Welsh Journals

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G. MANLEY HOPKINS AS A CYWYDDWR By W. H. GARDNER. HOPKINS, born in 1844, was of Welsh and English extraction. He became a Jesuit in 1868, was appointed Professor of Greek at the Royal University, Dublin, in 1884, and died of typhoid in 1889. His poems were not published until 1918. In 1874, Hopkins went to St. Beuno's College, North Wales, to pursue his theological studies. We learn from his journal and Letters that before he had been there two months he began to learn Welsh, ostensibly for the purpose of assisting in the conversion of the natives. The love of poetry, however, was strong within him, and he soon became engrossed in the beauties and intricacies of Welsh verse, which he pronounced "very rich in sound and imagery." The first of his mature poems, "The Wreck of the Deutschland," was written at St. Beuno's early in 1876, and in this and other poems of the following year we can plainly trace the influence of cynghanedd, tor ymadrodd, dyfalu, and other Welsh poetic devices. Apart from stressing the difficulty of Welsh (the poetry, he says, is quite as hard as a Greek chorus), Hopkins gives us in his printed works no information as regards the extent of his reading in that language. About two years ago, however, while examining the Hopkins MSS. at Amen House, I came across two interesting pieces of evidence one was a bare allusion to Tudur Aled's "Cywydd i Wenfrewi Santes" the other was a copy (probably the only one extant) of Welsh prose and verse by Hopkins himself. The following poem, with its prose introduction, is taken from a small sheet in Hopkins's own hand (MS. "H," No. 25). Whenever a spelling or grammatical correction has been made, the MS. reading is given in a footnote