Gerard Manley Hopkins
Heaven—Haven
A nun takes the veil
I wonder if this might, like Robert Frost's poem about two roads diverging, be a wildly misunderstood poem. But first, some context that proves rather illuminating.
Hopkins wrote "Heaven—Haven" whilst an Anglican undergraduate at Oxford, shortly before his conversion to Catholicism. This biographical detail transforms our reading - the poem becomes not an observation of another's vocation, but Hopkins' self-examination.
Heaven—Haven
A nun takes the veil
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.
The nun has, past tense, desired. 'I have desired'. It is not, necessarily, what she desires now.
When you 'take the veil' as a nun, you subjugate yourself deliberately to the rule of the order. You voluntarily surrender your own, personal, desires entirely.
So this poem cannot be about what the nun desires after taking the veil. Rather, it is what she desired, before she decided to have no desires, save those imposed on her by the rule.
But here lies the deeper reading: Hopkins is exploring his own motivations through this feminine persona. The poem reads more like a fuga mundi than an amor Dei - a flight from the world rather than love of God. Listen to the language: "Where springs not fail," "where flies no sharp and sided hail," "Where no storms come." This is the vocabulary of escape, of seeking refuge, not of joyful spiritual union.
The alliteration itself reinforces this sense of retreat - the harsh consonants of "sharp and sided" give way to the softer sounds of "green swell" and "havens dumb." Hopkins is crafting a tone that moves from turbulence to stillness, from engagement to withdrawal.
What's entirely absent is the gaudium of the matrimonium spirituale - that joy found throughout the Marian tradition and encapsulated in the Magnificat. This reads more like a dirge than a celebration. The imagery is one of cessation rather than transformation: springs that don't fail (rather than springs that eternally flow), storms that don't come (rather than peace that surpasses understanding).
Hopkins, writing as an Anglican contemplating Catholicism, seems to have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of religious vocation. He presents it as an ending rather than a beginning, as the cessation of desire rather than its ultimate fulfilment in divine love.
This misapprehension may well explain why his early years as a Jesuit proved so wretched. He entered religious life expecting the quietude described in this poem - a haven from life's storms - only to discover that authentic spiritual life demands not the elimination of passion but its redirection toward divine love.
The tragedy Hopkins describes - someone with "transcendent desires for calm, peace, beauty" surrendering them for institutional obedience - reflects his own impoverished understanding of what religious commitment actually entails. The poem becomes, inadvertently, a critique of his own motivation: was his calling genuine spiritual yearning or merely sophisticated escapism?
Reading "Heaven—Haven" this way, we see JMH wrestling with whether his attraction to religious life springs from authentic vocation or from a desire to retreat from the world's complexity. The fact that he chose to explore this through the persona of a nun suggests he recognised, perhaps unconsciously, the problematic nature of his own spiritual motivations.
The poem's enduring power lies not in any celebration of religious life, but in its honest examination of the difference between true calling and mere refuge-seeking - a distinction that would prove painfully relevant to Hopkins' own subsequent struggles with his vocation.
Though, having said that, for me, the appeal is the poem itself, rather than the theology.
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