Hopkins’s Use of Biblical Stories in His Shipwreck Poems

Abstract

Hopkins’s Use of Biblical Stories in His Shipwreck Poems Patrick Samway SJ When Gerard Manley Hopkins finished his two-year Jesuit novitiate in 1870, he began a traditional course of studies: first at St Mary’s Hall in Stonyhurst, Lancashire, where he focused on logic, philosophy, psychology, mathematics and ethics, and subsequently, beginning in the later part of 1874, at St Beuno’s College, near St Asaph in Wales, where he undertook a concentrated three-year programme of theology, taught primarily in Latin. This included courses on dogmatic and moral theology, canon law, church history, Hebrew, Sacred Scripture and other topics he termed ‘and what not’.1 During these years of study, Hopkins heard with great regularity passages from Scripture read during the liturgies in which he participated, and in the refectory at the beginning of most meals. Alfred Thomas SJ, who has tracked his years of Jesuit training with enormous precision, provides lists of these daily refectory readings, along with the spiritual biographies and writings of the saints also usually read in the same way. Unfortunately, there are no such lists for the specific years Hopkins studied theology, though undoubtedly such readings occurred.2 In short, as a Jesuit scholastic, he had a daily opportunity to listen to and appreciate the significance of God’s words contained in Scripture. Moreover, his theological studies at St Beuno’s gave him the opportunity to focus on Scripture, since courses on church history and dogma, in particular, would reference specific – and sometimes controversial – biblical texts. Emilio Perini SJ (1835–93), an Italian who served as a theologian to Cardinal Giuseppe Berardi at the First Vatican Council, taught Scripture and Hebrew at St Beuno’s for thirteen years, including the three years that Hopkins was a student there. (Alfred Thomas does not indicate whether or not Fr Perini had special training as a Scripture scholar).3 In hindsight, it seems clear that Hopkins and his fellow Jesuits did not have the benefit of a developed scriptural hermeneutics. Pope Leo XIII’s apostolic letter Providentissimus Deus (1893), the authoritative document of the official ecclesiastical attitude toward biblical studies, published approximately sixteen years after Hopkins Studies • volume 107 • number 425 43 had finished his theology, shows a nuanced approach to the scientific linguistic and exegetical study of Scripture, while exhibiting clear hostility towards the work of non-Catholic scholars. Over the years, as the Vatican responded to specific scriptural issues such as the date and composition of the Pastoral Letters or the concept of parousia in the writings of St Paul, it continued to send out through the Catholic world a dark cloud of reactionary conservatism, especially during the dangerous period of the Modernist crisis. The inevitable result was that only trained and approved clerics, not the laity, could interpret biblical texts. The hierarchy was well aware that some of their Protestant counterparts favoured an historical-critical exegesis that rather consciously embraced a distinctly anti-dogmatic bias.4 Although Hopkins’s knowledge of Scripture reflected the views of his day, he, like many converts, embraced his new faith wholeheartedly – though not without periods of despair and doubt – and he had no intention, certainly as a poet, of engaging in polemics. That dimension of his scriptural training would not well serve his poetic imagination. Still, it might be presumed, that during his years at St Beuno’s, he incorporated Scripture into his poetry, particularly New Testament citations, since these were the years, until his ordination on 23 September 1877, and for a short time afterwards, when he was formally studying Scripture and might be expected to have felt a certain lingering, concerted influence on his sensibility. And these were the years, too, when he wrote fourteen of his most significant poems, two of which, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ and ‘The Loss of the Eurydice’, incorporate sustained scriptural imagery.5 Yet, given the fact that Hopkins never explicitly refers by name in these poems to Saints Matthew, Mark, Luke or John, the question remains: how did he refer to the New Testament, not only in these fourteen poems, but especially in the two shipwreck poems? While individual words in some of these poems in question...