Hopkins

Abstract

Hopkins Jeffrey B. Loomis (bio) Although some new full-length books about Hopkins have been announced, none of these has yet appeared in general distribution. Most of the new pieces of published work available (which are all either articles or essays in book collections) focus on Hopkins' intellectual interaction with a range of both predecessor bards and his writer contemporaries. From such an array of discussion, we can learn quite a bit about the nature of intertextuality, as well as about the criticism that examines it. In "Hopkins and Cynewulf: 'The Wreck of the Deutschland,' 'The Windhover,' 'The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe,' and the Christ" (VP 43, no. 1 [Spring 2005]: 19-32), James Finn Cotter locates, in Hopkins' canon, considerable potential referencing of diction, images, and themes from Cynewulf's Old English work Christ. He particularly notes such potential referencing in the three Hopkins poems mentioned in Cotter's subtitle (but also, according to one of his endnotes [p. 33], in Hopkins' expansive sonnets "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection" and "Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves"). Allowing us to establish quite detailed acquaintance with Cynewulf's medieval opus, Cotter most convincingly demonstrates Hopkins' potential borrowing from that work when he compares Hopkins' sense of his "fling[ing] of [his own] heart to the heart of the Host" ("Wreck," st. 3, l. 21) with Cynewulf's depiction (as he himself recalled images from the Song of Songs and from a homily by St. Gregory) of "six [specific] leaps in Christ's redemptive mission" (p. 23). Besides discussing Cynewulf and Hopkins, Cotter reminds us of the Biblical prediction of the resurrected Christ, "go[ing] before [His disciples] into Galilee" (Matthew 28.7). Cotter believes that this Biblical verse influenced Hopkins' somewhat contrasting lines about Christ's incarnationally resplendent days of Galilean ministry ("Wreck," st. 7, ll. 49-50). Thomas Rand also, and quite meaningfully, studies Biblical allusions in Hopkins, sharing his observations in "'Time's Eunuch' Reconsidered" (HQ 32, nos. 1-2 [Winter 2005]: 5-7). My own interpretation, two decades ago, of Hopkins' "Thou art indeed just, Lord" focused on the poem's link with a text that its epigraph quotes: Jeremiah 12. I found that Biblical chapter an obvious background text of ironic commentary for Hopkins, calling into question the surface petulance of his sonnet's narrator. Rand sees more such ironic undertexting, in his case connecting the same Hopkins sonnet to Isaiah 56.3 ("And let not the eunuch say: Behold I am a dry tree"). Besides, [End Page 357] he believes that Hopkins may be recalling, in "Thou art indeed . . . ," a key Biblical convert-figure whom his own persona might wisely emulate: the Ethiopian eunuch—whom, according to Acts 8.32-34, the apostle Philip led to comprehend Christ's attitude to suffering as a model for the behavior of all Christian disciples. Peter Whiteford, in the Review of English Studies N.S. 56, no. 225 (2005): 438-446, answers his titular question, "What Were Felix Randal's 'Fatal Four Disorders'?," by pointing to St. Thomas Aquinas' discussion in the Summa Theologicae, about the four "wounds of nature" resulting from "original sin" (p. 443). These wounds were said to affect persons' reasons, their wills, and both their irascible and their concupiscible appetites (p. 444). Whiteford sees such theologically conceptualized wounds as helping to explain what Hopkins means by his reference to the poetic character Felix Randal's "fatal four disorders"—largely because the poem "Felix Randal" seems most to concern Hopkins' responsibility "to [spiritually] heal," " to mend, sacramentally, the [spiritually] wounded man over whom he watches" (p. 446). Moving forward in history and agreeing (with many) that Hopkins and Whitman have many very real affinities (p. 39), Eldrid Herrington presents his essay "Hopkins and Whitman" in EIC 55, no. 1 (January 2005): 39-57. Herrington detects a common nurturing impulse in Hopkins' poems about the priesthood and in Whitman's Drum Taps, with that book's accounts of Whitman's tender service as a wartime medic (p. 40). The critic also finds in both men's writings a frequent topical focus on birds, a stylistic "gallicizing...