By Stephen Waggoner
In Gerard Manley Hopkins’s early poem, “Heaven-Haven,” a speaker longs for a place of calm and respite amid a stormy landscape. The poem, which consists of two stanzas of contrasting depictions of serene and tumultuous weather, is contextualized by the inscription “A nun takes the veil.” The words presumably come from a woman who has taken up religious orders; they reflect her decision to dwell in the comfort of the church. She begins by saying, “I have desired to go / Where springs not fail,” and continues later in the poem specifying, “Where no storms come” (Hopkins, lines 1–2, 6). However, if the woman has physically arrived at her destination, the church, why does she seem caught in the desires of the past as if she has not arrived? Throughout the poem, readers are confronted with several other nuances that complicate Hopkins’s deceptively simple images. Rather than giving his listeners a sentimental reflection on the sanctuary that church and religion provide, Hopkins means to unsettle his readers’ assumptions that a life of holiness is one marked by stagnant calm.
Readers are immediately struck by the ambiguity of the first line’s verb tense. Hopkins writes it in the present perfect (“have desired”), which does not tell us whether the speaker believes that she has arrived at her haven. Should not Hopkins write that she “had desired to go” to the fields, since her journey into sanctuary, a community that provides her food, shelter, and calm, is complete? Hopkins, through this vague language, provokes readers to wonder more deeply about what the nun is looking for and why she is searching for it in the church. Hopkins also uses homonyms, which forces his audience into recursive readings of the text. When the speaker mentions “[fields] where springs not fail” (Hopkins, line 2), the noun “springs” may be interpreted as referring either to unfailing, natural founts of freshwater (conducive to the idea of calm) or to the season, which is evoked in the next two lines of the poem by mention of lilies. The readers are forced to rethink their first assumption, causing a disruptive, bouncing motion in their minds. Since the inclusion of “springs” makes the text unexpectedly dynamic, readers second-guess their ability to reliably interpret the nun’s desired destination.
The poem’s third line creates the sharpest disruption of the poem’s imagery. At first, the line “fields where flies no sharp and sided hail” (Hopkins, line 3) might inadvertently conjure the image of insects. However, readers then understand that Hopkins means to evoke a field where hailstones are not blown sideways by powerful winds. This scene pulses with action that the nun would like to avoid. However, by including such jarring syntax, the image causes readers to feel the storm themselves. Hopkins does not want his readers to accept unquestioningly his speaker’s desires; he wants the readers to feel the tumult that the woman in the story so fears.
Just as Hopkins’s syntax disrupts readers’ presumptions about the destination that is described in “Heaven-Haven,” the poem’s form challenges readers’ predictions. Hopkins, who wrote this poem early in his poetic career, composed it in an unestablished form. The first and last lines of the poem’s two stanzas share end rhyme and sandwich a middle couplet, which physically breaks from the rest of the verse. The wild imbalance between the top and bottom lines of the couplets is reflected in the indentation; the stanzas’ short second lines float to the right side of the verse, while the long third lines burst out far into the page. As readers trace the unfamiliar form of the first stanza and then find it appearing again in the second, their attention is vaulted back to the beginning. This dynamic wholeness of the poem starts to present itself as an analogue of the unspecified country that the nun desires.
If the poem were merely about a harbor in a storm, the reader might see this image akin to nature’s disrupting calmness. However, upon considering the religious subtitle, these bursting and breaking lines suddenly appear as liturgy. Even though the middle two lines break from the form, they are still contained by each stanza’s first and last lines—putting order alongside flux. Further, since readers find this form in both stanzas, it performs like a liturgy, which relies on the repetition of form. Hopkins uses this technique to suggest that dynamism not only can exist in religious life, but it is required, just as the poem requires tension between flux and calm to come alive.
In the end, Hopkins refuses his listeners a sentimental celebration of the sanctuary that a life in the church provides. Hopkins adds too much uncertainty and hesitance to “Heaven-Haven” for readers to accept the speaker’s suggestions that holiness leads to a life of stagnant calm. The poem begins with ambiguity of tense and persists throughout in complicating the expected symbols of rest. This uncertainty and motion soon find belonging in the invented symmetrical form of the poem itself. As readers wrestle with what exactly this “nun [who] takes the veil” could be desiring, the poem itself serves a taste of eternal beauty. Moreover, the same sanctuary that resides in the “springs” dwells in the loving dynamism of the Holy Trinity. Hopkins points to this vivid fact—this all-important, dynamic truth that can only be encapsulated by that deep, calm, wild, and loving mystery.
Work Cited
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. “Heaven-Haven.” Hopkins: Poems and Prose. London: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1995, p. 43.