The Blessed Virgin Mary: The Roman Catholic Church and Hopkins'Shared Vision

Gerard Manley Hopkins was a poet priest. Chronologically he belonged to the Victorian Era but temperamentally he was a modern poet. He is known as an innovator par excellence. He was a lover of natural beauty but his nature of poetry is not the pantheistic view of the romantic poets. His was a sacramental view of nature and all his poems are hosannas to the Author of Beauty-Jesus Christ. He also shared the views of the Catholic Church on Mother Mary, the mother of Jesus. She is honoured by the Church for her Immaculate Conception-it is a dogma of the Church that the child she conceived in her womb was not conceived by human intervention but by the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit, the Third Person in the Holy Trinity. As such the Church venerates her as a Virgin Mother, a Co-redemptrix as it was her acceptance of the divine fiat, which made it possible for the Son of God, Jesus Christ, to be born as a human being. She is therefore, ‘Virgin full of Grace’, a heavenly and earthly mother. This paper analyses Hopkins’ view of Mother Mary in the two poems Mary Magnificat and The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe.