In a poem by GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS SJ, a member of the Society of Jesus, where “his life as a priest was often a sad and weary one, beset by doubts and depression.”
Thus Adam Kirsch in his 5/11/2009 New Yorker review of Paul Mariani’s biography, Gerard Manley Hopkins.
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oilCrushed. 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 soilIs bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.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 wentOh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —Because the Holy Ghost over the bentWorld broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Later: Add to this about GMH’s life as a Jesuit. In a sense he was a misfit, also from the New Yorker review:
Long after his death, a fellow Jesuit, speaking to Hopkins’s first biographer, recalled, “I cannot say he was a success either as a teacher or a missioner. He was too whimsical, and . . . he was too delicate a mind for a good deal of the rough work that we have to do in the Society.”
Not hard for me to understand, not at all.
Blithe Spirit 