Hopkins and Tenderness

I recently joined Leah Libresco Sargeant’s Tiny Book Club Substack after several months of lurking. Last month’s topic was the 19th century British Jesuit and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, so let’s bring that conversation here too.

Poetry is my preferred art form. There are at least a dozen poems that bring me to tears every time I read them. I love the language, I love the sound, I love the ideas, and I love the challenge of memorizing them. My repertoire is mostly T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost, and I’m sure I’ll have more to say about them eventually. But for now- Hopkins.

Leah talks about Hopkins’ mastery of English sounds, so I won’t repeat that point. He’s famous for his sprung verse, which I find effective.

But even more than sound and rhythm, the thing I admire most about Hopkins is his tenderness. He’s moved with compassion over the felling of trees, and overcome with emotion by the flight of a falcon. Yet he’s not a pushover; he also tells a girl crying over fallen leaves that she’s actually mourning her own death, wrestles with God, and speaks of the interior life as a fierce battle.

That combination- tenderness without fragility- is a pretty good benchmark for a healthy masculinity. I don’t necessarily mean that tenderness is the most important manly virtue, but it is an important virtue, and it’s the most likely to be left out. Tenderness is out of style for men nowadays. In the cultural battle over masculinity, neither the defenders nor the detractors of masculinity consider tenderness particularly masculine. But Hopkins shows us in every line how a tender man thinks. May we take his words to heart!