Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Song of Songs

Abstract

Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Song of Songs Aakanksha J. Virkar (bio) Although Hopkins' biblical and devotional themes in "The Wreck of the Deutschland" (1876) have been extensively examined, there has been little discussion of the central importance to the poem of the Song of Songs and its tradition of related commentary. The Song famously portrays what has been read as an allegory of Christ's relationship with the Church, the Virgin Mary, and the individual soul, and a single article by James Finn Cotter focuses on this last interpretation to chart a series of thematic and imagistic parallels within Hopkins' "Wreck."1 Arguing that the exegetical tradition associated with the Song formed an integral part of nineteenth-century seminary training, Cotter draws on the work of patristic and later commentators to suggest a reading of "The Wreck" as an allegory of the soul as the Sponsa Christi. While acknowledging the specific textual parallels drawn by Cotter's argument, this article seeks to demonstrate that Hopkins' allusions to the Song in "The Wreck of the Deutschland" are of a more rigorously ecclesiological character; from the early Fathers on may be seen the relationship between the Song of Songs and the waters of baptism, and it is this relation that critically defines Hopkins' application of the Song. For Hopkins as for the Fathers, the Song is a nuptial hymn to be read in the terms of that baptismal union set out by St. Paul in Ephesians: Christ and Church are united in the washing of water by the word (Ephesians 5.26-32); in baptism is continued the nuptial union achieved first in the Incarnation. These are the grounds by which commentaries on the Song would come to be linked with the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Christ; as the sacramental streams that flowed from Christ's wounded body directed attention to their interior source, a parallel was seen between the Church formed from the side of Christ and the dove that famously nestles in the clefts of the rock (Song 2.14), in the wounded heart of Christ.2 In "The Wreck of the Deutschland" the heart is the poetic lens through which is invoked the sacramental symbolism of the Song. Significantly, Hopkins' own sermon on the Sacred Heart (1881) describes the worship of Christ's heart as "one of the dearest devotions of the Church"3 and observes that the devotion, though little noted at the time, is found in the sermons of St. Bernard (p. 100). The sermons to which Hopkins refers are Bernard's [End Page 195] eighty-six sermons on the Song of Songs, which remain the classic medieval commentary on this book of scripture. The commentary of Bernard may in fact be shown to be a key text in a re-reading of Hopkins' "Wreck." Such a reading will demonstrate the poem to be a rigorously constructed soteriological text, embodying through the vocabulary of the Song the doctrine of the Spirit. For its method the poem may further be seen to employ an innovative procedure; like Origen's commentary on the Song, Hopkins' "Wreck" is marked by a method of hidden ellipses, puns, and etymological word play. At the center of this word web is the heart, iconic inscape, and key to a doctrinal imagination. Hopkins' representation of the heart takes its place within the landscape of Victorian typology. George Landow has shown that one of the most commonplace types of the Victorian age was Moses striking the rock, widely seen as a prefiguration of the Crucifixion and the saving waters yielded by Christ's wounded body. In a less orthodox interpretation the stricken rock was also seen to convey the action of grace upon the heart, and nineteenth-century poets used the image to depict Christ wringing tears of repentance from the hardened heart. Hopkins' iconography draws from these Victorian contexts yet centrally incorporates an interpretation no longer common at the time, the more traditional interpretation by which the stricken rock was taken as a type of baptism:4 Ah, touched in your bower of bone, Are you! turned for an exquisite smart, Have you! make words break from me here all alone...