SOURCE: "Making Earnest of Game: G. M. Hopkins and Nonsense Poetry," in Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. XXVIII, No. 2, June, 1967, pp. 192-206.

In the following essay, Sonstroem draws an analogy between Hopkins and the nonsense poets of the late nineteenth-century.

In the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, there is often a play with words and their sounds that comes very close to nonsense, a verbal play comparable to that of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, or Sir W. S. Gilbert. Hopkins loses nothing in the comparison with his fellow Victorians: play is seldom if ever trivial or meaningless, and it is entirely compatible with seriousness and reverence. Furthermore, the nonsense game that he plays is more ingenious, more difficult, and broader in scope than that of his contemporaries. The analogy between Hopkins and the nonsense poets is both interesting in itself and especially helpful in revealing Hopkins' method of composition...