Margaret Ellsberg’s volume contains her own biographical, critical, and indeed spiritual understanding of Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet whose brilliant lines were not appreciated in his time and whose life included both the glory and agony of the Christ he served. The Gospel in Gerard Manley Hopkins: Selections from His Poems, Letters, Journals, and Spiritual [...]
The Church is not prison but liberation. It is the way of escape—from the cell of the self, from the solipsist nightmare, from the grubbiness of materialism, from the overwhelming fact, in every age, of sin and sorrow. The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961: Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh, by Father Ian Ker [...]
In the dark, melancholic, skeptical background of Victorian England, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetry presents an image of God as a prolific Creator, loving Father, and consummate Artist who blesses man with abundant gifts of beauty to inspire and uplift the heart and soul. In the Victorian Age, the spirit of the times caused a crisis [...]
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; 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; [...]
Prompted to compose his marvelous tour de force, “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” after reading the report of a shipwreck off the coast of England, the priest-poet Gerard Manley Hopkins gives one of the most profound and penetrating meditations on the mystery of suffering. The mystery of suffering, or the problem of pain as C.S. Lewis [...]
Glory be to God for dappled things— For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough; And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. […]
Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “God’s Grandeur” is far more powerful than William Wordsworth’s pondering and wandering on the banks of the Wye because Hopkins did not turn away from the dark reality… In England for a family celebration, we drove from Herefordshire down the beautiful Wye Valley stopping at the “bare ruined choir” of Tintern [...]
To read the Presocratic fragments is to re-enter a world where the simplest natural phenomena, such as boiling water, can set your bones quaking... To read the Presocratic fragments is to re-enter a world where the simplest natural phenomena, such as boiling water, can set your bones quaking. Today it is a cliche that “opposites [...]
Gerard Manley Hopkins was a philosopher, and not only a philosopher but a prophet, and not only a prophet but a priest, for he saw the intimate eternal reality of all created things and called us to share the vision and knowledge that the whole world is charged with the grandeur of God. Believing that [...]
The Devil’s first sin was not the temptation of Eve, but preceded the creation of the Garden. He “tried to destroy by violence before he succeeded in ruining by fraud.” You might like to compare Tolkien’s “Ainulindale” (the Elvish account of the creation of the world through music, in The Silmarillion), with the following meditation on the Exercises [...]