Time & Perspective Quote by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Hopkins opens with a sly consolation that quickly turns into a dare. “No royal road” borrows the old line about geometry - there’s no shortcut, no privileged corridor reserved for the well-born or the merely credentialed. Applied to poetry, it’s a rebuke to the Victorian faith in ladders: schooling, taste-making institutions, polite “culture” as a ticket to genius. Happiness, for Hopkins, lies in the refusal of that system. If there’s no royal road, then the gatekeepers can’t claim they hold the map.

Then he raises the stakes with Parnassus, that classical peak of the Muses, and makes arrival possible only “by flying.” It’s a deliberately impossible instruction: you don’t hike to real poetry through dutiful effort alone; you take a leap that looks irrational from the ground. The subtext is anti-bourgeois and anti-mechanical. Craft matters intensely to Hopkins, but he’s warning against mistaking craft for ascent. Metrics, rhetoric, and “correctness” can build strong legs; they can’t manufacture wings.

The line also reads like self-justification. Hopkins spent years largely unread, writing poems whose sprung rhythm and compressed music weren’t designed for easy reception. “Flying thither” smuggles in the spiritual register, too: Parnassus as a secular synonym for grace. You can prepare, discipline yourself, suffer, revise - but the final movement is an imaginative, almost ecstatic act. In an era enamored with progress and propriety, Hopkins insists poetry remains gloriously unaccountable.