Chapter 5 - Ireland

Summary

Gerard Manley Hopkins arrived in Dublin to the post of Professor of Greek at University College Dublin in February 1884. He was thirty-nine. He died of typhoid in his university rooms in June 1889, a month short of his forty-fifth birthday. Never the most prolific of poets, Hopkins wrote about twenty-five completed or near-completed poems in his five and a half years in Ireland, including undoubted masterpieces. Caught between devotion to church and resistance to state, Catholic Ireland was not exactly hostile to the priest who worked there for five years before his death, but its divisiveness immeasurably deepened the pitch and the discomfort of a poetry tugged in two ways, between the desolations of self and the consolations of church and state.