This volume comprises the first half of Volume vi of the Collected Works of Hopkins. (The second half will feature Hopkins’s many drawings as well as his extensive notes on music). Many of the pieces in the present volume of over five hundred pages deal with Hopkins’s study of Latin and Greek, beginning with his years at the Highgate School, beginning in 1856 when he was twelve, through his years at Balliol College, Oxford, from 1863 to June 1867, when he graduated with First Class Honours, no mean feat in itself. The collection, as its editor, R. K. R. Thornton, points out, “gathers up material that did not fit into earlier categories.” That is, material lying outside Hopkins’s correspondence, diaries, journals, notebooks, Oxford essays and notes, sermons and spiritual writings, the Dublin Notebook of 1884–86, and (the last volume in the collection which will be published), his collected poems.

As Thornton explains, different as the material here is, it too constitutes another rich if admittedly “unruly” collection, bringing together Hopkins’s school notes, followed by his teaching notes during his year lecturing Jesuit scholastics at Roehampton (1873–74), and his assembled comments during his tenure examining and lecturing at University College Dublin. The Roehampton material was composed the year before he headed for St. Beuno’s in Wales to begin his three years of theology, and where—his head full of new scansions and music, much of it based on his study of classical poetry and now Welsh—he would compose his groundbreaking “The Wreck of the Deutschland” as well as such breathtaking sonnets as “God’s Grandeur” and “The Windhover,” among others.

The notes he kept at Highgate and Oxford include material not only on such subjects as Homer, Euripides, Sallust, the Aeneid, Livy’s Histories, Herodotus, Thucydides, and an extensive exploration of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, but material on mechanics and trigonometry as well. It is a collection of material extensive and complex enough to make many readers shudder with a sense of what many of us today view as dark, unexplored woods.

The notes and commentaries he composed (or simply jotted down) as fellow of the Royal University of Ireland, fellow of Classics, and professor of Greek and Latin at University College, Dublin, where he took up residence at 85–86 St. Stephen’s Green in the winter of 1884. Among these notes are questions he wrote for various sets of examinations, as well as notes on Roman literature and antiquities, extensive notes on Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes(including an in-depth study of Greek poetic scansion), notes on Homer’s Iliad, and page after page of notes on Cicero’s On Duty, a subject to which Hopkins returned again and again.

Trying to reassemble Hopkins’s thoughts on a subject like duty, to take just one instance, could well take up a volume of its own. Consider, for example, his detailed study of On Duty—that long last discourse Cicero addressed to his wayward son who was then living the good life in Greece. Just as Cicero called on his son and his countrymen to do their patriotic duty for their country at a time when he himself was being hunted down and would soon be executed for calling out for a return to the standards of the Roman Republic following the assassination of Julius Caesar, so Hopkins cried out for renewed fealty to England in “What shall I do for the land that bred me,” a piece set to music, even as he was was teaching, often against his own inclinations, young Irish nationals at University College.

Here too are copious notes on the whole of Roman history up through the fall of the republic, reviewing twenty years on what he’d studied at Oxford, including the Asiatic, Rhodian and Attic schools of rhetoric, as well as Cato, Pompey, Crassus, Brutus and Mark Antony (the same who ordered Cicero’s death and whose oratorical style Hopkins dismissed as “unintelligible, turgid, and would-be pathetic.”) There are also extensive notes here on Roman poetry (Catullus, Horace, Ovid, Propertius, and Virgil among others), Greek and Roman tragedy and comedy, including mime and pantomime, with references to Menander, Plautus and Terrence. And satire as well, which Hopkins explained as a complex “hodgepodge” of styles, with reference to Lucilius, Varro, and Aristophanes.

There is also Hopkins’s keen ear for the music and scansion of Greek and Latin poetry, with special attention to the melopoeia of the Greek choruses. In addition, there is his close scrutiny of what he calls the “inflection of the voice to bring out the meaning” of a line of verse, such as with the counterpointing of Latin pentameter and Sapphic verse he finds abundantly in Horace and Ovid, though not once in Propertius.

It was also during his time in Dublin that he wrote such masterpieces as “I Wake and Feel,” “No worst,” “To seem the stranger,” “Carrion Comfort,” Mortal Beauty,” “Heraclitean Fire,” and, in his last months, before he succumbed to typhoid on June 8, 1889, at the age of forty-four, “Thou art indeed just” and “To R. B.” This last poem was addressed to Robert Bridges, his friend (and enemy) from his university years, who would go on to become England’s poet laureate, though it is Hopkins we read today—the poet who died in obscurity and lies in an unmarked grave in Glasnevin Cemetery with his brother Jesuits.

In short, this is a volume which, as the editor tells us, reminds us that nothing Hopkins wrote ever “came out of nothing,” his poetic brilliance being “nurtured by many springs.” So here too, among these seemingly disparate pieces by the foremost British poet of modern times, you will find hundreds—thousands—of complex and scintillant elements which made “up the man, the priest, the scholar, and the poet.”