The Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins alienated himself from practically all of his English contacts – including his family – by his decision to convert to Catholicism. Joining up with the Jesuits, he worked intensely, foremost on his priestly vocation and, secondly, on his highly perceptive poetry, which he deliberately kept to himself, frightened of the vanity that renown would bring. Hopkins is, along with John Henry Newman with his visionary The Dream of Gerontius, the best example of a Victorian English poet who converted to Catholicism, at a time when such a decision would lead to ostracism and scorn in his home country.
Yet, following in their footsteps, the late-Victorian poet and Catholic convert Lionel Johnson has been forgotten. Taking a step which would have similarly alienated him, Johnson converted after his undergraduate studies at New College, Oxford, and was received into the Church at St Etheldreda’s, Ely Place, in 1891. Johnson’s conversion was of enough significance to him that he considered the priesthood, though he decided to focus on his vocation of poetry instead.
Johnson’s conversion appears to have been inspired by a realisation that orthodoxy, although troubling, frees the Christian mind to worship God authentically. Commenting on his fellow poet-convert Newman, Johnson writes: “Though dogma be not revelation, yet revelation is dogma.” Johnson, a lover of mysticism, accepted that such mysticism must be tied up with orthodoxy and submit to the authority of the Church to realise its ultimate expression.
Despite this, Johnson was certainly not a snob. He defended William Blake’s poetry in one of his pieces for the Academy, still a heretical vanguard in the poetic world of his time. In fact, Johnson was willing to overlook Blake’s unorthodox theology to see him as a peer in a very specific sense: he believed that poetry was more than a mere trifle. For both men, poetry was a sacred act of adoration or exaltation which made theological ideas more perceptible. Expressing a vision of a purely devotional poetry, Johnson wrote: “The poet can translate into terms of breathing beauty his personal visions of universal reality … all the furnitures of heaven become to us in her poetry as real, visible, tangible, as altars upon earth.” For Johnson, then, writing a poem was a holy act of revelatory intensity, yet one which recognises Catholic truths such as original sin, re-ordering them in poetic language to show us the initial revelation that inspired them. Johnson’s theories about poetry translate into a beautiful poem, “Bagley Wood”:
The night is full of stars, full of magnificence:
Nightingales hold the wood, and fragrance loads the dark.
Behold, what fires august, what lights eternal! Hark
What passionate music poured in passionate love’s defence!
Breathe but the wafting wind’s nocturnal frankincense!
Only to feel this night’s great heart, only to mark
The splendours and the glooms, bring back the patriarch,
Who on Chaldean waste found God through reference.
Could we but live at will upon this perfect height,
Could we but always keep the passion of this piece,
Could we but face unshamed the look of this pure light,
Could we but win earth’s heart, and give desire release:
Then were we all divine, and then were ours by right
These stars, these nightingales, these scents: then shame would cease.
Petrarchan sonnets like this were popular with near-contemporaries such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Johnson ignores its connections with mourning a deceased lover, and uses it instead to mourn the world we lost through the Fall, expressing a vision of humanity living in accordance with divine will. The anaphora of “could we” mirrors that of Hebrew poetry, connecting it to that of the earnestly sacred.
Johnson’s corporeal imagery – for example, “earth’s heart” – mirror Catholic devotions like that of the Sacred Heart. Indeed, within the nocturnal vision expressed in this poem, we might detect a beautiful expression of an Easter Vigil celebration, in which the objects used in the act of devotion take on an eternal quality.
Johnson’s forms were traditional, yet he was untraditional in the way he stretched them to the height of their capacity to create an atmosphere of visionary intensity. All of this, of course, makes the life he led so ultimately tragic. Johnson’s ostracism involved a crippling alcoholism, and the loneliness he suffered is glimpsed in his more famous poem, “The Dark Angel”: “Lonely, unto the lone I go / Divine, to the divinity.”
It’s clear, of course, that he saw meaning in his loneliness and other sufferings. These granted him a perception of a greater reality. In that sense, his story should be a tribulation to us, but also a consolation amid the contemporary ostracism that Catholics all too often experience. Johnson should be a beacon of hope for any current religious poets, who must contend with the unjust fact that some of the biggest poetry publishers no longer publish explicitly religious poetry.
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