"By there comes a listless stranger": Gerard Manley Hopkins's "Epithalamion" as a Poem of Queer (Non)performance

Abstract

"By there comes a listless stranger":Gerard Manley Hopkins's "Epithalamion" as a Poem of Queer (Non)performance Eugene O'Connor (bio) It is always what is under pressure in us, especially under pressure of concealment—that explodes in poetry. —Adrienne Rich, "Vesuvius at Home" In a letter to Robert Bridges of February 15, 1879, Gerard Manley Hopkins stated of his own writing: "No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness. … Now it is the virtue of design, pattern, or inscape to be distinctive and it is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer. This vice I cannot have escaped."1 While he was referring to his innovative metrics and eccentric coinages, this use of the term "queer" by Hopkins for his poetics is particularly poignant, given its emphasis on oddness and ambiguity, which are so part of the current understanding of "queer."2 While invigilating an exam in a Dublin classroom in early 1888, Hop-kins worked on the manuscript of a lengthy poem to celebrate the upcoming marriage of his youngest brother, Everard. But as Hopkins described it in a letter to Bridges of May 25 of that year: "I began an Epithalamion on my brother's wedding: it had some bright lines, but I could not get it done" (Letter CLXI).3 Recalling as it does Hopkins's fond memories of bathing with fellow religious in favored swimming holes, the poem fails to celebrate traditional marriage, beyond a few formulaic lines at the end about wedlock and spousal love. Notwithstanding, the trained classicist Hopkins does tell Bridges that the poem is an epithalamion, that is, a wedding hymn.4 The brightness of its pastoral setting, its adoption of a pagan literary genre for a Christian marriage, [End Page 93] and its suggestive allusions have made it the subject of much scholarly inquiry and curiosity focusing on its charged sexual imagery, Wordsworthian echoes, and Hopkins's own scruples about adopting a pagan genre to celebrate a Christian wedding.5 In this essay I focus on Hopkins's classically informed "Epithalamion"6 as a poem of queer (non)performance, in that it both does and does not perform the function of the Greco-Roman epithalamion, which was meant to celebrate a public occasion between a man and a woman. Hopkins's wedding song, lacking a traditional bride, celebrates instead a private ceremony of sorts between a listless male stranger and a group of young boys swimming who remain oblivious of the stranger's attention. But in the very act of appropriating a public occasion, that is, a marriage, Hopkins "outs" this private space. According to terms established by Judith Butler in her article "Critically Queer,"7 the poet disrupts the closeting distinction between public and private. In the specific case of Hopkins's "Epithalamion," the private ceremony that takes place within the secluded grove subverts the authority of the traditional (read: heterosexual) wedding, which encodes publicly sanctioned forms of masculinity and femininity—"I now pronounce you man and wife." Hopkins had already used the occasion of a wedding to explore a non-normative performance of traditional gender roles. Richard Dellamora interprets the "wonder wedlock" in the final stanza of his 1878 poem "At the Wedding March" (l. 11) as Hopkins's own "marriage" to Jesus Christ, the embodiment of Hopkins's manly ideal.8 It expresses "Hopkins's version of an androgynous masculinity, one in which masculine authority, beauty, and power are incarnate in Christ. Through such imagery Hopkins finds a poetically sanctioned way of being 'feminine' through mystic marriage with Christ, just as in life he embraced 'feminine' powerlessness by way of the obedience that his vows as a Jesuit required of him" (p. 52). The queerness of Hopkins's "Epithalamion" of 1888 centers on the ambivalent role played by the listless stranger, unseen by the boys but seen by the reader, who has to make a judgment about one who is at once both hidden and hypervisible—much like Hopkins the man, whose oddness and remoteness from his Dublin colleagues—his being a stranger—made him the object of critical and often derisive comment. This admixture of public and private within Hopkins's wedding song...