The Major Works

"I am not a religious man, although Hopkins was. My interest in him is the use of language , the use of words. I have been a barrister for 40 years, addressing juries fairly frequently, sometimes badly and sometimes, I hope, reasonably well. I have also been involved in reasonably frontline politics for approaching 30 years now. I believe that the use of language is extremely important and that people are extraordinarily negligent in their use of language – there are certain words that I would never use unless I had very carefully considered them. I’ll give you two examples of that: ‘Nazi’ and ‘fascist’, which I would never use as terms of vulgar abuse. But that doesn’t mean that we have to be politically correct to the nth degree nor unimaginative in our use of words. For me, Hopkins is the supreme wordsmith of his time. Look at this poem, ‘Pied Beauty’. ‘Glory be to God for dappled things.’ Or some of these phrases: ‘Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls’, ‘skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow’, ‘rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim’, ‘swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim’. These are magnificent uses of words and they mean something. At the other irreligious extreme, I would say the same of Dylan Thomas. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter So his use of language is one reason for my fondness for Hopkins. The other is derived from the use of the phrase ‘dappled things’. Anyone who has practised criminal law for as long as I have knows that human beings are dappled things – there is something ugly about everyone beautiful. There is something hypocritical about everyone who is very moral. There is something of the selfish and egotistical in the altruistic. I have often used this phrase even in prosecuting apparently very good people who have done terrible things, and it also explains why people will do things that are not necessarily an offence but that they are rather ashamed of. This notion of people being dappled things, ethically, is very important. I have occasionally declaimed but not generally. You have to be careful – not necessarily to simplify the reference to ‘Pied Beauty’ but to contextualise it. Juries are far from stupid."