HOPKINS, Gerard Manley; Robert BRIDGES (editor); Charles WILLIAMS (introduction and appendices). Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

An Inkling’s Annotated Hopkins

HOPKINS, Gerard Manley; Robert BRIDGES (editor); Charles WILLIAMS (introduction and appendices). Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Oxford and London: Oxford University Press. March 1931.

8vo. Original blue cloth, spine and upper board lettered in gilt, lacking the dust-jacket; pp. xvi, [4], 159, [1], fore- and tail-edges untrimmed; spine a little faded and softened to tips, a few light surface marks to cloth; else a clean, bright near-fine copy; ownership inscription and date ‘C. G. Hardie / B[ritish]. S[chool of]. R[ome]. 25.3.33’, Hardie’s annotations in pencil to ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ and ‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’ (see below).

Inkling and distinguished Dante scholar Colin Hardie’s copy of Hopkins’s Poems, in the revised edition – second impression – of Robert Bridges’s text, with a new introduction by Hardie’s friend and fellow Inkling Charles Williams.

Colin Hardie (1906–98), born in Edinburgh into an academic family (his father and elder brother were also distinguished scholars), studied at Balliol College, Oxford, where a brilliant undergraduate career – Firsts in Mods (1926) and Greats (1928), Craven Scholar (1925), Ireland Scholar (1925), Hertford Scholar (1926) and Gaisford Prize for Greek Prose (1927) – was followed by a junior research fellowship (1928–29) and tutorial fellowship (1929–33). In 1933 he was appointed Director of the British School at Rome; the present volume, inscribed ‘C. G. Hardie | B.S.R. 25.3.33’ to the front endpaper, dates from this period. He returned to Oxford in 1936 as a Fellow and Tutor of Magdalen College, where he remained – except for war service in the War Office (1941–43) and the admiralty (1943–45) – until his retirement in 1973, serving as the University’s Public Orator from 1967 to 1973. At Oxford, Hardie belonged to two groups: the informal literary circle known as the Inklings, whose members included his friends C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams; and the Dante Society.

It was his years in Rome that ‘laid a firm foundation for Hardie’s knowledge of, and love for Italy and its language’ (Lowe). His scholarly work focused on Virgil and Dante, and he produced a steady stream of sharply focused essays and lectures on the Florentine poet over several decades. ‘His heart was in Dante, and he brought his pupils to Virgil through Dante, and to Homer through Virgil’ (ibid.).

The first edition of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Poems, edited by the poet’s friend and fellow poet Robert Bridges, was issued in 1918, nearly three decades after the poet’s death. In his critical introduction to the present edition, Charles Williams explains that Bridges, ‘when consulted on a second edition, being then preoccupied with The Testament of Beauty and feeling also that his own duty to his friend had been satisfyingly accomplished, passed on to me the business of recollating the printed poems and of adding those others which are here given. They include all of which the existence was known to him and the text available.’

Hardie – like Hopkins, a convert to Roman Catholicism – has annotated this copy chiefly in connection with Hopkins’s great extended poem ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, recounting the 1875 shipwreck of the Deutschland, in which five Franciscan nuns, forced to leave Germany under the anti-clerical Falk Laws, lost their lives.

The poem, however, is as much a drama of poetic metre, rhythm and stress, as of subject matter. Bridges’ brief, resonant note at the back of the book remains one of the best introductions to the poem:

The labour spent on this great metrical experiment must have served to establish the poet’s prosody and perhaps his diction: therefore the poem stands logically as well as chronologically in the front of his book, like a great dragon folded in the gate to forbid all entrance, and confident in his strength from past success. This editor advises the reader to circumvent him and attack him later in the rear; for he was himself shamefully worsted in a brave frontal assault, the more easily perhaps because both subject and treatment were distasteful to him. A good method of approach is to read stanza 16 aloud to a chance company. To the metrist and rhythmist the poem will be of interest from the first, and throughout.

Hardie takes Bridges at his word, tracing, in pencil, shapes and patterns down and across Hopkins’s elaborately constructed stanzas. These pencilled lines seem to follow patterns of sound, involving vowels and consonants, though we have been unable to establish precisely what is being isolated. Alongside this intriguing diagrammatic approach are verbal glosses, readings of particular words and marginal comments, all in Hardie’s tiny, neat hand.

Cf. Dunne A72. See Lowe, ‘Obituary: Colin Hardie’, Independent (1998).

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