`Today I Inscaped Them Together'

The Winter 2007-2008 edition of Image includes an excerpt from Paul Mariani’s upcoming biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Havoc & the Glory. Judging from these 12 pages, Mariani’s approach is impressionistic, not ponderously academic. I read his biography of John Berryman years ago and remember it as disappointingly thin and obligatory. In almost two decades, Mariani’s prose has improved, though it occasionally succumbs to fulsomeness. The selection in Image reads like variations on themes from Hopkins’ life and works, not a rigorous biography. To his credit, Mariani spurns the psychosexual approach that blighted another recent life of the poet-priest, but devotes several pages to a more important matter -- Hopkins as landscape and skyscape painter in prose (rivaled only by Thoreau – like Hopkins, dead at 44), in his letters and notebooks. Has anyone written more rapturously of clouds? Here’s Mariani:

“…a drunken bevy of clouds high over Dublin in the interstices between one summer squall and another, 26 July 1888. Clouds drunk and weaving across the heavens, because they have imbibed so deeply of the deluge they themselves – whatever selves they can be said to have -- have poured out on the earth in one of their millions of earlier manifestations. ‘Cloud-puffball,’ he begins, his bleeding eyes following the cloud formations above him, this perennial star-gazer and sunset-painter and cloud-watcher, who years before had studied the heavens as he had studied bluebells, looking for any least sign, looking for any least sign of god’s presence and beauty and order to be found there.”

Of late I’ve paid unusual attention to skyscapes. In greater Seattle, clouds are seldom gaudily colorful, even at sunrise and sunset. The view overhead is constantly in flux, and a typical ceiling includes blue patches, roiling mountains of black and a palate of subtly differentiated grays. Gray no longer seems an appropriate synonym for drab. There’s pewter, silver-gray, charcoal-gray, grizzled gray and the pale gray of a Northern mockingbird’s breast. The sky is as variegated as an Ansel Adams print, if you look closely enough. Here’s Hopkins in his notebook in 1864, the year he turned 20:

“Sept. 14. Grey clouds in knops [“A small decorative knob or boss”]. A curious fan of this kind of cloud radiating from a crown, and covering half the sky.”

And the same year:

“Saw a curious thing on, I think, Oct. 1. – A cloud hid the sun and its edges were so brilliant that the lustre prevented one from seeing outlines which swam in the light. Happening to look in a pond, I saw the cloud reflected and therefore with much diminution of light, of course, and the outlines of the lightest part of the cloud were distinct and touched here and there with spots of colours.”

Here, in a spectacularly detailed passage from March 12, 1870, note the use of “inscaped” as a verb:

“A fine sunset, the higher sky dead clear blue bridged by a broad slant causeway rising from right to left of wisped or grass cloud, the wisps lying across; the sundown yellow, moist with light but ending at the top in a foam of delicate white pearling and spotted with big tufts of cloud in colour russet between brown and purple but edged with brassy light. But what I note it all for is this: before I had always taken the sunset and the sun as quite out of gauge with each other, as indeed physically they are for the eye after looking at the sun is blunted to everything else and if you look at the rest of the sunset you must cover the sun, but today I inscaped them together and made the sun the true eye and ace of the whole, as it is. It was all active and tossing out light and started as strongly forward from the field as a long stone or a boss in the knop of the chalice-stem; it is indeed by stalling it so that it falls into scape with the sky.”

Mariani draws his title from an untitled poem Hopkins wrote two months before his death in 1889:

“The shepherd’s brow, fronting forked lightning, owns
The horror and the havoc and the glory
Of it. Angels fall, they are towers, from heaven—a story
Of just, majestical, and giant groans.
But man—we, scaffold of score brittle bones;
Who breathe, from groundlong babyhood to hoary
Age gasp; whose breath is our memento mori—
What bass is our viol for tragic tones?
He! Hand to mouth he lives, and voids with shame;
And, blazoned in however bold the name,
Man Jack the man is, just; his mate a hussy.
And I that die these deaths, that feed this flame,
That…in smooth spoons spy life’s masque mirrored: tame
My tempests there, my fire and fever fussy.”

The first line might be Hart Crane’s. The poem is a bit of mess and let’s forgive him the “hussy/fussy” rhyme. Hopkins was monstrously depressed and soon to die of typhoid fever. There are sweet touches: “we, scaffold of score brittle bones” and “life’s masque mirrored.” That he wrote so well near the end, albeit sporadically, is miraculous. Hopkins’ last words are reported to have been “I am so happy, so happy.”