Introduction
Mary as the Madonna in a garden setting in the chapel of the Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth, St John's Wood, London.
Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote his poem, "The May Magnificat," at Stonyhurst College in 1878, the year after he was ordained as a Jesuit (see Gardner 230). It reads simultaneously as a paean of praise to the full flowering of spring, and a devotional hymn to Mary, the mother of Jesus in the New Testament. As a commemoration of Mary, May is called the Marian month in the Catholic calendar, and follows two remembrance days earlier in the year. The first is Candlemas in early February, which marks the visit to the Temple for Mary's purification and her child's presentation, 40 days after Christ's birth; the second is Lady Day, towards the end of March, otherwise known as the Feast of the Annunciation. The Marian month itself ends with the Feast of the Visitation on 31 May, celebrating Mary's visit to her cousin Elizabeth. This is the occasion on which Mary sings the Magnificat, starting: "My soul doth magnify the Lord" (Luke I, 46-55).
In Hopkins's poem, Mary's time-hallowed association with the month is noted, and the particular reason for it inferred: Mary is felt to have been in close sympathy with the season ("All things rising, all things sizing / Mary sees, sympathising..."), her sympathy accounted for by her own experience of motherhood, and rousing, in turn, our own sympathies with both the month and Mary herself.
The May Magnificat
May is Mary's month, and I
Muse at that and wonder why:
Her feasts follow reason,
Dated due to season —
Candlemas, Lady Day;
But the Lady Month, May,
Why fasten that upon her,
With a feasting in her honour?
Is it only its being brighter
Than the most are must delight her?
Is it opportunest
And flowers finds soonest?
Ask of her, the mighty mother:
Her reply puts this other
Question:What is Spring? —
Growth in every thing —
Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
Grass and greenworld all together;
Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
Throstle above her nested
Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin
Forms and warms the life within;
And bird and blossom swell
In sod or sheath or shell.
All things rising, all things sizing
Mary sees, sympathising
With that world of good,
Nature's motherhood.
Their magnifying of each its kind
With delight calls to mind
How she did in her stored
Magnify the Lord.
Well but there was more than this:
Spring's universal bliss
Much, had much to say
To offering Mary May.
When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple
Bloom lights the orchard-apple
And thicket and thorp are merry
With silver-surfed cherry
And azuring-over greybell makes
Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes
And magic cuckoocall
Caps, clears, and clinches all —
This ecstasy all through mothering earth
Tells Mary her mirth till Christ's birth
To remember and exultation
In God who was her salvation.
[1878; Poem 19 in Hopkins's Poems and Prose]
In its details, the twelve-quatrain "May Magnificat" is full of that keen appreciation and knowledge of the natural world shown in so many of Hopkins's other poems, including the sonnet entitled "Spring," which he had composed in the same month of the previous year. One of the details in "The May Magnificat" is even carried over from the earlier poem, although it is differently described there — that is, the thrushes' eggs in "Spring" are like "little low heavens," while in "The May Magnificat" (in which the thrush goes by its archaic name of throstle) their colour is compared to the blue of the wild bugle-flower. Only the reference here to the "drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple / Bloom" of the apple blossom might suggest, in this later poem, the suffering of both Mary and Jesus in the time to come. On the other hand, the silvery sheen of cherry blossom and bluebells in the dewy air may suggest something more precious, ethereal and miraculous than can be found in the earlier poem.
From left to right: (a) Bugle flowers, with the blue Common Bugle in the middle, interestingly, Pratt mentions that the lower leaves are "egg-shaped, or inversely egg-shaped" (176). (b) Turdus Musicus or Song-Thrush, from John Gould's The Birds of Great Britain Vol. 2. Click on this image for more information. (c) Apple blossom, photo by the present author.
Surprisingly, Hopkins himself, writing about the poem to his friend Robert Bridges, at first found "little good" in "The May Magnificat," apart from "the freedom of the rhythm" (65). Later, he went even further, saying that he found "something displeasing" about it. The first editor of the letters to Bridges, Claude C. Abbott, tentatively ascribed this to the awkwardness of having deployed its "lush, yet fresh" natural description in relation to Mary (Letters 77, and n.2); but in view of the old and continuing custom of creating Mary or Marian Gardens in tribute to her, this seems doubtful. Many would agree with the much more recent view that his reservation was simply "unfathomable," and that the poem is, in fact, "as impressive as Hopkins' other successful poems" (Shimane 167).
Thematically, its approach is straightforward. Pondering the traditional connection made in the Catholic church between the month and this Biblical figure, the poet sees the burst of new life in nature at this time of year as analogous to Mary's bearing of the infant Jesus in the service of God. Indeed, in his discussion of the Catholic imagination, Andrew Greely views the poem as a perfect example of that particular form of religious imagination, "fervently at work as one might want," tying together "the fertility of spring, the fertility of Mary and the fertility of God" (92). To view the poem in these ways, as built on analogy and connections, is to differentiate it from a poem like "God's Grandeur" (1877) that celebrates nature as a direct manifestation of God. But it is no less joyful and celebratory. All these poems are very different in tone from Hopkins's later works, such as "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire" of 1888 — works that unflinchingly explore tension and division between the earthly and the spiritual, which can only be overcome at the Resurrection.
Indeed, this poem is intensely joyful. The main thrust of it is that nature in May is in a state of ecstasy very like that of the human being whose coarse, earthly, physical urges are sublimated in an intense experience, at once fertile and spiritual. There is a telling background to this. The process of sublimation is explored in a very early poem, "Il Mystico" (1862). A long exercise in Miltonic verse, this poem was written when Hopkins was only eighteen. It starts with a negative view of nature, and of man as the child of it, with the speaker exclaiming: "Hence sensual gross desires,/ Right offspring of your grimy mother Earth!" The spirit is deemed quite "alien" to this crude physicality, and the speaker now pleads for divine inspiration to free his spirit from it — to release him like a lark to fly from and above it:
to glide aloof
Under the cloud-festooned roof,
That with a turning of the wings
Light and darkness from him flings;
To drift in air, the circled earth
Spreading still its sunned girth;
Yet, after all, the whole spiritual experience in "Il Mystico" is couched in physical terms, not of the body itself, but of the natural world:
To hear the sheep-bells dimly die
Till the lifted clouds were nigh;
In breezy belts of upper air
Melting into aether rare;
And when the silent height were won, —
And all in lone air stood the sun,
To sing scarce heard, and singing fill
The airy empire at his will;
And not only does the initial transition to this "release" still have links with the earth, but the very climax of the experience connects it with earthly experience too. The last lines evoke nothing more rarified than a rural English landscape:
Then would I fling me up to sip
Sweetness from the hour, and dip
Deeply in the arched lustres,
And look abroad on sunny clusters
Of wringing tree-tops, chalky lanes,
Wheatfields tumbled with the rains,
Streaks of shadow, thistled leas,
Whence spring the jewell'd harmonies
That meet in mid-air; and be so
Melted in the dizzy bow
That I may drink that ecstacy
Which to pure souls alone may be.... [Emphasis added]
In short, the longed-for ecstasy in "Il Mystico" has not actually escaped from the physical; on the contrary, references to meeting and melting declare it to be inseparable, not from the cruder grounds or dregs of human nature, it is true, but from the natural world in general.
Hopkins's use of the word "ecstasy" in "The May Magnificat" is therefore not at all as unexpected or "curious" as the critic Daniel Brown suggests (22). Brown's position, the reason for his surprise, is that the word "usually refers to the state in which a person passes out of finite selfhood, transcends her or his natural state"; he concludes that the use of "ecstasy" in this poem "marks the distance that Hopkins takes from the purely naturalistic explanations that Darwin and his peers were offering at the time" (22). But this is just the point: the distance from Darwin has always been there, and Hopkins is once again expressing his long-held belief that the human spirit partakes of the divine in being inextricably involved with nature's "jewell'd harmonies."
Another example of Hopkins's use of the word "ecstasy" confirms this. "The Windhover," like "Spring," dates to 1877, the year before Hopkins composed "The May Magnificat." The bird, with its heraldic and spiritual connotations, is described as circling high in the heavens above him; it has "rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing /In his ecstasy!" It is, in other words, supported, steadied, clothed even, by it its great spreading flight feathers, with the word "wimpling" having the added implications of framing, protecting and encompassing. Once again, far from rejecting the physical, Hopkins involves the energy of the spirit intimately, dynamically, and usefully in tandem with it. And once again, this is far from Darwinian. John Holmes, a critic with a particular interest in how the poets responded to Darwin's ideas, notes that "[t]o the Darwinian poet, the hawk is the archytpe of predatory nature," while Hopkins sees the bird in an entirely different way, as "a symbol of Christ's chivalry" (159). Darwin simply does not come into the picture here.
The idea either that nature is a "piece-bright paling" that "shuts the spouse/Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows" ("The Starlight Home"), or that the divine can be found in conjunction with the physical world, permeates Hopkins's earlier works, and informs his poetic practice, lying behind his ideas of inscape and instress . It inspired poetry in which descriptions of the living and growing plants and creatures around him, the seasons and the scenery, express both his instinctive love of the natural world and his spiritual vision. Ten years later, however, anxiety about man's capacity to blight his surroundings has been joined by a sense of relentless change in those surroundings, and imminent doom, a view most fully expressed in the apocalyptic scenario of "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire," in which "nature's bonfire burns on" in a vast conflagration, to "leave but ash." As Michael D. Moore suggests, there are now only "occasional traces of Hopkins's confidence that non-human nature is 'news of God'" (154), and the best comfort (but a startlingly miraculous one) is the hope of Resurrection.
Bibliography
Abbott, C.C. The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935.
Brown, Daniel. Gerard Manley Hopkins. Writers and Their Work. Tavistock: Northcote House, 2004.
Gardner, W. H., ed. Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.
Holmes, John.Darwin's Bards: British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution. Pbk ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013.
Moore, Michael D. “‘A World Undone’: Earth and Utterance in Hopkins.” The Hopkins Quarterly Vol. 31, no. 1/4 (2004): 143–56. JSTOR. Web. 6 May 2025. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45241423.
Pratt, Ann. The Flowering Plants, Grasses, Sedges and Ferns of Great Britain..... London: Frederick Warne, 1873. Internet Archive, from a copy in the Foyle Special Collections Library, King's College London. Web. 7 May 2025.
Shimane, Kunio. “Ecstasy and Exultation: ‘The May Magnificat.’” The Hopkins Quarterly. Vol. 31, no. 1/4 (2004): 167–79. JSTOR. Web. 6 May 2025. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45241425.
Created 9 May 2025