"Hopkins in Ireland"
for the Jesuit community at Boston College
Above the bluebleak priest the brightblue fisher hovers. like a lit match closer to him. The windows have all been shut against Prof. Paul Mariani (English), the author of a biography on Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ, has written a new book of poems, Deaths & Transfigurations, which will be published by Paraclete Press next summer. The icon shown above, "Gerard Manley Hopkins," was created by William Hart McNichols '73 and is dedicated to Rev. Daniel Berrigan, SJ. McNichols, who lives in New Mexico, was the University's iconographer-in-residence during 1996-97.
By Paul Mariani
The priest notes the book upon the table, the lamp beside the book.
A towering Babel of papers still to grade, and that faraway look
as once more the mind begins to wander. Ah, to creep beneath the covers
takes another sip of bitter tea, then winces as he takes another look
at the questions he has posed his students and the twists they took
to cover up their benighted sense of Latin. The fisher hovers
the damp black Dublin night. After all these years, his collar chokes
him still, in spite of which he wears it like some outmoded mark
of honor, remembering how his dear Ignatius must have sensed
the same landlocked frustrations. Again he lifts his pen. His strokes
lash out against the dragon din of error. The fisher incandesces in the
dark.