With rosy foam and pelting blossom and mists
Of driving vermeil rain; and, as he lists
The dainty onyx-coronals deflowers,
A glorious wanton;—all the wrecks in showers
Crowd down upon a stream, and jostling thick
With bubbles bugle-eyed, struggle and stick
On tangled shoals that bar the brook—a crowd
Of filmy globes and rosy floating cloud.
The melodiousness, the simplicity of metre and the colour of this early poem are all notable; but still one feels that the poet, whose touch was most indubitably here, had yet to "find himself."
"The Habit of Perfection," quoted above rather as a page of character-revelation than as a piece of art, was written four years later. It is in all ways more significant. For, while retaining that delicate and exquisite sweetness, it bears distinct prophecy of those characteristics which were to mark the poet's maturer work; the subjectivity and intensity of feeling, the eccentricity of expression and preoccupation with spiritual ideas are all here foreshadowed. It is, indeed, one of the most interesting and revealing of his poems—the Abrenuntio of a pure and cloistral spirit. But it came perilously near being valedictory as well. For almost ten years after he entered the Jesuit novitiate, Gerard Hopkins' poetic labours ceased, and his lips seem literally to have "shaped nothing" but the mighty offices of his calling. When the young Levite turned once more to the world, her immemorial face had manifold and mysterious meanings for him. With the poet's sensuous appreciation of the outer life was to mingle henceforth a vein of ethical and divine interpretation. Omnia Creata—had he not weighed and sounded this world of shadow and symbol and enigma? But two realities abode steadfast: God, and the struggling soul of man.
