"Death blots black out": Thermodynamics and the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Abstract

HOPKINS' POETRY EMPLOYS TO A MARKED DEGREE TROPES OF ENERGY IN THE form of heat, fire, and light. His discourse reveals attraction to emerging science of thermodynamics, especially anxiety with second law. His energy tropes admit a dialogue between domains of science and literature, a conversation transcending very tropes themselves; shifting a metaphor from its initial field, as Gillian Beer observes, may bring to light homologies (or dissonances) that will propel new work. (1) Whereas tropes establish connections between things, discourse models metalogical operations by which consciousness, in general cultural praxis, comes to terms with its milieu. (2) At ontological levels, universe allows for cross-umwelt comparisons. Tropes raise the possibility of isomorphism across evolutionary levels so distant that it would appear that chunking would have erased any similarities based on contiguity. (3) Unveiling these tropes, according to Richard Boyd, is an essential part o f task of scientific (p. 362); for primary encounter with any text, be it metaphysics, poetry or biology, is linguistic, for texts are made of language. (4) While there might well be areas across which science and literature struggle to communicate, impasse Douglas Hofstadter has called chunking, there are clearly areas of seepage, especially where laws of thermodynamics are concerned, laws involving global systems that extend far beyond science proper. (5) Thus it makes sense to talk about ramifications of entropy on biological and social systems, way James Gleick does, recognizing chaos in the behavior of weather, behavior of airplane in flight, behavior of cars clustering on expressway, behavior of oil flowing in underground pipes.... Chaos breaks across lines that separate scientific disciplines, bringing together thinkers from cross-disciplinary studies asserting strong claims about universal behavior of complexity, among them determinism and free will, evolution, and the nature of conscious intelligence. (6) intend to explore extent to which Hopkins' poetry deviates from and distills concepts of energy, especially notions of waste and recovery, and to show disparate ways he employs tropes structuring protean character of nineteenth-century energetics. Implicit in my argument is assumption that so-called divide between science and literature, C. P. Snow's bifurcated cultures, cannot readily be applied to Hopkins. His is apologetic characterized by border crossings, excursions into fluid territory of cross-disciplinary umwelts, which makes Hopkins especially helpful segue into postmodernisr considerations. (7) Hopkins' conversion to Roman Catholicism (1866) and Jesuit affiliation (1868) granted him membership in a religious community open to scientific inquiry on grounds that science reveals mystery of universe and is ultimately compatible with Church dogma. (8) Issues raised by biological and geological sciences unsettled Victorians as well as Roman Catholic Victorians, like St. George Mivart, who imagined that there were in fact solutions within emerging scientific theories not incompatible to faith. A close friend and admirer of Darwin, Catholic biologist Mivart reassured believers that evolution need alarm no one, for it is, without any doubt, perfectly consistent with strictest and most orthodox Christian theology. (9) Less distressing, however, was new energetics, with its first law ensuring divine superintendence of universe and its second corroborating apocalyptic claims. Hopkins welcomed freedom to explore new scientific frontiers (optics, for one), with all sorts of ambi tious plans to advance science, many of them, like so much of Hopkins' career, aborted or never undertaken. Speaking of Hopkins' interest in the modern depiction of nature as inhuman and aimless flux, Daniel Brown believes that poem I must hunt down prize states a bold resolve to reclaim such territory for a more coherent view of nature than that which it ostensibly presents. …