Abstract

The poetic joy voiced in this book's title reflects the hope in God of a poet who sacrificed his art not long after his conversion, but then received back the use of his native talents with even deeper inspiration. As a young Jesuit, Gerard Manley Hopkins offered up the use of his creative abilities in frustrating silence as part of his quest to make a complete donation of himself to God. Only years later did a well-attuned alertness to the stirrings of divine grace propel him to poetry once more, but now a poetry chastened of his early infatuation with Victorian sensibilities and enlivened by a consciously Medieval approach to reading the signs of God's presence everywhere.