202 Studies • volume 106 • number 422 Two Nineteenth-Century Catholic Poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins and Aubrey de Vere Patrick Samway SJ Gerard Manley Hopkins clearly enjoyed both the language of play and the play of language. The linguistic arabesques and interlocking configuration of images in ‘Dun’s Scotus’s Oxford’– such as ‘Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmed, lark-charmèd, rook-rackèd, river-rounded’ – are, to cite but one example of such language, traps for poetic meditation. Who among us can easily put his or her arms around this language, to find epistemological connections that are grounded metaphysically in things as they are or things as we know them? Thus, from one perspective, Hopkins could easily become the poster boy for deconstructionism, which indeed treats the ‘play’ side of language – as, all too often, deconstructionists decree that poetry, or novels or any literary texts, for that matter, consist of a series of words without any verifiable ‘meaning’ or ‘centre’ as something, in my mind, antithetical to a Christian world view where Christ is the Verbum or the Logos, and therefore the content of all words. He is the Alpha and Omega of language, of all possible words in all languages, and thus the originator and receptor of all that can be thought or expressed in language. From a study of Duns Scotus, and other philosophers and theologians, Hopkins directed his readers toward words and concepts that allowed them to approach an understanding of his linguistic playfulness, words such as ‘inscape’ and ‘instress’. In this way he assists his reader in coping with the unified complex of characteristics that give each thing its uniqueness and that differentiates it from other things. Studying the ‘inscape’ of a thing shows us why God created it. ‘Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: / . . myself it speaks and spells, / Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came’. By ‘instress’, he refers to the force of being that holds the inscape together or carries it wholly into the mind of the beholder. Inscape, a word well-beloved to readers of Hopkins’s poetry, likewise can evoke other words, such as landscape, Patrick Samway SJ Studies • volume 106 • number 422 203 which Hopkins uses in ‘Penmaen Pool’, ‘Pied Beauty’ and ‘Ribblesdale’, and/or by extension, at least to my way of thinking, mindscape, which he does not use. Unfortunately, inscape, a word comparable to the French word instase, does not have an opposite, such as outscape, or as the French might say, exstase. Were we to use these new critical words, instase and exstase, in discussing Hopkins, our aim should not be of layering definitions, but of highlighting the originality of Hopkins’s contribution to the poetic enterprise. Thus we might note that in ‘Spring’Hopkins would have us be cognizant of weeds in wheels, thrush’s eggs, a glassy peartree, racing lambs and whatever has existed within the earth’s sweet being from the beginning. Instase looks within a being or within Being itself. ‘Pied Beauty’, to cite another instance, presents skies as the colour of the hides on brinded cows and of the skins of swimming trout, or the design of finches’wings and the shapes of plotted and pieced landscapes, all within a world that reveals the unchangeable beauty of God, who, though one, embodies what the world contains, or else how could he have created it? Instase, the search for what is within, goes beyond itself to lead to exstase, an overwhelming acceptance of the completely Other, in this case of God the Creator and Redeemer. Yet, whatever language one opts for should ultimately give more and more accessibility to Hopkins’s poetry and allow it to take on the clarity one witnesses in seeing the negative of a film develop before our eyes into a well delineated picture. The critical language one adopts is but one way of entering into important considerations of Hopkins’s originality, which can, of course, incorporate valuable literary theory. Yet, there is another way of gauging such originality, that is, by comparing Hopkins with other Catholic poets of his day and their play of language, the conceits that give distinction to their...