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 ASSIGNMENT SOLUTIONS GUIDE (2017-2018)
M.E.G.-1
British Poetry
Disclaimer/Special Note: These are just the sample of the Answers/Solutions to some of the Questions given in the
Assignments. These Sample Answers/Solutions are prepared by Private Teacher/Tutors/Authors for the help and guidance
of the student to get an idea of how he/she can answer the Questions in given in the Assignments. We do not claim 100%

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accuracy of these sample answers as these are based on the knowledge and capability of Private Teacher/Tutor. Sample
answers may be seen as the Guide/Help for the reference to prepare the answers of the Questions given in the Assignment.

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As these Solutions And Answers are prepared by the Private Teacher/Tutor so the chances of error or mistake cannot be

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denied. Any Omission or Error is highly regretted though every care has been taken while preparing these Sample

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Answers/Solutions. Please consult your own Teacher/Tutor before you prepare a Particular Answer and for up-to-date

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and exact information, data and solution. Student should must read and refer the official study material provided by the
university.
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Dear Student,

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In a conventional class your teacher would have discussed your assignment with you,
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pointed out what made a good essay and what a bad one. We have done exactly this
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in Unit 52 of the British Poetry (MEG-01) course. Read it carefully and discuss it with your counsellor
and class-fellows at the Study Centre. Thereafter decide upon a topic, i.e. a period or literary group in the
history of British poetry. You may, if you wish, select a topic from the list given in 52.2.1 (p. 70) in Block

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Alternatively, you could write on a British poet of your choice. You may write on a poet

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discussed in the units, i.e. on the syllabus, or even a poet we have not discussed in

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detail such as Robert Burns, G.M. Hopkins, R.S. Thomas, Ted Hughes or Seamus Heaney.

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You may have heard some of our lectures on William Blake, The Movement, Philip Larkin and Ted

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Hughes on the EduSat. They may now be available on e-gyankosh on www.ignou.ac.inYou have yet another
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choice. Write an essay on a famous poem in English literature. Having decided upon your topic, do your

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research and then read section 36.5 in Unit 36 in Block VIII for a model essay and a format for presentation.
You may learn how to present your term paper/sessional essay from 36.5. You must not quote from
unacknowledged sources.
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To sum up, write an essay on a period or a literary group in British poetry or a British

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poet or a British poem in about 3000 words on the model provided in 36.5 (in unit 36).

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The full marks for the essay is 100.
We look forward to reading your sessional essay.
Sincerely yours

w Teacher
Ans. Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of the three or four greatest poets of the Victorian era. He is regarded by
different readers as the greatest Victorian poet of religion, of nature, or of melancholy. However, because his style
was so radically different from that of his contemporaries, his best poems were not accepted for publication during
his lifetime, and his achievement was not fully recognized until after World War I.
Hopkins’s idiosyncratic creativity was the result of interactions with others, beginning with the members of his
family. Hopkins’s extended family constituted a social environment that made the commitment of an eldest son to
religion, language, and art not only possible but also highly probable. His mother, Kate Smith Hopkins (1821-1900),
was a devout High Church Anglican who brought up her children to be religious. Hopkins read from the New
Testament daily at school to fulfil a promise he made to her. The daughter of a London physician, she was better

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educated than most Victorian women and particularly fond of music and of reading, especially German philosophy
and literature, the novels of Dickens, and eventually her eldest son’s poetry.
Her sister Maria Smith Giberne taught Hopkins to sketch. The drawings originally executed as headings on letters
from her home, Blunt House, Croydon, to Hopkins's mother and father reveal the kind of precise, detailed drawing
that Hopkins was taught. The influence of Maria Smith Giberne on her nephew can be seen by comparing these letter
headings with Hopkins’s sketch, Dandelion, Hemlock, and Ivy, which he made at Blunt House. Hopkins’s interest in
the visual arts was also sustained by his maternal uncle, Edward Smith, who began as a lawyer but soon made
painting his profession; by Richard James Lane, his maternal great-uncle, an engraver and lithographer who frequently
exhibited at the Royal Academy; and by Lane's daughters, Clara and Eliza (or Emily), who exhibited at the Society of
Female Artists and elsewhere. Another maternal uncle, John Simm Smith, Jr., reinforced the religious tradition which
Hopkins's mother passed on to him; Smith was churchwarden at St. Peter’s, Croydon.
These artistic and religious traditions were also supported by Hopkins’s paternal relations. His aunt Anne Eleanor

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Hopkins tutored her nephew in sketching, painting, and music. His uncle Thomas Marsland Hopkins was perpetual
curate at St. Saviour’s Paddington, and coauthor with Hopkins's father of the 1849 volume, Pietas Metrica Or, Nature

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Suggestive of God and Godliness, “by the Brothers Theophilus and Theophylact.” He was married to Katherine
Beechey, who, with her cousin Catherine Lloyd, maintained close contacts with the High Church Tractarian movement

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which deeply affected Hopkins at Oxford. Her sister, Frances Ann Beechey, was a good painter, famous in North

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America for her documentary paintings of the Canadian voyageurs. In 1865 she was in London, where Hopkins met
her, and after 1870 she exhibited at the Royal Academy. Charles Gordon Hopkins, Hopkins’s uncle, developed the
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family interest in languages as well as religion. He moved to Hawaii, where he learned Hawaiian and helped establish

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an Anglican bishopric in Honolulu. In 1856 he helped Manley Hopkins, the poet's father, become consul-general for
Hawaii in London.

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Manley Hopkins was the founder of a marine insurance firm. It is no accident that shipwreck, one of the firm’s
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primary concerns, was the subject of Hopkins's most ambitious poem, The Wreck of the Deutschland (1875). Nor

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can the emphasis on religion in that poem be attributed solely to the mother’s influence. Manley Hopkins was a devout
High Church Anglican who taught Sunday School at St. John’s in Hampstead, where he was churchwarden. He loved
music and literature, passing on his fondness for puns and wordplay to his sons Gerard and Lionel and his love for

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poetry to Gerard especially. His publications include A Philosopher's Stone and Other Poems (1843), Pietas Metrica

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(1849), and Spicelegium Poeticum, A Gathering of Verses by Manley Hopkins (1892). He also reviewed poetry for

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the London Times and wrote one novel and an essay on Longfellow, which were never published.

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In 1864, Hopkins first read John Henry Newman's Apologia pro via sua, which discussed the author’s reasons for
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converting to Catholicism. Two years later, Newman himself received Hopkins into the Roman Catholic Church.

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Hopkins soon decided to become a priest himself, and in 1867 he entered a Jesuit novitiate near London. At that time,

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he vowed to “write no more...unless it were by the wish of my superiors.” Hopkins burnt all of the poetry he had
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written to date and would not write poems again until 1875. He spent nine years in training at various Jesuit houses

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throughout England. He was ordained in 1877 and for the next seven years carried his duties teaching and preaching

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in London, Oxford, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Stonyhurst.
In 1875, Hopkins began to write again after a German ship, the Deutschland, was wrecked during a storm at the
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mouth of the Thames River. Many of the passengers, including five Franciscan nuns, died. Although conventional in

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theme, Hopkins poem “The Wreck of the Deutschland” introduced what Hopkins called “sprung rhythm.” By not
limiting the number of “slack” or unaccented syllables, Hopkins allowed for more flexibility in his lines and created

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new acoustic possibilities. In 1884, he became a professor of Greek at the Royal University College in Dublin. He
died five years later from typhoid fever. Although his poems were never published during his lifetime, his friend poet
Robert Bridges edited a volume of Hopkins's Poems that first appeared in 1918.
In addition to developing new rhythmic effects, Hopkins was also very interested in ways of rejuvenating poetic
language. He regularly placed familiar words into new and surprising contexts. He also often employed compound
and unusual word combinations. As he wrote to in a letter to Bridges, “No doubt, my poetry errs on the side of
oddness…” Twentieth century poets such as W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, and Charles Wright have enthusiastically
turned to his work for its inventiveness and rich aural patterning.
It feels like a historical oddity because the pair are otherwise so incongruous: Gerard Manley Hopkins, as we now
call him, was small, pious and serious, living a life of obedience in the strictest of the Catholic orders after his

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conversion to the faith. Wilde was by contrast large, debauched and flippant, dazzling the smartest salons and heading
for a terrible fall. That they nearly rubbed pages in a Jesuit journal was probably as close as they were ever going to
come.
But the two men have more in common than that. It is clear from Hopkins’s private writings that he was also gay,
and while he went to great lengths to suppress his sexuality, that very suppression infuses his work. As Professor
Gregory Woods observes in his landmark A History of Gay Literature: “The more one reads Hopkins, the more one
becomes convinced that his particular torture was to have realised the intensely carnal nature of his own spirituality.”
Hopkins is rightly loved and venerated by Catholics for the intensity with which he expressed his religious devotion.
But with the centenary of his first publication falling next year, it is time that Hopkins was given a place in the canon
of gay letters, alongside more obvious contemporaries such as Henry James.
Born in Stratford, east London in 1844, Hopkins was the eldest child of a shipping insurer. He reached Oxford as
a culture war was raging, with the High Anglicanism of a number of celebrated Oxford dons on one side, and an anti-

prism of religion, Hopkins was instinctively drawn to the bells-and-smells worship of the High Church.

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effeminate “muscular Christianity” on the other. In an age where young men tended to express difference through the

He eventually went a good deal further, converting to Catholicism in 1866 and joining the priesthood, but not

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before his heart had been broken by a self-consciously outrageous young poet called Digby Mackworth Dolben he
met while studying at Oxford University. Dolben was expelled from Eton not for his flagrant love affair with another

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boy, but for wandering the countryside dressed as a barefoot, medieval monk.

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Dolben died at 19, having barely noticed poor Hopkins's existence, and it is unlikely that Hopkins ever had

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physical relations with anyone: he was horrified to find himself aroused by images of Christ on the cross, and he would
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scourge himself after erotic dreams.

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Instead, his vice was poetry. As his order frowned on such things, he toiled privately, composing verse in a radical
system of metrics of his own devising. Unfortunately, with its complicated syntax and unconventional form, it baffled

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edition. By the mid-20th century, Hopkins was regarded as a visionary genius. Re
all who saw it. When he died of typhoid in 1889, aged just 44, virtually none of his poetry had been published.
It was not until 1918 that his university friend Robert Bridges–by then the poet laureate–published a collected

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Although his work is overwhelmingly religious, a frequent theme is the physical beauty of working men, as well as

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of Christ, and the frenzied repetitions and climaxes of his verse seem to speak strongly of pent-up passion. As Woods
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puts it: “His technical innovations are the key to the actual expression of an eroticism which, for all his struggles

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against the temptations of voyeurism and masturbation, he could not conceive of suppressing altogether.”

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His poetry remains difficult. My novel The Hopkins Conundrum follows the comic fortunes of an unscrupulous

in his verse.
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chancer who tries to exploit Hopkins's opacity by convincing the gullible that the secrets of the Holy Grail are hidden
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This madcap scheme to stir up Hopkins mania is entirely cynical, but I hope my novel may generate an interest in
this neglected poet for better reasons. As well as introducing a new generation to his rich, enthralling work, I’d love
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Hopkins’s existing admirers to consider how intrinsic his sexuality was to his genius. A century after his first publication,

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I hope we can come to think of him as part of the same canon as Wilde, united by more than near-coincidence in a
Jesuit periodical.
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The language of Hopkins’s poems is often striking. His imagery can be simple, as in Heaven-Haven, where the
comparison is between a nun entering a convent and a ship entering a harbour out of a storm. It can be splendidly
metaphysical and intricate, as it is in As Kingfishers Catch Fire, where he leaps from one image to another to show

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how each thing expresses its own uniqueness, and how divinity reflects itself through all of them.
Hopkins was a supporter of linguistic purism in English. In an 1882 letter to Robert Bridges, Hopkins writes: “It
makes one weep to think what English might have been; for in spite of all that Shakespeare and Milton have done [...]
no beauty in a language can make up for want of purity”. He took time to learn Old English, which became a major
influence on his writing. In the same letter to Bridges he calls Old English “a vastly superior thing to what we have
now”.
He uses many archaic and dialect words, but also coins new words. One example of this is twindles, which seems
from its context in Inversnaid to mean a combination of twines and dwindles. He often creates compound adjectives,
sometimes with a hyphen (such as dapple-dawn-drawn falcon) but often without, as in rolling level underneath him
steady air. This use of compound adjectives, similar to the Old English use of compounds nouns, concentrates his
images, communicating the instress of the poet's perceptions of an inscape to his reader.

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 Added richness comes from Hopkins's extensive use of alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia and rhyme, both at
the end of lines and internally as in:
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Hopkins was influenced by the Welsh language that he acquired while studying theology at St Beuno's near St
Asaph. The poetic forms of Welsh literature and particularly cynghanedd with its emphasis on repeating sounds
accorded with his own style and became a prominent feature of his work. This reliance on similar-sounding words
with close or differing senses means that his poems are best understood if read aloud. An important element in his
work is Hopkins's own concept of "inscape" which was derived, in part, from the medieval theologian Duns Scotus.
Anthony Domestico explains,

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Inscape, for Hopkins, is the charged essence, the absolute singularity that gives each created thing its being;
instress is both the energy that holds the inscape together and the process by which this inscape is perceived by an

petals, when we are enraptured by its specific, inimitable shade of pink."

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observer. We instress the inscape of a tulip, Hopkins would say, when we appreciate the particular delicacy of its

The Windhover aims to depict not the bird in general but instead one instance and its relation to the breeze. This
is just one interpretation of Hopkins's most famous poem, one which he felt was his best.

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Hopkins composed two poems about Dolben, "Where art thou friend" and "The Beginning of the End." Robert
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Bridges, who edited the first edition of Dolben's poems as well as Hopkins's, cautioned that the second poem "must

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never be printed," though Bridges himself included it in the first edition (1918). Another indication of the nature of his

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feelings for Dolben is that Hopkins's High Anglican confessor seems to have forbidden him to have any contact with

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Dolben except by letter. Their relationship was abruptly ended by Dolben's drowning in June 1867, an event which

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greatly affected Hopkins, although his feeling for Dolben seems to have cooled a good deal by that time. "Ironically,
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fate may have bestowed more through Dolben's death than it could ever have bestowed through longer life ... [for]
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many of Hopkins's best poems - impregnated with an elegiac longing for Dolben, his lost beloved and his muse - were
the result." Hopkins' relationship with Dolben is explored in the novel The Hopkins Conundrum.
Some of Hopkins' poems, such as The Bugler's First Communion and Epithalamion, arguably embody homoerotic

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themes, although this second poem was arranged by Robert Bridges from extant fragments.One contemporary

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literary critic, M.M. Kaylor, has argued for Hopkins's inclusion with the Uranian poets, a group whose writings

later his lifelong friend.

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derived, in many ways, from the prose works of Walter Pater, Hopkins's academic coach for his Greats exams, and

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Some critics have argued that homoerotic readings are either highly tendentious, or, that they can be classified

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under the broader category of "homosociality," over the gender, sexual-specific "homosexual" term. Hopkins's journal
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writings, they argue, offer a clear admiration for feminized beauty. In his book Hopkins Reconstructed (2000), Justus

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George Lawler critiques Robert Martin's controversial biography Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life (1991)

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by suggesting that Martin "cannot see the heterosexual beam... for the homosexual biographical mote in his own
eye... it amounts to a slanted eisegesis". The poems that elicit homoerotic readings can be read not merely as
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exercises in sublimation but as powerful renditions of religious conviction, a conviction that caused strain in his family
and even led him to burn some of his poems that he felt were unnecessarily self-centered. Julia Saville's book A
Queer Chivalry views the religious imagery in the poems as Hopkins's way of expressing the tension with homosexual

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identity and desire.
Christopher Ricks notes that Hopkins engaged in a number of penitential practices, "...but all of these self-
inflictions were not self-inflictions to him, and they are his business-or are his understanding of what it was for him to
be about his Father's business."Ricks takes issue with Martin's apparent lack of appreciation of the importance of the
role of Hopkins' religious commitment to his writing, and cautions against assigning a priority of influence to any
sexual instincts over other factors such as Hopkins' estrangement from his family.Biographer Paul Mariani finds in
Hopkins poems "... an irreconcilable tension-on the one hand, the selflessness demanded by Jesuit discipline; on the
other, the seeming self-indulgence of poetic creation."
Hopkins spent the last five years of his life as a classics professor at University College Dublin. Hopkins' isolation
in 1885 was multiple: a Jesuit distanced from his Anglican family and his homeland, an Englishman teaching in Dublin

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during a time of political strife, an unpublished poet striving to reconcile his artistic and religious callings. The poem
“To seem the stranger” was written in Ireland between 1885-1886, and is a poem of isolation and loneliness.
“Pied Beauty” is a curtal sonnet by the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889). It was written in 1877,
but not published until 1918, when it was included as part of the collection Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
In the poem, the narrator praises God for the variety of “dappled things” in nature, such as piebald cattle, trout and
finches. He also describes how falling chestnuts resemble coals bursting in a fire, because of the way in which the
chestnuts’ reddish-brown meat is exposed when the shells break against the ground. The narrator then moves to an
image of the landscape which has been “plotted and pieced” into fields (like quilt squares) by agriculture. At the end
of the poem, the narrator emphasizes that God's beauty is “past change”, and advises readers to “Praise him”.
This ending is gently ironic and beautifully surprising: the entire poem has been about variety, and then
God’s attribute of immutability is praised in contrast. By juxtaposing God’s changelessness with the vicissitude of His

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creation, His separation from creation is emphasized, as is His vast creativity. This turn or volta also serves to
highlight the poet’s skill at uniting apparent opposites by means of form and content: the meter is Hopkins’s own

Hopkins describes.

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sprung rhythm, and the packing-in of various alliterative syllables serves as an aural example of the visual variety

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