Gerard Manley Hopkins in Dialogue with Felicia Hemans

Abstract

Gerard Manley Hopkins in Dialogue with Felicia Hemans Harriet Kramer Linkin (bio) Gerard Manley Hopkins spent three of his most fruitful years at St. Bueno's College near St. Asaph in Wales (1874–1877), where he not only completed the studies that resulted in his ordination but also began to write poetry again, after a silence that commenced in 1868, when he determined to dedicate himself to the priesthood.1 On the fourth day of his arrival at St Bueno's, he "passed Mrs. Hemans' house,"2 an event he recorded in his journal and mentioned the next day in a letter to his mother: "I walked to St. Asaph and passed the place where Mrs. Hemans lived and wrote and saw her monument in the Cathedral."3 Although Felicia Hemans was born in Liverpool (1793) and died in Dublin (1835), she passed most of her life in Wales (1800–1828). Akin to Hopkins, who wrote to his mother, "I have always looked on myself as half Welsh" (Correspondence, 1: 237), Hemans identified herself as a "naturalised Welshwoman."4 While critics like Catherine Brennan and Elizabeth Edwards rightly interrogate the nature of Hemans's nationalist enthusiasm for Wales, equivocally expressed in her Selection of Welsh Melodies and numerous lyrics situated in or about Wales,5 Jane Aaron notes that her contemporary Welsh audience hailed her as a "poet for Wales."6 Hopkins may not have read her poetry there, but he certainly knew it: in addition to the familiarity most schoolchildren had with "Casabianca," his mother owned four volumes of her poetry,7 she influenced the style of his father's poetry,8 and Hopkins notably categorized her as a member of the sentimental school of poetry in an 1881 letter to Richard Watson Dixon (Correspondence, 1: 505–506).9 Hopkins rarely referred to any female authors in his letters or journals, much less female poets, beyond his well-documented admiration for Christina Rossetti and his often-disparaging attention to Katherine Tynan.10 Indeed his position on masculinist power and poetic ability—that "masterly execution . . . is a kind of male gift and especially marks off men from women"11—made him an infamous target of feminist critique in the 1970s and 1980s.12 None of the extant Hopkins scholarship examines Hemans's poetry in relation to his,13 but, surprisingly, several of the eleven major poems Hopkins wrote at St. Bueno's invoke Hemans, beginning with the poem that broke his long silence. [End Page 325] In "The Wreck of the Deutschland," Hopkins's figuration of the tall nun who, like "a lioness arose breasting the babble, / A prophetess towered in the tumult, a virginal tongue told"14 clearly echoes Hemans's description of the avenging mother Maimuna in "The Indian City" (from Records of Woman), whose Muslim son is killed for bathing in a sacred Hindu pool: And what deep change, what work of power,Was wrought on her secret soul that hour?How rose the lonely one?—She roseLike a prophetess from dark repose! (ll. 121–124) As intriguingly, "The Wreck" also appears to engage in conversation with the conversion scenes in Hemans's "The Forest Sanctuary," the poem she considered "her best"15 and one that speaks to what she named in 1826 as "the great subject of national debate—the Catholic question."16 Fifty years later, that question continued to be a crucial one for Hopkins, as he too "lived and wrote" where Hemans composed "Casabianca," "The Forest Sanctuary," and "The Indian City," poems that provide hitherto-unexplored intertexts for "The Wreck." While this essay focuses on the ways those three poems intersect with "The Wreck," it also takes up additional affiliations that link Hopkins's "Spring" with Hemans's "Come Away!," his "In the Valley of the Elwy" with her "A Farewell to Wales," and his "The Windhover" with her "Joan of Arc." Both Hopkins and Hemans found Wales inspiring, composing poems about the Vale of Clwyd, St. Winefride's Well, and other local sites. Both coincidentally died in Dublin, after completing sonnets that conveyed their very different senses of spiritual ease at those points in their lives, Hopkins's "Terrible Sonnets" counterpointing Hemans...