Gerard Manley Hopkins Quotes
And though we do have him before our eyes, masked in the Sacred Host, at mass and Benediction and within our lips receive him at communion, yet to hear of him and dwell on the thought of him will do us good.
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Edited by Christopher Devlin, Oxford University Press, 1959.
when he ingests the wafer at holy communion He was referring to the Roman Catholic communion where the bread wafer is believed to be the body of Christ. This really offended many Protestants who saw it as blasphemous and to many justified their intolerance. And yet, as Locke herein observed, there was really no injury that a Roman Catholic taking communion inflicted on a Protestant who had nothing to do with the Catholic service. Of course, the same logic did not then apply to the Roman Catholic intolerance of Jewish and Muslim religious customs in which they were not involved.
Gerard Manley Hopkins SJ was an English poet and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous fame established him among the leading Victorian poets. His manipulation of prosody – particularly his concept of sprung rhythm – established him as an innovative writer of verse, as did his technique of praising God through vivid use of imagery and nature. Only after his death did Robert Bridges begin to publish a few of Hopkins's mature poems in anthologies, hoping to prepare the way for wider acceptance of his style. By 1930 his work was recognised as one of the most original literary accomplishments of his century. It had a marked influence on such leading 20th-century poets as T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis.
