“The Wreck of the Deutschland” and the Birth of the Poet: Literary Form, Performative Utterance, and Hopkins’s “Gift of Tears”

Abstract

dost thou touch me afresh? Over feel thy finger and find thee. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1) last thing one discovers composing work is what put first. Blaise Pascal (2) must tell you, writes Hopkins Robert Bridges 1878, I am sorry you never read Deutschland again. (3) Bridges's resistance his friend's dense and difficult poem had been immediate, intense, and enduring: following his first encounter with it 1877, he assures Hopkins that he would for any money read [the] poem again (CW, 1: 282). Even when he eventually brings it into print more than forty years later, Bridges characterizes ode as a great dragon folded gate of Hopkins's work--a phrase that has since become something of critical commonplace. (4) And not without reason: Hopkins admits his frustrated friend that his poem needs study and is and allows, with telling litotes, that he was over-desirous that meaning of all should be quite clear (CW, 1: 295). Nearly century of divergent commentary on poem has confirmed Hopkins's understatement while validating Bridges's experience--described his notes ode--of being shamefully worsted by dragon in brave frontal assault (p. 106n). Some scholars have taken Bridges's advice (which is modeled on Hopkins's own advice him) to circumvent [the poem] and attack [it] later rear both literal and figurative senses. That is, some readings of The Wreck approach it not only from oblique points of entry, but from unconventional critical perspectives. (5) In 1960s, for example, Elisabeth Schneider suggested that miracle is represented ode, arguing that its obscure twenty-eighth stanza contains involuted account of divine vision granted five drowned nuns that poem commemorates. (6) Revisiting issue some twenty years later his Martin D'Arcy Lectures, Norman H. MacKenzie gave voice current critical consensus that poem contains no such vision--nor miracle of any kind. (7) Yet, as Lesley Higgins put it recent reappraisal, Schneider still persuaded two generations of Hopkins critics read [Stanza 28] miraculously. (8) Bridges's advice (and Schneider's example) notwithstanding, most critics have preferred engage with more obvious themes of ode, exploring its theodicean theology, its biographical resonances, and its peculiar literary form. This last topic is one of most frequently addressed issues Hopkins scholarship, and many commentaries have considered relation of poem's two uneven parts great detail. To take recent example, Imogen Forbes-Macphail has explored mathematical ratios of unevenly divided ode, drawing on calculus clarify its bifurcated form: the two halves of she argues, held an integral/differential relationship with each other, with Part First displaying nature abstract and Part Second describing] God's presence manifested or 'integrated' into real world. (9) Dennis Sobolov, for his part, takes rather different critical approach, reading Hopkins's oeuvre through lens of semiotic phenomenology, yet his conclusion is not dissimilar: strategic division between abstraction and integration that Forbes-Macphail finds form of poem, Sobolov sees within poet himself. His engagement with The Wreck thus forms final chapter of Split World of Gerard Manley Hopkins because, on Sobolov's reading, it showcases symptomatic gap that runs throughout all of Hopkins's work between faith he professed and his own lived experience. (10) Like suggestion that Bridges offers his note The Wreck, these antinomies--between theory and practice, between faith and experience--have their origin Hopkins, too. His letters and journals are replete with worries about wasting time on poetry, and his early concerns about incompatibility of verse writing with his religious life led period of elected silence during which he abandoned poetic composition altogether. …