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Hopkins in Wales
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
Wednesday, December 8th, 1875. A soft confetti of snowflakes was fluttering down upon Wales. The higher windowpanes were gardens of frost. His right hand still twined a rosary, its anesthetic routine of prayers his midnight defense against sleeplessness. Lying in bed in his nightshirt and black woolen stockings, Hopkins recited his Morning Offering, then stood to use the chamber pot. The scuttle contained only a scarcity of coals and he would want those for his studies, so he gashed the fireplace embers with an iron poker and held his hands over their golden, waning heat. He lit and chimneyed one gas retort on the wall.Washing with Castile soap and icy water, he worried over his scrawniness, his spindle shins, the green yarns of vein in his forearms, his face so thin that his zygomatic bones and jaw shaped harps underneath his ginger brown, oneinch beard and mustache. His high school nickname was "Skin," and even now at age thirty-one he weighed hardly a hundred pounds, with a jockey's height of five feet four."Eats like a parakeet," Cyprian Splaine said just last night, and Rickaby joked, "Eats like a single 'keet."Yesterday's long underwear would do, Hopkins thought, and then a jersey that the Theologate's laundress had shrunk. Over these he buttoned a cuff-frayed and graying black cassock with its faint stink of him, waisted it with a hand-wide black cincture, snapped on a starched, white Roman collar, and laced on his ankle-high black walking shoes. Then he dipped a horsehair toothbrush in a yellow ...See the full content of this document
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