Ghost Stories with Gerard Manley Hopkins
In the Everymans' Library edition of Hopkins: Poems and Prose, there's a selection of entries from the diary that Gerard Manley Hopkins kept. The notebook is full of the observations he was always making, particularly of sunsets, the flight of birds, and other wonders of nature he saw as he would wander the countryside. Hopkins had a keen eye for observation and worked tirelessly to compress and refine those observations until they became pure language, piercing to the unspoken heart of what he saw.
"Hill of Tara IR - Saint Patrick's Church and Graveyard 01" by Daniel Mennerich is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
He had a strange fascination with supernatural wells and folk tales. This fascination makes an occasional appearance in his poetry, often transformed into a haunted view of the universe as a place shadowed over by the wing of the Holy Spirit. It all pointed to the inscape, or the presence of Christ inscribed into the very Being of each created thing. One of the consequences of seeing Christ in all things is to see all of him, including his pain, suffering, and death. Thus the pain, loneliness, and loss that we feel simultaneously alongside beauty and love. It's uncanny. For Hopkins, I suppose, everything was haunted, all the time, by Christ.
Anyways, we're on the verge of All Hallows and I thought I'd share with you some of the ghost stories that Hopkins jotted down in his notebooks.
THE HAUNTINGS AT SION HOUSE
“On March 22 I asked the Brentford boys about a ghost story they had told me before that. At Norris's market gardens by Sion Lane there is a place where according to tradition two men were ploughing with four horses: in bringing the plough round at the headland they fell into a covered well which they did not see and were killed. And now if you lean your ear against a wall at the place you can hear the horses going and the men singing at their work.”
“There are other ghosts belonging to Sion House. E.g. there is an image (of our Lady, if I remember) in a stained window which every year is broken by an unseen hand and invisibly mended again.”
JESTER FAIRIES
“Hockey and football are much played in Ireland and the great day is Shrove Tuesday, on which the 'merits' are awarded. A player who had greatly distinguished himself at football was that day going home when in a lonely field a ball came rolling to his fee; he kicked it, it was kicked back, and soon he found himself playing the game with a fieldful of fairies and in a place which was strange to him. The fairies would not let him go but they did their best to amuse him, they danced and wrestled before him so that he should never want for entertainment, but the could not get him to eat, for knowing that if he eat what they gave him they would have a claim upon him he preferred to starve and they for fear he should die on their hands at last put him on the right road home. On reaching home he found a pot of stirabout on the fire and had only had time to taste a ladlefull when the fairies were in upon him and began to drag him away again. He caught hold of the doorpost and called on the saints but when he came to our Lady's name they let go and troubled him no more.”
FAIRIES AS THICK AS WEEDS
“A priest one night was driving out upon a sick call when in the dark his whip was snatched from his hand. His servant got down to look for it and found himself in the midst of the fairies. “Father” he said, “they're as thick as traghneans'. (Traghneans, however spelt, are the heads of flowering grass or of some flowering grass, often used as pipe-cleaners). The priest now began to read (say repeat, it being a dark night) some sentences from breviary and the whip was instantly put into his hands.”
CANDLES IN THE GRAVEYARD
“Br Slattery knew of a woman who had buried three children, one unbaptised, at shoe wake three lights or 'candles' were seen in the yard (the grave-yard?), one weaker than the two others: these were he children's souls come to accompany hers. These 'candles' seem to be recognised form of apparition for departed souls.”
Finally, to see how Hopkins refined these ideas (he discarded all of the above stories and they languish as journal fodder), a lovely poem about fall and mortality that I cannot stop reading.
to a young child
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
