The longest year of my life was 1963-1964, the one I spent in Wales. It stretched endlessly across the months because I felt so isolated, cut off from home, friends, and favorite activities.

The countryside surrounding St. Bueno’s College, the large house in which I lived with some forty other Jesuits, was indeed beautiful: the valley of the River Clwyd below, Mt. Snowden off in the west, and the North Sea a few miles in that direction. But the isolation combined with the austerity of our lifestyle got me down. I used to crave the arrival of the Royal Mail truck halfway through the morning, in hopes that a letter for me would be among its deliveries.

The memory of this place rushed back to me last week as I read a new book by one of my favorite spiritual writers, Frederick Buechner. In Part One of “Speak What We Feel” he writes about a Jesuit who lived in that same house in Wales where I spent that longest year.

That Jesuit was Gerard Manley Hopkins, regarded by scholars as either a great minor poet or a minor great poet of the English language. Hopkins was born in 1845. He became a Catholic during his undergraduate days at Oxford and a Jesuit priest a few years later.

In this latter role, he was largely a misfit, too eccentric for comfort in community living and too sensitive for dealing with normal people. Worse still was the way he felt about himself. As Buechner says, “Deeper down still and even harder to bear was his sense of alienation from almost everything and everybody.”

Ironically enough for my taste, however, Hopkins loved the three years he spent studying theology at St. Bueno’s, from 1874 to 1877. There he could relish the beauty of the countryside and indulge his peculiar appreciation of God’s creation. It was there that he wrote “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” his long elegy about some Franciscan nuns who perished at sea.

This poem, now much loved by many who have grown familiar with it, was pronounced incomprehensible at the time by Robert Bridges, a college classmate, one of Hopkins’s best friends and eventual editor of his writings. Bridges even made fun of the poem, which had been rejected by a Jesuit publication.

In a later series of poems, now referred to as his “Dark Sonnets,” Hopkins expressed deep feelings of abandonment. Though he had served God faithfully, accepting Jesuit assignments for which he was ill-suited and faithfully living the spiritual life, God seemed to have cut him off.

The poet speaks of hours of sleeplessness during the dark of night and then extends their meaning. “But where I say / Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament / Is cries, countless, cries like dead letters sent / To dearest him that lives alas! away.”

Here is a spiritual man who is experiencing the bitter taste of emptiness, of absence on the part of his beloved. He continues to try and communicate with God but it is as if his letters never arrive where they are addressed.

For anyone who has known the terror of the night, or worse still, the absence of God, Gerard Manley Hopkins can serve as something of a patron saint. In daily life, especially when he was teaching in Dublin during the last years of his life, he painfully felt himself the misfit, the oddball, that others thought him to be. To feel, on top of that, cast out of his relationship with God must have come as a crushing blow.

He died in 1889 at age forty-four, still unknown to the world that would later discover his poetic talents. The words written of him in a register maintained by the Jesuits are significant: “On the eighth day of June, the vigil of Pentecost, weakened by fever, he rested. May he rest in peace. He had a most subtle mind, which too quickly wore out the fragile strength of his body.”

His poetry remains perhaps a special taste; many will find it still strange now more than a century after it was written. But the spiritual life of Gerard Manley Hopkins can provide inspiration to anyone who has suffered feeling like a misfit and encountering mere darkness in the search for God.

Richard Griffin