Gerard Manley Hopkins and George MacDonald on Immortality

Abstract

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS often turned to the vernacular, folksy, or child-like. ‘Little I reck ho!’ (‘Tom's Garland’, 103)1 caught the tone of the spoken, spontaneous, colloquial voice; ‘O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!’ (‘The Starlight Night’, 66) had something of a child's story-book in the ‘fire-folk’. George MacDonald (1824–1905), poet, novelist, and Christian writer imagined in his celebrated romance At the Back of the North Wind (1871) the moon to be occupied, and the stars to be polished by ‘little girl-angels’ (312). They were nearly ‘fire-folk’, perhaps. Hopkins hardly needed MacDonald to imagine ‘fire-folk’, to be sure. But I wonder if he hoped the reader might notice a reference to At the Back of the North Wind in the climax of his compelling, fast-paced poem on mortality and transformation, written on 26 July 1888: ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection’? The close of the poem is about the heavenly change from ordinary human life into precious immortality: I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond. (106)