Page:Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1918.djvu/127

104 lyrical poems, mostly sentimental aspects of death: one of them 'Winter with the Gulf-stream' was published in 'Once a Week', and reprinted at least in part in some magazine: the autograph copy is dated Aug. 1871, but G. M. H. told me that he wrote it when he was at school; whence I guess that he altered it too much to allow of its early dating. The following is a specimen of his signature at this date.



After these last-mentioned poems there is a gap of silence which may be accounted for in his own words from a letter 1868-1875 to R. W. D. Oct. 5, '78: 'What (verses) I had written I burnt before I became a Jesuit (i.e. 1868) and resolved to write no more, as not belonging to my profession, unless it were by the wish of my superiors; so for seven years I wrote nothing but two or three little presentation pieces which occasion called for. But when in the winter of '75 the Deutschland was wrecked in the mouth of the Thames and five Franciscan nuns, exiles from Germany by the Falck Laws, aboard of her were drowned I was affected by the account and happening to say so to my rector he said that he wished some one would write a poem on the subject. On this hint I set to work and, though my hand was out at first, produced one. I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm which now I realised on paper.... I do not say the idea is altogether new ... but no one has professedly used it and made it the principle throughout, that I know of.... However I had to mark the stresses ... and a great many more oddnesses could not but dismay an editor's eye, so that when I offered it to our magazine The Month ... they dared not print it.'

Of the two or three presentation pieces here mentioned one is certainly the Marian verses 'Rosa mystica', published in the 'The Irish Monthly', May '98, and again in Orby