‘Heaven Haven’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)
I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.
And I have asked to be
Where no storms come.
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.
Considering the Poem
Apart from telling us something we didn’t know, or telling us something we did know but had not fully thought out, a successful poem often tells us something about the English language itself. Sometimes, while reading, we can experience the poet discovering something about the way the language actually works, about its exploitable accidents, oddities, ambiguities, potentialities, inner relationships and so on.
This happens here. The title itself captures our attention because of the similarity of sound and appearance between the two words, making us get the core meaning of the poem before we have even started to read it. Then there is the dual application of the word ‘green’ used about the sea’s swell (7) but which also could be used about the fields (3) of the first verse, so referring us back, imaginatively, to one of the ways that the sea scene of the second verse overlaps with the land scene of the first verse; the scenes are linked, also, by their quietness, their freedom from mental and physical pain, and their restrained movement.
The ‘speaker’ or voice of the poem is one imagined by Hopkins: a novitiate nun about to remove herself from the world. But to whom is the nun speaking?
Often, in lyric poems like this, the answer would be to no-one in particular, or to herself in an inner dialogue which we, as it were, overhear. But we imagine a listener because the tiny poem has a conversational tone in the first line of each verse and a conversational manner persists even after each verse’s opening statements because, although the vocabulary is more traditionally poetic, the sentences, like our speech, are made from simple, linked phrases: there are three sentences in the poem and four uses of the commonest of all conjunctions, ‘and’ (sometimes in critical positions in the verse).
So, perhaps the listener or ‘audience’ is the speaker’s confessor to whom she looks for spiritual guidance.
The two verses throughout match each other in form. They have clear correspondences which are easy to see, line by line: ‘Where springs not fail’ (2) and ‘Where no storms come’ (6), and so on. The verses are also held together by Hopkins’ use of words with prominent /s/ sounds in them. This creates a kind of acoustic unity in the poem.
But the subject of each verse is different: first, the fields and then, the sea. The theme, however, is the same – the longing for refuge from every day’s hubbub and pain.
The fields in verse one will have no sharp hail and in them lilies will ‘blow’ in a perpetual spring (4). The lily is, of course, a biblical symbol of modest, self contained purity and by ‘blow’ Hopkins means just to be ‘in flower’. The sea will have no storms. Its ‘green swell’ reminds us of the significance of water as a biblical symbol of renewal, and reminds us not just of the fields of verse one but also brings into the edge of our consciousness, ideas about fertility and growth.
The swell is ‘dumb’ (7), or quiet. It is more moderate in movement than the rather sickening ‘swing’ of the sea, that sickening feeling being intensified by the pronounced sway in the actual rhythm of the poem’s last line. This sickening is what the novitiate, and Hopkins, wish to escape. We don’t know whether they succeed.
The poem has no retrospection.
Christian Poetry Considered 