ABSTRACT
Gerard Manley Hopkins read the poetry of William Wordsworth with extreme care, and he read all of it. Wordsworth was known, particularly after Ecclesiastical Sketches, as an Anglican: more importantly he was a poet whose work, in Gill’s judicious words, ‘offered not quite a substitute for religion but an alternative realm in which religious sensibilities could operate’. Wordsworth’s ‘particular grace’, his charisma, was his ability to transcend the ordinary: it was a feature of his poetry that Hopkins recognised as spiritual, part of the perception of the world that is given to very few. Hopkins, the Jesuit priest, knows from whence it comes, for the poem was written ‘not without their intercession’, the intercession of the two saints with God. Hopkins was aware of the shaping of his own mind through Wordsworth’s work, of the older poet’s importance to a religious person who wanted to recognise what Hopkins called a ‘spiritual insight into nature’.
