend Robert Bridges, who edited his verse into a 1918 collection titled "Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins".

Answer: dappled

These lines are from "Pied Beauty", which was written in 1877 in the form of a curtal sonnet. Here Hopkins employs one of his characteristic compound adjectives, "couple-colour." More follow in the next two lines:

"For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings."

Hopkins studied Old English, and his use of compounds in his poetry was modeled on the language's use of compound-nouns.

Answer: The Windhover

The Windhover, or common kestrel, is a type of falcon that can hover in midair while hunting its prey. The poem, which was written in 1877, begins:

"I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding..."

Here Hopkins pulls off triple alliteration in his compound adjective "dapple-dawn-drawn."

Answer: The Wreck of the Deutschland

The poem recounts the shipwreck of the SS Deutschland, which led to the death of five Franciscan nuns, among others. The Falk Laws were enacted in 1873 to 1875 in the German Kingdom of Prussia. Written by the Prussian minister of public worship, they abolished Catholic administration of schools and expelled the Jesuits.

Answer: oil

The "crushed oil" here is most likely olive oil, as olives are "crushed" to make olive oil. Likewise, Christ was emotionally "crushed" by the knowledge of the sacrifice he was about to make during his fitful night in the garden of Gethsemane, which means "oil press" in Hebrew. The poem, "God's Grandeur", continues:

"...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."

Answer: Binsey Poplars

Written in 1879, the poem was inspired by the felling of a row of poplars near the town of Binsey. It begins:

"My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank."

A handwritten draft of this poem has been preserved by Bodleian Library at Oxford University.

Answer: kingfishers

"As Kingfishers Catch Fire" continues:

"As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves - goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came."

Once again, Hopkins's fondness for alliteration is apparent. According to Norman MacKenzie, this poem was likely written in the spring of 1877 when Hopkins was in St. Beuno's and wrote several sonnets in pastoral Wales.

Answer: William Wordsworth

"The child is father to the man" is a line from William Wordsworth's poem "My heart leaps up". Hopkins is unconvinced:

"Suck any sense from that who can:
'The child is father to the man.'"

For the last five years of his life, Hopkins served as a classics professor at University College Dublin. He died in 1889.

Answer: carrion

The poem continues:

"Not untwist - slack they may be - these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?"

"Carrion Comfort" is one of the poems where the reader can see Hopkins struggling with his depression. The poet died of typhoid fever and is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery.

Answer: lush

The poem continues:

"Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling."

Hopkins derived the idea of "inscape," the unique inner nature of a person or object in a poem, from the ideas of Duns Scotus, a medieval philosopher.

Answer: Holy Ghost

These lines come from "God's Grandeur". Hopkins has detailed the ugliness of the fallen world, where "all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; / And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell," but he ends his poem with a note of hope:

"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."

The Holy Ghost is often symbolized as a dove, thus the metaphor of wings. The image of the Holy Ghost brooding over the bent world calls to mind Genesis 1:2-3: "And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters" (KJV).