Poetry: “The May Magnificant” by Gerard Manly Hopkins

Another Hopkins poem, and I post this not because it’s so overwhelming a poem—it’s a nice poem, but not great—but because it gave me insight into the Flannery O’Connor short story, “Greanleaf” which I’ve been analyzing.

First the poem.

The May Magnificat

by Gerard Manly Hopkins

MAY is Mary’s month, and I

Muse at that and wonder why:

    Her feasts follow reason,

    Dated due to season—

Candlemas, Lady Day;                      5

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?   10

    Is it opportunest

    And flowers finds soonest?

Ask of her, the mighty mother:

Her reply puts this other

    Question: What is Spring?—           15

    Growth in every thing—

Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,

Grass and greenworld all together;

    Star-eyed strawberry-breasted

    Throstle above her nested                 20

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           25

Mary sees, sympathising

    With that world of good,

    Nature’s motherhood.

Their magnifying of each its kind

With delight calls to mind                       30

    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                        35

    To offering Mary May.

When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple

Bloom lights the orchard-apple

    And thicket and thorp are merry

    With silver-surfèd cherry                     40

 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     45

Tells Mary her mirth till Christ’s birth

    To remember and exultation

    In God who was her salvation.

For those that may not know, “The Magnificant” refers to the Canticle of Mary that our blessed mother sings (or speaks) on her visit to her cousin Elizabeth in Luke’s Gospel, 1:46-55.  The poem also refers to the Liturgical Calendar’s dedication of the month of May to the Blessed Virgin.  As you can read, Hopkins starts the poem as a meditation.

If read the first part of my of my analysis of O’Connor’s short story, “Greanleaf,” I wondered why O’Connor named the central character “Mrs. May.”  I don’t know if O’Connor read this poem—it’s quite likely—but the fertility that Hopkins associates with Mary here (she is pregnant with Jesus) is clearly alluded to in the O’Connor short story.  That Mrs. May stands for sterility in the story makes her name ironic and paradoxical.  The word “greenworld” in the 18^th line of the poem echoes the name of the family that stands in contradistinction to Mrs. May, the Greanleafs.

I’ll flesh this out in my part two post of the “Greanleaf” analysis but for now just enjoy this wonderful poem.