#digby mackworth dolben

[idylls-of-the-divine-romance]

Man I will learn about some Christian Victorian gay poet and be like... "he was absorbed in imperfectly suppressed erotic thoughts" and "religious imagery was his way of expressing the tension with homosexual identity and desire"... same dude. Same *sighs*

[tunglo]

Father Ignatius just keeps giving...

Digby Mackworth Dolben - he of the tragic schoolboy crush genre of poetry - was apparently a novice in Ignatius' order! Digby was so unrepentantly blatant in his obsession with an older boy at school that he was almost kicked out of Eton. (no amount of exclamation marks would be sufficient)

Anyway, he promised his parents he'd try to keep his interest in both boys and Ritualism on the downlow, but wrote to his cousin (Robert Bridges) in Jan 1864:

I am to have an introduction to Brother Ignatius of Claydon!!!

Over the next few months Digby became completely obsessed with Ignatius and the Order - so much so that he didn't want to go back to Eton after Easter break. Ignatius invited him to at least one sleepover at Ascot Priory where he met Pusey and Lydia Sellon during this time, and Digby dutifully went around calling himself Brother Dominic and trying to convert all his friends to the cause. He left Eton at Christmas '64.

In '65, when his tutor was ill, Digby wrote to Robert Bridges' mother and asked if he could come stay for a bit, and learn alongside her younger son and his tutor. She told him absolutely no way because she didn't trust him not to corrupt her son with his papism! Despite his promises to be 'discreet', she wouldn't back down. (All his letters to Robert were still waxing lyrical about Ignatius and the Order, so I guess it wasn't without reason.)

To cheer him up Bridges let him visit at Oxford and introduced Digby to Gerald Manley Hopkins who fell in immediate infatuation. Per Wiki: Hopkins's biographer Robert Bernard Martin asserts that Hopkins's meeting with Dolben, "was, quite simply, the most momentous emotional event of [his] undergraduate years, probably of his entire life". They exchanged letters up to Digby's untimely death and Hopkins wrote poetry for him.

Digby was then sent to Boughrood to prepare for Oxford, and his classmates there remembered him as "a young monk of mediaeval times. … In appearance he was tall and slight, with a complexion of transparent pallor. He had good features, and fine dark melancholy eyes. Do you remember Dore's picture of a young monk sitting in chapel among a lot of older men, & gazing sadly into vacancy? He was rather like that."

He was still obsessed with Ignatius and the Order, to the point he was travelling to Llanthony Abbey and back in full monkish garb. When he wasn't busy telling everyone he was going to be a monk, he tended to go on about his crush from Eton. Throughout late '66 / early '67 everyone's recollection seems to be of a sad pale lonely young man, not much looking forward to Oxford but determined to see out his promise to his father that he wouldn't become a Catholic until after he graduated...

He drowned on June 28th in the River Welland, presumably after fainting in the water while swimming. Robert Bridges later collected his poetry and published it.

On river banks my love was born, And cradled 'neath a budding thorn, Whose flowers never more shall kiss Lips half so sweet and red as his. Beneath him lily-islands spread With broad cool leaves a floating bed: Around, to meet his opening eyes, The ripples danced in glad surprise. I found him there when spring was new, When winds were soft and skies were blue; I marvelled not, although he drew My whole soul to him, for I knew That he was born to be my king, And I was only born to sing With faded lips and feeble lays His love and beauty all my days...

[kazalmilk]

“On river banks my love was born,

And cradled ‘neath a budding thorn,

Whose flowers never more shall kiss

Lips half so sweet and red as his”

-Digby Mackworth Dolben

obsessing over these two… ❤️

[queerwelsh]

Gerard Manley Hopkins was born on the 28th of July, 1844 in Essex, to devout High Church Anglicans, who may have had Welsh roots (based on the surname Hopkins).

At Oxford, he became close to poet Robert Bridges and became estranged from his family due to his conversion to Catholicism. Gerard then became a Jesuit.

He continued his education at St Beuno's College in Denbighshire and started to more strongly identify with Wales. He wrote poems about Wales and Welsh identity and started to learn Welsh and of Welsh poetry such as the 'Cywydd' and 'Cynghanedd'. He left Wales when ordained to the priesthood.

Many of his poems also were homoerotic. It is thought some of these poems were inspired by, or directed towards, Digby Mackworth Dolben, another poet, who he seemed to have fallen in love with at Eton. Gerard was told by his Anglican confessor to stay away from Digby, who died a couple of years later from accidental drowning.

Digby was a 'Urainian poet,' a group of 'male homosexual poets' of the 19th and 20th century, and arguments have been made that Gerard should be included in this group. His sexually was however certainly repressed and he isolated himself at the end of his life.

Gerard suffered from ill health and so-called melancholia, which today some believe to have been bipolar disorder or major depression. His last words were "I am so happy, I am so happy."

Gerard Manley Hopkinds died of typhoid fever on the 8th of June, 1889, in Dublin, where he was buried in a Jesuit plot.

[olympic-paris]

THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

based on: The White Crane Institute's 'Gay Wisdom', Gay Birthdays, Gay For Today, Famous GLBT, glbt-Gay Encylopedia, Today in Gay History, Wikipedia, and more … July 28

600 B.C – The Greek poet Theognis is born near Athens. He was an aristocrat who lost his wealth and property during one of the many civil wars of the period and turned to writing, penning most of his works for his young lover Cyrnus.

1844 – Essex-born Gerard Manley Hopkins (d.1889) was a Victorian poet and Jesuit priest.

At Balliol College, Oxford (1863-67) he studied classics. Hopkins was an unusually sensitive student and poet, as witnessed by his class-notes and early poetic pieces. It was at Oxford that he forged a lifelong friendship with Robert Bridges (eventual Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom) which would be of importance in his development as a poet, and his posthumous acclaim. Hopkins was deeply impressed with the work of Christina Rossetti and she became one of his greatest contemporary influences, meeting him in 1864. During this time he studied with the prestigious writer and critic Walter Pater, who tutored him in 1866 and who remained a friend till September 1879 when Hopkins left Oxford

Hopkins began his time in Oxford as a keen socialite and prolific poet, but he seemed to have alarmed himself with the changes in his behaviour that resulted, and he became more studious and began recording his "sins" in his diary. As an undergraduate he engaged in friendships that may be viewed as romantic, though they tended to be idealised and spiritualised. In particular, he found it hard to accept his sexual attraction to other men, including a deep infatuation for Digby Mackworth Dolben. There is nothing to suggest, however, any physical consummation and indeed he seems to have remained celibate throughout his life. He exercised a strict self-control in regard to his homosexual desire, especially after he became a follower of Henry Parry Liddon and of Edward Pusey, the last member of the original Oxford Movement. It was during this time of intense scrupulosity that Hopkins seems to have especially begun confronting his strong homoerotic impulses and began to consider choosing the cloister.

Although a brilliant scholar, Hopkins failed his final theology exam which limited his career in the clergy, although ordained. Short (5ft 2in.), gloomy and odd, he was not an effective teacher either, although he was a professor of Greek literature at University College, Dublin; but he was a lifelong poet of considerable brilliance (if a gloomy kind of brilliance) and influence. He was particularly influential in creating a new form of rhythm by combining different traditions of poetry into something completely new, which effectively pre-dated the free verse of 20th century poetry.

Plagued by ill health for much of his life, Hopkins died of typhoid fever on 8 June 1889, aged only 45, and is buried in Dublin.

Little known during his lifetime, he had an enthusiastic audience of motley fellow poets but it was his university friend and supporter Robert Bridges who brought Gerard Manley Hopkins work to prominence when he, by then Poet Laureate, published the first collected edition of his late friend's work.

Although it is unlikely that the sexually-repressed Catholic priest, Hopkins would have considered himself to be homosexual, his poetry reveals that he considered male beauty to be one of the most splendid witnesses of the divine; his diaries reveal something of a tortured obsession with actual male beauty.

1927 – Born: John Ashbery, an American poet who has won nearly every major American award for poetry and is recognised as one of America's most important, though still controversial, poets. (d.2017)

"No figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 50 years as John Ashbery", Langdon Hammer, chairman of the English Department at Yale University, wrote in 2008. "No American poet has had a larger, more diverse vocabulary, not Whitman, not Pound". Stephen Burt, a poet and Harvard professor of English has compared Ashbery to T.S. Eliot, the "last figure whom half the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible".

Ashbery was born in 1927 near Rochester, New York. He is author of more than fifteen books of poems, beginning with Turandot and Other Poems in 1953, and is considered one of the leading contemporary American poets. His works range in length from two-line poems and haiku to the book-length Flow Chart.

Ashbery is often referred to as a philosophical poet. He is clearly concerned with the nature of language and its connection to thought. He is also concerned more specifically with the nature of poetry and its boundaries in the second half of the twentieth century, as well as with the relationship between poet and reader.

Although Ashbery's poems often have the feel of autobiography, he does not include his own life in his poetry in a recognisable way. His claim to being a gay poet depends more on his friendship with Frank O'Hara and his inclusion in O'Hara's poems than it does on anything in his own writing.

The critic and poet Richard Howard makes a distinction between "homosexual writers" and "writers who are homosexual." Although most Ashbery criticism places him in the latter category, ignoring questions of sexual preference either in his life or the poems, there have been a few attempts to read Ashbery as a gay poet.

Despite the lack of explicit gay content, for example, his work shares concerns with other late twentieth-century gay writing. Ashbery probes the nature of identity, how a person constructs his own identity and that of others, and the degree to which that identity depends on the culture around us.

In the early 1970s, Ashbery began teaching at Brooklyn College, where his students included poet John Yau. In the 1980s, he moved to Bard College, where he is the Charles P. Stevenson, Jr., Professor of Languages and Literature. He was the poet laureate of New York state from 2001 to 2003, and also served for many years as a chancellor of the Academy of Poets.

Ashbery lived in New York City and Hudson, New York, with his husband, David Kermani, who in 2017 announced Ashbery's death of natural causes to the press.

1928 – The Netherlands: Opening of the 1928 Olympics where French athlete Violette Morris (1893 – 1944) had been barred from competing because she was a lesbian and because she and her female lover made their affair public. Her lover left Morris after the athlete had decided to undergo a double mastectomy to fit into race cars more easily. She won two gold and one silver medals at the Women’s World Games in 1921–1922. Starting in 1936 she worked with the Gestapo during World War II. She was killed in 1944 in a Resistance-led ambush as a traitor to the French state.

1941 – Colin Higgins (d.1988), Hollywood director and screenwriter. Born in the South Pacific island of New Caledonia to an Australian mother and American father, Higgins moved with his family to Redwood, CA from Sydney in the fifties. After attending Stanford University for a year, he dropped out to hitchhike across the country. His travels took him first to the Actors Studio in New York and then to Europe where he volunteered for the Army as a sports reporter for The Stars and Stripes. He eventually returned to Stanford to receive his degree in English and later attended film school at UCLA. During his final year, he wrote the screenplay for Harold and Maude.

While today it is considered to be one of the great Hollywood movies, Harold and Maude was a huge flop when it opened during the Christmas season of 1971 with little fanfare and advertising. The unusual romance between a young man and a much older woman, starring Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon, struck a chord with audiences and soon became a cult favorite around the world. His stage version ran in Paris for seven years.

Following the success of Harold and Maude, Higgins went on to write and direct some of the most successful films of the 70s and 80s, working with some of the biggest names in Hollywood, including Jane Fonda, Goldie Hawn, Richard Pryor and Burt Reynolds. His films include Silver Streak, Foul Play, Nine to Five and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.In 1986, Higgins established a foundation in his name to further his humanitarian concerns. The Foundation annually awards the Colin Higgins Youth Courage Awards for "bravery in the face of discrimination, intolerance and bigotry based on sexual orientation and/or gender." That same year, he also completed a television mini-series based on Shirley MacLaine's book Out on a Limb, which turned out to be his last film project. Higgins died of AIDS in 1988.

1972 –Richard Newman was a contestant on the UK Channel 4's seventh series of Big Brother in 2006. He is a former-waiter from London who moved to Edmonton, Alberta, Canada at an early age, and returned to the UK ten years ago. An out gay man, Richard described himself as a 'sexual terrorist' when he entered the Big Brother house for BB7 in May 2006. He took on the role of the 'father figure' in the House. Richard often mediated during fights between other housemates. He is also something of an agony uncle and was always giving advice to other housemates - ironic for a man in his thirties wearing a series of vests, naval caps and assorted diamanté jewellery.

He holds a record of surviving eviction 6 times, the most in Big Brother UK history. On the night of the Final, Richard came fourth.

From October 2006 Richard worked on the award-winning digital station GaydarRadio, hosting his own weekend show and co-hosting the Dickie & Dolly Show with former BB housemate and now good friend, Lea. Richard left the station after a shake-up of the schedule of Gaydar Radio was announced in July 2008 .

Richard has since become an accomplished freelance writer contributing mainly to the gay press in the UK, Europe and his native Canada. He has written for Boyz, QX, Scene 24/7 and Winq Magazine. Richard also writes his own blog, Richard Says! Musings From a Former Reality Star.

1977 – Wade Davis is a former American football player. A defensive player, Davis played college football at Weber State. He was on the preseason rosters of three different NFL teams in the early 2000s, but never made the final roster for the regular season. In 2012, Davis came out and spoke publicly about what it was like to be a closeted homosexual in the NFL.

"I think subconsciously I think I understood, the way I was raised that being gay was wrong and there was no way that my family, at least in my mind would accept me, and also that my football family would accept me just because the perception that being gay meant you're less masculine," Wade said.

Wade remembers a time in Tennessee when a teammate saw something different in him. The teammate told Wade that he would make the team as long as he didn't give anyone a reason to suspect him of being gay. Wade went out that evening and spent $1,500 at a strip club so that there was no inclination that anything was different about him.

Since his playing days, Wade has been living what he calls his second dream. He works at the Hetrick Martin Institute, which is an LGBTQ non-profit organization where gay, lesbian and nonconforming youth can find great services and a sense of family if they don't have that. "I get to do a job every day that changes lives," Wade said.

Watch the interview (7 mins 22 secs):

1987 – Gay filmmaker Arthur Bressan, Jr., American film-maker dies of complications from AIDS. Ironically, his film Buddies was one of the first feature films to deal with AIDS.

All of his films were low budget productions, and dealt with gay characters and storylines. Although the bulk of his output was in the gay pornography genre, he wrote and directed Buddies. Released in 1985, Buddies was the first American feature film on the subject of the AIDS pandemic.

Other films included Gay USA (1978), a documentary film about the burgeoning gay rights movement in America that came at a time when that movement was facing backlash from people such as Anita Bryant, and Abuse ([1983), a dramatic film about a young, effeminate boy who seeks out an older gay man to escape his parents, who torture him in their home. Copies of Abuse and Buddies are held by the Hormel Center at the San Francisco Public Library as part of a collection donated by the Frameline Film Festival.

Bressan died of an AIDS-related illness on July 28, 1987.

TODAY'S GAY WISDOM:

Gerald Manley Hopkins

A telling instance of Gerard Manley Hopkins's sublimated homoeroticism is the "Epithalamion" that he began as a wedding gift for a younger brother and his fiancée. Its initial description of a rural paradisal setting in which the young heterosexual lovers may roam as a prelapsarian Adam and Eve is quickly overtaken by the poet's homoerotic fantasy of "a listless stranger" who is restored to joy by the sight of naked boys frolicking in a secluded pool.

"Here [the stranger] feasts: lovely is all," the poet exclaims.

Epithalamion

Hark, hearer, hear what I do; lend a thought now, make believe We are leafwhelmed somewhere with the hood Of some branchy bunchy bushybowered wood, Southern dene or Lancashire clough or Devon cleave, That leans along the loins of hills, where a candycoloured, where a gluegold-brown Marbled river, boisterously beautiful, between Roots and rocks is danced and dandled, all in froth and waterblowballs, down. We are there, when we hear a shout That the hanging honeysuck, the dogeared hazels in the cover Makes dither, makes hover And the riot of a rout Of, it must be, boys from the town Bathing: it is summer’s sovereign good. By there comes a listless stranger: beckoned by the noise He drops towards the river: unseen Sees the bevy of them, how the boys With dare and with downdolphinry and bellbright bodies huddling out, Are earthworld, airworld, waterworld thorough hurled, all by turn and turn about. This garland of their gambols flashes in his breast Into such a sudden zest Of summertime joys That he hies to a pool neighbouring; sees it is the best There; sweetest, freshest, shadowiest; Fairyland; silk-beech, scrolled ash, packed sycamore, wild wychelm, hornbeam fretty overstood By. Rafts and rafts of flake-leaves light, dealt so, painted on the air, Hang as still as hawk or hawkmoth, as the stars or as the angels there, Like the thing that never knew the earth, never off roots Rose. Here he feasts: lovely all is! No more: off with—down he dings His bleachèd both and woolwoven wear: Careless these in coloured wisp All lie tumbled-to; then with loop-locks Forward falling, forehead frowning, lips crisp Over finger-teasing task, his twiny boots Fast he opens, last he offwrings Till walk the world he can with bare his feet And come where lies a coffer, burly all of blocks Built of chancequarrièd, selfquainèd rocks And the water warbles over into, filleted with glassy grassy quicksilvery shivès and shoots And with heavenfallen freshness down from moorland still brims, Dark or daylight on and on. Here he will then, here he will the fleet Flinty kindcold element let break across his limbs Long. Where we leave him, froliclavish while he looks about him, laughs, swims. Enough now; since the sacred matter that I mean I should be wronging longer leaving it to float Upon this only gambolling and echoing-of-earth note— What is … the delightful dene? Wedlock. What the water? Spousal love.

The scene he has set is brilliantly homo-erotic, but he is really unable to rationalize his supposed metaphor for marriage. No amount of pious commentary can recover the poem from its unintended digression to this sensual scene from its intended celebration of "spousal love."

[x00151x]

Efemérides literarias: 8 de febrero

Nacimientos 1552: Théodore-Agrippa d’Aubigné, escritor y poeta francés (f. 1630). 1810: Eliphas Lévi, ocultista, escritor y mago francés (f. 1875). 1819: John Ruskin, escritor, crítico de arte y reformista británico (f. 1900). 1828: Julio Verne, novelista francés de ciencia ficción (f. 1905). 1848: Digby Mackworth Dolben, poeta británico (f. 1867). 1850: Kate Chopin, escritora…

[vynixnostra]

Beyond

It was long since the hour when the sun faded away to give birth once again to a myriad of stars in the navy sky. Beyond the time when most sailors had made their docking, found a soothing drink (or ten) and stumbled abed inside his inn. Well past his son’s nightly lullaby, when breathing evened and dreams began to take form. Even time stretched past when weary wings guided a sleep-deprived form through his upper-story window so as not to disturb the skeleton crew in the tavern. There had been time for quiet talk, the mending of war wounds with warm dampened cloth and wraps, and even some mild ruffling of feathers at least where the bedding was concerned.

Now was the time when any sane individual would chase sleep like a child after a firebug, but such wasn't often the case for him. One would expect the calm steady breath of slumber beside him would be enough to fade away into the restorative black. A welcome retreat from the madness of war and worry. No. The night was the time his brain set on fire, exhausted though he may be, and knew full well tossing would only disturb the one alongside needing every second of sleepy solitude.

So from the mattress he carefully rose, untangling from dead-weight limbs to slip away with sure steps that did their best to keep the wooden floorboards at bay. The bard’s naked figure moved like a shadow in the space, finding a notebook and pencil upon the table prior to slowly sinking himself down into the nearby armchair with a bare leg strewn across one of the rests.

In lieu of his habitual tongue clicks he instead tapped the writing utensil to his lower lip as he pondered what exactly had him restless, the fresh piercing in his nose accidentally knocked asymmetrical on an upswing that drew a tiny hiss out in the otherwise silent bedroom. Adjusting the horseshoe ring back, he was reminded of the far more serious pain the Illidari beneath his covers was enduring out there on a daily basis. He winced, frowned and grimaced all within the span of a breath upon taking it to heart (for the thousandth time this week). It was only a few seconds later that writing began to scribble down on a blank page, the moonlight at his angle upon the chair his guiding light.

Beyond the calumny and wrong,

Beyond the clamour and the throng,

Beyond the praise and triumph-song

He passed.

Beyond the scandal and the doubt,

The fear within, the fight without,

The turmoil and the battle-shout

He sleeps.

The world for him was not so sweet

That he should grieve to stay his feet

Where youth and manhood's highways meet,

And die.

For every child a mother's breast,

For every bird a guarded nest;

For him alone was found no rest

But this.

((@perchedon))

[myfakelove]

was tagged by @edlothia !! thanks for tagging me :^)

nickname: i don’t have one really. the non-native english speakers at work call me “chespiro” and at volunteering “nana” because my full name is hard for them to say, but in my abt i have my name as “al” 

height: 5′4″

last movie i saw: probably lego movie 2? but i can’t remember

favorite artist(s): does this mean music or visual art? you know what i’m going to be original and list one of my favorite poets, digby mackworth dolben especially his poem “poppies” 

song stuck in my head: no plan by hozier

do i get asks?: no but that’s fine w me

other blogs?: i have a ton of saved urls and one sideblog where i put things i want to go back to but don’t want here

following: 563 lol

lucky number: i have a few numbers i look for, like 11, 18, 23, etc. but i don’t know if they are necessarily lucky

what i’m wearing: fancy button up and pants because i’m giving a presentation very soon and i’m very scared

dream job: flowershop/bookstore/coffeeshop owner in an idyllic town who also travels constantly

play any instruments: i used to play piano and cello and i was a boss on the recorder

languages: english, intermediate french, taking japanese this fall

favorite song: right now probably something by hozier, like maybe almost sweet music or no plan. although last fm says my most played song right now is 비켜 by first bite lmao

random fact: i have a big collection of stuffed animals 

i’m not sure who to tag but if you do this, tag me so i can see!! 

[titleleaf]

Timothy d'Arch Smith, antiquarian bookseller, ascribes to Hopkins suppressed erotic impulses which he views as taking on a degree of specificity after Hopkins met Robert Bridges's distant cousin, friend, and fellow Etonian Digby Mackworth Dolben, "a Christian Uranian".[24] Robert Martin asserts that when Hopkins first met Dolben, on Dolben's 17th birthday, in Oxford in February 1865, it "was, quite simply, the most momentous emotional event of [his] undergraduate years, probably of his entire life."[25] According to Robert Martin, "Hopkins was completely taken with Dolben, who was nearly four years his junior, and his private journal for confessions the following year proves how absorbed he was in imperfectly suppressed erotic thoughts of him."[26] Martin is also of the opinion that "...it is probable that [Hopkins] would have been deeply shocked at the reality of sexual intimacy with another person."[27]

Hopkins composed two poems about Dolben, "Where art thou friend" and "The Beginning of the End." Robert Bridges, who edited the first edition of Dolben's poems as well as Hopkins's, cautioned that the second poem "must never be printed," though Bridges himself included it in the first edition (1918).[28] Another indication of the nature of his feelings for Dolben is that Hopkins's High Anglican confessor seems to have forbidden him to have any contact with Dolben except by letter. Their relationship was abruptly ended by Dolben's drowning in June 1867, an event which greatly affected Hopkins, although his feeling for Dolben seems to have cooled a good deal by that time.

damn dude

[doglordoffferelden]

Gerard Manley Hopkins: the poet priest who deserves a place in the gay canon

Fun literary fact: when a Jesuit priest called Father Gerard Hopkins wrote a long, experimental poem about a shipwreck in the Thames estuary in 1876, he sent it to his order’s journal the Month, which he thought might publish it. He was wrong about that. However, in the very edition where he had hoped to see his own work, there was a short poem by a young Oxford student identified only as OFO’FWW. Trivia buffs will know those initials: this was the young Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde’s first published work.

It feels like a historical oddity because the pair are otherwise so incongruous: Gerard Manley Hopkins, as we now call him, was small, pious and serious, living a life of obedience in the strictest of the Catholic orders after his conversion to the faith. Wilde was by contrast large, debauched and flippant, dazzling the smartest salons and heading for a terrible fall. That they nearly rubbed pages in a Jesuit journal was probably as close as they were ever going to come.

But the two men have more in common than that. It is clear from Hopkins’s private writings that he was also gay, and while he went to great lengths to suppress his sexuality, that very suppression infuses his work. As Professor Gregory Woods observes in his landmark A History of Gay Literature: “The more one reads Hopkins, the more one becomes convinced that his particular torture was to have realised the intensely carnal nature of his own spirituality.”

Hopkins is rightly loved and venerated by Catholics for the intensity with which he expressed his religious devotion. But with the centenary of his first publication falling next year, it is time that Hopkins was given a place in the canon of gay letters, alongside more obvious contemporaries such as Henry James.

Born in Stratford, east London in 1844, Hopkins was the eldest child of a shipping insurer. He reached Oxford as a culture war was raging, with the High Anglicanism of a number of celebrated Oxford dons on one side, and an anti-effeminate “muscular Christianity” on the other. In an age where young men tended to express difference through the prism of religion, Hopkins was instinctively drawn to the bells-and-smells worship of the High Church.

He eventually went a good deal further, converting to Catholicism in 1866 and joining the priesthood, but not before his heart had been broken by a self-consciously outrageous young poet called Digby Mackworth Dolben he met while studying at Oxford University. Dolben was expelled from Eton not for his flagrant love affair with another boy, but for wandering the countryside dressed as a barefoot, medieval monk.

Dolben died at 19, having barely noticed poor Hopkins’s existence, and it is unlikely that Hopkins ever had physical relations with anyone: he was horrified to find himself aroused by images of Christ on the cross, and he would scourge himself after erotic dreams.

Instead, his vice was poetry. As his order frowned on such things, he toiled privately, composing verse in a radical system of metrics of his own devising. Unfortunately, with its complicated syntax and unconventional form, it baffled all who saw it. When he died of typhoid in 1889, aged just 44, virtually none of his poetry had been published.

It was not until 1918 that his university friend Robert Bridges – by then the poet laureate – published a collected edition. By the mid-20th century, Hopkins was regarded as a visionary genius.

Although his work is overwhelmingly religious, a frequent theme is the physical beauty of working men, as well as of Christ, and the frenzied repetitions and climaxes of his verse seem to speak strongly of pent-up passion. As Woods puts it: “His technical innovations are the key to the actual expression of an eroticism which, for all his struggles against the temptations of voyeurism and masturbation, he could not conceive of suppressing altogether.”

Source

[loudlylovingreview]

Digby Mackworth Dolben: A Song

Digby Mackworth Dolben: A Song

The world is young today: Forget the gods are old, Forget the years of gold When all the months were May.

A little flower of Love Is ours, without a root, Without the end of fruit, Yet – take the scent thereof.

There may be hope above, There may be rest beneath; We see them not, but Death Is palpable – and Love.

—

Digby Augustus Stewart Mackworth Dolben (1848 – 1867) was an English poet who died…

[x00151x]

Efemérides literarias: 8 de febrero

Efemérides literarias: 8 de febrero

Nacimientos 1552: Théodore-Agrippa d’Aubigné, escritor y poeta francés (f. 1630).1810: Eliphas Lévi, ocultista, escritor y mago francés (f. 1875).1819: John Ruskin, escritor, crítico de arte y reformista británico (f. 1900).1828: Julio Verne, novelista francés de ciencia ficción (f. 1905).1848: Digby Mackworth Dolben, poeta británico (f. 1867).1850: Kate Chopin, escritora estadounidense (f.…

[fairywine]

For Ever

Enough, the yearning is unsatisfied, Resolved again into a plea for faith. Believe the true elixir is within, Although I sought to draw from that full tide Some crystal drops of evidence to win A little vapour only-yet believe, Believe the essence of a perfect love Is there, and worthy. Not a tinge of shame My words can colour. Of thine own recieve, Yes, of thy very being. It shall prove Indeed a poem, though without a name. 

[belongtopoetry-blog]

I asked

I asked for Peace - My sins arose, And bound me close, I could not find release.

I asked for Truth - My doubts came in, And with their din They wearied all my youth.

I asked for Love - My lovers failed, and grief assailed Around, beneath, above.

I asked for Thee - And thou didst come To take me home Within thy heart to be.

Digby Mackworth Dolben

[thecagedskylark]

Sister Death

by Digby Mackworth Dolben, English poet drowned at age 19, cousin of Robert Bridges. My sister Death! I pray thee come to me Of thy sweet charity, And be my nurse but for a little while; I will indeed lie still, And not detain thee long, when once is spread, Beneath the yew, my bed: I will not ask for lilies or for roses; But when the evening closes, Just take from any brook a single knot Of pale Forget-me-not, And lay them in my hand, until I wake, For his dear sake; (For should he ever pass and by me stand, He yet might understand-) Then heal the passion and the fever With one cool kiss, for ever.