Heaven-Haven

Heaven-Haven
A nun takes the veil

     I have desired to go
        Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
     And a few lilies blow.

     And I have asked to be
        Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
     And out of the swing of the sea.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1918

There are many things to love about Gerard Manley Hopkins. That he looks like Adrien Brody is only one of them. (Only let me interrupt here for a second: Adrien? Hi, it's Mike. You're thisclose to losing my love forever. It was bad enough when you "starred" in that godawful Diet Coke commercial, but need I remind you that the thing I love the most about you is your nebbishy Jewiness? And that nebbishy Jews don't dance with artificially sweetened diet drinks in disco clothes? And nebbishy Jews certainly don't star in movies with Ben "Coke-n-Bloat" Affleck and Diane "Watch Me Masturbate on a Train While Thinking About a Stinky French Guy" Lane. Capiche?)

I'm not so much often with the poetry. I don't seek it out the way I seek out novels; but I like what I like. And I really like my man Manley Hopkins. I love his surprising cadences and unexpected rhythms. It's pretty rare that I feel energized after reading poetry; Gerard Manley Hopkins, however, is like a jolt of ice water in my veins. Only that would probably kill me, now that I think about it. Or is it air bubbles? Something like that, with either water or air bubbles, happened in an episode of Quincy that pretty deeply affected me as a child. Oh Jack Klugman: so surprising; so versatile; so astonishingly not dead yet. He's totally going on my dead pool list.

Hopkins lived from 1844 until he died at the age of 45 in 1889. ("Lived until he died." Nice one, Mike.) He was ordained a Jesuit in 1877, and burned all of his early verse as being too "worldly." (Kinda like Tolstoy after his crazy-go-nuts religious conversion post Anna Karenina.) "I am a eunuch," he wrote to Robert Bridges; "but it is for the kingdom of Heaven's sake." Which I find a little hot, in the same way that the Vicomte de Valmont found Madame de Tourvel a little hot (only not when she's played by Michelle Pffeeiffeffer). There's something corruptingly sexy about moral certitude, especially when it can be so easily broken.

Let's just close that door into Mike's psyche, shall we?

The other thing that I love about Gerry is this anecdote from my on-its-last-legs 1973 edition of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (which starts with Walt Whitman and ends with James Tate -- and apparently at some point I liked James Tate's poem "Stray Animals" and here's what I'd like to say to the Mike from the Past who clearly loved this poem: What were you, high? That poem's awful):

"[Hopkins] had also read another poem by Yeats, 'The Two Titans,' and while he thought it absurd to set two titans down on a rock in the sea with no indication of how they got there, he could see, and say, that the poem had many fine lines and vivid images. W.B. Yeats...wrote later that he had not cared much for the Jesuit priest, who seemed a querulous, sensitive scholar, alien to a young man with Whitman in his pocket. But actually, Hopkins carried Whiteman in his pocket too."

In 10th grade, I was in Mr. Dow's Advanced English class with such intellectual illuminaries as Frank Burkholder, Ian Woods, and John Horn. We had to work in groups or individually (the "individually" part was added after the fact since no one wanted to work with me, and Mr. Dow didn't want me to feel pariahically left out) on reading and presenting a poem to the class. I don't remember the name of the poem I picked -- it was something modern about Orpheus and Eurydice and dancing trees were involved. Anyway. I picked it because I had been obsessed with Greek and Roman mythology as a child. (I tried loving Norse mythology, but it gave me too many nightmares about wolves and dragons and the end of the world.) I loved those stories, and read them again and again. My favorites: Arachne and Athena, and Theseus and the Minotaur, and Orpheus and Eurydice. Only I had never read them aloud before; no one in my family new from Greek anything, let alone how to pronounce the exotic looking names. So when I read my poem aloud, and when I pronounced Eurydice as "Your-e-dice" -- Frank, Ian, and John snickered derisively and corrected me in that bored way the over-educated and insecure have of correcting everyone. There were several other words I ended up not knowing how to pronounce in the course of that poem. They were sure to catch those, too.

I bring up that story because Greek myths were the Walt Whitman in my pocket that no one assumed I had. I think it was assumed that, because we were poor, literature was beyond my ken. Literature, actually, is what saved me I think. I don't know that I could have survived that long childhood of Klamath Falls heartbreak and monotony if I didn't have books. In poverty-ridden Oregon, the fact that any of us could read without moving our lips made us suspect and outsider. We should have been there for each other.

But I digress.

I picked this poem to look at and write about because I am interested in the message. Knowing that Hopkins becomes a Jesuit, and that this poem is about a nun taking the veil -- what's he saying?

The novice seems to be thinking that cloistered life is going to be somehow safer than what she knew before. She wants quiet and peace and "no storms come." But is that true? I think that a contemplative life would be filled with its own storms. That yearning of the flesh for flesh; that questioning of the soul about God. Quiet isn't necessarily peaceful, and I'm worried that she believes that this is going to be the case. "Oh, honey," I want to say to her.

The other question this poem prompts me to ask is, how appropriate is it for this person to want to absent herself from the world? If we pretend for a moment that Jesus existed and said some of the things he's supposed to have said in the Christian bible -- he's pretty clear: "Feed my sheep," he tells Simon Peter. Jesus doesn't say, "Lock yourself up in a community of women and then pretend to marry me. Do you have any idea how many wives that would be?" I've never been interested in Jesus as a supernatural mythical figure who raises the dead and redeems the world (from what again? Original sin? And where are y'all getting that from?). I am interested in Jesus as a radical figure for social justice, and I think he would be appalled with the idea of those early communities of men and women who vowed chastity and only experienced their own suffering without doing anything in the world to lessen the sufferings of others. I think Jesus would have been fine kicking it Hebrew and quoting Micah: "What does the LORD require of you but to do justice and love kindness?"

The poem is short, and Hopkins doesn't affirm her choice or condemn it. He merely reports. That's the strength of this poem, I think; that the reader grapples with these issues with no help from the class. And I wonder if Hopkins himself struggled with these same doubts. His poetry may have been his attempts to influence beyond the walls of his cloistered heart.