Imagining Eternity in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Late Poetry

Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry is notable for, among other things, its range of modes and moods over the course of Hopkins’s relatively short life. His famous sonnets of 1877 rapturously celebrate the presence of God in the natural world. As he noted in his journal earlier in the 1870s, after coming upon wildflowers in a field: “I do not think I have ever seen anything more beautiful than the bluebell I have been looking at. I know the beauty of our Lord by it” (JP 199). But by the time Hopkins moved to Dublin in 1884, where he remained for the last five years of his life, his ability to discover God in the world around him had largely dried up. In one despairing letter to Robert Bridges from 1888, he wrote, “All impulse fails me: I can give myself no sufficient reason for going on. Nothing comes: I am a eunuch–but it is for the kingdom of heaven’s sake” (LRB 270). As stark as this change in disposition is, Hopkins’s late work, written in what he called the “winter world” of Dublin, shows signs of a persistent attentiveness to the varieties of distinctiveness in both language and life. To demonstrate this claim, I’ll examine two difficult poems from the 1880s that conspicuously turn their focus from the natural world: One envisions hell, “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” (1886), and one envisions heaven, “That Nature is a Heraclitian Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection” (1888). In “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves,” night has arrived and blots out all of the earth’s vitality and variety. Everything, according to the poem’s imagery, is culled into one of two spools aligned with the two “folds” of sheep and goats from the Gospel of Matthew’s account of Judgment Day. Humanity, then, is stripped of its celebrated particularity, divided “in two flocks, two folds–black; white │ right, wrong”: