Hawker, ROBERT STEPHEN, the Cornish poet, was born at Plymouth, December 3, 1803. His father, then a physician, afterwards took orders; his grandfather, the Rev. Robert Hawker, D.D. (1753-1827), the author of the well-known Morning and Evening Portions, was for fifty years a vicar in Plymouth. He was a bright boy, notable especially for high spirits and an inveterate love for practical jokes. He had his education at Liskeard and Cheltenham grammar-school, and entered Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1823; but his father, now a curate, soon found himself unable to keep him at Oxford. Fortunately this difficulty was obviated by the lad's own marriage (November 1824) to a lady of some fortune. He was not yet twenty-one, while his wife, Miss Charlotte l'Ans, who had been his godmother, was forty-one. With her he returned to Oxford, migrating to Magdalen Hall. He carried off the Newdigate in 1827, took his B.A. in the following year, was ordained priest in 1831, and was presented by Bishop Phillpotts in 1834 to the vicarage of Morwenstow, a small village on the wild north Cornish coast, 6 miles N. of Bude Haven. Here he laboured with devotedness for forty years, lavishing charity from his slender means upon shipwrecked mariners and his own poor alike. There had been no resident vicar for a hundred years, the quaint old church and the vicarage were in ruins, and the parishioners were demoralised by generations of wrecking, smuggling, and spiritual ignorance. Hawker rebuilt his vicarage, restored his church, roofing it anew with shingles in spite of all advice and opposition; built and maintained a school; introduced the strange innovations of a weekly offertory and a harvest-thanksgiving, as well as a striking ceremonial largely of his own devising, and more often suggesting the usages of the Eastern than the Western Church. Yet he never felt any affinity with the modern Ritualists, but indeed he was in every sense a man difficult to class. His zeal was hot against Wesleyanism and every form of dissent, for his sympathies did not range wider than his knowledge. He himself shared many of the superstitions of his people, believing in the manifestations of spirits and in the influence of the evil eye. The spiritual world was very near and real to him: St Morwenna was no mere member of the choir invisible, but an influence that could still affect his everyday life. All his eccentricities were redeemed by his humanity, his humour, and his tender love for children and for animals. His manner in preaching is described as rapt and awe-inspiring; but his theology sadly lacked logic and consistency. The theologian cannot afford to allow his judgment to be dominated by fancy, but in poetry the case is altogether different. Here Hawker is absolutely delightful, with simple unsought pathos and exquisite imagery moulded into faultlessly graceful form. He has both the gifts of sweetness and sonority, and withal manly strength and vigorous phrase at will. His Tendrils by Reuben, published at seventeen, he had the good sense not to reprint; but by his Cornish ballads in Records of the Western Shore (1832; a second series in 1836) he stamped himself unmistakably a poet. These were republished in Ecclesia (1840); with some additions, as Reeds shaken by the Wind (1843; a second cluster in 1844); and yet again, along with Genoveva, in Echoes of Old Cornwall (1846). In 1869 he republished his earlier poems in Cornish Ballads, and the Quest of the Sangreal—the latter had already appeared in 1863. His Footprints of Former Men in Cornwall (1870) was a collection of miscellaneous papers on local traditions. None of Hawker's poems is better known than his spirited ballad based on the old Cornish refrain 'And shall Trelawney die?' which both Sir Walter Scott and Lord Macaulay took at first for a genuine antique.
Hawker's wife died in February 1863—a blow which drove him to melancholy and opium, from which he was saved only by his marriage (December 1864) to Miss Pauline Kuczynski, daughter of a Polish refugee by an English mother, and then a governess in a clerical friend's house. She bore him three daughters, and nursed his declining years with rare devotion. Hawker died at Plymouth, 15th August 1875, having been admitted less than twelve hours before to the Roman Catholic communion.
The biography by the Rev. S. Baring-Gould (1876; 4th ed. 1899), was severely attacked by some critics, and certainly contains irrelevances enough; much less satisfactory, however, is the Memorials, by the Rev. F. G. Lee (1876). A complete edition of Hawker's poems was edited in 1879, with a sensible short life, by his friend J. G. Godwin, who also edited his prose works (1893).