Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 688. Hb, $190.00.

If you are interested in knowing who Hopkins the poet and the man were, you will have to read (and wrestle) with this book some ten years in the making. “It is our conviction,” the editors tell us, “that the best understanding of the poems and of the poet himself can only be derived from a more thoroughgoing understanding of a Hopkins who is theologically informed, spiritually committed, and apostolically engaged.” This being the case—and it is—it follows that “the sermons and spiritual writings are best read to discover an integrity of the texts themselves and what they are communicating, rather than as mere annotations to the poetry.”

Reasonable enough, though that doesn’t make it any easier for the reader, who is offered a volume of nearly seven hundred pages that includes all of Hopkins’s spiritual writings and sermons as he left them to us, though it needs reminding that that was never really Hopkins’s intention. Here we find, together with thousands of informative footnotes and so many carefully crafted and insightful introductions, meticulously gathered together in one volume Hopkins’s drafts, corrections, crossed-out passages, revisions and rethinkings as he struggled to find the right approach to a spiritual commentary or sermon. Over a thirteen-year period he addressed congregations ranging from his fellow Jesuits during his time studying theology at St. Beuno’s in Wales—when he wrote such masterpieces as “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” “God’s Grandeur,” and “The Windhover”—to those offered to the educated audiences of London and Oxford and Sydenham to the working classes of Bedford Leigh, Liverpool (where he composed his powerful pastoral sonnet, “Felix Randal,” as well as Maryport and Glasgow. In short, these are what Hopkins called the sakes, the written trail of a soldier bringing the Good News to wherever he was sent.

He could be hard on himself in reviewing the effects his homilies had on his listeners. There were his fellow Jesuits spontaneously laughing when the young theologian at St. Beuno’s kept repeating Christ’s words during the Sermon of the Mount to have the crowds sit down. That laughter was a most unexpected response, of course, but there it was, and Hopkins was honest enough to record the effect his sermon had had on his fellow Jesuits. At times as a Jesuit priest he had trouble delivering his sermons, especially when he extemporized, so that his Jesuit superior felt called upon to reign him in, especially for once comparing Christ’s love of mankind as surpassing what a lover might feel for a “sweetheart.” After using that word to a congregation of mostly working-class Irish (who had probably heard a lot worse in their goings about, he was told by his superiors to write out his sermons and have them looked over, though, when Hopkins did just that, his superior merely shrugged the matter off.

Then too there was the parishioner who told Hopkins after Mass one Sunday that his sermons were not to be counted in the same week as those of the more popular Fr. Clare. Very well, Hopkins said, but what did the man think of what he had said in his sermon. That, the Irishman couldn’t really say, since he’d slept through most of it.

Often Fr. Hopkins spoke of the comforts of Christ and Mary and especially of the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, whom he likened to a cricketer urging (“Come on! Come on!”) his teammate to score. Again and again, Hopkins praised the hard labor of his congregation, telling them that their work at the forge or with slop pails or driving wagons were prayers which could merit them heaven.

But he could also deliver a terrifying sermon, as on the last things—death, judgment, and hell—as he did at a mission retreat in Maryport in 1882. He wanted his congregation to stop and think what hell would be like and took them through that experience with each of the five senses. He wanted them to realize that no one escaped death, that already their souls were locked inside the very bodies that would one day be corpses. He was there, he warned them (and himself) while there was still time to repent and turn toward their Redeemer. What James Joyce gives us so convincingly in the Jesuit’s sermon in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which so shook the young Joyce, here is Fr. Hopkins, S.J. in that very role.

Then too there are the extensive notes he wrote during both his Long Retreat during his tertianship at Roehampton, as well as two eight-day retreats at Jesuit houses, one at Beaumont Lodge outside Windsor in September 1883, and the second at Tullabeg, some sixty miles west of Dublin in January 1889, the year he died. Then too there are the spiritual notes he kept, folded into the Dublin Notebook from early 1884 to early 1885, the same period when he wrote “Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves” and composed his dark sonnets.

Almost a third of this volume is devoted to the commentary on the Spiritual Exercises he composed, mostly during his tertianship. These notes, he explained to Robert Bridges, “would interest none but a Jesuit,” though many readers have found them central to understanding the core of Hopkins’ poetry. These notes now form, the editors tell us, Hopkins’s “largest collection of occasional Ignatian notes,” and are preserved, like so many of the writings in this volume, at Campion Hall, Oxford, administered by the Jesuits. The commentary, the editors explain, are for the most part analytical, “appealing to the intellect rather than the will,” that is, Hopkins the philosopher and scholar at work, rather than Hopkins the retreatant, because it was his habit, early and late, to fall into a kind of depression and self-loathing whenever he focused on his own shortcomings, so that his spiritual advisors suggested he ease up on himself whenever he could. But even in his last retreat, in January 1889, that same sense of being unworthy, of having failed, once again overcame him. Until at last, as the retreat wound down, light once again broke through and he understood that, if, as with Christ at Cana, the best wine had been kept until last, perhaps with him too “there had been no stint,” only “an unwise order in the serving.” Jude Nixon and Noel Barber, S.J. have—like the faithful servants they have proven to be—given us Hopkins’s spiritual record. It will be up to others, they tell us, to read and interpret these bright shards for themselves.

doi:10.1163/22141332-00704008-05