THE CURIOUS CASE OF ROBERT SOUTHWELL, GERARD HOPKINS AND A PRINCELY SPANISH HAWK.
Bouchard, Gary M.
IN 1962 Mother Mary Eleanor, S.H.C.J. published a short article
entitled "Hopkins' `Windhover' and Southwell's Hawk
in which she called "attention to a curiously parallel image in a
little known book of meditations by Robert Southwell (1561-1595) on the
Love of God" (21). Mother Eleanor's modest claim was that the
image of Christ as a hawk in flight from "Meditation 56" of
Southwell's A Hundred Meditations on the Love of God "may or
may not provide a clue to the source of Hopkins' image; but it at
least reinforces one's sense of the appropriateness of such an
image, since it has occurred to another poet, formed in the same school
of spirituality and arrested by the same fact of Christ's redeeming
action" (21). This provocative discovery of Mother Eleanor's,
a peculiar Renaissance needle in the vast haystack of literary
influence, has been little heeded, scholarly readings of "The
Windhover" having proceeded for the past thirty-five years as
though her suggestion had never been made. This may be in part due to
the considerable modesty with which she presented her case, but is
attributable as well, no doubt, to the fact that she offered no external
evidence to suggest how or why Hopkins, as a young nineteenth-century
Jesuit, might have come to read, let alone borrow from, these little
known meditations of his beheaded sixteenth-century Jesuit predecessor.
How, in other words, did Hopkins stumble upon this same
"needle" and who exactly put it in the haystack? I intend here
to address these questions by considering an as yet unnoticed
coincidence which connects the nineteenth century publication of A
Hundred Meditations on the Love of God with Gerard Hopkins, and
demonstrates the likelihood that Hopkins not only read at least some of
the Meditations, but may have been guided in his reading by its editor,
Father John Morris, S.J. who, as it turns out, would soon be one of
Hopkins' professors, as well as one of the few Jesuits to encourage
Hopkins in his own efforts as a poet. Having presented this connection
between Hopkins and the Meditations' editor, I then wish to return
to the parallel imagery of "The Windhover" and
Southwell's "Meditation 56," to argue Mother
Eleanor's case afresh.
Let us begin with the peculiar history of A Hundred Meditations
Upon the Love of God. Immediately after Robert Southwell's trial
and gruesome public death in 1595 there followed, ironically, a prolific
publication of his poetic works:
The first editions of the poems in 1595 followed immediately upon the
execution of Southwell in February. The popular demand for the poetry
reflects the extraordinary response of the London crowd to Southwell
himself. The first edition of Saint Peters Complaint, With Other Poems,
appearing probably in March, was followed by a second edition before some
of the type for the first edition had been distributed. When Gabriel Cawood
secured the copyright in April and started his series of editions, he may
have been confident that he had obtained the rights to a commercial
success. (Poems 1v)
By 1636 Saint Peter's Complaint With Other Poems, accompanied
by a now famous dedicatory epistle, had been printed in London no fewer
than eleven times. Nonetheless, A Hundred Meditations Upon the Love of
God, which in its published form comprises some 538 pages of prose,
survived unpublished and presumably unread in one transcribed copy at
Stonyhurst College until 1873.
THE person responsible for rescuing A Hundred Meditations from
oblivion was Father John Morris, S.J., Lecturer of Ecclesiastical
History at St. Bueno's Seminary in Wales, who, trusting in the
"Transcriber's Dedication,"(1) believed incorrectly that
he was bringing to light an extraordinary work of original recusant prose. In fact, however, the Hundred Meditations are not
Southwell's original work, but an English translation which he made
from an Italian version of a Spanish work, Meditaciones devotissimas
amor Dios written by a Franciscan Friar, Fray Diego de Estella and
published in Salamanca in 1576.(2) It is likely that Southwell
translated an Italian version of Diego's work in order to help
regain his competence in English after a decade on the continent.
Whether Southwell knew that his Italian version of these meditations was
a translation of Diego's Spanish work, or what his particular
attraction to these meditations was, we can never know.
What is important to our present argument is not that
Southwell's work was original, but that Father Morris believed that
it was, and described it to his readers with a zeal appropriate to that
belief. He wrote in his Preface:
The interest of these Meditations is greatly enhanced by the recollection
that it is a Martyr, at whose intercourse with God we are present. It is a
revelation to us of the interior union with God of a brave heart that
aspired to and attained martyrdom.... In these Meditations, then, we see
into a Martyr's heart, or rather ... see the thoughts by which the heart
was made heroic and apt for the great sacrifice of martyrdom. It was filled
with the love of God. Everything spoke to it of the Love of God. It drew
the love of God to itself from all around, and in its meditation all
creatures, instead of weakening, helped to strengthen its love of God. (A
Hundred Meditations vii-viii)
One of Morris' motivations for publishing A Hundred
Meditations, in fact, was to help "hasten the day when the Martyrs
to whom we owe our inheritance shall receive their honors from the
Church to which they were loyal unto death" (x). Southwell, along
with the other English martyrs of the sixteenth-century recusant
movement to whom Fr. Morris refers, would eventually be canonized, but
not for another hundred years.
As for Morris' edition of A Hundred Meditations, it remains
the only one to have ever been published, and while regarded until
fairly recently as Southwell's original work, its audience has been
comprised of, shall we say, a devout few. Extant copies of the text
remain only in private collections, selected religious houses and in
fewer than two dozen libraries world-wide. In fact, the greatest impact
of Morris' unenviable labor may have been the unintentional
spawning of Hopkins' extraordinary sonnet, "The
Windhover" which the poet himself regarded as one of his finest
poems. Just what do we know then about Fr. Morris and his eccentric
pupil, Gerard Hopkins.
At the time at which Morris' edition of A Hundred Meditations
on the Love of God was published, and during the previous three years
while he was presumably working with the original manuscript at
Stonyhurst, Gerard Hopkins was studying in the Jesuit Philosophate at
St. Mary's Hall, Stonyhurst (1870-1873). That the two men would
have met and conversed in some manner during this time seems quite
possible as there were only thirty-five residents at St. Mary's
Hall, including the three priests. That Morris may have brought to the
young poet's attention his work upon what he believed were Robert
Southwell's A Hundred Meditations is likewise possible since Morris
admired Southwell's poetry, and, with Hopkins' composition of
"Ad Mariam" at Stonyhurst, his own talent as a poet, or at the
very least his interest in poetry, was known among his fellow Jesuits
there. In any case, even if Morris and Hopkins completely escaped one
another's notice at this time, they would meet three years later in
Wales when Morris was now Hopkins' professor for both Canon Law as
well as Ecclesiastical History at St. Beuno's.(3)
By this time, biographer Norman White suggests, "Hopkins must
have been known to his colleagues as a poet. This reputation probably
[having] followed him from Stonyhurst where he had written the Marian
poems, and `The Wreck of the Deutschland' would of course be known
to the Rector" (262). What White does not mention is just what a
very peculiar reputation "poet" would have been for Hopkins to
have acquired among his fellow Jesuits, the order not being exactly
overcrowded with would-be laureates. In a letter to R. W. Dixon in 1881,
Hopkins himself would describe the scant Jesuit literary presence which
preceded him:
We have had for three centuries often the flower of the youth of a country
in numbers enter our body: among these how many poets, how many artists of
all sorts, there must have been! But there have been very few Jesuit poets
and, where they have been, I believe it would be found on examination that
there was something exceptional in their circumstances or, so to say,
counterbalancing in their career. (Correspondence 92)
Hopkins then mentions three Jesuit poets:
Fr. Beschi who in Southern Hindustan composed an epic which has become one
of the Tamul classics and is spoken of with unbounded admiration by those
who can read it.... In England we had Fr. Southwell a poet, a minor poet
but still a poet; but he wrote amidst terrible persecution and died a
martyr, with circumstances of horrible barbarity: this is the counterpoise
of his careen Then what a genius was Campion himself! Was not he a poet?
Perhaps a great one, if he had chosen. (Correspondence 94)
Since Campion did not choose to write poetry, and Beschi was
Indian, Hopkins, by his own reckoning, is left with but one English
Jesuit literary predecessor, Robert Southwell.
One other person who would be keenly aware that the English Jesuits
had but one poet to speak of would, of course, have been Fr. Morals who
refers in his Preface to "Mr. Grosart's admirable edition of
Father Southwell's Poetical Works" (A Hundred Meditations
v)(4) which was published in 1872, the year before his own edition of
the Hundred Meditations. What Morris thought about Hopkins' poetry
is suggested by an incident in 1876. For fittingly, this champion of
Southwell's works was also responsible for the first and only
printing of a Hopkins poem during Hopkins' own lifetime, "The
Silver Jubilee."(5) In 1876 Fr. Morals had preached a special
sermon on the occasion of Bishop James Brown's Jubilee visit to St.
Beuno's that year. The sermon, the Bishop's address and the
poem Hopkins composed for the occasion were subsequently published
together in a pamphlet at the Bishop's request. When "Hopkins
had protested against his poem being included ... Fr. Morris had
gracefully persuaded him that he needed its publication in order to
entitle the sermon `The Silver Jubilee'" (White 262). This
incident may have been as simple and pragmatic as it sounds, although it
suggests a tactful and sympathetic mentoring of the young poet away from
excessive modesty and towards publication. It is, in any case, the small
sum of what we know for certain about the relationship between Fr.
Morris and Gerard Hopkins.
A year after writing "The Silver Jubilee" Hopkins would
write "The Windhover." Before turning to the resemblances of
this poem to "Meditation 56," we should note that from the 538
pages which comprise A Hundred Meditations, Fr. Morris offers a sampling
of only five brief passages in his Preface, and the longest of these by
far, and the one to which he gives the most attention, is the passage of
the regal hawk in flight compared to Christ from "Meditation
56." Hence, Hopkins would not have had to read beyond Morris'
Preface to discover this unusual metaphor. Although circumstantial, this
evidence indicates that Hopkins may well have had his attention drawn to
these meditations by Fr. Morris.
As to Hopkins' famous poem, it is easy to see why "The
Windhover" was his favorite composition in what was a very creative
year for the poet (White 282), and why many regard it as his single best
poem, if for no other reason because of its extraordinary structural and
formal characteristics. Never before or since, I think, has so much
movement, rhythm, sound and emotion been so masterfully orchestrated
within the confines of an Italian sonnet. Even so, a paraphrase of the
poem's action is quite ordinary: an exuberant narrator admires the
graceful flight and sudden descent of a kestrel. The poem's
provocative dedication, "To Christ Our Lord," however,
invites, perhaps requires, the reader to see the flight of the small
bird with the same symbolic significance and accompanying excitement as
the narrator:
I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of
daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his Ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the
hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,--the achieve of, the mastery of thing!
If one insists upon reading this poem only as an extraordinary
nature meditation, echoes of "Meditation 56" might be heard,
though not significantly, as in "When the eagle-falcon, or
ger-falcon, or any other kind of long-winged hawk, hath flown a high
pitch, and skimming through the air hath mounted up to the clouds ...
" From this description may have been derived the more striking
"rung upon the reign of a wimpling wing" or the sweep of a
skate's heel. But Hopkins, a keen observer of nature would need no
primer on how to describe a hawk's flight.
If, on the other hand, one follows the prompting of the poet's
dedication "To Christ Our Lord" and understands the flight as
representative of Christ's own mastery of his destiny and ours, the
potential significance of Fray Diego de Estella's "Meditation
56" as translated by Robert Southwell and published by Morris may
be seen and heard in earnest. The passage from the meditation which
Morris quotes in his Preface is as eloquent a summary of the religious
meaning of "The Windhover" as any ever rendered:
O Princely Hawk! which comest down from Heaven into the bowels of the
Blessed Virgin, and from her womb unto the earth, and from the earth unto
the desert, and from the desert unto the Cross, and from the Cross unto
hell, and from hell unto Heaven, and madest those turnings to pursue our
souls which Thou wert losing, and which without Thy helping hand had
perished, is it much that Thou requirest our heart for reward of the
travail and pains that Thou hast done to work our redemption? What hawk
ever made such a brave flight, or lost so much blood in the pursuit of her
game, as the salvation of our souls hath cost Thee, our God and our Lord?
(A Hundred Meditations ix-x)
"O" we wait for Diego, via Southwell, to declare "my
Chevalier!" For the parallel imagery between the two passages
includes, not just the comparable flights of the hawks, but the awe at
the hawk's regality and the consequent recognition of Christ's
own kingship in the masterful flight. The essential spiritual movement
of the two passages, in fact, is identical: the brave and redemptive
life of the princely Christ witnessed in the flight and fall of a hawk,
prompting the consequent stirring of the observer's heart.
The climactic spiritual awakening in Hopkins' poem, the
inexplicably lovely fire which breaks from the kestrel at the moment of
buckling, also has a precedent in Fray Diego's "Meditation
56." Consider first the opening three lines of Hopkins' sestet
by which he arrives, in the last three words, at his famous version of
"O Princely hawk!"
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
Now consider what might pass for a prose paraphrase of these very
lines rendered into English by Southwell some two hundred eighty years
earlier:
And is it much, O Lord, that I should offer unto Thy Divine Majesty my
heart inflamed in Thy holy love, seeing that Thou, my God, didst so burn
upon the Cross with the fire of infinite love, whereon Thou didst put
Thyself for my sake and for love of me, insomuch that there sprinkled out
so many flames of fire from the sacred breast as there were wounds in Thy
most sacred body.? (A Hundred Meditations 282)
The inflamed heart and the fire are themselves conventional
religious images, but the "sprinkled out ... flames of fire"
within the context of the hawk's flight bear a persuasive
resemblance, I think, to Hopkins' "fire that breaks from thee
then" (line 10) which becomes in the poem's memorable final
image: "blue-bleak embers" which "Fall, gall themselves,
and gash gold-vermillion" (13-14).
Since the above passage from "Meditation 56" does not
appear in Morris' Preface, Hopkins would have had to turn to the
meditation himself, prompted, if he did so, by the passage in
Morris' Preface, and believing that the words which he read there
were those of Fr. Robert Southwell, the only English Jesuit poet to
precede him.
It may be that the comparison of the redemptive life of Christ to
the flight of a hawk, though novel to us, was in Hopkins' day a
somewhat more conventional part of religious imagery which has since
been lost, leaving behind a poem which seems more eccentric and original
than it is. It is likewise possible that the imagery and imbedded
spiritual argument of "The Windhover" are entirely the product
of Gerard Manley Hopkins' experience of observing a kestrel in
Wales and his own poetic fancy. Yet all works of art, and especially
great ones, are, in some fashion, an imaginative compilation of certain
things which have come before them. In the exclamation "ah my
dear," of the poem's second to last line, for example, Norman
White hears Hopkins borrowing from his favorite poet, George Herbert
(White 283). My own suggestion is that the poem contains a much more
substantial borrowing than these three words, that, unbeknownst to
Gerard Hopkins or Mother Eleanor, "The Windhover" owes its
origins to a sixteenth-century Spanish writer via two of Hopkins'
brother Jesuits, Fr. Southwell who accomplished this, his most
significant work of translation,(6) in virtual house arrest, and Fr.
Morris who worked in immediate proximity to his future pupil, Gerard
Hopkins, to bring to publication what he believed to be the original
work of an important English poet and Jesuit predecessor.
The implications of the above case of influence should be of some
interest to readers of Hopkins. In the first place, if Hopkins did read
"Meditation 56," he may also have read some, though likely not
all, of the other Hundred Meditations On the Love of God in Morris'
edition. Certainly the first two meditations, stirring canticles to
creation and the creator, would have engaged Hopkins' sensibilities
and drawn him in, and Diego's Franciscan-inspired love of nature,
which is apparent in the imagery of nearly all the meditations, may well
have had particular appeal to Hopkins. Since Hopkins never mentions A
Hundred Meditations specifically in either his journals or
correspondence, any other cases of influence must rest upon the external
evidence I have presented here and any notable similarities between the
two authors' texts. One other implication of the above argument is
that Gerard Hopkins, as Jesuit poet, may have found in the example of
Southwell and the encouragement of Morris something of a respite from
the artistic isolation in which we have grown accustomed to imagine him.
Whether or not this was the case, I hope, at the very least, to have
demonstrated in this essay that the stirring imagery of "The
Windhover" has a more richly textured presence and history than has
heretofore been recognized by Hopkins' scholars. The needle which
Mother Eleanor discovered in the literary haystack back in 1962 is, I
believe, a significant (and significantly complex) one, far richer in
its Spanish origins and its Italian and Elizabethan reconfigurations
than she, or Fr. Morris, or Gerard Manley Hopkins himself had imagined.
Notes
(1) Morris cannot be blamed for trusting himself to the claims of
transcriber who was him/herself but making an honest mistake. The
Dedication reads as follows: "TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE AND VIRTUOUS
LADY, THE LADY BEAUCHAMP. Noble Lady,--Having long had in my custody the
original of these ensuing discourses, written with Mr. Robert
Southwell's own hand (a gentleman for his holy life and happy death
of eternal memory), and knowing certainly that he especially wrote and
meant to have printed them for your holy mother's devotion,
singularly by him honoured and affected, I have, in an eminent esteem
which I profess myself to have of your virtuous and noble worth, moved
also thereunto by one of your noblest and nearest kinswomen, presumed to
make your honour partaker of such a treasury of devout discourses
..." (A Hundred Meditations Upon the Love of God xix).
(2) Fray Diego de Estella, whose worldly name was Diego Ballesteros
y Cruzas, lived from 1524-1578. He is known, though not admired, for his
authorship of Meditaciones devotissimas amor Dios. The work is regarded
as an example of the sort of popular mystical works which were common at
this time, primarily doctrinal rather than apologetic. His Meditaciones
are filled with the abundant nature revelry typical of Franciscan
spirituality.
(3) See Catalogus Provinciae Angliae Societatis Jesu (Roehampton:
Typographia Sancti Joseph, 1875), p. 10: "P. Joannes Morris, Lect.
hist. eccl .... "and Catalogus Provinciae Angliae Societatis Jesu
(Roehampton: Typographia Sancti Joseph, 1876), p. 10: "P. Joannes
Morris, Lect. jur. can. et hist. eccl .... "I am grateful to Father
Joseph Feeney, S.J. for securing this data on my behalf. Though we have
no description of Fr. Morris as a lecturer, we are told of his reading
of his Italian colleague, Fr Perini's lectures in English in the
evenings (Alfred Thomas, S.J., Hopkins the Jesuit: The Years of
Training, 1969).
(4) The edition to which Morris refers is Alexander Grosart's
The Complete Poems of Robert Southwell (1872) which was the first
collected edition of Southwell's poetry.
(5) Says Norman White: "It was the first work he had published
since entering the Society of Jesus, and it was also the only serious
complete English poem written after he became a Jesuit which he would
ever see in print" (White 262).
(6) This according to Nancy Pollard Brown, editor of The Poems of
Robert Southwell and of a forthcoming collection of his complete prose
works.
Works Cited
Eleanor, Mother Mary, S.H.C.J. "Hopkins' `Windhover'
and Southwell's Hawk." Renascence 15.1 (Fall 1962): 21-22, 27.
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins
and Richard Watson Dixon. Ed. Claude Colleer Abbott. Oxford: Oxford UP,
1935.
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley
Hopkins. Ed. Norman Mackenzie. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
Southwell, Robert. A Hundred Meditations on the Love of God. Ed.
John Morris, S.J. London: Bums and Oates, 1873.
Southwell, Robert. The Poems of Robert Southwell. Ed. James H.
McDonald and Nancy Pollard Brown. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967.
White, Norman. Hopkins: A Literary Biography. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1992.
Having received his Ph.D. from Loyola (Chicago) in 1988, Gary M.
Bouchard is presently Associate Professor at Saint Anselm College (Manchester, NH). He has published articles on Spenser, Milton, and
Hopkins and is currently working on a monograph which presents a fuller
comparative analysis of the works of Hopkins and Southwell.3