Gerard Manley Hopkins

Mr. Arnold,
I think you have basically identified the power of the universe with your last quotation from “Dover Beach”. Why don’t you just come out and say that this is an example of God’s grandeur? I think God is the primary reason why we need to appreciate nature and be “green” as you call it today. Now, can anyone think of another writer from this period who appreciated God’s grandeur more than me? And if you want a poet who was influential…well, my aversion to pride prevents me from “tooting my own horn”, but you all have seen my advances in meter and stresses in poetry, right? Well, if you've never heard of "sprung rhythm", you could click here and read about that and other things if you so choose.

To show my appreciation of nature, I have chosen some passages from my poem “Spring”. Mr. Arnold spoke of consonance in “Dover Beach”, and you will see the same device in the first four lines of “Spring”:

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look like little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring (Hopkins 1517, ll. 1-4)

I think the repeated “w”, “l”, “thr” and “r” sounds help make these natural occurrences in spring all that more memorable. The imagery and similes in this poem are also quite nice, wouldn’t you agree? Can you not see the bird’s eggs looking like heavens and the weeds shooting out long and lovely? Another passage of this poem connects nature’s beauty to a higher force (i.e. God).

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden (Hopkins 1517, ll. 9-11)

God created all this joy that we see in nature, and it was my job to describe it in such a way that readers could see the connections more clearly. I will leave it up to you present readers now to decide if I was the greenest writer of these literary periods. And yes, I know some critics put me in the 20th century period (since that’s when my poems were published), but I hope you will consider me eligible. God will it be so!