What is the link between a Fairport convention song, with the mythic power akin to that of Oedipus, and a poem by Hopkins?
In this case, it is a saint: not a man who did great things, but a man who helped many by suffering greatly.
Alphonsus’s early years in Segovia, Spain, are a story of tragedies. When he was fourteen, his father died and he left school to help his mother run the family business. At twenty-three he married, but his wife died in childbirth three years later. Within a few years his mother and son also died. On top of this, his business was failing, so he sold it. Recognizing a late vocation to religious life, he applied for admission to the Jesuits at Segovia, but was refused because he was not educated. Undaunted, Alphonsus returned to Latin school, humbly bearing the ridicule of his adolescent classmates. Finally, in 1571, the Jesuit provincial accepted him as a lay brother. He was sent to Montesione College on Majorca, where he served as doorkeeper for forty-five years.
His post allowed him to minister to many visitors. And he became the spiritual adviser to many students. He exerted wide-reaching influence, most notably in guiding St. Peter Claver into his mission to the slaves.
Rodriguez did not fit well into the already established educational pattern of the Jesuits. He was a lay brother. He kept the door. He did not do much. But the Romans account him as a saint with good reason.
Laybrother of the Society of Jesus
Honour is flashed off exploit, so we say;
And those strokes once that gashed flesh or galled shield
Should tongue that time now, trumpet now that field,
And, on the fighter, forge his glorious day.
On Christ they do and on the martyr may;
But be the war within, the brand we wield
Unseen, the heroic breast not outward-steeled,
Earth hears no hurtle then from fiercest fray.Yet God (that hews mountain and continent,
Earth, all, out; who, with trickling increment,
Veins violets and tall trees makes more and more)
Could crowd career with conquest while there went
Those years and years by of world without event
That in Majorca Alfonso watched the door.Gerard Manley Hopkins
You cannot judge the influence you have. You are blind to what you do. It is the Almighty who judges truly, and it his Spirit that inspired that most religious of the English poets, Hopkins.
UPDATE.
As Rodriguez was a widower, this.