GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS AND THE ECOLOGICAL BALANCE OF WILDNESS

Abstract

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS AND THE ECOLOGICAL BALANCE OF WILDNESS In the nineteenth century, the swing of anthropocentric forces wrought profoundly deleterious changes upon the face of the natural environment. Witnessing these metamorphic processes at work was Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose unique sensibility found the despoilment of nature by human hand no less than extremely dispiriting. Against a backdrop of the vanishing beauty, Hopkins fervidly engaged with the transforming world in his ecopoetical ruminations. He was not the first poet of ecological dissent, for during the Romantic period John Clare had poignantly expressed the anguish at what had then been the incipient stages of nature being disrobed of its inherent singularity. Being quite familiar with Clare’s ecopoetical meditations, the Jesuit poet was able to further elaborate upon Clare’s vision, while proving successful in presciently observing the discrepancies between wilderness as a cultural construct and a wildness whose emphasis upon the appreciation of the global through the local corresponds closely to the present-day awareness concerning the fragility of ecosystems. Most vividly and extensively, Hopkins explores the dyad of wildness and wilderness in poems like “Inversnaid,” “Duns Scotus’ Oxford,” and “Binsey Poplars,” wherein he truly establishes himself as one of the essential forerunners of modern ecological science.