May is Mary’s month, and I couldn’t help thinking of Gerard Manley Hopkins as I made a trip to Walsingham to honour her this week. He describes May as the time of year “When drop-of-blood-and-foam dapple/ Bloom lights the orchard-apple/ And thicket and thorp are merry/ With silver-surféd cherry”. As ever in Hopkins’s writing, there is an expressive cooperation between sound and sense. The compound words and run-on lines do give an impression of the breathless surfeit of the beauty.
Sure enough, the Norfolk countryside was in riot. White hawthorn blossom lined the roads. Horse chestnut trees stood like giant candelabra. At one point the way was through wild rhododendrons with magenta flowers, and sunlight slanted through a thicket of trees carpeted with bluebells.
On the Holy Mile from the Slipper Chapel there was an apple tree in blossom just as Hopkins describes, and on the hill towards Houghton St Giles two cherry trees, their branches sagging under the weight of blossom, framed a cotttage front.
Around the valley in which the shrine sits were fields of fallow brown, jade green of young wheat and lemon yellow of oilseed rape against the arching East Anglian sky. These huge blocks of colour made the landscape as vivid as a child’s painting.
Hopkins had what Paul Claudel called “the Catholic imagination”. Such an imagination is not just moved by the beauty of nature, but also moved somewhere by it, to contemplate what it means, to see it as the cipher for another, more real world of the spiritual. There is something more than nature to be discovered in the natural world: namely, its Creator and the love with which He created it. Such an imagination is the concomitant of a faith which is sacramental, which learns from outward signs to apprehend inward, invisible realities. This is very different from the nature love of the Romantics, for whom the beauty of nature is most truly apprehended in the inspiration of their imagination – in the eye of the beholder, as it were.
Hopkins, like Claudel, would struggle to define this in metaphysical terms – the idea that nature is both real and points to a greater reality – Hopkins with his use of the words “inscape” and “instress”, derived from his reading of Scotus, and Claudel from his reading of Aquinas. Claudel eventually does it more successfully, I think. He says that it is “only in a world created by God that things bear a significance that is greater than they themselves are and for that reason is not imposed upon them from the outside.”
Trying to capture this in poetry then becomes an analogy for prayer: one is not seeking to make meaning out of nothing, nor to limit the meaning to the imposition of one’s subjective experience of observable reality. One is seeking to apprehend a truth which reveals itself, which is long before it is in my reflection on my experience of it.
Neither the believer nor the poet is engaged merely in a search for inspiration to do justice to their ability to articulate what their experience is, but rather to explicate their sense that their experience touches what truly is. Both must have listened and received in order to have an experience of that which is real – they cannot impose reality.
You could not seek God unless God had first revealed Himself to you, St Ambrose says. Claudel would say that in order for the poet to make something beautiful and true, he has first to receive something: the beauty and truth of the thing which is his inspiration, which cannot be fully received without realising it derives from and leads to Beauty and Truth. In making a poem about something, one is really a receiver of the making that, in fact, constitutes the thing as it is. “It is in this sense that poetry converges with prayer,” says Claudel, “because it distils from things their pure essence, which is their being creatures of God and their bearing witness to God”. Prayer is not my “capturing” God; it is my bearing witness to his existence.
And so I come to seek the succour of Mary, Mother of God, the one who first listened so attentively that she was able to bring forth the Word through the Holy Spirit, the woman from whose womb, burgeoning and fruitful, Eternity brought forth the tenderest, most beautiful blossom of Flesh.
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