Lovers of poetry have much to thank Robert Bridges for; if it wasn’t for his loyal service we would never know of the extraordinary poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins, working as a Jesuit priest in Dublin, had died of typhoid fever on 8 June 1889, his poems virtually unknown. Bridges published the first collection of his friend’s work in 1918 – a century able to understand and love this strange poetry in a way that the Victorian world in which Hopkins lived could not have done.
I am writing this in response to Bright Wings Dappled Things, a selection of Hopkins’ best loved poems, produced by Messenger Publications, Dublin, with an introduction and commentary by Sister Jo O’Donovan RSM. It is a handsome hardback volume, including photographs by Fr Francis Browne SJ (1880-1960) which, not unlike Hopkins’ poems, had lain in the Jesuit Provincial Archives for 26 years after his death.
