A Vision of the Mermaids; A prize poem dated Christmas, 1862
London: Oxford University Press, 1929. Limited edition. Folio (13 1/8 inches tall), original patterned paper boards, black cloth spine, printed paper title label mounted to front board, uncut. Upper front corner bumped, slight soiling to boards. A near-fine copy. Item #1770
"MERMAIDS SIX OR SEVEN / RIS'N FROM THE DEEPS TO GAZE ON SUN AND HEAVEN / CLUSTER'D IN TROOPS AND HALO'D BY THE LIGHT"
Limited edition of A Vision of the Mermaids by Gerard Manley Hopkins—the first appearance in full of his schoolboy "Prize Poem" for Christmas 1862. A complete facsimile of this bit of juvenilia, written several years before his Oxford conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1866. One of only 250 copies published at the Oxford University Press during the wave of enthusiasm for Hopkins. Scarce.
From a High Anglican family, Gerard Manley Hopkins arrived as a boarding student at Highgate School in 1854. According to his biographer, G.F. Lahey, "at Highgate we see him a frail lad, taking no part in football or cricket. His time was spent 'dreaming and reading and chewing the world of his gleanings from the world harvest of poetry, a fairy child in the midst of a commonplace, workaday world" (Calvert Alexander). Suggesting a Keatsian influence, A Vision of the Mermaids was illustrated by Hopkins with his own "circular pen-and-ink drawing...a sunset sea-piece with rocks and mermaidens singing as they stand half-immersed in the shallows...'But most in half-circle watch'd the sun'" (W.H. Gardner). Printed by John Johnson, with a four page facsimile of the handwritten poem together with a printed title page and colophon, and bound in tall Art-Deco-style folio boards. W.H. Gardner. Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins; Calvert Alexander. The Catholic Literary Revival; Tom Dunne. Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Comprehensive Bibliography, A71.
Price: $200.00