There is perhaps no poet who more beautifully conveys the experience of Victorian doubt than G. M. Hopkins. So doubtful are his psychic grapplings with God, human suffering, and alienation that critics have happily secured his critical place among the modernists, within a world where God seems dead and the destructive nature of humankind reigns supreme. Yet Hopkins’s poetry is also restorative and ennobling. The irrepressible beauty of nature exudes from his verses, exemplifying the sheer beauty of dappled things. His homage to alliterative Old English verse heralds back to times more ancient with a reassuring stability. The rhythms of “chestnut-falls” and “finches’ wings” counterpoint the force of his sprung rhythm and arresting spondees: “Praise him.” The vibrant hues that color his lines create a boundless landscape in God’s glory: “descending blue,” “glassy peartree leaves and blooms,” “gold-vermillion,” “azurous hung hills,” “very-violet-sweet.” Hopkins’s poetry is one of solitude that carries the spirit of reflection, yet it does not necessarily find solace or repose. He revels in God’s grandeur but makes us question the heights to which our own fear and weakness can overwhelm and conquer faith. This “poetics of wavering” that I identify in Hopkins’s verses offers a recognition of the motion and movement that allow us to travel through the difficulties of life—whether “riding a river” or having the freedom to waver, to “fable and miss.”

Among the Victorian poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins would seem the furthest removed from the heavily commercial, xenophobic, and anti-Catholic world of 1790s English Gothic fiction. An English Jesuit priest who converted to Catholicism largely as a result of the Oxford Movement, Hopkins stands among the Victorians as a devotional poet who wrote serious spiritual verse. After being received into the church by John Henry Newman in October 1866, he resolved to become a priest in May 1868 upon returning to Hampstead. The burning of his early poems and the seven years of silence that followed his Jesuit initiation mark a commitment to his religious office that effectively cut him off from the public literary scene, though he was still engaged in serial and periodical print culture. It might be said that his literary circle consisted solely of a few family members and his friends, Robert Bridges, Coventry Patmore, and Richard Watson Dixon.