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Gerard Manley Hopkins' "terrible sonnetst1are famous for their ambiguity and for the profound spiritual suffering they express. Secular critics uçually interpret the poerns as failures of one sort or another, psychological or intellectual or poetic. Christian critics usually interpret the poems, not in terms of failure, but of mystery: what Hopkins calls the Hincomprehensible certaintyH of God. Hopkins' reference, in the poem "Carrion Cornfort," to the story of Jacob's wrestling with Cod at Penuel (Gen.

32:23-32) invites a specifically biblical interpretation of the mystery of the "terrible sonnets.ll The circularity of

Jacob's life - £rom conflict, through resolution, to a deeper conflict - illuminates the circular development of Hopkins' poetry; and the climactic episode of Jacob's life - bis confusing, paradoxical wrestling with God at Penuel - allows us interpret the "terrible sonnetsIl as a spiritual, intellectual and literary wrestling with God. Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Professors Roger Ploude, Diana Austin and Robert Larmer for their thoughtful readings of the manuscript. 1 am particularly indebted to my supervisor, Professor Dan Doerksen, and to my best friend and partner, Heidi MacDonald, for their patience and faithfulness during the long writing of this thesis.

To them, and to the glory of God, this thesis is dedicated.

iii Table of Contents

Chapter One The Problem of the "Terrible SonnetsIl Chapter Two The Criticism Chapter Three Christian Criticism Chapter Four Penuel Chapter Five A Poet's Progxess Chapter Six The Poet at Penuel Works Cited 1 Chapter One The Problem of the "Terrible Sonnets"

Questions to which clear, simple and universally satisfying answers can be given are not the only questions worth asking. - Helen Gardner '

It is perhaps inevitable, when reading the final works of a poet, that we listen for a summary note, a final judgement upon, or resolution of, the conflicts that inspire a poet's work. Last poems, whether intended as such or not, carry at least this inadvertent authority: whatever a poet's intentions or ambitions, the poetry ended here, ended as this. And bearing the authority we normally grant to final things, final poems have a unique retrospective power. Learning £rom thern the poetryts destination, we can, £rom final poems, chart a poetts progress. Like the last lines of an individual poem, last poems may signify a destination reached, or an integrity rnaintained. Last poems can grant to a poetls life work the kind of integrity we expect to find in individual works. Even in modern poetry, in which the open or broken quality of the verse rnay disallow tidy resolutions, we may hope to hear in a poetts last works a final, consummate brokenness. The desire for conclusion, for

1 Helen Gardner, Relision and Literature (London: Faber and Faber, 1971) 13. "the sense of an ending" in Frank Kermoders phrase, runs very dee~.~ In the case of Christian poets, the reader's desire for conclusion may become a settled expectation; for, through their £aith, Christians are firmly grounded in Christ, the Alpha and Omega, the first and last. Just as Christ's completed life, death and resurrection comprehends the whole of a Christian's life, sot it may be assumed, christian doctrine should determine the purpose and shape O£ Christian poetry. In Relision and Literature Helen Gardner suggests that the peculiar beauty of religious poetry lies precisely in the fact that the poet who writes as a religious man does write in fetters. He writes as a man committed and his commitment, even if it is not stated, is implied-.. . he asks the reader to accept, at least during the reading of the poem, truths which are not presented as persona1 discoveries, [and] values that

are not his individual values. (Gardner 134) Such commitment suggests that, in Christian poetry, resolution is always close at hand. The poetry is written, as the life is lived, "in obedience to what are felt to be imperatives £rom without the sel£ that are binding" (Gardner

* Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Endinq (New York: Oxford UP, 1967) 4. 3 Christian poetry exists not to glorify itsel£, nor the poet, but to glorify God and His greater creation. Thus the

Christian poet, it might be said, labours in the service of an already completed work. We would not expect the last poems of a Christian poet to contxadict the witness of his earlier poetry - not so long as he rernained true to the doctrines of the Christian faith. Gerard Maniey Hopkins clearly challenges this assumption: his last poems, particularly his six or seven "terrible sonnets," express a su£f ering and con£usion unprecedented in Hopkins ' poetry and in English literature generally - a profound spiritual conf lict which is not even an intelligible con£lict . Hopkins' last poems suggest, not that the poet has ceased to believe in, or submit to his Gad' but rather that God has been disloyal to him, and is trying to destroy him. The

llterrible sonnets" are not "terriblet1in the popular sense of the word - because of a failure in their design or technique - but because they so convincingly recreate the experience of terror. More disturbing yet, the source of that terror is revealed as Ilthou terrible," God himself,

from whom one would normally seek refuge from terror.

The agony expressed in the ltterxible sonnetst1 would be remarkable in any poet, at any age, but is particularly surprising given the confidence with which Hopkins ' most

famous poems proclaim Godt s mercy. The nature poems for which Hopkins is most £amous are among the most joyous, confident poems produced in our language. Even a quick list of titles - Weaven-Haven," "Gad's Grandeur,' and perhaps most explicitly, "The Virgin Mary compared to the Air we

Breathe" - suggests Hopkinst confidence in the goodness of God and of His creation. Such poetry celebrates the communion which exists between the divine and human and natural orders. If, as a Christian poet, Hopkins was writing, as Gardner says, "in fetters," they were fetters in which he found freedom. He embraced the doctrines of Roman Catholicism, even as they embraced him. How did this poet whose earlier work seems so full of confidence in Godlsgrace, corne, at the end of his life, to write poems of such desolation? How are such poems to be understood? This, briefly put, is the problem of the "terrible sonnets.

In May 1885 Hopkins sent a long, chatty letter to his friend Robert Bridges in which we find the first oblique reference to the "terrible sonnets." Hopkins writes: "1 have after long silence written two sonnets, which 1 am touching: if ever anything was written in blood one of these was.l13

The phrase "which 1 am touching" may suggest that Hopkins was "touching up," or revising the poems, and such revision is borne out by the surviving manuscripts. The words also suggest, however, that as he writes the letter, Hopkins is

3 The Letters of Gerard Manlev Hopkins to Robert Bridses, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott (London: Oxford UP) 221. 5 touching the manuscript with his fingers; and to readers familiar with the poems, this is a strangely compelling image. These sonnets speak of a suffering so extreme, yet so obscure, that it renders the poet a mystery to himself. One can imagine Hopkins trying with difficulty, and perhaps with great reluctance, to touch again the disorienting, frightening crisis of the poems, to hold within the mind that considers the poetry, that other mind, also his, which suffers so powerfully in them. The appropriateness of the phrase "written in bloodw becomes obvious enough, even on a cursory reading. These are poems not of creation, but of dissolution; not of praise, but of sacrifice:

Not, 1/11 not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; Not untwist - slack they may be - these last strands of man In me or, most weary, cry ' 1 can no more. ' 1 can; Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be . But ah, but Oh thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lion limb against me? scan With darksome devouring eyes my bruised bones? and fan, O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee? 6 Why? That my chaf£ might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.

Nay in al1 that toil, that coil, since (seems) 1 kissed the rod, Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh , cheer . Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, foot trod Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

Whatever else we might think of such a poem - and surely one finishes it conscious of many contending emotions - one thing is clear: Hopkins is not praising his God, nor cooperating with Him in praise of creation. On a cursory reading it does not seem to be a Christian poem, for it offers none of the accustomed consolations of religion. The narrator blames, not himself, but God, for breaking the covenant between them. God seems to be at war with his creation . In contrast to the confident assertions of Hopkinst nature poetry, Ilcarrion Comfortn achieves not clarity, but

4 Al1 poems quoted in this manuscript are taken from. The Poetical Works of Gerard Manlev Ho~kins,ed. Norman H. MacKenzie (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990) . Mackenziets is the f ifth and latest edition of Hopkinst poetry, and is universally accepted as authoritative. confusion; not praise, but panic. The central paradox of Ilcarrion Cornfortu lies at the heart of al1 the Ilterrible sonnets" : the conf lict between Creator and creature, an absurd and unwilled antagonisrn between one sou1 and its God.

Such confusion culminates in the repetition of "my Godn in the last lines of the poem: "That night, that year / 1 wretch Lay wrestling with (my God!) my Gad." While the f irst exclamation, (my God! ) , II suggests terror, the second,

II (my God) , seems a cry of recognition and wonder. It is tempting, though ultimately simplistic, to suggest that "Carrion-Cornfort" demonstrates Hopkinst loss of faith in God. It is precisely the poetts determination to believe in the reality and goodness of God, and his simultaneous su£fering at Godfs hands , that gives the poem its great power. It seems as though an affirmation of faith has called the crisis into being. The narrator is determined to trust in the goodness of God in spite of his suffering. There is no clever way to remove this essential paradox £rom this poem: the poet suffers so cruelly £rom God's neglect precisely because he is determined to believe in God's goodness; it is only the goodness of God that gives his suffering significance. He will Wot untwist - slack they may be - these last strands of manu - those strands of faith perhaps, which will not let him disregard his suffering. It is again, in Hopkins' words, the Voilw of simultaneous conviction and confusion which renders the poem so disturbing. If Varrion Comf art" were an isolated poem of suf f ering and distress, it could perhaps be conveniently ignored. However, what is probably the second of the poems mentioned to Bridges is even more anguished than the first:

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief, More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring. Comforter, where, where is your comforting? Mary, mother of us, where is your relief? My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing - Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling-

ering! Let me be fell: force 1 must be brie£'. O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fa11 Frightful, sheer, no-man fathomed. Hold them cheap May who neter hung there. Nor long does Our small Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep, Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: al1 Life death does end and each day dies in sleep.

There is no certainty which of the two poems, "Carrion- Comfowtl'or "No Worst, is the one "written in blood, but it hardly matters; the epithet fits both these poems, and those which were written shortly a£ter. In September 1885, 9 ~opkinssent a further letter to Bridges in which he admits confusion about the nature of the poems he was now writing. He says, "1 shall shortly have some sonnets to send you, £ive or more. Four of these came like inspirations unbidden and against my will" (Letters 221). Hopkinst Vive or moreM sonnets are now considered as a group of roughly six to ten sonnets, which Bridges, in reference to the terror expressed in them, called the "terrible sonnets." Beyond the time and place of their composition - ~ublin,from roughly 1884 to 1887 - the poems share a common concern, a profound but ambiguous spiritual struggle in which the poet tries to reconcile his convictions about the nature of his relationship with God with his present experience of that relationship. The sonnet

"1 Wake and Feeln is easily as terror-ridden as Varrion- ComfortH and "No Wor~t.~~The other poems, usually said to include I1To Seem the Stranger," "PatienceIl and "My own heart,II chart the poetls struggle, more or less successful, for clarity and consolation. This, the standard list, is often extended to other poems which share the same concerns.

It is tempting to discuss Hopkinst poetry without reference to these last poems; certainly Hopkins' canon seems more unified, more comprehensible without them. The poetry of what has been called Middle Hopkins (Warren 168), particularly those sonnets which celebrate Godfs presence in 10 the natural world, seem the proper culmination of the poetts career. There is nothing in them, and nothing in their theology of praise, which asks to be developed or amplified. It would be much sirnpler for literary criticism if, having perfected his celebratory nature sonnets, Hopkins simply continued reproducing them, or lapsed into a devout silence. Hopkins, of course, did neither; rather, compelled by "inspirations unbidden, he produced a poetry he himself neither understood, nor completely approved.

Yet whatever his misgivings about these last poems, Hopkins chose ultimately to trust them. His manuscripts reveal that he revised these poems thoroughly, a revision which did not compromise their violence and ambiguity, but

rather sharpened them. The l1 terrible sonnets stand not only as an identifiable group of poems, but are, individually, finished works of art, well-executed and self-contained in sonnet form. Such technical finish argues that Hopkins valued the poems. If, as the poet Robert Bringhurst says, we "value technique as a test of an author's sincerity,lt6then Hopkins' last poems bear as much authority as any he ever wrote.

5 Daniel Harris, Inspirations Unbidden: The "Terrible Sonnets" of Gerard Manlev Ho~kins(Berkeley: U of California Pt 1982) 147-63.

6 Robert Bringhurst , "Reading Through the Feet : An

Autobiographical Meditation,l1 Pieces of Music, Pieces of Max, (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1986) 106. 11 While the "terrible sonnetsft clearly bear Ifthe sense of an ending," it is an apocalyptic, and not the paradisal ending which we might expect. The challenge of criticisrn lies not In dismissing or disregarding this apocalypse, but rather in making it meaningful for modern readers. Chapter Two The ~riticism

1 could not refrain £rom taking issue with many of his assertions. They seemed to me to be too facile, too glib. . . "And what roleu I asked (1 really wanted to know) "does Providence play in your scheme? You have forgotten, in your thesis, to place God.I1 - A.M. Klein

Studies of the "terrible sonnetsn are made both dif ficult and f ascinating by the singularity of the poet . Although Hopkinst dates (1844-89)place him solidly in the Victorian era, there is no victorian literary context that makes sense of the crisis evident in his last poems. Certainly the Oxford Movement, a high church movement within the Church of England, had a profound influence on Hopkinsf early poetry, and provided the theological justification for his most famous, sacramental poetry; and yet, in the

"terrible sonnets" Hopkins seems to have departed frorn, or transcended the concerns of the Oxford Movement . The two other intellectual crises of the Victorian era - the controversy over Darwin's Oriqin of S~ecies,and the equally

controversial use of German lt highex crit icisrnH to analyze the Bible - seem to have left Hopkins completely unfazed.

7 A.M. Klein, The Second Scroll (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1951) 89. One would expect that evolution, a theory of life's origins which seems to contradict the book of Genesis, would cause great concern in a Young ~esuitpriest, particularly one who delighted in the revelation of the natural world. Yet Hopkins seems to have been completely unconcerned by this famous controversy. He mentions Darwin only occasionally in his letters, and always sympathetically. Hopkins' genial attitude toward science in general is illustrated by his encounter with the physicist John Tyndall, a famous popularizer of ~arwin's theory. Hopkins met Tyndall while hiking in Switzerland, "at the foot of the Matterhorn." Says Hopkins, calmly, in a letter to hiç

mother: "1 fear he must be called an atheist but he is not a

shameless one: 1 wish he might come round.l18 The furore over Ithigher criticism" in biblical studies began with David Strauss' Life of Christ, a dispassionately agnostic treatment of the Gospels, and continued with source and redaction criticisms of the Bible which denied the divine nature of the book and the authenticity of the miracles recounted in it, Like the theory of evolution, the advent of "Higher Crit icismgldistressed many of Hopkins ' contemporaries. Arthur Hugh Clough found his confidence in the Bible thoroughly undermined by such criticism. In his poem lfEpi-Strauss-ion"he laments,

8 Further Letters of Gerard Manlev Ho~kins, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Oxford UP, 1956) 182. Matthew and Mark and Luke and Holy John Evanished al1 and gone. There was no such corresponding impact on Hopkins. The advent of "higher criticismu concerned him even less than evolutionary theory. Hopkins generally seems untouched by the scientific frame of mind which everywhere was rewriting

traditional orthodoxies. Hopkins never felt the need £or scientific proofs for his faith, and so he remained invulnerable to the disproofs of his day. The Vwo worldsn of religious and scientific truth which characterize the Victorian era, and between which Matthew Arnold wandered, the l'one dead / The other powerless to be born," simply did not exist for Hopkins." For Hopkins, religious faith was an essentially private reality, the truth of which needed no external verif icat ion. Perhaps more surprisingly, Hopkins seems remote £rom the major literary movements of his day. He was part of no literary school. A few of his earliest poems are reminiscent of the pre-Raphaelite poets, and indeed Hopkins wrote one early poem, "A Voice £rom the World," in response to

9 Arthur Hugh Clough, llEpi-Strauss-ion, l1 The Poems of Arthur Hush Cloush, ed. F.L.Mulhauser, 2nd ed. (Ox£ord: Clarendon, 1974) 163.

10 Matthew Arnold, ltStanzas£rom the Grande Chartreuse," The Norton Antholow of Enslish Literature Vo1.2 4th ed. (Toronto: Norton, 1979) 1381. Christina Rosettifs "The Convent Thre~hold.~~"Yet such affinities with contemporary poets are few and insubstantial- Indeed, his sympathy with Christina Rosetti arose largely out of their shared sense of isolation. Only a

few of Hopkinst poems were published in his lifetime, and these, his least characteristic poems, were published only in obscure ecclesiastical publications. In fact only three people read significant amounts of Hopkins' poetry during

his lifetime - R.W. Dixon, Coventry Patmore and Robert

Bridges - al1 of whom were poets and mutual friends, and al1 of whom shared, at best, a confused and grudging respect for

~opkins'mature work. While al1 three braved a few careful criticisms of Hopkins' poetry, there is no evidence that he found their criticisms useful. They tended to disapprove of those effects that Hopkins tried hardest to achieve, and to praise most highly those qualities he considered less important.

Because Hopkins' poetic technique anticipates many of the developments of modern English poetry, he has often been claimed as an honorary modern poet. Hopkins' mature poetry shows its greatest affinities with poets born two

generations after him, Dylan Thomas being only the most obvious example. Hopkins dismissed as llparnassian,"as too predictably poetical, the iambic pentameter which was so

11 Paul L. Mariani, A Commentarv on the Corndete Poems of Gerard Manlev Hopkins (ïthaca: Corne11 UP, 1970) 39. 16

common in Victorian poetry. l2 Instead, Hopkins developed for himself a particular kind of "sprung rhythm," an exceptionally unpredictable metre in which a poetic foot can Vary £rom one to four syllables . Like many early modern composers , Hopkins ernployed unexpected dissonances and silences in his art. Indeed, Bridges' violent reaction to Hopkins' sprung rhythm in "The Wreck O£ the Deutschlandn recalls the cries of protest and derision with which audiences greeted stravinskyls "Rites of Springn when it was f irst performed. Both works of art were presented to audiences which understood only how they disregarded conventional aesthetics, without understanding how they created new ones. And of course, both Hopkinst and

Stravinsky's art were to be fully vindicated and appreciated by a later generation. As W. H. Gardner, the f amous Hopkins critic, has written, Hopkins "succeeded in breaking up, by a kind of creative violence, an outworn convention. He led

poetry forward by taking it back - to its prima1 linguistic

origins."13 1t was largely the novelty of Hopkins' I1sprung

rhythm1!that led Bridges to wait until 1918 to publish a first edition of Hopkins' poems, almost thirty years after the poet's death. For stylistic reasons, Hopkins is most

l2 See Hopkinsf letter on the ll~arnassian, Further Letters 216.

l3 W. H . Gardner, II Introduction, Gerard Manlev Hopkins : Poems and Prose (London: ~enguin,1985) xiv. 17 frequently anthologized with poets who began writing after the First World War. If Hopkinst mature poetic technique distinguishes him as an honorary modern, his intellectual preoccupations often seem anachronistic; and this is particularly true of his last poems. Helen Gardner makes a very pointed cornparison of Hopkinst poetry with that of his age: In his concentration on the ardours and endurances of the spiritual life, as opposed to its consolations, in his feeling for the tragic rather than the pathetic, his knowledge of the loneliness and pain that is involved in man's effort to be born again ..., Hopkins sounds notes that we hardly hear elsewhere in his century in English poetry. (164) The poems often felt to be nearest to the "terrible sonnetsN in religious conviction are those of the seventeenth, not the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. Robert Martin states the "terrible sonnets" are I1like nothing else in English Poetry since the ~etaphysicalpoets of two centuries

bef ore. 1114 Similarly, Austin Warren daims of the "terrible

l4 Robert Martin, Gerard Manlev Hopkins: A Verv Private Life (London: HarperCollins, 1991) 382. sonnets,l1 "their nearest parallel 1 can summon would be Donne's 'holy sonnets.'" " Although Hopkins would not have studied English poetry

while at Oxford, l6 his letters reveal his familiarity with the "Great Traditionu of English poets, particularly Shakespeare and Milton. Hopkins rarely ment ions Donne, whom, one would think, he would find congenial; but perhaps Hopkins was uncomfortable with Donne' s conversion, the opposite of his, £rom Roman Catholicism to Anglicanism. Hopkins often mentions George Herbert in his letters, and one can easily trace Herbert ' s influence on Hopkins' early

poetry, and on his life. A letter by Hopkinst friend William Addis suggests that Herbertts reputation as both a fine Anglican priest and poet discouraged, at least for a time, Hopkins ' eventual conversion to Roman Catholicism. "George Herbertu Addis writes, "was Hopkins' strongest tie to the

English Church. '17 Undoubtedly Hopkins' terrible sonnetsu owe something to the poetry of Donne and Herbert, particularly their boldness in employing paradox, and their willingness to acknowledge their occasional anger at God. These

1s ~ustin Warren, llInstress of In~cape,~~Ho~kins: A Collection of Critical Essavs, ed. Geof f rey Hartman (Englewood Ciiffs, N. J., Prentice-Hall, 1966) 168.

l6 In Hopkins' day, the Oxford syllabus for NGreatslldid not include any English poetry. See Martin 52.

l7 Eleanor Ruggles, Gerard Manlev Hopkins : A Life (New York: Norton, 1944) 73. 19 seventeenth-century poets do not, however, provide a sufficient context for understanding Hopkins1 poetry. Helen Gardner has written most convincingly of the links which connect the sonnets of Donne and Herbert, and those of Hopkins, and she finds more differences than similarities in their poetry. Donne and Herbert, she argues, lived in "a propitious age" for the writing of religious poetry, an age in which the poet can rely on his readers doing much of his work for him, seeking implications and accepting standards that the poem does not itself make and create. (Helen Gardner 137) In the post-Romantic age of ~opkinshowever, I1a poem is expected to make its own field of reference. The poet is expected to l1make us know and feel what, without him, we should have never known or felt. Gardner argues that, in Hopkins' age, original expression is the necessary proof of a poet's sincerity, and that in Hopkins the demand for originality "takes the form of an eccentric violence' (137). The eccentricity of Hopkins1 poetry, she argues, I1is the corollary of his comparative spiritual isolation in his ageu (Helen Gardner 165) . Being Metaphysical in conscience, Victorian by circumstance , and modern in technique, Hopkins stands as utterly unique in his age. There is no familiar cultural context which can explain Hopkins' poetry . Hopkins himself seems to have recognized his uniqueness. doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness, he confesses in a letter to Robert Bridges,

but what 1 am in the habit of calling "inscapeU is what 1 above al1 aim at inpoetry. Now it is the virtue of design, pattern, or inscape to be distinctive and it is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer.

This vice I cannot have escaped. (Letters 384) Hopkins1 willingness to endure persona1 and professional isolation so that he might perfect his unique conception of poetry is perhaps the most moving aspect of his life. In spite of the pressure put on him by his friends and fellow poets, Hopkins refused to adopt a more conventional style and subject matter for his poetry. Instead, Hopkins dedicated his work to Christ, whom he considered "the only just judge, the only just literary critic." l8

The singularity of the "terrible sonnetsIl is such that they escape the more convenient cultural contexts in which poetry is usually discussed. Therefore criticisms usually

begin, not by comparing the "terrible sonnets" with the work of other poets - a frustrating and largely fruitless enterprise - but by interpreting them in the light of Hopkinst earlier work. In practice, critics usually begin by

proposing a paradox, or, what is almost the same thing, by asking an unanswerable question: how did this devout Jesuit

l8 Hopkinst letter to R.W. Dixon, June 13, 1878. The Correspondence of Gerard Manlev ~opkinsand Richard Watson Dixon, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott (London: Oxford UP, 1955) 8. priest, while remaining faithful to the consolations of his religion, write poems of such overwhelming despair? If this question seems unnecessarily biographical, the paradox may be framed differently: how does the language of these poems sustain, simultaneously, such extremes of conviction and doubt? Or again: How does the God addressed in these poems exist as both advocate and antagonist, creator and destroyer? While numerous critics have tried to reconcile the contradictions inherent in the poems, no consensus has been reached, The ambiguities of the poems are such that they tolerate the most antithetical interpretations. Readers who seek biographical explanations of poetry are confounded by Hopkins' poetry generally, and especially

by the "terrible sonnets," so dark and interior is their

world. Yet it is worthwhile to place the suffering of the "terrible sonnets1'in the context of Hopkins' life, if only because, in one poern, Hopkins tries to do the same. In "To

Seem the Stranger" Hopkins meditates on the isolation which has characterised his life, and which has culminated in his present suffering:

To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life among strangers. Father and mother dear, Brothers and sisters are in Christ not near And he my peace / my parting, sword and strife. England, whose honour O al1 my heart woos, wife To my creating thought, would neither hear

Me, were 1 pleading, plead nor do 1 : 1 wear- Y of idle a being but by where wars are rife.

1 am in Ireland now: now 1 am at a third

Remove. Not but in ali removes 1 can Kind love both give and get. Only what word Wisest my heart breeds dark heaven's baf fling ban Bars or hellts spell thwarts. This to hoard unheard, Heard unheeded, leaves me a lonely began.

While al1 the II terrible sonnets If are con£essional poems, "TO Seem the Strangervlis unique in being explicitly biographical, clearly referxing to events and places and people in Hopkinsf past. The poem is HopkinsJ dispassionate appraisal of his life in Dublin at the time he wrote his last poems. The f irst two lfremovesulof the poem result directly from Hopkinst conversion to Roman Catholicism. Although theological differences were slight between the High Chusch Anglicanism of Hopkins' youth and the Catholicism to which he converted, the social consequences of his conversion were enormous, and caused an irreparable breach with his past. Hopkinst complaint in the first quatrain that his "Father and mother dear, / Brothers and sisters are in Christ not

nearl1 ref ers to the f irst consequence of his conversion.

Hopkins found himself torn between competing loyalties. His duty to his parents, and to the Anglican faith in which they

raised him, could not be reconciled with his duty to Christ, as Hopkins now understood it - a duty which demanded his forma1 conversion to the Roman Catholic Church. The letters

Hopkins exchanged with his parents at this time reveal how

much pain and misunderstanding his conversion caused: "every

new letter 1 get breaks me dom afresh," he writes his

mother, "You might believe that 1 suffer tooIf (Further

Letters 35) . Although he regretted the pain his conversion brought to his family, Hopkins was encouraged by Christ's

unequivocal warning in the Gospel of Matthew:

Think not that 1 am corne to send peace on earth: 1 came

not to send peace but a sword. For 1 am corne to set a

man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother .... He that loveth father or mother

more than me is not worthy of me." (Matthew 10:34) l9

One suspects that these verses were never far from Hopkinst

thoughts. Almost twenty years after his conversion they

surface in "To Seem the Strangern as Hopkins addresses Christ as I1my peace / my parting, sword and strife . " Hopkins' second "removeI1 also resulted f rom his

conversion. As a Roman ~atholiche was estranged, not only

from his family, but £rom the spiritual life of

predominantly Protestant England, and from his university,

l9 Except where noted, al1 biblical quotations are taken from the King James Authorized Bible, which was the only Bible Hopkins knew in English. Oxford. Although it was the Oxford Movement, begun a generation earlier, that first led Hopkins to become a Roman Catholic, yet his Catholicism isolated him from the Oxford community when, years later, he returned there to serve as a priest. The irony of this did not escape him. He felt great loyalty toward a university, and a nation, which felt none for him. As a poet he wished to contribute to the glory of English literature, and as a priest, to win back England for the Roman Catholic Church. Yet his experiences in England after his conversion taught him that England Ilwould neither hear / Me were 1 pleading, plead nor do 1." The poem's sestet opens with Hopkinst third remove, his simple physical isolation from those places where he had been happy, and had written his happiest poetry. With solemn simplicity he writes, flIam in Ireland now: now 1 am at a third remove." Such geographical isolation must have made the first two llremovesll- his spiritual separation from his family, and £rom his country - seem absolute and irreparable. Certainly Hopkins' exile £rom England was further aggravated by the political situation in Northern Ireland. Although sympathetic to Irish Home Rule, Hopkins remained determinedly loyal to the monarchy and government of England, and would not actively campaign against the

English government in Ireland. Thus, he remained politically isolated from both sides of that highly divisive issue. 25 The three "removesu of "To Seem the Strangerg8are such an eloquent description of Hopkins' suf f ering that many critics accept them as an adequate explanation of that suffering- In his study of Hopkins, In Extremitv, John

Robinson writes, IlThe poems so often describe a condition of life rather than its immediate causes that [these conditions] can, with some show of plausibility, be advanced as causes." Robinson daims that, despite their powerful interiority, the "terrible sonnetsu derive "£rom something

external to the man. "*O Similarly, Robert Martin, Hopkins' most recent biographer, suggests that Hopkins wrote llTo Seem the StrangerN as a kind of self-diagnosis. "Hopkinst instinct, like our owntHhe writes, "was to locate a specif ic, identifiable cause for his malaiseIl (Martin 384) .

Certainly ~opkins' tendency towards self-analysis and his fragile mental state are easily demonstrated in his

note-books and letters. In 1885, the year he wrote the "terrible sonnets, Hopkins complains in a letter to his

friend A.M. Baillie, "The melancholy 1 have al1 my life been

subject to has become of late years not indeed more intense in its fits but rather more distributed, constant and

cripplingw (Further Letters 256). Hopkins made several such confessions. To Robert Bridges in the same year, he writes,

20 John Robinson, In Extremitv: A Studv of Gerard Manlev Ho~kins(New York: Cambridge UP, 1978) 129. 26 III think that my fits of sadness, though they do not affect my judgement, resemble madness1I (Letters 193) . There are, if one looks for them, enough such confessions to suggest that Hopkins' spiritual struggles are properly psychological , or neurological, in origin. The most thorough psychological discussion of the

terrible sonnetsl1 is f ound in Robert Martints Gerard Manlev Ho~kins:A Verv Private Life, a biography in which the vocabulary and premises of Freudian psychology and psychoanalytic theory are used to explain the crisis of the

terrible sonnets,IV Sexual and reproductive metaphors, of which Hopkins1 poetry is full, receive particular emphasis. In explicating I1To Seem the Stranger, arti in focuses on the passage in which Hopkins speaks of England in the idiom of an unrequited romantic lover : I1England,whose honour O al1 my heart woos, wife / To my creating thought.I1 The romantic language which the poem exploits f iguratively, Martin interprets literally, inferring a kind of sexual frustration. "~nevitably, he tells us, l'the word 'wifeg stands out for the readerI1 (385). In particular Martin presumes that Hopkins had a homosexual affair while he was studying at Oxford, for which he spent the rest O£ his life suffering tremendous guilt. ~ccordingto Martin's reading, Hopkins dealt with his guilt not oniy by redirecting his sexual energies into his poetry, but also by developing a

llpathol.ogicalintroversionm - a def ensive subjectivity, 27

which resulted in his gradua1 isolation £rom his family and

country (Martin 385). While arti in recognizes the

paradoxical nature of the l'terrible sonnets, he interprets

them not as religious paradoxes but as psychological ones,

arising from contradictory impulses within the poet ' s

psyche. In this reading, Hopkins the Jesuit priest stands

directly opposed to Hopkins the sensual poet of nature: the

ascetic opposes the aesthetic. With this ernphasis, Martin's

book is representative of much recent critical work on

Hopkins. As David Downes puts it, "Most of the modern

critics have gone to Freud for their explanation of these

poems . lvZ1 Martint s reading of the "terrible sonnets, " although

consistent, is not unassailable. The specific biographical

evidence off ered for Hopkins' homosexuality is thin, and the

specif ic diagnosis of " pathological intro~ersion~~extremely

conjectural. Martin is, however, a just critic, and his

f idelity both to the poetry, and to the evidence of Hopkins'

life, leads him to concede the complexity of Hopkins' case:

'lit must be admitted, he states,

that without the evidence of the poems themselves,

it would be difficult to guess from the bulk of his

correspondence during that summer that he was

undergoing a breakdown, or even much more than his

*l David Downes, The Isnatian Personalitv of Gerard Manlev Hopkins (Lanham, Maryland: UP of America, 1990) 108-09. 28 usual unhappiness. It is a perfect example of the way that he could exist on two levels, both real enough

but apparently incompatible. (Martin 382) This last sentence - offering as it does a very serviceable definition of paradox: "two levels, both real enough but apparently incompatible" - implies that the biographical evidence which Martin uses to explain the poetry, is, in fact, as fully paradoxical as the poetry itself. Martin further admits the limitations of a biographical reading of the "terrible sonnets'l when he states that IlThe real evidence about [~opkins'1 emotional life must be his poemstt (Martin 383). The biographer here attempts a sleight-of-hand wherein the spiritual crisis revealed in the poetry is presented as a biographical event, which is then presented as an explanation of those particular poems. In short, the purely biographical evidence of Hopkins' crisis is illusory.

The facts of Hopkinst life - at least those which a biography recognizes - cannot fully explain either his last poems, or the crisis which inspires them. If, in spite of such reservations, Martin's thesis is accepted, it remains unclear what relationship Hopkins ' psychological states would have with his specifically religious concerns. Would a case of "pathological introversiont1cause a spiritual crisis, or would it result from one? 1s a diagnosis of mental illness an explanation or merely a description of Hopkinsf crisis? How can we 29 distinguish between psychological and religious realities? Martin does not ask, and certainly does not answer such questions, for his use of spiritual language is purely perfunctory. Such terms as "spiritual lifeIv and Msoulu are used entirely in de£erence to Hopkins' religious faith, and form no integral part of Martin's analysis. It remains true that Martin's reading of Hopkins is entirely self-consistent, and even compelling, on its own terms. Martin tells the story of a life; and, like many critics, he finds the mysteries of human life more compelling, more relevant, when expressed in psychological rather than religious terms. His analysis has the appeal of any consistent cause-and-effect analysis: it reassures us that a human life - even one as complex and ambiguous as

Hopkinst - can be made cornprehensible. In the concluding lines of "To seem the Stranger," Hopkins explains the cause of his spiritual crisis in terms so explicitly religious that his crisis cannot be understood in purely psychological terms. He claims, IvNot but in al1 removes 1 can / Kind love both give and get." With the complex double-negative "net butvvwhich he uses to convey a complex mental state, Hopkins claims that he is never without "kind love;" and indeed, everything in his biography supports this. Hopkins was reconciled with his family, if not close to thern. He sent and received letters frequently, and visited them when he could. He had few, but close, 30 £riends in Dublin. Above all, in his duties as both priest and Prof essor at the Royal University of Ireland, Hopkins had regular and friendly contact with both students and colleagues. It is only £rom Christ that he appeals in vain for ltKind love.II This is the crux of the poem, and indeed of al1 the Yerrible sonnets." He su£fers under "dark heaven's baffling ban." Hopkins mourns not the loss of an adolescent, homosexual love, but a more pressing and immediate loss: he is a stranger to his God. Writing to Bridges in 1879, Hopkins complains: Feeling, love in particular, is the great moving power

and spring of verse, and the only person that 1 am in love with seldom stirs my heart sensibly. (Letters 277) In this statement, as in al1 Hopkinsf poetry, "the only personIl is always Christ, for love of whom Hopkins has suffered al1 other "removes." While Hopkins explicitly acknowledges the misfortunes of his life - those three removes which distinguish his biography - he places the crisis of T"I' Seem the Strangerll in a further, a fourth, llrernovell:his estrangement £rom God. Thus the conclusion of the poem sustains the paradox manifest in al1 the "terrible sonnets": the poetts loving and all-powerful Creator,

Christ, has unaccountably set ~imselfat odds with His creature. It is but a srna11 step f rom understanding the "terrible sonnetsw as a failure of the poet's mental health, to understanding them as signalling a failure of his poetic vision. Critics naturally accept the optimistic nature

poetry of Hopkinst middle period as the norm of religious poetry, and not without cause. The famous nature sonnets of Middle Hopkins, those poems which af firm continuity between the natural and spiritual worlds, will always be better known than his last poems, not because they are more popular in style, or even less paradoxical than his later work, but simply because they are happy poems, which speak of happy paradoxes. One senses that critics seek to defend the

beauty, simplicity and comfort of these poems from the painful paradoxes of his last poems. Consequently, critics speak of the llfailurellof the "terrible sonnets, and search out the critical weakness, or weaknesses in Hopkins' poetic.

In "Tirnefs Eunuchln Christopher Devlin states that I1by 1884 Hopkins had failed in his major ambition, which ... was an attempt to show the Grace of Christ working in the

universe to form it into one body with many members . la Similarly Harold Fulweiler argues that, in his last poems, Hopkins understood himself as "a failed mediator between

f inite and 1nf inite."23

22 Christopher Devlin, "Time1sEunuchf1I The Month, n.s., 1 (1949): 309.

23 Howard W. Fulweiler, Letters From the Darklins Plain: Lansuase and the Grounds of Knowledse in the Poetrv of Arnold and Ho~kins(Columbia, Mo. : U of Missouri P, 1972) 144. 32 A similar, though more sophisticated, daim is made by J. Hillis Miller in his chapter on Hopkins in The Disamearance of ~od." Miller relates Hopkins' spiritual crisis to the late Victorian era, and specifically to "the ineluctable withdrawal from the Victorian mind of satisfactory evidence of ~od. Miller suggests that the "terrible sonnetst1signal a shi£t in Hopkinst concern, £rom seeking God in the outward forms of nature and society, to seeking God in himself. Miller argues that Hopkins' misdirected search for his individual and distinctive llinscape," for Ilthe selfless self of self, as Hopkins himself paradoxically put it, led him into an increasingly solipsistic maze from which he could not escape. increasingly isolated £rom God, and imprisoned within his

own self, Hopkins became, in the llterrible sonnets,II

~diabolicallyidiosyncratic" (Miller 343 ) . A deconstructive interpretation of Hopkins' ufailuren is offered by Michael ~prinkler.'~In A Countemoint of Dissonance Sprinkler argues that the "terrible sonnetsH reveal the inevitable failure of language to achieve the

24 J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard UP, 1963).

25 Robert Brinlee, IlThe Biblical Underthought of Hopkins' 'Terrible sonnets, Literature and Theolow, ed. Thomas F. Stanley and Lester F. Zimmerman (Tulsa, Oklahoma: U of Tulsa P, 1969) 13.

26 Michael Sprinkler, "A Counter~oint of DissonanceN: The Aesthetics and Poetry of Gerard Manlev Ho~kins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980). kind of meaning Hopkins demanded from it. Hopkins, he argues, thought of language not only as a logocentric structure, but a sacramental one as well, capable of expressing spiritual truths. In opposition to Hopkins' understanding of language, Sprinkler poçits the arguments of Jacques Derrida, according to whom language can never achieve a complete signification of any kind. Language never achieves a stable meaning, and certainly never reposes in what Derrida calls a "transcendental signified." As signifiers, words do not achieve full signification; rather they beget only other signifiers. Sprinkler approves Derrida's idea that "there is nothing outside the text," no stable meaning, no I1transcendental signif ied, no God (98). Hopkins wanted his words to speak The Word, the Logos; but

as Rachel Salmon phrases it, "Success in such terms could mean only the conscious and decisive demonstration of what language cannot do. The criticism of Hopkinsf "failureI1 finds its clearest expression in Daniel Harris' Ins~irationsUnbidden, the first book-length study of the "terrible sonnets.1128~arris' book is in many ways a summary work, building upon the

27 Rachel Salmon, IlHopkins and the Rabbis : Christian Religious Poetry and Midrashic Reading,I1 Rereadins Hopkins: Selected New Essavs, ed. rancis L. Fennell (Victoria,B.C.: U of Victoria P, 1996) 98.

28 Daniel A. Harris, "Inspirations Unbiddenll: The "Terrible SonnetsM of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Berkeley: U of California P, 1982. ) arguments of Miller and others, and stating clearly the premises which inspire many articles on Hopkins' last poems. Like most critics, Harris accepts the poems of Hopkinst

Middle period - from l1God' s Grandeur, It written in 1877, to

ltRibblesdalellin 1882 - as his most successful. Harris

argues that these poems fulf il most perfectly Hopkinst

intentions : to llconstruct and render within his poetry a sacramental vision of nature;" (Harris, xii) and it is in comparison with these poems that the later poems are

interpreted. The "terrible sonnets" are a £ ailure, Harris argues, not in any ultimate sense, but Ilin a comparative

sense." The poems Vail to embody the methods he had

previously employed, the aims he had formulated1I (Harris xiii) . Harris bases his argument on the integral role that nature plays in the poems of Middle Hopkins, and the lack of nature imagery in the "terrible sonnets.' In the poems of Middle Hopkins, nature serves as the site of inscape, l'the outward reflection of the inner nature of a thing, a place of synthesis between human and eternal realms. Within

the "terrible sonnets, he states, Ilnature has virtually

disappeared" (Harris 23) . The sonnet "To Seem the Stranger, he notes, "contains no images from nature at all" (Harris

19). Harris argues that, towards the end of his life,

29 W .A. M. Peters, S. J. , Gerard Manlev Hopkins: A Critical Essav towards the Understandina of his Poetrv (London: Oxford UP, Hopkins felt "shattering doubts about the supernatural vitality within nature1' (23). The disappearance of nature in

the poems signals, in Miller's phrase, "the disappearance of GodfHa disappearance which leaves the poet in "an unwilled submission to s~lipsisrn~~(3) . The sonnet llPatiencellseems at first a perfect example of Harris' argument that the absence of nature in the poem manifests the absence of God. The narrator is clearly cut off from nature -indeed he is cut off from the outside world generally - and consigned to the bleak isolation of his own mind :

Patience, hard thing! the hard thing but to pray, But bid for, Patience is! Patience who asks Wants war, wants wounds; weary his times, his tasks; To do without, take tosses, and obey. Rare patience roots in these, and, these away Nowhere. Naturai heartfs ivy, Patience masks Our ruins of wrecked past purpose. There she basks Purple eyes and seas of liquid leaves al1 day. We hear Our hearts grate on themselves: it kills

To bruise them dearer. Yet the rebellious wills Of us we do bid God bend to him even so. And where is he who more and more distils Delicious kindness? - He is patient. Patience fills His crisp combs, and that cornes those ways we know. 36 The poem "Patience" testifies to the difficulty of prayer, the necessity "to do without," the rnediation of God through nature.

Harris' argument seems completely convincing - at least until one reads the poetry closely. Upon a close reading, even 'IPatiencetttthe poem most suitable to Harris1 thesis, reveals a complexity of thought and image which escapes easy formulation. The poem opens with the narrator isolated from God, and praying for the patience he needs to endure his isolation. By the second line, the focus of the poem shifts from describing the narratorts prayer for patience, to describing the nature of patience itself. Although it is the role of patience to suffer absence, the poem so completely personifies patience that it seems to take tangible form. As one critic points out, V?atiencef ceases to be an abstract

concept, and becomes personified as a kindly I1she.lt30 Thus the presence of patience, rather than the absence of God, becomes the true subject of the poem. In contradiction to Harris' thesis, "Patiencen does present a few images £rom nature. They serve not as images of God, nor of the absence of God; nor are they meant to. They are, rather, images of patience herself: Natural heartts ivy, Patience masks Our ruins of wrecked past purpose. There she basks

'O Virginia Ridley Ellis, Gerard Manlev Hopkins and the Lanquaqe of Mysterv (Columbia, Missouri: U of Missouri P. 1991) 291. Purple eyes and seas of liquid leaves al1 day. Harris, believing that the poemfs proper subject is the narratorts suf£ering, dismisses the image of "Natural heart's ivy," a small masterpiece of compression, as merely lvdecorativeand ornamentaLf1The image is given, he says, only to provide "ernotive coloration to the abstract virtue"

(Harris 48). In fact, Hopkins creates the image, and give it such intensity, in order to render the reality of patience in fully material terms. Beyond the poem "Patience," there are other "terrible sonnetsH - Varrion Cornfort" and "1 Wake and Feelu particularly - in which God is so powerfully, palpably present that His absence might be of greater comfort than His presence. This is a God not in any way amenable to the gentle image of the ivy in V?atien~e,~~but a God who is threatening and fearful: But ah, bot O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lion limb against me? scan

With darksome devouring eyes my bruised bones? and fan,

0 in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee? This violent, unpredictable, and in Hopkins' sense of the word, "terribleM God, is undeniably present in the poem. He is, furthermore, described as being "in turns of ternpe~t,~~ clearly an image taken from nature. Harris conveniently disavows this image, clairning that, because it is lltraditionally biblical," its "very conventionality demonstrates the failureI1 of Hopkins' poetic (Harris 19). Harris' critique of the terrible sonnetsf1focuses almost exclusively on the mediating role of nature, and ignores what kind of God nature is supposed to mediate, or what mysteries of being and non-being might arise from this conjunction of the natural and the supernatural worlds . Not surprisingly, as a result of Harrist narrow focus, God seems to disappear £rom the poetry, even though the poetry makes no sense without Him. Such a paradox may also be stated the other way around: it is God's purpose in the poems to not be in the poems. The result of this seems clear: paradox, like murder, will out. One must either interpret the paradoxes within the poems as explicitly as possible, and deal with the mysteries which arise £rom them, or suffer having equivalent paradoxes appear in one's thesis. Harris interprets the "terrible sonnets" as if Hopkins were essentially a poet of nature, and only secondarily a religious poet - as if, in fact, Hopkins were struggling to be a Rornantic poet after the rnanner O£ Keats. This interpretation has a certain validity when discussing the poems of Hopkinst middle period, for in those poems he participates in one of the great projects of Romanticism: to clarify and celebrate the moral meaning of nature. One can, 39 for example, imagine Hopkins approving Keatsf equation that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,It for Hopkinsr concept of inscape certainly embraces both beauty and truth. Hopkins would not, however, have approved of Keats' corollary "that is al1 / Ye know on earth, and al1 ye need to know.~~'Hopkins considered nature to be a valid revelation, but not one sufficient in itself. Like both Wordsworth and Keats, Hopkins wrote of nature with earnestness and great sensitivity; yet unlike them, he never sought his religion there. He diffexs £rom the Romantics generally in his determination to spell out the spiritual significance of the natural world in terms of Christian, and specifically Roman Catholic, doctrine. There is a sternness in Hopkins, an uncompromising adherence to the hard facts of Christian doctrine which (except for the aging Wordsworth) is uncharacteristic of the Rornantics. In the "terrible sonnets,I1 as in al1 his poetry, Hopkins strictly subordinates the revelations of nature to the revelations of Scripture and of Catholic theology, whenever he feels they are in conflict. With such avowed dependence on revelation outside of nature, Hopkins cannot properly be considered as a Romantic, nor can his poetry be understood as ufailedlt romanticism.

31 John Keats, Ilode on a Grecian Urn," Norton Antholoqv of Enqlish Literature, Vol 2 4th ed. (Toronto: Norton, 1979) 827. In explaining the VailureV of Hopkins' last poems, Harris makes an honest and illuminating admission: To define the absence of a particular poetic feature as constituting a peculiar characteristic of a certain body of poetry, and to show the values implied by that

absence, is a difficult enterprise. (19) Harris' thesis, and those of other critics who judge Hopkins by poetics in which he did not believe, can properly define the "terrible sonnetsu only by negation, by what they are not. This is yet a useful critical activity, and one aspect of Harris' claim is easily defended: in the "terrible sonnetslnGod is not bodied forth by nature as in the great poems of Middle Hopkins; yet Hopkins must not be faulted for failing to achieve what he never attempted. The disappearance of nature in these poems does not signal the

"disappearance of Godln but the disappearance only of a God

who is harmless, unthreatening, and whose reality is adequately cornmunicated by the beauties of nature. In The Function of Criticism Yvor Winters produced the most severe of al1 critiques on Hopkins, and therefore one of the most ~seful.~~For Winters, the ambiguous nature of the "terrible sonnetsM disqualifies them as legitimate poetry altogether. Winters daims that the "terrible

32 Yvor Winters, "The Poetry of Gerard Manley HopkinstUThe Function of Criticism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957). 41 sonnets" are obscured by an overindulgence of emotion - emotion which the poet never explains or justifies. Because of this overindulgence, he suggests, the poems offer, not meaning, but only Ilthe illusion of meaning1l (Winters 109) . Winters cornplains: Hopkins has no generating concept, or at least offers none; since he cannot move us by telling us why he himself is moved, he must try to move us by belabouring

his emotion. He says, in effect : IfSharemy fear£ul emotion, for the human mind is subject to fearful ern~tions.~~But why should we wish to share an emotion

so il1 sponsored? Nothing could be more rash. (113) ~ertainlyWintersl initial observation is just. The "terrible sonnets" do not arise out of a familiar or identifiable context. Winters presses this point by comparing Hopkinst sonnet fiNoWorstu to the sonnet IlThou hast made meu by John Donne. Donne's poem shares with "No Worst" a sense of spiritual desolation and an acute awareness of the difficulties of human relationship with God. The opening quatrain of "Thou hast made met1presents the paradox of a good and all- powerful God who, inexplicably, allows the suf fering and death of His creatures: Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay? Repair me now, for now mine end doth haste;

1 run to death, and death meets me as fast, And al1 my pleasures are like ~esterday.~~ In the second quatrain, the narratorts confusion escalates into a sense of panic and disorientation rerniniscent of

Hopkins' terrible sonnets1I:

I dare not move my dim eyes any way,

Despair behind, and death before doth cast Such terror, and my feeble flesh doth waste By sin in it, which it towards hell doth weigh. The poem, Winters says, I1is simple in conception: the poet looks forward a little way to death and backward on the sins of his life.I1 Although the narrator suffers truly, yet he seems to suffer in an orderly manner, an order guaranteed by

his theological universe: Hel1 is below him and heaven above, and he understands himself as caught in that contested space in-between: "Thou Hast made me," Winters suggests, presents 'an orthodox theological definition of a

predicament in which every man is supposed to share." The concluding sestet of a sonnet is, traditionally, a place for counter-argument and resolution; and so it is in Donne ' s poem . Only thou art above, and when towards thee

By thy leave 1 can look, 1 rise again. But Our old subtle foe so tempteth me

That not one hour myself 1 can sustain;

33 This text of Donne' s "Thou hast made met1is taken £rom Winterts The Function of Criticism (107). Thy Grace may wing me to prevent his art, And thou like Adamant draw mine iron heart. In spite of his despair, the narrator retains an objective sense of his situation. He is able to orient himself spatially in a comprehensible universe, and so can affirm the possibility of Grace. Vnly thou art above, " he says to God and to himself, l'and when toward thee / By thy leave 1 can look again." In this cautious but hopeful expectation the sonnet concludes. For many readers, and certainly for Winters, Donne's Thou hast Made Me1'is everything a Christian poem should be. The poem presents clearly the dif f iculties of the religious life - the reality of sin and doubt, the sense that, occasionally, God is far from us - without recourse to sentimental or simplistic consolations. Though the narrator speaks intimately of his su£f ering, recreating it powerfully in the present tense, the poetry retains a great formality. The rhythm, though it varies, never departs far from iambic pentameter, and is anchored by strong rhymes at the end of each line. Donne achieves a dignified balance between spontaneity and order, and such dignity in the poetry argues for the dignity of the narratorls theology. A very real dif ference is felt in Hopkins' "No Worst. The poem achieves a sense of panic similar to Donne's poems, yet never really transcends it: 44 No Worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief, More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring. Cornforter, where, where is your comforting? Mary, mother of us, where is your relief? My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chie£ Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing - Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling-

ering! Let me be fell: force 1 must be briefl. Hopkins does not use the sestet to provide a counter- argument as we might expect. The narrator does not commune with God, nor console himself with the possibility of Godfs grace, but seems disoriented within the universe of his own mind. There Is in these famous lines no consolation, but a sense of both wonder and despair at the magnitude of his confusion: O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fa11 Frightful, sheer, no-man fathomed. Hold them cheap May who ne1er hung there. Nor long does Our small Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep, Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: al1 Life death does end and each day dies in sleep. Whexeas Donne's poem argues for the existence of a rationally comprehensible universe, Hopkinsf poem achieves order only through the severe guarantees of oblivion: "Al1 / Life death does end, and each day dies in sleep." 45 Although Winters allows that Hopkinsf sestet is "moving and impressiveV he cannot approve of it, but asks

What are these mountains of the mind? One does not enquire because one holds them cheap, but because one has hung on so many oneself, so various in their respective terrors, that one is perplexed to assign a

particular motive. (Winters 108)

Winters asks that Hopkinsf %iountains O£ the mindu should be, to pursue the metaphor, a clearly identifiable feature of mental geography - a mountain of doubt perhaps, or of fear. He imagines perhaps a mountain one stands upon and looks £rom, or a mountain on the horizon one looks toward.

ut Hopkins1 narrator hast and daims, no such perspective. He does not know which mountain he is on. He knows only "Cliffs of fa11 / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed."He knows only that he clings for his life. Clearly the poet and the critic are at cross-purposes here. If it is reasonable for a critlc to ask lfWhat are these mountains of the mind?," it is not reasonable to demand one particular kind of answer, or perhaps any answer at all. Winters would disagree. It is the business of a poet, he claims, to make a statement in words about an experience; the statement must be in some sense and in a fair measure acceptable rationally; and the feeling communicated 46 should be proper to the rational understanding of the experience . (104) Winters suggests that a poem which cannot be rationally understood is not a proper poem. While such a definition very clearly underlines the virtues of Donnefs "Thou hast made me, it is an unreasonably prescriptive definition of poetry. Although Winters rightly claims there is no way to describe rationally what happens in "No Worst," he is wrong to suggest that nothing happens in the poem. It is, in part, the irnpossibility of rational comprehension which invokes such terror in the poem's narrator. The narrator of "No Worstll does not, as Winters suggests, despise rationality, but has simply exhausted it . Donnefs poem is about despair, and the speaker retains sufficient objectivity toward his subject to make his description, in Winters' terms, "acceptable rationally . Hopkins' narrator hast and claims, no such objectivity. He is not writing about despair. He is despairing. It is true that "No Worstu does not present a clear subject or meaning; rather it manifests a violent struggle for meaning, a struggle which does not grant the poet a comfortable perspective on his own suffering. Robert Martin writes: ~f it can be said O£ any work of art, it is true that these are not poems about misery, but the feeling itself. They are not emotions recollected in tranquillity or even in terror, they are experiences so 47 immediate that the reader constantly feels that they wholly possessed Hopkins at the very moment of

composition, as indeed they probably did. (383)

Clearly the Il terrible sonnetst1exhibit a lack of clarity, but then such confusion seems to be their essence, even perhaps, their subject. Winters resents in the "terrible sonnetsIl precisely what many readers find so convincing: the narratorts unwilling and therefore violent descent into suffering, into realities beyond the limits O£ Our rational underst anding . Winters allows himself a revealing outburst of anger at Hopkins, one which no doubt expresses the confusion and impatience of many readers: "Who is this man, Winters asks, "to lead us so far and blindfold into violence? This kind of thing is a violation of Our integrity; it is somewhat beneath the dignity of man1' (Winters 113). Winterst outburst is candid and relevant. The "terrible sonnetsu do offend us with their insistence that our lives, and Our human relationship with God, are not fully comprehensible to us, and not acceptable rationally . If the "terrible sonnetsu do lead us I1blindfold into violencei1it may be that Hopkins himself was so led, and he wished to leave testimony. If these poems "violate Our integrity" it may be that Hopkins sees the integrity of humanity as largely illusory. If these poems seem to be I1beneath the dignity of man1! one might answer that there is a great deal of human reality to be found beneath hutnan I1dignity,"and that poetry has the power to make it plain. Part of the attraction of the "terrible sonnetsv lies in their capacity to present truths beyond oux capacity to understand: the reality of suffering and the mystery of Godfsparticipation in suffering. Ultimately, criticism on the "terrible sonnetsN turns on what Harris calls "a far more fundamental issue: the justification, or lack of it, for sufferingI1 (Harris 14). This, one suspects, is the real crux of Hopkinsf "terrible sonnets, and of the criticisms they inspire: the poems o£fend us, not just because they are ambiguous, and not just because they are so unhappy, but because their ambiguity prevents us from disarming their unhappiness, or limiting it. We cannot contain their suf£ering or contextualize it, or explain it away. Happiness, however ambiguously it may be presented, is easily and imrnediately understood. Happiness needs no defence or rationale. The suf£ering of the "terrible sonnets," however, leads us into mystery. The "terrible sonnets" witness to a God who interferes in human lives in ways beyond the reach of a biography, who exists beyond the mediation of the natural world, and whose ways are beyond the reach of our rational comprehension. The "terrible sonnets" enter into mystexy, and it is our privilege to follow them as far into that mystery as we can. The novelist Flannery O'Connor is another Roman Catholic writer whose work has been criticised for its violence. Critics have accused her of degeneracy, and a lack of faith, to which charges she has replied: If the writer uses his eyes in the real security of his Faith, he will be obliged to use them honestly, and his sense of mystery, and acceptance of it, will be increased. To look at the worst will be for him

no more than an act of trust in God. 34 O'Connor does not rationalise suffering, or apologise for its presence in Christian experience and thought. To accept the reality of suffering is, for her, an act of faith - and faith not in the world as we would like it to bel but in the present world as God suffers it to be. The violence of O'Connor's fiction and of Hopkins' poetry arises out of the determination, at once religious and artistic, to resist forcing our descriptions of the world into a shape acceptable to the intellect, but rather to describe honestly what is seen and felt, and to accept the paradoxes and ambiguities that inhere in such descriptions. Intellectually, criticism cornes to an impasse on the question of religious faith and suffering. Hopkins can

testify with O'Connor that tt To look at the worst will be for [the Christian writer] no more than an act of trust in

God,tt and yet , as O' Connor ominously adds, I1what may be one

34 Fiannery O'Connor, IlThe Church and the Fiction Writer, Mysterv and Manners (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990) 148. 50 thing for the writer may be another for the reader"

(OfConnor 148) . Winters will not admit as poetry any writing that is not "in a fair measure acceptable rationally," or any writing too insulting to the "dignity of man." Hopkins felt compelled otherwise, and at the end of his life laboured diligently at poems which offend both rationality and the "dignity of man. And how is literary criticism to resolve such a disagreement? We argue £rom premises held so deeply, they seem to hold us. Our convictions of what human I1dignity1llies in, of what kind of truth religious faith aspires to, and of what spiritual value there may be in suffering bravely borne: we cannot resolve these issues by discussing the merits of particular poems, but rather such convictions are the very premises upon which literary discussions are based. And so the debate properly passes out of literary criticism altogether, and into philosophy, or theology. This intellectual impasse may be illustrated by a brief, but revealing, incident which Hopkins relates in his

1868 Journal. Hopkins has taken a trip to Switzerland with his friend Edward Bond, and the two spend several days climbing in the Alps. Hopkins relates an encounter wherein he and his guide argue over who shall carry Hopkins'

knapsack : We came up with a guide who reminded me of F. John. He took E.B.Is knapsack, and on finding the reason 51

why 1 would not let him take mine said "Le bon Dieu

n'est pas comme Ca." The man was probably a rational Protestant; if a Catholic at least he rationalised

gracefully, as they do in Switzerland. "

One understands the guide's point of view irnmediately: he is undoubtedly much stronger than Hopkins (who was never an athlete), and he has been paid for the labour of carrying their gear up the mountain. He wishes to relieve Hopkins of an unnecessary burden. Yet Hopkins refuses to part with his pack. Being a private Journal entry, Hopkins does not disclose his reasons for refusing the guide's offer, and perhaps he does not fully understand his own reasons; but evidently he explained it to the guide in terms of penance - a physical discipline undertaken for spiritual purposes. The guide thinks that Hopkins1 reasoning, and his

suffering under the burden of his knapsack, is absurd; and

his rejoinder that "Le bon Dieu n'est pas comme cal1 is intended to reassure Hopkins: simply put, God is good, and does not require you to suffer for no good reason. Hopkins, for his part, understands carrying the knapsack as a meaningful discipline, a gesture, and an act of submission to God. The guide thinks, no doubt, that Hopkins is simply being stubborn. Hopkins, no doubt, considers the guide presumptuous and interfering.

35 The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manlev Ho~kins,ed. Humphrey House, completed Graham Storey (London: Oxford UP, 1959) 184. 52

Tt is hard to imagine this brief controversy on the mountain being resolved by further discussion, even between two men of undoubted good will and clear intellect; for they disagree not only on the value of suffering in a universe governed by a loving God, but also on the role of rationality in determining that value. Hopkins' judgement of the guide, that "at least he rationalised gracefully, suggests that while the guide considers human relationship with God as rationally comprehensible, he does not.

A similar dispute attends much criticism on Hopkins' "terrible sonnets.' Many critics think that, in his last poems, Hopkins bears an unnecessary burden of suffering and confusion. And however complex their criticisms may bel however gracefully they may rationalise, there can be no argument more compelling or more profound than that offered by Hopkinsf Swiss guide, who said simply IfLe bon Dieu ntest pas comme Ca. God is not like that. He does not require you to carry this burden. Hopkins "terrible sonnetst1resist al1 such neat resolutions; for they testify to an irremdiable paradox: that 'the good Lord is like that. ' He tolerates suffering when it seems to serve no purpose, and He does so without ceasing to be good. Chapter ~hree Christian ~riticism

The idea of philosophy is mediation - Christianity' s is the paradox.

- Kierkegaard 35

It is tempting, when encountering the confusion and

paradoxes of the "terrible sonnets," to conclude that Hopkins simply got it wrong. The central crux of the poems -

the narrator su£fering innocently at the hands of a

benevolent God - strikes us both morally and intellectually

as too difficult and strenuous a theme. The truth of the

poems must, we decide, be something other, and simpler; and

the role of criticism must be to clarify the

misunderstanding or failure which gives rise to the poetry.

Thus Robert Martin speculates on Hopkinsf psychological

f ailure to reconcile his poetic and priestly vocations.

Daniel Harris points to the failure of these poems to

sustain the sacramental vision of nature which Hopkins had

achieved in his middle poetry. Yvor Winters argues that the

poems fail to achieve the clarity of thought and image which

creates real meaning, and offer instead only "the illusion

of meaning." Such criticisms do not explain the central

paradox of the poems; instead they deconstruct it,

35 The Journals of Soren Kierkeaaard, trans. Alexander Dru (Toronto: Oxford UP, 1951) 89. explaining how the paradox is founded upon a

misunderstanding of one sort or another - psychological, or

poetic, or rational. Despite their great variety, such

criticisms share one basic premise: the central paradox of the "terrible sonnetsu - the narrator suffering at the hands

of a loving God - derives £rom a failure of some kind on the

part of the poet.

Literary critics who are Christians are generally

distinguished £rom their secular peers by a greater

tolerance for ambiguity in religious rnatters. Christian

critics generally accept the conjunction of Godt s love and

human suffering as signifying not failure, but mystery. In

the words O£ the critic John Coulson:

Religious imagination experiences a mystery which can

never be reduced to a consistent or general theory: we worship a loving God, yet one who tolerates undeserved suf f ering. . . . We also assume that beneath this duality there exists a coherent and unified

presence. "

In Christian criticism, the central paradox of the "terrible

sonnetsH - "we worship a loving God, yet one who tolerates undeserved suf fering1I - manifests not a failure of faith, or even a crisis of faith, but rather a mystery that exists

within faith. In 1883, the year before the writing of the

36 John Coulson, Relision and Imadnation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981) 131. "terrible sonnets," Hopkins and Robert Bridges exchanged letters in which they discussed the nature of a mystery (Letters 187). Bridges had used the word "mysteryU to denote an I1interestinguncertainty. For Bridges a %tysterytlwas essentially an unsolved puzzle, like a situation offered in a mystery novel: a man is rnurdered, the cause in uncertain, and everyone with a motive has an alibi. Hopkins responded to Bridges, saying Tou do not mean by mystery what a Catholic means." A religious mystery,

Hopkins claimed, is lla much f iner thing: not an "interesting uncertainty , but an II incomprehensible certaintyu (187). The rnystery lies, not in the fact that a particular man was murdered, but that three days after his corpse was sealed in a tomb, the dead man appears very much alive, walking, talking, and proclaiming that, through his death, death itself has been destroyed. In such a mystery as this - the simultaneous mortality and immortality, divinity and humanity of Christ - the more clearly the mystery is explained, the more clearly mysterious it becomes. Our interest in the Incarnation lies not in how it may be explained, but in the very impossibility of ever achieving an explanat ion. Clearly the premises of such a religious mystery can be rejected. If either the divinity or humanity of Christ is disputed, then the paradox collapses; l'and as its mystery goes, so does its hold on [our] mindstl(187) . Yet once those 56 premises are accepted, the mystery can never be resolved into a fully comprehensible truth. Only through a paradox can such a mystery be properly described, and its solution, if such there be, lies in "the unknown, the reserve of truth beyond what the mind reaches, and still feels to be beyond1I

(187). Helen Gardner makes the same point : "Mystery is not the same as muddle, she argues. I1It is the understanding's acknowledgement of what is beyond understanding" (Helen

Gardner 111) . Although a statement and a question would seem to be two very dif £erent modes of thought , the framing O£ a mystery comprehends them both. If we emphasize Our certainty O£ a mystery we state a paradox: Jesus is both mortal and immortal. If we emphasize the incomprehensibility of a mystery, we ask a question using the same words: Wow can he be both mortal and immortal?" Thus the acknowledgement of a mystery provokes in us a dual consciousness: we are conscious both of the truth we reach for, a truth rendered by a paradox, and Our inability to grasp that truth. Wow must it be, II ~opkinsasks, "when the very answer is the most tantalising statement of the problem, and the truth you are to rest in [is] the most pointed putting of the difficultyu

(188). Thus alternating between question and answer, between inconceivability and certainty, the contemplation of a mystery leaves the mind, Hopkins says, I1swinging;poised, but on the quiver.. ." (188). 57 If Hopkinst understanding of mystery is applied to the "terrible sonnets,f1the implications for criticism are profound. If we acknowledge that the poems arise from the contemplation of a religious mystery, we must acknowledge

also that we cannot fully understand thern. If the poems are

founded on an lt inconceivable certainty, then Our understanding of those poerns is limited by that inconceivability. We can describe the mystery of Hopkins"Iterrib1e sonnets" in various ways, but we will never explain it away. Christian criticism of Hopkinst last poems can be described in Thomas Merton's phrase as Ilraids on the unspeakable. Our understanding of mystery becomes particularly important when considering what Daniel Harris calls the "fundamental issue" of criticism on the "terrible sonnetsu: Ilthe justification, or lack of it, for su£f ering" (Harris 14). Secular critics generally treat the suffering of the "terrible sonnetsffas a kind of malignancy, a suffering which serves no purpose, and which distorts the proper nature of the poetry. A truly omnipotent and loving God, it is held, would Save His creatures from suffering, and the poetry should bear this out. The Christian formulation is both more encouraging and mysterious: the paradox lies, not in the idea that God

37 Thomas Merton, Raids on the Uns~eakable (New York: New Directions, 1966) . 58 should Save us from suffering, but doesnft; but rather in the idea that God should choose to Save us through suffering. Christian critics generally view Hopkins' crisis as a pregnant, rather than a malignant, suffering: a

suffering which fulfills itself in a greater good. While pregnant suffering may be no less painful than the malignant kind, one endures it for the sake of the new life which

follows. The "terrible sonnets,l1 it is argued, reveal not that Hopkins was losing his faith, nor that his faith was misguided, but rather that his faith was growing; and to grow means to change; and to change means to suffer. Early criticism on Hopkins commonly referred to the

"terrible sonnets" as the poetfs "Dark Night of the Soul," thus drawing a parallel between Hopkins and the medieval rnystics, particularly St. John of the Cross. The Vnysterynn of the "terrible sonnets," it was thought, could best be explained by the poet's nlmysticism.llG.F. Lahey, Hopkinst first biographer, writes that the sorrow of the Interrible sonnets" sprang from causes that have their origin in true mysticism. Hopkins, smiling and joyful with his friends, was at the same time on the bleak heights of spiritual night with his God. '*

38 G.F. Lahey, S.J., Gerard Manlev Ho~kins (London: Oxford UP, 1930) 142-43. in the writings of the mystics, spiritual conflict is characteristically spoken of as a suffering and a death to the self, which prepares the soul for new life in the spirit. The soul must be emptied before it can be f illed, and such ernptying is painful. "Al1 writers on mysticism, "

Lahey tells us, St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross included, "have told us that this severe trial is the greatest and most cherished giftl1 of God (143) . Ultimately,

I the suffering of the mystics recapitulates the Passion of

Christ : his suf f ering the cross, suf f ering unto death, which fulfils itself in the resurrection. If long- familiarity with the Gospel story blinds the paradoxical nature of this process, new life proceeding £rom death, Christ's declaration to his apostles quickly restores the mystery to us: "Whoever saves his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for my sake, will surely Save itu

(Luke 17:33). It is certain that Hopkins understood his

suffering as a type O£ Christ's suffering. In a much-quoted

Journal entry from 1883, the year before he wwote the

"terrible sonnets," Hopkins writes: "In meditating on the crucifixion 1 saw how my asking to be raised to a higher degree of grace was asking also to be lifted on a higher

cross" (Sermons 254) . The cornparison of Hopkins' suffering in the "terrible

sonnetsf1to the sufferings of the mystics seems apt, and one may agree that, in general, the principles of purgation and illumination, death and rebirth, apply in many manifestations of the religious life. Yet it is fruitless for literary criticism to state the connection between Hopkins' Ilterrible sonnets1l and the suffering of the mystics in more than general terms. Beyond an annual retreat centered around the Spiritual Exercises, Hopkins 1s not known to have practised rnystical disciplines. He left no surviving sermons or writings on the mystics. If the "terrible sonnetsn themselves are not accepted as a record of rnystical encounter, then it is clear he left no other. Even if the "terrible sonnets1#are accepted as witness of mystical experiences, the poems do not clearly declare the broad themes of birth and death. More like miniatures than landscapes, the "terrible sonnets1I are simply not broad enough in reference to reveal explicit spiritual development. Beyond granting an aura of saintliness about the poet, the identification of Hopkins with the mystics adds very little to our appreciation of individual poems. Although the patterns of death and rebirth, purgation and illumination, are not evident in individual sonnets, some critics do discern them in the entire group of poems when read sequentially. Hopkins' final transcription of the "terrible sonnetsIl in what is now called Folio 35 presents the sonnets in an order which, read as a sequence, seems to trace the poet's progress £rom desolation to consolation. In the words of James Finn Cotter, the "terrible sonnetsn reveal Hopkins1 I1slow ascent upward £rom his Inferno to the

dawn of Easter Day. f139 Patricia Wolfels essay "The Paradox of Self1!is perhaps the most succinct example of a sequential interpretation. The central conflict of Hopkinsr "terrible sonnets," she writes, "is a clash between the desire to reach spiritual fulfilment, and the human reluctance to surrender persona1 identity."" In Wolfe's reading, the first sonnet, Varrion Cornfort," dramatises Hopkinst reluctance to relinquish fully

bis selfhood to God. He refuses to Ifuntwist - slack they may

be - these last strands of man in me. In "No Worst, II the second of the sonnets "written in blood," the poet seems to suffer most powerfully. I1To Seem the Stranger, the most barren sonnet of the sequence, presents the poet completely estranged £rom his God. The narratorts recovery seems to

have begun in "1 Wake and Feel." Although the poem offers a frightening vision of hell, the state of total separation £rom God, the vision seems distant £rom the narrator and is cast partly in the past tense. In V?atiencetUthe poet Ndiscovers the Divine Essence in patience" and almost palpably seems to recover hope (Wolfe 101) . The last sonnet in the sequence of Polio 35, l1My own heart, begins with

39 James Finn Cotter, Insca~e: The Christolow and Poetrv of Gerard Manlev Ho~kins(Pittsburgh, U of Pittsburgh Pl 1972) 230.

40 Patricia A. Wolfe, "The Paradox of Self: A Study of Hopkinst spiritual Con£lict in the 'Terrible Sonnets, Victorian Poetrv 6.2 (1968): 85-103. 62 Hopkins forgiving himself ("My own heart let me have more pity onH) and ends with the light of Godfs forgiveness that I'lights a lovely mile. Thus, Wolfe argues, the sonnets "represent successive stages in the poetfs progress toward a resolutionv (Wolfe 85). The 'paradox of self," in which a creature must surrender its self to God, in order to truly become itself, is finally resolved. Many critics distrust sequential interpretations for the same reason that others delight in them: such interpretations suggest that, after the agony of the first poems, Hopkins finds almost perfect consolation. Although an obviously attractive reading of the poems, sequential interpretations are not quite convincing.

Daniel Harris ob j ects to sequential interpretation on the basis of Hopkinsf manuscripts. While Hopkins clearly transcribed the sonnets of Folio 35 in a specific order, his manuscripts reveal that he did not write the poems in that order. "Carrion Comf ort , while clearly the f irst sonnet to be started, was also the last one finished. To Seem the Stranger," it appears, was worked on intermittently, with pieces of it and other poems strewn through the manuscripts. Harris argues that on the basis of manuscript evidence the poems cannot be interpreted sequentially, but should be read as usynchronous entities" (Harris 15). He further suggests that Hopkins transcribed the sonnets in Folio 35 in their 63 particular order in order to "masku the continuing misery he felt (Harris 15) . A further objection to sequential interpretations lies in the witness of the poems themselves. In order to

accommodate the pattern of death and rebirth, the despair of the earlier poems and the encouragement of the later poems tends to be overstated. The retrospective nature of Wolfe's analysis, for example, suggests that the suffering and paradoxes of "Carrion Comfort1I are properly comprehensible only £rom the consoling perspective of "PatienceIl and "My own Heart.' Although Wolfe admits that "the surrender of mortal sel£hood can be considered either a glorious transition from a lower to a higher state or a tortuous sacrifice of human identity," her reading clearly emphasizes the I1glorious transitionI1 (89). Sequential interpretations move inevitably from darkness to light, from absence to presence. Although Wolfe bases her argument on Ilthe paradox of self," her interpretation does not allow the pain of that paradox to be fully communicated. The pathos which most readers find the unique virtue of the poems becomes lost in what Harris calls I1a providential teleology of sufferingI1 (Harris 12) . The philosophers are right,I1 Kierkegaard says, "when they say that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition: that it must be lived forwardsu (Kierkegaard, Journals 89) . In the same way, a 64 poem must be both lived through £rom beginning to end, and yet understood £rom its conclusion. Perhaps the "terrible sonnets" must be understood backwards, as in Wolfe's analysis, £rom the consoling perspective of "Patience" and

"My Own Heart," as delivering into consolation. Only from this perspective can the reality of God's love for the narrator be revealed in the poetry. Yet the "terrible sonnets" must also be lived through, forwards, even as the poet lived through them, without experiencing that love. Only £rom this perspective can the reality of human suffering, and courage in the face of such su£fering, be honoured. The "terrible sonnets" must be read with the dual consciousness which the contemplation of a mystery entails. Both the incomprehensibility of the narratorts undeserved suffering, and the certainty that Godls love underlies that suffering, must be maintained. Neither of these elements may be removed if the paradox is to be maintained. If, as Hopkins believed, his suffering reenacts Christ's suffering, then a sequential reading must maintain the tension of paradox in the same way as is £ound in the stations of the Cross. One meditates on the Stations of the Cross - the twelve distinct episodes of suffering which culminate in Christ's crucifixion - in order to comprehend in Christ's life the duality Coulson speaks of: "we worship a loving God, yet one who tolerates undeserved sufferingn

131). Christ's journey through pain and humiliation will, we know, end in resurrection and new life; and yet, while proceeding through the Stations, this consolation is held in abeyance, so that the desolation and suffering which must

precede it is honoured and given its due.

The most scholarly Christian interpretations of the Ilterrible sonnetsu are inspired by the S~iritualExercises

of St. Ignatius Loyola, the f ounder of the Society of Jesus to which Hopkins belonged. Ignatian critics argue that the

su£f ering evident in the "terrible sonnets II con£orms to

llspiritual desolation" as described in the Exercises : a state I1when the soul iinds itself altogether slothful,

tepid, sad, and as it were separated £rom its Creator and Lord.lt4' Spiritual desolation would seem to comprehend fully both the suffering of the "terrible sonnetsN and the powerful and loving God represented in them, for, as is implicit above in the words "as it were, God is still

present to the soul even in His apparent absence. Spiritual

desolation is a trial set by God, so that, in the words of

St. Ignatius, "we may intimately feel that it is not in our own power to acquire or retain great devotion ... but that al1 is a gift and grace of God Our LordIl (lfDiscernment of Spiritsr1204) . Ilspiritual desolation, as understood by St . Ignatius, is therefore a further formulation of the process,

celebrated by the mystics, whereby illumination follows from

41 IlThe Discernment of Spirits, The Spiritual Exercises quoted in The Sermons and ~evotionalWorks of Gerard Manlev Hopkins ed. Christopher Devlin, S.J., (Toronto: Oxford UP, 1959) 204. darkness, peace follows £rom suffering, and life follows

f rom death. As such, l1 spiritual desolationn speaks

powerfully to that sense of mystery which informs the

l1 terrible sonnets. If

David Downes, S. J., daims that the "terrible sonnets" are essentially Ignatian in conception, and in his Gerard

Maniev Hopkins: A Studv of his Isnatian Spirit, interprets them as an expression of Ilspiritual desolation. The poems

result, he claims, £rom Hopkinst practice of the S~iritual Exercises, the imaginative reenactment of the central Christian mysteries: the Creation, the Fall, the Incarnation and the Resurrection. Invoking a loosely sequential arrangement, Downes argues that the terrible sonnetsfi1are

Hopkinst attempt to "raise himself out of his own desolation

into a state of spiritual consolationll (Iqnatian S~irit

136) . Thus, he claims, the "terrible sonnetsu serve a priestly function for Hopkins.

It is symptomatic of both the ambiguity of the

"terrible sonnets" and the flexibility of Ignatian theology that David Downes' second book is as convincing as his

first, and yet contradicts it almost completely. Whereas in

Icrnatian Spirit Downes argues that Hopkins' dual vocation as priest and poet was 'la poised religious reconciliation, in The Ignatian Personalitv of Gerard Manlev Hopkins he claims

42 David A. Downes, Gerard Manlev Ho~kins:A Studv of His Iqnatian Spirit (New York: Bookman Associates, 1959) 131. that Hopkins' vocation as a priest "powerfully confronted his poetic persona1ity.11~~In his second book Downes revives the distinction made by secular critics between the ascetic and aesthetic sides of Hopkins, and recasts it in religious terms: Hopkins, he says, chose with the greatest persona1 pain to frustrate the poetic %nscapes of his self-nessu (~snatianPersonalitv 151). Downes now conceives the paradoxes of the 'terrible sonnetsu not as a tension between the poet and his God, but as a division within the poet himself . Indeed Downes suggests, in his second book, that Hopkinst suffering was not spiritual desolation in its Ignatian sense at all. St. Ignatius, he notes, conceived of spiritual desolation as a temporary experience, Ilan unusual state of the soul, one which he urges his followers to get

out of as soon as possibleu (Isnatian Personalitv 112). Downes suggests that, in his later life and poetry, Hopkins indulged his spiritual despair and was reluctant to see it end. Downes cornes to view the paradoxes of the "terrible sonnetsH as most secular critics do, as a corruption rather than corroboration of Christian experience. ~opkins,he suggests, has failed his Ignatian theology. Although Downes sees his second book as a correction of his first, it seems most reasonable to affirm the legitimacy

43 David A. Downes, The Isnatian Personalitv of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Lanham, Maryland: UP of America, 1990) 151. 68 of both books. The two books - the first arguing the spiritual authenticity of Hopkins1 suffering, and the second detailing so painfully the psychological aspects of Hopkinst suffering - argue opposite sides O£ the paradox which informs the "terrible sonnetsit:We worship a loving God, yet one who tolerates undeserved ~uffering.~~Downes' two books exist in contradiction in the same way the poetry exists in contradiction; and though they cannot easily be reconciled, yet together they grant us a composite view of the poetry. ït is surely significant that the most balanced Ignatian appraisal of Hopkins1 spiritual desolation comes not from a critic who argues a comprehensive theory of the "terrible sonnets,1tbut from an editor, Christopher Devlin, S.J., who simply comments upon Hopkins' last poems £rom the perspective O£ the poet's Journals and retreat notes. Such impartiality allows him to acknowledge fully the opposing truths which comprise the paradox of the "terrible sonnetsn without trying to reconcile them in a completely comprehensible way. Devlin completely affirms the "terrible sonnetsw as legitimate expressions of spiritual desolation granted to the poet by God, yet he also suggests that Hopkinst spiritual desolation had further, persona1 complications - specifically, Hopkins' Itexaggerateddistinction between the affective and the elective will" (Devlin 119). While 69 Hopkins' "affective will1! demanded that he express in poetry his love of God and of creation, his "elective willI1 demanded that, as a priest, he sacri£ice hiç artistic urge to the will of God, his Creator. Although the nature poetry of his middle period seems to have fulfilled both Hopkins' affective and elective wills, Devlin suggests that Hopkins was increasingly incapable of reconciling these two aspects of hirnself. "He tended to think of his love of beauty as a weakness to which stronger men than he were not liablet1

(120). Hopkinst poetic genius, Devlin writes, was his very essence, his "inscape," his special likeness to the Divine Essence. Yet Hopkins the Jesuit behaved to Hopkins the poet as a Victorian husband might to a

wife of whom he had cause to be ashamed. (119) In ~evlin's criticism, as in Downes' second book, the distinction made by secular critics between the ascetic and aesthetic sides of Hopkins is reinterpreted in religious terms: the elective will of the priest conflicts with the affective will of the poet. Yet Devlin does not criticise Hopkins, nor, like Downes, suggest that Hopkins has somehow failed his Ignatian theology. Devlin argues that the spiritual life always demands some sacrifice of one's self, and that for Hopkins, this sacrifice took the form of his poetry. Devlin sees the conflict in Hopkins between his elective and affective wills as a type of Christ's agony in the garden of Gethsemane: "O my Father, if it be possible, 70 let this cup pass £rom me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt" (Matthew 26 :39) . By denying his will for the will of God, Hopkins achieved "a faithful imitation of Our Lordtt(Devlin 121) . Devlin provides both a theological judgement and a psychological description of Hopkins' suffering. He both affirms that Hopkins' suffering is a form of spiritual desolation, granted him by God, and describes this theological mystery in psychological terms, stressing how the elective will of the priest conflicts with the affective will of the poet. Devlin does not try to synthesize the theological mystery with the psychological mystery, nor does he subordinate one to the other. With laudable restraint, Devlin simply leaves them as divine and human versions of the same reality, and in doing so, the mystery of the "terrible sonnetst1is sustained and deepened. It can be difficult to know how to respond to Ignatian critics. Trained in the same philosophical tradition as Hopkins, they are more sympathetic to Hopkinsi theological concerns than any other group of readers. Indeed, Ignatian critics have found most of the philosophical support for their arguments about the "terrible sonnetsBtin Hopkins' own Journal, where, with characteristic scrutiny, he marshals theological arguments both for and against the spiritual significance of his sufferings. 71 The limitations of Ignatian criticism arise from the fact that even Hopkins' own theological arguments about suffering seem remote £rom his poetry. Poetry serves a very different purpose for Hopkins than does his Journal, and reveals a different aspect of his personality. While Hopkins the Jesuit theologian meditates in his Journals on the limitations of human reason and the inscrutability O£

Providence, Hopkins the poet simply cries out l'O thou Terrible." The abstract conceptions of Ignatian theology, whether Hopkins' own, or those of his commentators, seem remote £rom the anger and anguish of the poetry. While ~gnatiancriticism on the "terrible sonnetsIl may be sound theology, even Hopkins found theology to be of limited use in understanding his own suffering. Hopkins himself seems to acknowledge the limitations of Ignatian theology when, in concluding a meditation on the proper use of reason, he admits Iland again, philosophy is not religiontt(Sermons 261) . By dist inguishing between religion and philosophy, Hopkins recognizes the difference between holding a theory about a way of life and actually living that life. To rationally discuss the nature of faith is not the same as being faithful, as Hopkins most intimately knew; and it is with this further, more difficult task that his poetry is concerned. The limitations of both sequential and Ignatian criticisms of the Ilterrible sonnetsn1are revealed when considering one of Hopkinst very last poems. The sonnet "Thou Art Indeed Just, Lordt1was written a few years after

the sonnets of Folio 35 and, though not usually considered one of the "terrible sonnets," stands as a kind of first

cousin to them.u In "Thou art indeed just, Lordu the paradox of the "terrible sonnetsM finds its most mature expression. With the shock of his immediate spiritual crisis over, Hopkins was able, in this later poem, to write about his sufferings with much greater poise. Yet, in spite of its stateliness, the poem powerfully reaffirms the central paradox of the "terrible sonnetsu: the Creator of the universe, a loving and omnipotent God, seems negligent of the happinesç of his human creatures.

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if 1 contend

With thee; but, sir, so what 1 plead is just. Why do sinnersf ways prosper? and why must Disappointment al1 I endeavour end?

Wert thou rny enemy, O thou my friend,

How wouldst thou worse, 1 wonder, than thou dost Defeat, thwart me; Oh, the sots and thralls of lust

Do in spare hours more thrive than 1 that spend, Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes Now, leaved how thick! laced they are again

44 Norman H. MacKenzie gives a date of March 17, 1889 for the earliest surviving copy of this poem. ~oeticalWorks 501. With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes

Them; birds build - but not 1 build; no, but strain, Tirne's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.

Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain. The insistence with which Hopkins affirms both hls innocence and the injustice of God suggests that the "terrible sonnetsI1 cannot be understood, as sequential interpretations suggest, as a simple movement from desolation to consolation. The suffering which surfaces in "Carrion

Cornfortu - itself but a reappearance of the "battling with GodI1 of Hopkins' earliest poems - is sustained throughout the "terrible sonnetslI and continues to the very last poems Hopkins wrote. Neither can "Thou art indeed just, Lordn be read solely, as the Ignatian critics suggest, as the

"confrontational self-addressI1 of Hopkins with himself, " or as an interrogation of his own inscape, or as a conflict between his affective and effective wills; for the narrator argues not with himself at all, but only with God. After the self-conscious confusions of the earlier "terrible sonnets," the narrator of "Thou art indeed just, Lord" maintains a most beautiful resolve to confront God, to announce his indignation with God, and to admit his fears. In this poem, as in the book of Job, we encounter, not a crisis of self-

45 Walter J. Ong, Hopkins, the Self, and God (Toronto: U of Toronto Pr 1986) 140. 74 knowledge, but a lively and extroverted faith %O real that

it permits man to cal1 God to accounttl (Barrett 74) . If the poem ltThou art indeed just, Lordtt reveals the

limitations of sequential and Ignatian interpretations of the '(terrible sonnets, it also reveals what may be the most

fitting context for the study of the poems. The opening quatrain of Thou art indeed just, Lordw is a literal

translation O£ a verse from the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah

(12:l). Moreover, Hopkins prefaces the poern with the latin

translation of that verse :

Justus quidem tu es, Domine, si disputern tecum;

verumtamen justa loquar ad te: Quare via irnpiorum prosperatur? These lines, like a layer of bedrock thrust up through alluvium into the daylight, reveal the fundamentally biblical quality of Hopkins' late poetry. The Hebrew quality

of these lines - the impertinence of a man speaking directly

to his Creator and demanding of Him justice - continues throughout the poem and, indeed, is characteristic of al1

the "terrible sonnets. II Hopkins' last poems, read by

themselves, remind one of nothing so much as the Hebrew Scriptures . If modern readers find the "terrible sonnetst1 unfamiliar and alienating, we can be sure that Job, or the Psalmists, or the Prophet Jeremiah would have no such

trouble. These are Hopkins' true peers. He asks the same 75 questions of God, and having asked them, su£fers the same silences. Recognition of the biblical nature of the "terrible sonnetsIl came late to Hopkins scholarship - proof that literary criticism, while diligent about tracking down abstruse literary influences, often remains blind to what is most visible. In his 1969 essay "The Biblical Underthought of Hopkins' Terrible SonnetsH Robert Brinlee was the first to catalogue the numerous biblical references in these poems, and to suggest that the poems be interpreted, not in light of Ignatian theology, and not as veiled autobiography, but in the light of the Bible. "Like Jeremiah and Job," Brinlee writes, Hopkins' understanding O£ his situation is oriented almost entirely toward God as both the source and the solution for his problem, rather than toward the circumstances of his life. (Brinlee 12) Brinlee discerns biblical allusions in al1 of the "terrible sonnets,I1 and notes that Hopkins draws most heavily upon those books in the Hebrew scriptures which acknowledge most explicitly conflict between God and His chosen people: Genesis, Deuteronomy, Job, the Psalms , Jeremiah, Lamentations and Isaiah. Brinlee interprets the sonnet "To Seem the Stranger, for example, in the Hebrew tradition, as a poem of exile. The line which Robert Martin considers particularly Freudian - "England, whose honour O al1 my heart woos, wife / To my creating thoughtu - Brinlee

interprets as being particularly Hebrew, pointing out that "The image of Israel as an errant wife is the major theme of

Hosea, and appears elsewhere in the prophetsl1 (Brinlee 17). Brinlee finds "Carrion Comfoxtvrparticularly rich in

biblical allusions. The speaker in that poem, he clairns, is

"wrestling with the same temptation which came to Job, to

curse God and diett (Job 2:9). Not only the speaker of the poem, but also his divine opponent, is characterised in

biblical terms. The divine opponent in "Carrion Cornfortu

recalls the unpredictable, often violent God of the Hebrews.

"Gad is a lionIf Brinlee points out (Daniel 6:13-281, "God is

a tempestu (Jeremiah 15:7), and above all, "Gad is a

wrestlerI1 (Genesis 32 :Z4-3l) . Such intense use of biblical language is almost

entirely new in Hopkins' mature poetry. Although his earliest, pre-conversion poetry often alludes to the Bible, Hopkins mature poetry derives far more often from the

revelations of nature, than from scripture. llOnly towards

the end of his life," States Anthony Kenny, "with the

sonnets of desolation, does Hopkins return to the rich biblical allusiveness of his yo~th.1f46Brinlee argues that,

in contrast to the rest of his mature poetry, IlHopkins

46 Anthony Kenny, God and Two Poets : Arthur Hugh Cloush and Gerard Manlev Hopkins (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1988) 95. expresses in the terrible sonnets a biblical faithH (Brinlee 21) . While Daniel Harris recognizes the Hebrew quality of

the "terrible sonnets," he suggests that such dependence on scripture is another sign of their failure as poetry. The

"terrible sonnets,l1 he daims, are "so traditionally Biblical that their very conventionality demonstrates [their] £ailurew to be properly imaginative (Harris 19). Harris presumes that traditional biblical images must always be used in traditional ways, and are therefore conventional and unimaginative. The "terrible sonnetsw are themselves the simplest refutation of this claim, for there is nothing conventional in Hopkins' use of biblical material. In her essay "Images and Allusions in Hopkinst 'Carrion Cornfort,'" Marie Cornelia recognizes the many references that poem makes to Genesis, Deuteronomy and the ~salms.~?She notes that Hopkins rarely quotes the Bible exactly, but rather adapts biblical language in his own way, and for his own purposes. Hopkins' biblical allusions are characterised by Ilan allusiveness which is at first difficult to trace and define, but which strongly conditions the reading of the poemI1 (Cornelia 51).

Hopkins' "O thou terrible, for example, does not refer to a

particular book of the Bible, much less a specific chapter

47 Maria Cornelia, "Images and Allusions in Hopkins' 'Carrion Comforttl'Renascence 27 (1974): 51-5. 78 and verse, but refers generally to the terrible God of the prophets. He is the God whom Esdras describes as "God of heaven, strong, great and terrible ..., the Yahweh whose wrath was too great for men to bear. (Cornelia 52) Thus Hopkinsf allusions, though unmistakeably biblical, "awake more echoes than can be isolated and definedu (Cornelia 53). So thoroughly has Hopkins assimilated his biblical allusions that the reader cannot easily distinguish between what is a biblical allusion, and what is Hopkinst own speech. In the "terrible sonnetsH Hopkins does not simply refer to biblical texts, as he did in much of his early poetry, but reshapes biblical material to his own purposes. Even when a very specific biblical allusion is made, as in the allusion to Jacob's wrestling which closes Varrion C~mfort,~~traditional biblical language is subjected to the complex stresses and syntax of sprung rhythm. The restrained plainsong of '!And a man wrestled with him there until nightfall" (Gen. 32:23) becomes transposed through sprung rhythm into a much more stressful, vehement kind of music: "that night, that year / Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (My God! ) my God. The biblical quality of the "terrible sonnets" cannot therefore be understood, as Harris suggests, as a 'failure1 to be properly imaginative. There is no biblical allusion in the "terrible sonnetsIl 79 which is not sharply refracted through Hopkins' imagination and fully integrated into its poem.

If the terrible sonnets1I manif est any f ailure at a11, they manifest the failure of Hopkins' Ignatian theology to

cornprehend the spiritual crisis he was suffering. Brinlee

suggests that Hopkins adopted biblical language "when his

persona1 speculations and the theology of his t ime proved

inadequate" (Brinlee 13) ; and the contrast between the hesitant theology of Hopkinsr Journals and the urgent

biblical speech of his poetry supports this. One senses that Hopkins found the refinements of Ignatian theology, and his

private philosophical speculations about the nature of

inscape, incapable of expressing the fearfulness and violence of a confrontation with God. Perhaps Hopkins' adoption of biblical language was not a conscious act; but

if the "terrible sonnetsIl came to Hopkins, as he says, like

inspirat ions unbidden, then biblical images would have presented themselves as the inevitable f orm of expressing conflict with God. Whether consciously or not, Hopkins seems

to have repeated the turbulent, existential crisis of the French philosopher Biaise Pascal who, in his quest for a truly authent ic experience of God, counselled himself to seek llNot the God of the philosophers, but the God of

Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. If 48

48 Quoted by William Barrett in Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophv (Toronto: Doubleday, 1990) 116. 80

What the Hebrews still have to tell us, they tell us not in coherent and logical theologies which assert in abstract terms the nature and reality of their God; rather they tell us stories: stories of their encounters with God, stories of how God delivers them from their enernies, and, occasionally, stories of how God Himself seems to be their enemy. It is these last stories - the accounts of Jonah and

Nahum prophesying the destruction of Nineveh, the Book of

Lamentations, the terrible fa11 and rise of Job, and above all, the story of Jacob's wrestling - which proved to be the "inspirations unbiddenn behind the "terrible sonnets,"

The wonderful strength of such stories lies in their capacity for paradox. The Hebrew mind is not troubled by paradoxes - indeed the Hebrew people would not have understood the concept of the paradox as we do - for they lacked the structures and pretensions of rational thought which came only with Greek culture. The American philosopher

William Barrett argues that the religious faith of the

Hebrews was not %eliefIf in Our modern sense of the word at al1 - I1belie£ in the articles, creeds and tenets of a Churchu - but was better characterised as "trust." Trust is

"the relation between one individual and another.,. the opening up of one being toward anotheru (Barrett 74). In the earliest Hebrew scriptures - the Pentateuch particularly - - God reveals Himself only to particular people, and at particular times and places. The Hebrew religion which followed £rom these revelations is therefore highly situational, and is cornmunicated not through formal theologies , but through stories which detail the developing relationship of trust between God and His people. To say that the Hebrew religion was one of trust does not of course mean that the Hebrews were always content with their God. There were many con£licts between humanity and God in the Hebrew world, as the story of Job demonstrates almost too vividly; but to the Hebrew mind, this conflict is nevex intellectual in nature. The Hebrew scriptures are rich in those emotional qualities which have no place in the rational dialectics of Ignatian theology. IlThe Hebrew proceeds, Barrett tells us, not by the way of reason, but by the confrontation of the whole man, Job, in the fullness and violence of his passion with the unknowable and overwhelming Godu (73). Such a description of the encounter, unreasonable and violent, between man and God, serves as an apt description, not just of the Book of Job, but of Hopkins' "terrible'sonnets" as well . It is "the whole man, Gerard Manley Hopkins in al1 his confusion and anger and love for God, who speaks to us in the poetry. After his formal conversion, Hopkins evidently never suffered £rom difficulties of "belief in the articles, creeds and tenets" of the Roman Catholic church. Even in the face of spiritual crisis, his intellect seems to have been completely satisfied by the subtleties and distinctions of 82 Ignatian theology. The problem for Hopkins, as probably for most people, is not belief, but trust: the opening up of ourselves, in our entirety, toward the person of God. The duty of trusting God is an act which can never be fully accomplished, but must be performed continuously, and be constantly renewed. The "terrible sonnetst1can be read as a record of Hopkins' determination to trust God fully, in the face of great personal suffering. Although the story of Job must remain the great exarnple of human conflict with God in the Hebrew scriptures, the story of Jacob's wrestling is the most ernphatic of Hopkinsf biblical allusions. It is also the most explicitly terrifying, for God appears in that story, not only through prophecy, or as a disembodied voice calling from a whirlwind, but with the same unnerving materiality which Hopkins' poetry, at its best, provides.

In "The Metaphor of Struggle in Carrion Cornfort," J. Angela Carson places the story of Jacob's wrestling foremost

in her analysis, as do most biblical cri tic^.^^ "The wrestling of Jacobn she writes, is a clearly recognizable allusion, but Hopkins' use of it is far from slavish. He does not describe his own experience as being a less intense version of Jacob's;

49 J. Angela Carson, IlThe Metaphor of Struggle in Tarrion Cornf ort , ' II Philoloqical Ouarterlv 49 (1970): 548. 83 rather he makes Jacob's experience function as a type

of his own. (Carson 549)

Carson claims that, by declaring 111 wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God," Hopkins is not just making a biblical allusion, but proclairning that his experience is equivalent to Jacob's. The story of Jacob's wrestling has two antithetical virtues which Hopkins would have identified with: inconceivability and certainty. The story is confusing and terrifying enough to communicate Hopkinst disbelief at finding himself fighting against God. At the same time, the story of Jacob's wrestling is "certain" as well; for it is a story £rom sacred scripture, and partakes of al1 the scripture, that Hopkins could believe it. When, for whatever reason, Hopkins lost confidence in the power of philosophy and theology to comprehend his suffering, his mind caught hold, not of yet another theology which he could neither prove nor disprove, but of a story which seemed to affirm al1 that a logical and coherent theology cannot: the mystery and fear which must accompany any encounter with God. During the night Jacob rose, took his two wives, his two slave-girls, and his eleven sons, and crossed the ford of Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the gorge with al1 that he had. 84 So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him there till daybreak. When the man saw that he could not throw Jacob, he struck him in the hollow of his thigh, so that Jacob's hip was dislocated as they wrestled. The man said, 'Let me go, for day is breaking',

but Jacob replied, '1 will not let you go unless you bless me.' He said to Jacob, 'What is your name?', and

he answered, 'Jacob.' The man said, 'Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you strove with God and with men, and prevailed.' Jacob said, 'Tell me, 1 pray, your name.' He replied, 'Why do you ask my name?', but he gave him his blessing there. Jacob called the place Peniel because, he said, "1 have seen God face to face and my life is spared." The Sun rose as Jacob passed through ~enuel,limping

because of his hip. (Genesis 32 : 23-31)

Even a cursory reading of Jacob's wrestling reveals the mysterious, intractably paradoxical nature of the incident. Jacob's wrestling, Elie Wiesel writes, is a confused and confusing episode in which the protagonists bear more than one narne; in which words

I use The New English Bible when discussing Jacob's wrestling because of its greater clarity. have more than one meaning and every question brings forth another .... It is almost like a mystical poem, barely coherent, barely intelligible, not only to the reader but even to the protagonists. " Like Hopkins' "terrible sonnets,I1 the story of Jacob's wrestling does not resolve readily into a single comprehensible meaning, but rather seems to dramatise a wrestling for meaning. Both Jacob's wrestling and Hopkinst wrestling present a paradigm of human relationship with God in which our communion with Him is beyond Our comprehension, and yet beyond doubt - an "incomprehensible certainty" as Hopkins defined a mystery. The context created by Jacob's wrestling is radically different £rom those offered by Freudian psychology, Romantic poetic theory or Winters' poetic rationalism. Such contexts can not explain the religious paradoxes O£ the poems. They do however allow the paradoxes to be deconstructed, explaining how they are ultimately founded upon a misunderstanding of one sort or another - psychological, or poetic, or rational. By this procrustean logic, the intractably religious aspects of the poetry are lopped off to make the poems better conform to the narrower contexts of psychology or sociology or literary theory. Such criticisms are still valuable, if only because, by their

51 Elie Wiesel, Messenqers of God (New York: Summit, 1976) , 107. 86 repeated and necessary failures to comprehend the "terrible sonnets," the true nature of the mystery presented in these poems is revealed; the incomprehensibility of their certain mystery is made clear. Perhaps more surprisingly, the context created by

Jacob's wrestling differs substantially £rom those offered by sequential and Ignatian critics. Although al1 three contexts comprehend within the "terrible sonnetsu1the same essential mysteries, the story of Jacob's wrestling presents these mysteries from a radically different perspective. Sequential and Ignatian criticisms proceed from formal, doctrinal statements of mystery, and ultimately seek to repose in them. Such criticisms seem to function £rom a great height, discerning the meaning of the "terrible sonnetsI1 £rom God's perspective. The critic descends into the fallen, human context of the poems in order to deliver them from that context - a critical activity which bears some analogy to the redemptive work of Christ in our world. The story of Jacob's wrestling proceeds £rom the same £allent human world that Hopkins inhabited, and thus provides an existential rather than a theological context for understanding the "terrible sonnets." Jacob does not view his struggle with God from a great theological height. He is a participant, not a spectator, and his confusion as to who the stranger is, his courage in accepting a wound, and his faith in demanding a blessing from his opponent are al1 essential elements of his experience. The truth of Jacob's wrestling is primarily the truth of a relationship that is wrestled out between him and God, and not a static doctrinal or theological truth. Jacob and Hopkins share a particular experience of God, an unwilled and confusing encounter with God which we may cal1 Penuel: an experience in which God is both known and unnamed, in which God wounds us and blesses us, and in which wrestling with God is the necessary rite of passage into covenant with him." Penuel is not a place where the paradoxes of human relationship with God are clearly understood, but rather the place where such paradoxes are performed. There can be no theological short-cuts to understanding the experience, but we must try to wrestle through the experience of the poetry even as Jacob and Hopkins wrestle. Tracing the correspondences between Jacob's wrestling and the wrestling of Hopkins' poetry will not explain the "terrible sonnets." We cannot explain one mystery simply by invoking another. But the comparison of the "terrible sonnetsu with Jacob's wrestling lets us place the mystery of Hopkins' wrestling in the context in which he understood it.

52 In Genesis 32 :3O Jacob names the place of his wrestling "Peniel, Ilthe face of God. In verse 31 however the word is spelled llPenuel." Scholars accept these as variant spellings of the same word, and not two different sites. 1 favour the spelling Penuel throughout the thesis to designate both the place of Jacob's wrestling, and the particular experience of God which he suffers there . 88 In the midst of spiritual turmoil, Hopkins recognized himself and the pattern of his suffering in this strange Hebrew story. We should follow Hopkins as far into that mystery as we can. Chapter Four Penuel

The Lord was as an enemy.

Lamentations 2:5

Jacob's story begins, as it ends, in conflict and in mystery. While she is pregnant and expecting twins, Rebecca notices how "the children struggled together within her." Understandably concerned, she appeals to God £or an explanation and receives £rom him an unsettling prophecy: Two nations in your womb two peoples, going their own ways £rom birth. One shall be stronger than the other;

the older shall be servant to the younger. (Gen.25:23) The twin boys wrestle each other in the womb, struggling to be the first-born, the one who will inherit their father's blessing and the covenant first granted to their grandfather Abraham. The child born first is red and hairy, and he is called Esau, meaning "red." His brother follows immediately behind him, still grasping his brother's heel. Re is named Jacob, variously interpreted as "he will trip by the heelw or "he who strives.'" In this pre-natal wrestling, Jacob's character is revealed £rom even before the proper beginning of his life. His entire life is to be a wrestling, a

53 I1JacobIt1Dictionarv of the Bible, ed. John L. McKenzie, S.J. (New York: MacMillan, 1965). 90 struggle to attain and to be worthy of the covenant of his f athers . Jacob's story is full of minor characters with whom he struggles. The wrestling which begins Jacob's life escalates into a feud with his brother. With his motherfs help, Jacob steals his fatherfs blessing. Thus estranged from his father and forced into exile, Jacob finds himself in a war of wits with his uncle Laban. In many ways the various trials of Jacob's life constitute a rather simple, comprehensible human drama; and yet behind these minor characters and conflicts lies the overarching power and personality of God Himself. It is God who ultimately leads Jacob into conflict and who helps him to triumph through them. These conflicts reach their culmination when, in an eerie recapitulation of his wrestling with Esau, Jacob wrestles with a stranger at Penuel, a stranger who Jacob later realizes is God Himself. Jacob's wrestling at Penuel is the great epiphany of his life, an experience which comprehends and illuminates everything which preceded it. Jacob twice steals the blessing which would normally fa11 to his older brother. One day after Esau returns, tired and hungry from a day of hunting, Jacob purchases Esau's birthright with a bowl of hot soup. Unlike Jacob, Esau is very much "at ease in ZionIg (Amos 6:l). A hot bowl of soup is worth much to him. Later, with his mother's help, Jacob steals the blessing directly £rom his father. Jacob dresses up in goatskins so that he feels and smells like his hairy brother Esau, and then asks his father for the blessing reserved for the Isaac fooled, and gives Jacob the blessing intended for his older brother.

this is, think, rather unlikely for the Creator of the Universe to fulfil his purposes here on earth. There is an undeniable comedy in the disparity between the grandeur of what is at stake - a persona1 covenant, contract, with the Creator of the Universe - and the ignoble means by which such a covenant is achieved: intrigue involving bowls of soup and animal skins. Hebrew scholars occasionally remind the rest of us how very humorous scripture can be, and how that humour compromises the grandeur of the scriptures not at all. Jacob conforms to

the stock literary type of "the trickster, a rebellious character who, through ingenuity and charm, subverts the

accustomed social order to get his own way.

What keeps the story £rom devolving into simple comedy

is the continua1 pressure exerted on Jacob by his God. Jacob never acts in isolation. From before his birth Jacob has

been designated as the one who will continue God's covenant with His chosen people. Such a destiny grants Jacob's

actions a disquieting other-worldliness. Erich Auerbach identi£ies the close but ambiguous

connection between the earthly and spiritual levels of

narrative as the most characteristic quality of Hebrew 92 writing. While the actions of biblical characters arise from the most comprehensible human motives, yet Doctrine and promise are incarnate in them and inseparable from them; for that very reason they are fraught with %ackgroundlI and mysterious, containing a

second, concealed meaning .54 The omniscience and omnipresence of the Hebrew God are suggested more by what the narrative leaves out, than by what is clearly mentioned. In the terse, enigmatic quality of biblical narrative, the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies between is nonexistent; time and place are undefined and cal1 for interpretation; thoughts and feeling remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole permeated with the most unrelieved suspense.

(Auerbach 12) God's interference in Jacob's life is often irnplied by the very absence of other explanations or motivations revealed in the text. The full significance of Jacob's actions are

felt to lie, as Hopkins would say, in "the reserve of truth beyond what the mind can reach, yet still feels to be beyondu (Letters 187) .

54 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Repxesentation of Realitv in Western Literature. trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1953) 15. 93 If the presence of God remains enigmatic throughout the story, so does the nature of the covenant which he grants to Jacob. Though the blessing establishes continuity between God's will and Jacob's life, Jacob is never to know this continuity in any fullness or security. Upon discovering that Jacob has stolen their father's blessing, Esau swears to kill Jacob. Jacob is forced to leave the accustomed comforts of home in fulfilment of a prophecy which he cannot completely comprehend. In a sceptical moment we might congratulate Esau fox escaping the burdens created by such a blessing. Yet, if there is for Jacob no unqualified happiness in his covenant with God, neither can there be any happiness for him without it. Having entered into covenant with God, Jacob's life is not comprehensible in worldly terms. The mystery of divine imperative upon Jacob makes his life nothing complete in itself, but contingent upon the unfolding of a mystery. Jacob is set on a journey whose destination he cannot know. It is this quality of pilgrimage that makes Jacob's life an adventure of faith. Travelling alone towards the country of his uncle Laban, Jacob is vulnerable as never before. In order to reassure Jacob of their continued covenant, God grants to hirn the dream of the ladder. It seems proper that this revelation cornes to Jacob at night, when the self-evident 94 realities of the daylight world are more easily eclipsed by larger mysteries: Jacob stopped for the night because the Sun had set; and taking one of the stones there, he made it a pillow for his head and lay down to sleep. He dreamt that he saw a ladder, which rested on the ground with its top reaching to heaven, and angels of God were going up

and down upon it. (Genesis 28:ll-12) Jacob's ladder has passed into the language and iconography of Our culture as Jacob's wrestling has not, for it presents an immediately comprehensible ideal of fulfilled religious aspiration. Jacob's ladder illustrates both the human desire to escape earthly burdens and ascend into heaven, and the complementary hope £or heaven to descend upon and redeem our earth. The dream of the ladder anticipates the many instances in the Bible where God's revelation to humankind is described in vertical figures: Moses climbing the mountain of Sinai to receive the Law, or Christ, himself the perfect embodiment of both divinity and humanity, hanging on a cross, rnediating between heaven and earth. With angels ascending and descending upon it, the ladder declares the continuity between hurnan and divine realities. Jacob's dream of the ladder presents what is exceedingly rare in Hebrew narratives: a moment of almost pure transcendence, uncomplicated by the burden of earthly responsibilities or conflict, a moment perfectly sufficient 95 in itself. Jacob does not climb the ladder or even touch it. The angels travelling up and down its height do not speak, and they carry nothing but themselves; yet their presence alone is sufficient. Distinct £rom any incident in his life thus far, Jacob's dream of the ladder is not "fraught with background." It is itself the background of Jacob's life briefly brought into the foreground. Jacob's dream serves as a window out of his temporal, earthly life, revealing his covenant with God visibly before him. While Jacob is dreaming, God repeats to him the covenant which he has inherited £rom his forefathers: The Lord was standing beside him and said, "1 am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. This land on which you are lying

1 will give to you and your descendants." (Genesis

28:13)

For the first time in his life, God speaks directly to Jacob, forcing him to acknowledge the reality, not just of the covenant of God, which until now had perhaps seemed comfortably remote, but of the God Himsel£ who keeps his covenants: Jacob woke from his sleep and said, "Truly the Lord

is in this place, and 1 did not know it." Then he was afraid and said, "How fearsome is this place! This is no other than the house of God, this is the gate of

Heaven.It (Genesis 28:16-17) 96 Jacob had not been fearful of God while dreaming, for he had lacked the self-consciousness necessary for fear. Yet now, suddenly awake, Jacob is struck by the terrible contingency of his earthly life. He senses his vulnerability before this God of his fathers. One suspects that Jacob is only now conscious of the magnitude of the blessing which he has stolen. As John Sanford puts it, "This direct, confronting, demanding relationship with God iç the birthright that Jacob, unknowingly, secured for him~elf.~~~ Jacob acknowledges his renewed covenant with God by making a significant gesture of his own. Upon waking he takes the stone upon which he had dreamed and dedicates it as a holy site: Jacob rose early in the morning, took the stone on which he had laid his head, set it up as a sacred pillar and poured oil on the top of it. He named that

place Bethel, Ilthe house of Godn (Genesis 28:17-19). There is, for modern readers, an enviable simplicity, almost naivete, in Jacob's gesture. We might naturally suggest a symbolic connection between the dream Jacob is given, and the stone by which he commemorates it. We might interpret the title given to the stone, InBethel,the house of God, " as a metaphor. Jacob, however, does not seem to interpret his situation at all. Only that particular stone marks the site

5s John A. Sanford, The Man Who Wrestled with God (Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1987) 37. 97 of the particular dream that was given once, and once only, to Jacob. It is his dreamstone. When Jacob wishes to reciprocate God's gift of a dream, he needs to invent nothing, and to represent nothing, but he finds his material at hand. Or rather, under his dreaming head. God gives to Jacob not only a dream, but also the per£ect material language in which Jacob can thank God for that dream. From Bethel, Jacob leaves the covenant lands and makes his way into Padan-aram where his uncle Laban lives. In one of the milder paradoxes of his story, Jacob achieves worldly success only in exile £rom the land promised in the covenant. Jacob's exile is never entirely free of conflict, and in scenes reminiscent of the rivalry between Jacob and Esau, Jacob and Laban match their wits against each other to see who can accumulate greater wealth at the otherrs expense. Yet Jacob enjoys God's favour in everything he undertakes. Jacob's exile results in his marriage to not one, but both of Laban's daughters, the birth of his sons - £rom whom will derive the twelve tribes of Israel - and enormous persona1 wealth, measured largely in cattle. Jacob is "at easew in his exile as he never could be "in Zion." If there is a deficiency in Jacob's life in exile, the text does not suggest it. There seems nothing in Jacob's life that demands a further purpose or a deeper meaning. Jacob's marriages, his wealth, and the promise for the future that lies in his sons: in al1 these things, the grace of God toward Jacob has been proved. Jacob's success amply fulfils the literary conventions of comedy. His story, we

think, should end here, in his contented and successful

exile.

Yet Jacob's story continues. It develops not into a

more fully articulated comedy, nor into a simple tragedy in which al1 the gains of Jacob's exile are forfeit; rather the

final episode of Jacob's life delivers him into a mystery

which transcends both comedy and simple tragedy. It is not

Jacob's will to leave such success, as it would not be ours.

And yet "The Lord said to Jacob, 'Go back to the land of

your fathers and to your kindred. I will be with your Il

(Gen.31:3). After a lengthy disagreement in which Laban tries to

trick him out of cattle, Jacob succeeds in tricking Laban

out of most of his stock. In an eerie recapitulation of

Jacob's flight £rom Esau, Jacob now must flee £rom Laban.

With al1 his f amily and possessions, Jacob sets out toward

the land of his fathers. Eventuaily they corne to the river

Jabbok, which £orms the northeastern frontier of the

promised land. 56 Jacob is now a man without a country. Behind him, Laban

retakes the land which Jacob has worked for twenty years. Ahead of him lies Esau, who has twenty years before promised

56 John L . McKenzie, S. J. , Jacob at Peniel, The Catholic Biblical Ouarterlv 25 (1963) 73. 99 to kill him. Although now twenty years older, Jacob is still "he who grasps by the heel," the man who has stolen his brother's birthright. Jacob knows that a confrontation is coming. Bis life has corne full circle, and there will be a reckoning.

There is, in Jacob's encounter with God at Penuel, nothing we could have predicted, and nothing which is not rnysterious. While Jacob's character is familiar - we recognize his aggression, his determination, as always, to extract a blessing - such familiarity serves only to heighten the singularity of the encounter. Jacob struggles, not with his brother as he had in his youth, or with his uncle as he had in exile, but with God himself, the God who had helped him to triumph in those earlier struggles. If the God of Jacob had previously seemed too remote and immaterial to be quite believed, He now seems too material to be truly a God. He enters directly and materially in Jacob's life. More strangely yet, this God who has led Jacob into covenant with him now fights Jacob to prevent him £rom entering those covenant lands. The material and spiritual planes of Jacob's life, which at his birth had seemed merely juxtaposed and almost unrelated, and which at Bethe1 coincided only briefly in a dream, now eclipse each other totally at Penuel. Penuel is cleaxly a mystery in the theological sense, an event which is both natural and supernatural in 100 character, and which can only be described through paradox. Jacob participates in a reality which he cannot master, a reality which is greater than he is, and which contains him. We too, as readers, suffer the same limitations. Our ignorance is as great as Jacob's. It is a characteristic of a theological mystery that the more clearly it is described, the more truly mysterious it becomes - a description which the mystery of Jacob's wrestling bears out. A verse-by-verse explication of Penuel serves to rendew the signi£icance of Jacob's experience both more certain and more certainly incomprehensible. The first paradox of Penuel is performed by Jacob: During the night Jacob rose, took his two wives, his two slave-girls, and his eleven sons, and crossed the ford of Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the gorge with al1 that he had. So Jacob, was left alone . Jacob crosses the Jabbok and enters into the covenant lands with al1 his family and possessions. This is as we expect. He has corne to claim his birthright, the lands promised him in the covenant. And then, without explanation, in the first of many paradoxes in this encounter, Jacob crosses back to the other side O£ the Jabbok, outside the covenant lands, and waits there alone. Why should Jacob do this? Has God not delivered him into the promised lands? Surely in the land of Esau his 101 family is vulnerable to attack without him, and surely he is vulnerable to attack without them. But Jacob does not arm himsel£ for battle; rather he renders himself as completely defenceless as when he £irst left his homeland. He is in fact armed only with a promise: The Lord said to Jacob, "Go back to the land of your fathers and to your kindred. 1 will be with you" (Gen.31:3). Jacob, like the reader, has come to Penuel without knowing what, or whom he is to encounter. He has received no invitation, heard no prophecy. Yet he does not wait in vain: and a man wrestled with him there till daybreak. When the man saw that he could not throw Jacob, he struck him in the hollow of his thigh, so that Jacob's hip was dislocated as they wrestled. Jacob does not know who this "manu is. At first he must think it is his brother Esau, who twenty years earlier had sworn he would kill Jacob. This wrestling match must seem to him an eerie recapitulation of their wrestling at birth, a wrestling which, again, Jacob is not certain to win. Jacob and the stranger encounter each other as equals, neither able to throw the other; and yet, upon acknowledging their equality, the stranger is able to break their deadlock by striking Jacob "in the hollow of the thigh." The stranger hasr until that moment, kept in abeyance some kind of supernatural power. He is "a manH and yet something more than a man. Tradition has long determined that Jacob's opponent be called an angel, and so we rnay consider him; yet we must not picture him with the delicate white wings and beatific smile of the angels in Renaissance art. Jacob's opponent rnay be

more than human, but he is certainly not less - less earthly or less dangerous. "Every angel is terrible" says the German poet Rilke, and Yheir beauty is nothing / but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure ....lts7The numinous, otherworldly nature of Jacob's opponent could only inspire fear in him. Nor would Jacob assume that this supernatural stranger serves the God of his fathers. While the Hebrews acknowledged only one divine God, yet their

universe was populated by a great variety of lesser transcendent beings, both good angels, messengers of God,

and demons , who I1were f eared, not worshipped. 11" With his hip dislocated, Jacob must now wrestle, not only in darkness, and without help £rom his family, but also without his physical strength. Furthermore, the site of Jacob's injury, Ilin the hollow of the thigh," suggests a groin injury, and by implication, impotency. Such a claim, though it seems fanciful, makes sense in light of Jacob's situation. Jacob has separated himself from al1 the sources of his strength, his wealth, his wives, and the sons who are

57 Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Poems, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1984) 151.

58 John L. McKenzie, S.J. , The Two-edsed Sword (New York : Doubleday, 1966) 72. his only hope of continuing the covenant. Now he has lost his physical strength. Emmanuel Swedenborg interpwets Jacob's wound as suggesting the loss of his sexual potency. With this wound, the "natural manu in Jacob has finally been broken, at which extremity the "spiritual manu within hirn can finally be freed." In any interpretation, Jacob has clearly been weakened until he has only one source of strength left: The Lord has promised Jacob that, if he

returns to his homeland, "1 will be with youI1 (Gen.31:3). Perhaps to indicate the spiritual dimension of their encounter, the struggle between Jacob and the stranger now becomes verbal as well as physical: The man said, "Let me go, for day is breaking, but Jacob replied, '1 will not let you go unless you bless me. ' With his hip dislocated, his physical strength compromised, it would seem impossible for Jacob to win this wrestling match. And yet, despite his physical weakness, Jacob remains determined not only to continue wrestling with the stranger, but to demand a blessing from him.

59 The suggestion of Jacobts sexual impotency has been made by many commentators, most famously by Emmanuel Swedenborg, Arcana Coelestia (New York: American Swedenborg Press, 1906) 6:32. With The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway proves himself an unlikely commentator on the nature of Jacob's injury. Jacob (Jake) Barnes, the hero of the novel, is wounded while on the Italian Front in World War 1. He suffers a mysterious groin injury, which has rendered him impotent, and unable to consummate his desire for Lady Ashley. Never has the terse, enigmatic quality of Hebrew narrative been more compelling, more fraught with

background," than when Jacob demands of his opponent, "1

will not let you go unless you bless me." It took pride as well as faith for Jacob to steal the birthright decreed by nature to Esau. It took fear for his life, as well as faith, for him to venture alone into exile, and still greater faith for him to return £rom that exile, armed only with the promise of God's presence. But it takes an almost inconceivable leap of £aith for Jacob, assailed on the banks of the Jabbok by a dangerous and mysterious stranger, to demand a blessing £rom his attacker. Jacob trusts that the

God who promised "1 will be with youtlis indeed with him now. He trusts that this stranger who has attacked and wounded him, and who prevents his entry into land of his fathers, is Himself the God of his fathers. At this moment, Jacob is one with Job who, out of despair and courage and a faith that transcends reason, cried out Though He slay me, yet wiil I trust Himm (Job 13:15) . Kierkegaard describes a similar movement of faith in his book Fear and Tremblinq when he recounts Abraham's horrific experience on Mt. ~oriah? God has directed Abraham to kill his only son Isaac, even though it is only through Isaac that the hereditary covenant can continue.

Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Tremblinq, ed. Alastair Hannay (Toronto: Penguin, 1985) . 105 God's demand seems absurd. Yet Abraham obeys Him. Abraham brings Isaac with him on a three-day journey to Mt. Moriah. He collects wood for the burnt offering, binds Isaac, places him on the pyre, and I1took the knife to slay his son ..." (Gen.22:ll).

"On the strength of the absurdI1IKierkegaard writes, Ilon the strength of the fact that for God al1 things are possible," Abraham believes that he must kill his son, and that his son will live. Abraham's faith is clearly paradoxical - "absurd, as Kierkegaard describes it - but Abraham can do nothing but act out the paradox of his situation. Tt is only in the finite world that the understanding rules," Kierkegaard tells us. But Abraham "believed on the strength of the absurd, for al1 human calculation had long since been suspendedu (Kierkegaard 75). Like his grandfather Abraham, Jacob makes the "paradoxical movement of faith.I1 Jacob trusts that the same God who has promised to uphold in him the covenant of his fathers, and who has now attacked him, wounded him and prevented him from entering into the covenant lands, will yet, Ilon the strength of the absurd," grant him His blessing, and uphold his covenant. The paradox can be put another way. By continuing to wrestle with God, Jacob disobeys God's order to let Him go. And yet he disobeys God in order to demand his blessing, and thereby fulfil the covenant which only God can grant him. 106 Thus Jacob Eights against God for the sake of his covenant with God. Jacob can obey God only by disobeying him. The paradox seems even more intractable when we remember that it was God who started this strange wrestling match, who chose to contend with and wound one of his own creatures, and who now, though obviously the stronger wrestler, assumes the weaker role, asking Jacob to let him go free. Undoubtedly Jacob is confused, yet, like his grandfather Abraham, he can do little but play out the paradox of his situation. In his extreme weakness and vulnerability, and acting "on the strength of the absurd, on the strength of the fact that for God al1 things are possible," Jacob adopts the stronger role. He demands the blessing of God £rom the stranger. The stranger responds to Jacob's demand, not by submitting immediately, nor by refusing, but by asking a question: He said to Jacob, What is your name?" and he answered,

tlJacob.n The man said "Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you strove with God and with men, and prevailed." Undoubtedly the stranger has always known Jacob's name; but he asks so that Jacob may declare hirnself "Jacob, he who struggles.~In a recapitulation of Jacob's naming at birth, the stranger changes Jacob's name to I1Israel,he who strives against God. Thus God grants to Jacob, now Israel , a blessing and a rebirth. By granting his blessing to Jacob, the stranger vindicates Jacob's faith, revealing that He is indeed God.

Such might seem the proper end of the encounter. Yet Jacob proves the rnutuality of his relationship with God by asking hirn the same question: Jacob said, "Tell me, T pray, your name. He replied, "Why do you ask my name?" but he gave hirn his blessing there. In Jacob's question and in the stranger8s response lies the

most touching moment of their struggle. From before his birth, and through al1 his life, Jacob's identity has been bound certainly but obscurely to the will of this God. Jacob's struggles with Esau, his exile from home, his struggles with Laban, and his eventual exile £rom that home too: al1 this Jacob has suffered, so that his covenant with this stranger, this God, can be fulfilled. Surely Jacob has the right to reach as far as he can into the mysterious reality before hirn, however obscure and "fraught with backgroundIl it may bel and bring forth a name. He has the right to ask the question.

In his Dictionarv of the Bible, John L. McKenzie, S.J., writes that, while the text interprets tlIsraelllas meaning Irhe contends against El, the form more properly suggests "let El contend.I1 This ambiguity is perhaps legitimate theologically, as well as linguistically, since Jacob can wrestle with God only with the strength God gives hirn. 108 And yet the question is not answered. It is cornmonly suggested, not with complete seriousness, that God responds to Jacob like a stereotypical Jewish mother, answering a

question with another question: "Why do you ask my name?" Yet behind Godrs refusal to grant Jacob His name lies a great mystery; and one which seems to typify Jacob's entire encounter at Penuel . Perhaps the stranger does not tell Jacob his name because, as Reynolds Price suggests, luit should be apparent. With a farewell blessing He departs or disappear~.~~~~Price suggests that the blessing is itself the fullest possible revelation of the strangerts identity. It is possible too that Jacob's question simply cannot

be answered, at least not in the way Jacob wishes. Jacob has a name because there has always been someone superior to him, his parents and his God, to give him a name. Yet who is there superior to God to give Him His true name, the name that properly defines His relationship to the very world He created? A name is, in its letters and sounds, a material

thing; and the God Who created the material universe must certainly exist beyond the Creation. The God who in the opening moments of Genesis speaks the universe into existence must surely transcend the signifying power of speech. It may bel paradoxically, the stranger's refusal to

62 Reynolds Price, A Pal~able God (New York: Athenaeum Books, 1978) 31. 109 be bound by any earthly name, however exalted, that best communicates to Jacob his transcendence. The stranger does not answer Jacob's question. And yet as he and Jacob are bound to each other, physically in their wrestling, and spiritually as the destiny of "I~rael~~is fulfilled between them, he does respond to Jacob's question. It is with respect for the mystery being worked out between the two of them that the stranger responds to Jacob's unanswerable question with a question of His own: Why do you ask my name?" To which Jacob can say nothing. The brief conclusion of Jacob's wrestling does not grant Jacob or the reader any answers, but restates the ambiguities of the encounter in other terms. If God does not leave Jacob with His name, yet Jacob himself can grant a name to the place of his wrestling: Jacob called the place Peniel 'becauset,he said, '1 have seen God face to face and my life is spared.' The Sun rose as Jacob passed through Penuel, limping because of his hip. By calling the place of his wrestling Penuel, Ilthe face of God,I1 Jacob finally affirms the truth of what until now he has held by faith: the stranger who has attacked and wrestled with him is indeed God Himself, the God of his f athers . The concluding line of the passage best expresses the strangeness and ambivalence of the Penuel experience. The 110 rising Sun suggests not only a new day, but a new life for

Jacob: he is now Israel. As he crosses the Jabbok river for the last time and enters into his homeland, he carries in himsel£ the fulfilled covenant of his people. He is clearly heroic. And yet he enters limping. Even as the newly exalted Israel, he drags the broken and emptied Jacob with him, like a broken leg. Jacob is wounded and immortal. In his new name, 111~rae3,11he carries the immortality guaranteed by his covenant with God, and in his broken flesh he carries his rnortality. He is a living paradox, the £igure in W.B. Yeats' I1Sailing to Byzantium,I1 a sou1 "fastened to a dying anima1.l1 These last lines of Jacob's wrestling also recall the last lines of Paradise Lost where Adam and Eve, "with wandering steps and slow, / through Eden took their solitary wayn (Book XII,648-9). Such is the posture, at once wounded and exalted, of those who find God's power made perfect in their weakness. Following his encounter with God at Penuel, Jacob's story is almost, but not quite over. We think of Jacob now as an old man, who must tidy up the details of his life before passing the burden of the covenant to his sons. Jacob still fears Esau and, hoping to appease him, sends his goods and his family ahead of him. He has no pretence of physical power left to him. Jacob, I1bowed down to the ground," limps into the promised land. "But Esau ran to meet him and 111 embraced him; he threw his arms round him and kissed him, and they weptu (Gen. 33:3). In a final, graceful irony, Jacob says to Esau, "1 have seen your face as though it were the face of GodIf (Gen.

33:10). Jacob recognizes "the face of God," the face of the stranger at Penuel, in his brother. In some incomprehensible yet certain way, Jacob's wrestling with the stranger at Penuel has reconciled him to Esau, whom he wrestled at birth and cheated O£ his birthright twenty years before. Thus the God who has led Jacob through the various struggles of his life, £rom the wrestling with Esau in the womb to his exile in the land of his uncle, and who wrestled with him at Penuel, has now closed the circle of Jacob's life, Just as Jacob's encounter at Penuel reconciles his early quarrel with Esau, so it continues and deepens the dialogue between Jacob and God which began at Bethel. What passed there in the forms of prayers and dreams is fulfilled at Penuel in wrestling, in dialogue, and in a further blessing demanded and given. Their wrestling together is possible only given the mutuality and respect which Jacob and the stranger have for each other. They wrestle each other in the service of a higher resolution: the establishment of Israel, in Jacob himself and in his sons, and in the land which they inherit. 112 Such is the story to which Hopkins appeals in "Carrion Cornfort" when he, like Jacob, is overwhelmed by the confusion and fear of an encounter with God. Such is the vital, supernatural universe which informs al1 the "terrible sonnets." It would be wonderful if, in his sermons or meditation notes, Hopkins had left an interpretation of Jacob's wrestling; but there is none. If he wrote such a document, it no longer exists. If he did not write such a document, its absence should not surprise us. Both Hopkins' account of how he wrote the "terrible sonnets, and the nature of the poems themselves, suggest that Hopkins came to appreciate the implications of Jacob's story only with great reluctance. There is however no shortage of commentaries on the story, and like the many interpretations of the "terrible sonnets," they reveal the tremendous depth of the mysteries of Penuel. The most ancient cornmentaries on the story of Jacob's wrestling are the midrashim found in the Haggadah, part of the Jewish Talmud. Midrashim tend to be more imaginative than scholarly, more a meditation on a biblical text than a strict exegesis .63 Although there are a variety of midrashim, both in the Haggadah and other places, which concern Jacob's wrestling, they generally share a common emphasis, stressing the role played in the story by Jacob's

63 "Midrash,If Dictionarv of the Bible. 113 opponent. The best known midrash (Abkir, in Yalqut, 1.132)& asserts that Jacob's opponent was the archange1 Michael. After testing Jacob on the banks of the Jabbok, Michael demands to be set free so that he could return to heaven to sing the morning chorus of praise of God. If he does not return in time, he tells Jacob, he will be forever banned from the heavenly choir. Jacob, ever the opportunist, takes

advantage O£ Michael's desperation by demanding a blessing which Michael had never intended to give him. The moral of the story, according to Elie Wiesel, is that ItThough powerless before God, man is capable of defeating the angelsn (Wiesel 130) . It is the materiality - indeed the humanity - of Jacob's opponent, and his apparent defeat by Jacob, which causes the gravest concern to Jewish commentators. Jewish interpreters zealously affirm the absolute transcendence of God, and his supremacy over the world he has created. Thus, it is argued, it cannot have been God whom Jacob wrestled and defeated, but one of His messengers. In this interpretation the mystery of human relationship with God - specifically the paradox of a man physically wrestling with God - is compromised by the mediation of a third party. Robert Graves goes so far as to suggest that Jewish midrashim Ilare al1 prompted by pious embarra~sment.~llGod,

64 "Jacob, A Dictionarv of Biblical Tradition, ed. David Lyle Jeffrey (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1992). the transcendental God of later Judaism, could never have demeaned himself by wrestling with a mortal and then begging him to release his h~ld."~'The stranger is accepted, not as God in human forrn, but as a true intermediary, a third person whose presence e£fectively removes God from the conflict at Penuel. The twelfth century Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides further rationalises the story of Jacob's wrestling by claiming that the wrestling was not a physical event at all. Rather, he argues, the angel's I1wrestling and speaking was entirely a prophetic visi~n.~Maimonides further states as a general rule of interpreting scripture that, in stories where "the ange1 is only rnentioned at the end, you may rest satisfied that the whole account £rom the beginning describes a prophetic vision.1t66Maimonides neatly side- steps the paradoxical qualities of the story that might appear to challenge the omnipotence of God. Christian commentators are much less reserved about the humanity of Jacob's opponent than their Jewish peers. Indeed it is the humanity of Jacob's opponent which makes the story so resonant for Christians; in his humanity, the stranger seems a striking Hebrew anticipation of the Incarnation.

65 Robert Graves and Raphael Patai, Hebrew Mvths: The Book of Genesis (London: Cassell, 1964) 228.

66 Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. M. Friedlander (New York: Hebrew Publishing Co. [no publishing date 115 Thus Christian commentators uniformly support Jacob's own view that his wrestling is real, and that l'the wrestler is

divinet1(Biblical Tradition 85.4 . The question for early Christian commentators was whether Penuel is a theophany, a revelation of God, or a Christophany specifically, a revelation of Christ. Augustine sometimes identifies Jacob's opponent as God the Father, and in other places interprets Jacob's wrestling as a type of Christ's passion: "Jacob blessed and Jacob lameH mirrors Christ "wounded by Our transgressionsM and ltvictoriousover sin and death.I1 Martin Luther argues that the ange1 "was not an ange1 but Our Lord Jesus Christ, eternal God and future man." Luther's has become the dominant view, no doubt because, as he suggests, the materiality of the stranger clearly prefigures the Incarnation of Christ (~iblicalTradition 853). John Calvin recognises in the story of Jacob's wrestling a paradigm of human relationship with Gad." Calvin acknowledges the paradoxical nature of the struggle wherein Jacob is compelled to fight against God, in order to

fulfil Godts work. And yet "It is easy," says Calvin, "to

untie the knotu: For we do not fight against [God] except by his own power, and with his weapons; for he, having challenged

67 John Calvin, Commentarv won the Book of Genesis, trans. John King (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdrnants, 1963) 2:196. 116 us to this contest, at the same tirne furnisheç us with means of resistance, so that he both fights against us and for us. (Calvin 196) Calvin plumbs the depths of the mystery of Penuel as eloquently as anyone hast recognizing that the paradoxes of Jacob's wrestling are divinely purposed and executed: Because God supplies us with more strength to resist than he employs in opposi.ng us, we may truly and properly say, that he fights against us with his left hand, and for us with his right hand. It is true that he remains at perfect unity with himself; but the double method in which he deals with us cannot be

otherwise expressed. (John Calvin 196) The paradoxes of Jacob's experience, his almost simultaneous wounding and blessing, and his role as both aggressor and victim, reveal the paradoxical rnanner in which God works His purposes in human life, "the double methodtttin Calvin's words, Ilin which [God] deals with us. Calvin's interpretation is echoed by a modern Jewish commentator, Elie Wiesel. Wiesel similarly recognizes a "double methodIt in Godts relationship with humanity, and he eloquently interprets the whole of Jacob's life as a series of conflicts with God which is, at the same time, a gradual, sustained journey towards God. He writes: God does not wait for man at the end of the road, the termination of exile; He accompanies him there. 117 More than that: He is the road, He is the exile. God holds both ends of the rope. (Wiesel 123) Like Calvin's assertion that God 'If ights against us with his left hand, and for us with his right hand,ll Wiesel's claim that IfGod holds both ends of the ropeH describes the inevitably paxadoxical nature O£ human relationship with God. God leads us into conflict with Him in order that we might establish a living and vital relationship with Him. From this lofty theological perspective, the mysteries of human life expressed in the story of Jacob's wrestling would seem, ultirnately, to be God's mysteries, unfathomable by the human mind. The psychologist Car1 Jung describes the paradoxical qualities of the Hebrew God so powerfully that we might despair of ever comprehending Our relationship with

Him: "For Yahweh is not a human being," Jung writes; he is both a persecutor and a helper in one, and the one aspect is as real as the other. Yahweh 1s not

split but is an antinomy - a totality of inner

opposites - and this is the indispensable condition for his tremendous dynamism, his omniscience and omnipotence. However He may appear to us when participating in human history, "Yahweh is not a human being," and he does not compromise his omniscience and omnipotence.

68 Cari Gustav Jung, Answer to Job, trans. R.F.C. Hull (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954) 10. 118 If such theological statements provide an essential perspective for understanding the meaning O£ Penuel, their limitation lies in the suggestion that Jacob plays only a very minor role in his own life. By emphasizing the omniscience and omnipotence of God, it is easy to suggest that Jacob has no free will at all, or to neglect the courage which the wrestling at Penuel demands of him. At no point in Jacob's story does God impose his covenant on Jacob. Jacob is not a Puppet on strings, manipulated by God, but is an essential and willing participant in the wrestling which is the climax of his life, If, as the theologians suggest, the mysteries of Penuel are ultimately God's mysteries, it remains true that Jacob does not experience them in an ultimate way. He understands the mysteries only in the context of his fear, and courage, and confusion; and it is this human aspect of Jacob's wrestling which recent commentators tend to emphasize. In contrast to Jung's analysis of God's nature, many commentators use the story of Jacob's wrestling and Jung's psychological ideas to elucidate human psychology. Their work emphasizes not God's purpose and nature, but Jacob's. In The Man Who Wrestled with God, John A. Sanford treats Jacob's entire life as an allegory of psychological growth. Penuel itself is understood as the climax of a long psychological process which Jung terms luindividuation":"the transformation of human beings £rom egocentric, unconscious 119 persons, to persons of wholeness, breadth of vision and spiritual awareness" (Sanford 6). Sanford recognizes three experiences which challenge Jacob's egocentricity: his suffering when he is £orced into exile, the revelation of God granted to him at Bethel, and his falling in love with Rachel. Through these three experiences, Sanford traces Jacob's growth from being a selfish child who steals his brotherts birthright, through his incipient spiritual awareness at Bethel and his slow maturing while in exile. It is only through his wrestling at Penuel, however, that Jacob becomes fully conscious of the spiritual forces at work in his life, and allows himself to be transformed into a spiritually mature person. In San£ordtsview, the "blessingn which Jacob struggles for throughout his life is precisely this transformation, from a childish egocentricity to a mature spiritual awareness. Jacob flindividuatesMat Penuel.

As l1Israel he becomes a completed "Jacob." If flindividuationllis the blessing which Jacob strives for, it is inevitably a wounding as well: The experience of God, Sanford writes, becomes like a wound, constantly reminding us of the spiritual reality we have known, and enforcing upon us a recognition of the finite nature of this little ego of ours in relationship to the awesomeness

O£ God. (Sanford 42) 120 There is a complexity and pathos in Sanfordts understanding of Penuel which is gratifying. The wrestling which typifies Jacob's entire life, and which culminates with Penuel, symbolises the continual struggle in human life between our natural self-centredness and Our need to repose in relationship with God. Sanford recognizes that Jacob's experience at Penuel is not an isolated incident, but the necessary conclusion of a process. The meaning of Penuel therefore cannot be formulated in simple or static terms. If Jacob uindividuatestfat Penuel, and enters into his blessing, yet this blessing is received at a real cost to him, a wounding. In his description of Jacob's wounding, Sanford offers a kind of secular restatement of basic Christian doctrine. Jacob discovers strength through his weakness, Sanford daims, for 'through such a wounded ego there pours the life of God" (42). In Sanford's description of Jacob's experience we hear echoed the famous paradox offered by St. Paul: I shall therefore prefer to find my joy and pride in the very things that are my weakness; and then the power of Christ will corne and rest upon me ...; for when 1 am weak, then I am strong (2 Cor. 12:9-10). Penuel, for Jacob, is a victorious failure, a fortunate fall. We are reminded, not for the last tirne, of the poignant and complex image which concludes Jacob's 121 encounter: "The Sun rose as Jacob passed through Penuel, limping because of his hip." Esther Spitzer, in "A Jungian Midrash on Jacob's Dream," also interprets Jacob's wrestling in a Jungian frarnew~rk.~'In her analysis Penuel is understood as the conclusion of a psychological process which results in Jacob's "numinous confrontation with the Shadow, or the dark, selfish side of himselfM (Spitzer 22). As a young man, she argues, Jacob did not honestly confront the suffering he caused by his early quarrel with his brother and father, but escaped into exile. Similarly, he later flees the suffering caused by hi$ quarrel with Laban. At Penuel, however, Jacob finally demands a full accounting of himself. Spitzer interprets Jacob's cry to the stranger, "1 will not let you

go until you bless me, It as Jacob's great reckoning: When the Adversary wanted to quit, Jacob said,

"No. 1 will not let you go unless you bless me,"

What did Jacob mean by this? He meant "1 will not

part from this experience unless 1 find a meaning to my suffering. (Spitzer 23) The strength of Spitzer's argument lies in her emphasis upon those psychological realities which are easily lost in theological discussions: Jacob's confusion, his courage in

69 Edith Spitzer, I1A Jungian Midrash on Jacob's Dream. Reconstructionist (October 1976) 22-4. 122 accepting a wound, and his determination that suffering will fulfil itself in a blessing. The limitation of her reading lies in its neglect of the theological implications of the story. It is not with God that Jacob wrestles, she suggests, but with the experience of suffering itself. And if suffering is Jacob's opponent, it is also, at least indirectly, the source of his blessing. Spitzer writes: Suffering of itself does not heal. Only suffering that has a meaning, and is accepted willingly, has the power to heal, to transform an individual into a whole

person. (24) In Spitzer's reading, Jacob's wrestling is a conflict almost wholly internalized, with God Himself reduced to a name. It is natural, perhaps, for discussions of human relationship with God to divide into God-centered and hurnan- centered interpretations. Augustine, Luther and Calvin view

Jacob's wrestling £rom a great theological height, and see in the encounter a revelation of God and his purposes in human life, From this perspective, Jacob's role, though not unimportant, is clearly subordinated to God'ç role. Recent commentators however tend to explicate Penuel from Jacob's perspective, emphasizing his responsibilities in the encounter. Arguing £rom psychological premises, they tell the story of Penuel with Jacob as the protagonist, casting God as a secondary character or neglecting Hirn altogether. 123 ït seems clear however that the experience of Penuel cannot be reduced to a simple truth, or be recounted satisfactorily from oniy one point of view. The meaning of Penuel lies not only in God's actions towards Jacob, or Jacob's response to God, but in both their actions and natures, and in both at once. God's actions are significant because they are fulfilled in Jacob, and Jacob's actions are significant because they are fulfilled by God. There is no way to defuse this polarity of divine and human truths. Jacob both acts, and is acted upon, and the meaning of the wrestling at Penuel exists in the tension between these two realities. Calvin very properly declares that IfThe knotl1 of Penuel Iris easily untiedgt£rom a theological perspective. And yet, £rom the perspective of human experience, it must remain, in some ways, a hopeless tangle. The critic and theologian John Coulson suggests that the only full expression of human relationship with God is found in apparent contradiction and in paradox. In mystexies such as Penuel where human and divine realities eclipse each other, we must see, Coulson argues, "by juxtaposition rather than by logical sequencen (Coulson 132). The meaning of Penuel emerges out the comprehension of a dynamic, not a static relationship between human and divine truths. Coulson describes such a resolution as Ira holding polar tension, or seeing stereoscopically; and as a saying and unsaying, or correction by opposite strokesm (Coulson 66). 124 The theological and human complexities of Penuel, and the paradoxes which best communicate those complexities, find their clearest formulation in the work of the nineteenth-century theologian, Ernst Troelsch. Troelsch argues that theologies based on Judaic traditions must

comprehend Ira double polarity - of other-worldliness and detachment, and of this-worldliness and attachment.~'~ Weither of these poles may be completely absent," Troelsch affirms, "if the Christian outlook is to be maintained." Using a wonderfully provocative image, Troelsch suggests that "Christianity resembles, not a circle with one centre, but an ellipse with two foc us es^ (199). Troelsch argues that there is in Our religious consciousness a perpetual and creative tension between Our consciousness of God as a superior and independent reality which we cannot comprehend, and Our self-consciousness as we strive to fulfil Godts purposes in Our lives. Christianity, he argues, bears a conception of the world both optimistic and pessimistic, both transcendental and immanental, and an apprehension both of a severe antagonism, and of a close interior union, between the world and God.

(Troelsch 200)

70 Ernst Troeltsch, Christliche Welt, trans. Friedrich Von Hugel in Eternal Life: A Studv 2nd. ed. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1913) 199. 125 In Troelschts coupling of these polarities - transcendence and immanence, antagonism and union - we recognize those fundamental paradoxes which found the Christian faith: humanity as fallen and sinful, yet redeemed; Christ crucif ied, yet victorious . Troelschts description of the religious life as both "a severe antagonism and a close interior uniontfalso clearly comprehends the nature of Jacob's relationship with God. The "close interior unionttbetween God and Jacob is founded in the covenant which Jacob inherits from his father, and which is revealed most powerfully to Jacob in his dream at Bethel, where he sees a ladder with angels ascending and descending, connecting earth with Heaven. At the same time, however, although the covenant is promised outright, it is yet not granted outright. The name Jacob means "he struggles" and it is only through the "severe antagonismH O£ Jacob's various struggles that he eventually becomes worthy of this covenant. However inevitable Jacob's fulfilment of the covenant rnay be, through Godts foreknowledge or predestination, Jacob must still live out his life and, through the dif£icult human choices which constitute that life, fulfil the covenant. In contrast to the dream of the ladder, it is Jacob's wrestling, both in the womb and at Penuel, which symbolises this aspect of his life. We might Say, speaking philosophically, that Jacob has one foot firmly planted in the world of Being, and the other 126 in the world of Becorning. From his struggle in the womb, to his vision at Bethel, to the final wrestling at Penuel, everything in Jacob's life moves between the poles of "already givenH and "not yet fulfilled.~ Whether by coincidence or scholarly influence is not clear, but the Jewish theologian Martin Buber uses the same provocative image as Troelsch to describe his faith. He sees "the sou1 of Judaism as turning round two centres like an ellipse.ll" One centre is "the fundamental experience that God is wholly raised above man, that his throne is out of

the sight O£ man.11The second centre is the recognition that God is nyet present with these human beings who are absolutely incommensurable with him.It God is, Buber argues, both beyond Our reach, and deep within us, and it is important I1to recognize both realities at the same time, and in such a way that they cannot be divided £rom each otherot

(19) Between ItGod in heavenH and 'Iman on earth, in Buber's terms; between the "already givenl1 and the I1not yet achieved" reality of Jacob's covenant; between Calvin's insistence that God Yights against us with his left hand, and for us with his right1I and Spitzer's insistence on

Jacob's courage in proclaiming "1 will not part from this

experience until 1 find a meaning to my suffering": only in

71 Martin Buber, "The Two Centres of the Jewish Soul," Mamre: Essavs in Reliaion, trans. Greta Hort (Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1946) 19. 127 the relation and tension between these polarities, can the full reality of Penuel be made known. The relation between "the two centres," human and divine, which constitute Penuel is clearly paradoxical; yet they are held in union by the narrative, the Nellipse,nof Jacob's li£e. We recognize this tension-in-union throughout the Bible: in Abraham's arguments with God in Genesis, in the lamentations of the prophets, and with great power and stress in the Book of Job. Above al1, it is Christ Hiniself, the Incarnation of God in man, who reveals most powerfully the paradoxes of religious experience. Not in the glory of the Transfiguration alone, nor in the agony of Gethsemane alone, is Christ's nature revealed, but in both His glory and agony, and in both at once. As both pastor and lad, priest and sacrifice, the image of Christ Veconciles conflicting and divergent descriptions by embodying them in

one common representative. "72 It is one function of religious literature to do precisely this: to express as fully as possible the vital and creative tension between the transcendent and immanent in human life. The story of Jacob's wrestling is exceptional

perhaps in presenting this tension in such disarmingly graphic form: the physical wrestling between God and man.

'* John Henry Newman, An Essav in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, ed. C.F.Harrold (New York: 1870) 339. 128 Hopkins understood the poetic power of Jacob's story, and in the midst of his own spiritual struggles, recognised the pattern of his own suffering in that ancient story. Thus both Jacob's wrestling and Hopkins' "terrible sonnetsN witness to a particular experience of God which we may cal1 Penuel: an experience in which God is both known and unnamed, in which God wounds us and blesses us, and in which wrestling with God is the necessary rite of passage into covenant with Him. Chapter Five A Poet's Progress

What was that paradox 1 heard of yo~rs?~~asked the Professor: Ilabout criticism it was."

"0 it was nothingH said Hanbury drawing back. "But let me hear it defended. Everybody likes a good paradox.

- Hopkins, "On the Origin of Beauty,

a University Essay for his tutor, Walter Pater. "

Hopkinst poetic career is usually thought of as a rise and fall: out of the confusions O£ Hopkinst early poetry, one can trace the gradual development of his mature poetic, which fulfils itself in his famous sonnets celebrating God's revelation in the natural world; equally, the gradual dissolution of this poetic can be traced in the "terrible sonnets1I which conclude his career. If, however, one credits the "terrible sonnets" with real authority, and recognizes Hopkins' last poems as a development rather than a dissolution of his poetic, then the story traced through the poems becomes, not a simple rise and fall, but a circular progression: a story of conflict, exile, and return. The story behind Hopkinsf poetry becomes, in fact, much like the story of Jacob.

73 W.H. Gardner, Gerard Manlev Ho~kins: Poems and Prose (London: Penguin, 1985) 92. 130 David Walhout, in Send Mv Roots Rain, takes this latter view. He states that Hopkins' life "can be viewed as falling into three distinct periods. The early period I1is formative, characterized by considerable mental turmoil." The second period I1finds Hopkins engrossed and apparently happy." Hopkinst final period recapitulates his first, as he works through I1a new onslaught of despair." Walhout considers Hopkinst cycle of melancholy as a natural, even proper, aspect of the religious contemplative life (Walhout

107). A similar pattern is recognized by Margaret D. Smith in her remarkable book A Holv ~trucrsle.~~In a sequence of sonnets and prose meditations, Smith contemplates the nature and pattern of Hopkinst spiritual life, Her book is organized into three chapters, which refer to three distinct periods of his life: they are titled MSacrifice,u ItRedemption, " and "Another Sacrifice. Smith summarises this cycle by quoting, as her epigraph, Hopkinst description of a piece of music he wrote in 1884: "It is in three partsI1!he says, "the third returning to the first." Finally, Robert J. Andreach, in his chapter on Hopkins in Studies in Structure, identifies three periods in

73 Donald Walhout, Send Mv Roots Rain: A Study of Relisious Ex~erience in the Poetrv of Gerard Manlev Hopkins (Athens, Ohio: Ohio UP, 1981).

" Margaret D. Smith, A Holv Strusqle: Uns~okenThoucrhts of Hopkins (Wheaton, Illinois: Harold Shaw, 1992). 13 1 Hopkinst work, which he classifies according to the Ignatian theology of Joseph de Guibert, S.J." Hopkinst early poetry, he daims, arises out of an initial flpurgative stagen of the spiritual life. The poet's middle period conforms to a more advanced "contemplative stage." in Hopkins' final poetry, he argues, the poet "returns to the beginning, but, unlike the early poetry, embodies a genuine

ascetic purgationIl (Andreach 14). Although Andreach recognises "a tremendous spiritual gulf separating the early poetry and the later poetryIU he argues that Ilthe structures are the same. The later poetry is the early poetry rewrittenI1 (Andreach 26) . The circular pattern described by Hopkinst poetry, the "terrible sonnetsIl rewriting the early poetry, parallels the circular pattern of Jacob's life. Jacob and Hopkins share a sirnilar.progress of the soul, a relationship with God which begins in conflict, continues through faith into a sustained and fruitful exile, and fulfils itself in a recapitulation of the original conflict, This final, mysterious experience we may cal1 Penuel: the wrestling with God which, paradoxically, establishes communion with Hirn. We must not expect incidental similarities between the life of Jacob, a Hebrew shepherd who lived in Palestine four thousand years ago, and the life of Hopkins, a nineteenth-

75 Robert J. Andreach, Studies in Structure: The Stases of the S~iritualLi£e in Four Modern Authors (Fordham: Fordham UP, 1964) . century English Jesuit priest. Nor should Jacob's life be understood as a kind of allegory of Hopkinsf life, or as a matrix into which the details of Hopkins1 life should settle of their own weight. It would be possible, no doubt, to postulate a hybrid personality, a kind of Hebrew-Victorian shepherd-poet Jacob Manley Hopkins; and yet the discovery or creation of ingenious similarities in their outward biographies would only distort the very real similarities to be found in their spiritual biographies. Jacob and Hopkins are bound, not to each other, but to a cornmon mystery, the lfincomprehensiblecertaintyH of relationship with the God who governs their lives. The example of Jacob allows us to treat Hopkinsf poetry after the manner of a midrash - an imaginative retelling of a mystery story, a tale of a poetts relationship with God, and also therefore a kind of love story. The story traced by Hopkins' poetry does not, like Jacob's, begin with an overt mystery, a wrestling match within the womb. Rather, Hopkins' earliest verse, like that of most poets, reveals him simply trying to find his voice. It is clear, though, that right £rom the start, Hopkins knew what his subject matter would be. His earliest surviving poem is "The E~corial,~a devout 125-line tribute to Spanish

Catholicism employing the stanza form of Keatst IlThe Eve of St. Agnes," and copying much of Keats' diction. Written when he was fifteen, "The Escorial11won for Hopkins the annual 133 poetry prize at his school. The early poem "Pilateu is a biblical dramatic monologue clearly modelled after Browning. The opening lines of "11 Mysticou present what seems, at first, a disturbingly precocious example of the spiritual struggle which will so greatly concern the mature poet: Hence sensual gross desires, Right offspring of your grimy mother Earth! My spirit hath a birth Alien £rom yours as heaven from Nadir-£ires. A closer reading, however, reveals that these lines, and indeed the entire poem, were written in imitation of

Milton's "11 Penseroso1I,although, as Paul Mariani notes, "Milton is made to don Pre-Raphaelite robes" (Mariani 4). In these early poems, Hopkins is clearly not writing £rom persona1 experiences, but is adopting conventionally poetic postures on conventionally poetic subjects. George Herbert's influence is evident in Hopkins' first completely successful poem. In a characteristic compression of language, Hopkins reduces Herbert's line, "These seas are tears, and heav'n the haven,~~~into the title of one of his best-known poems:

" George Herbert, IlThe Size, The Com~letePoems of George Herbert (Toronto: Oxford UP, 1907) 125. Heaven-Haven (a nun takes the veil)

1 have desired to go where springs not fail, To fields where £lies no sharp and sided hail And a few lilies blow.

And 1 have asked to be Where no storms corne, Where the green swell is in the havens dumb, And out of the swing of the sea.

"Heaven-Haven" is a poem of tremendous poise and stillness. The narrator reposes in the present-perfect: with III have desired to go," and "1 have asked to belt1he announces his detachment £rom the outside world. Our interest in the poem arises from our consciousness both of the narratorrs equanimity, and the violent, unpredictable storm he has escaped from, the flying I1sharp and sided hail," and "the green swellIf of "the swing of the sea." With this dual consciousness, the narratorts renunciation of sense experience seems to become, in itself, a kind of sensuality. As Robert Martin puts it, ItOnly the deeply passionate make good ascetics, a qualification which Hopkins amply 135 fulfilledu (77). By this paradox, "Heaven-Havenn succeeds in being both a highly ascetic, and deeply passionate, poem. By being such a good, but uncharacteristic poem, IfHeaven-Havenuappears as the false dawn of Hopkins' poetry. The poem stands as Hopkinst graceful refusal to confront directly the conflicts, the "sharp and sided hail," of the religious life. Had he continued in this vein, Hopkins might have developed a sincere and convincing poetic of disengagement from the world, comparable in its way to the nostalgia of the Pre-Raphaelites and the Arthurian poems of Tennyson. Though it is hard to imagine now, it seems that Hopkins might have become, in his own the, a popular poet. He would not, however, have become the great poet he did become. There is something wistful, even faintly dishonest, about Hopkins' subtitle for "Heaven-Haven," "a nun takes the veil, as if he were pretending that a religious vocation would remove him from al1 earthly conflicts. He must have known it could not be. Hopkinst greatest conflicts were al1 internal, and not so easily avoided. He was to fight "the war within," as the late sonnet "St Alphonsus Rodriguezu puts it, and prove himself, as Jacob was, "one who ~restles.~~ During his third year at Oxford, Hopkinst poetry suddenly takes on its characteristic urgency. Although not as technically polished as "Heaven-Haven,I1these new poems reveal Hopkins' determination to confront, not escape, 136 spiritual conflict. For the first time in his poetry, Hopkins reveals himself profoundly '511-at-ease in Zion." These poems are, in theme, strikingly like the "terrible sonnetsu which would conclude Hopkins' poetic career twenty years later. In 1865 Hopkins writes:

My prayers must meet a brazen heaven And fail or scatter al1 away. Unclean and seeming unforgiven

My prayers 1 scarcely cal1 to pray. 1 cannot buoy my heart above;

Above it cannot entrance win. 1 reckon precedents of love, But feel the long success of sin.

My heaven is brass and iron my earth: Yea iron is mingled with my clay,

So hardentd is it in this dearth Which praying fails to do away. Nor tears, nor tears this clay uncouth Could mould, if any tears there were. A warfare of my lips in truth, Battling with God, is now my prayer.

"My prayersu is almost, but not quite, a good poem. The metre is too insistently iambic to be truly musical, and the diction (Itthisclay uncouth") seems to have been chosen largely to accommodate the necessary rhymes (l1rnylips in truth"). And yet, despite such clumsiness, the poem succeeds through the narratorts sincerity: "unclean and seeming unforgivenfl he nevertheless prostrates himself, repentant, before God. While "My prayersl1 is clearly not as good a poern as tfHeaven-Haven,uit marks an ambitious shift in Hopkinst poetic. The narratorfs candour leads him to confess his anger at God, as well as his repentance, for repentance alone seems futile before a God so indifferent and remote. The narrator struggles not only with his own weaknesses - "My prayers I scarcely cal1 to prayn - but also with a God who does not listen to those prayers - a God ensconced in "a brazen heaven." This tension between the narrator and God never truly resolves itself, but hardens into a stalemate of opposing truths : "Man on Earth, " in Buberfs terms, stands opposed to "God in hea~en,~as if he were besieging Him in

His high fortress. If we believe nothing else in the poem, we believe in the precise and bitter couplet which closes

A warfare of my lips in truth, Battling with God, is now my prayer. The fourteen lines which precede this couplet are, we suddenly realize, mere scaffolding; this is what the poet needs to Say: relationship with God is not achieved simply 138 by default, by withdrawing £rom the world, but must sometimes be actively fought for. David Downes, along with

other critics, xecognises in these last lines "a portent of the last sonnets. Another early poem, "Trees by their yield," speaks further of Hopkinsf "Battling with God." The poem is unfinished and, at such an early point in Hopkins' career, was probably not finishable. Indeed, it may be the poemts incompleteness which most eloquently reveals Hopkins'

crisis : Trees by their yield Are known; but 1 - My Sap is sealed, My root is dry. If life within

1 none can shew (Except for sin) It must be so - 1 do not love.

Will no one show

1 argued ill? Because, althougb Self-sentenced, still

77 David Anthony Downes, The Great Sacrifice: Studies in Ho~kins(New York: UP of America, 1983) 89. 1 keep my trust. If He would prove And search me through Would he not £ind (What yet there must Be hid behind ....

"Trees by their yield" is founded on a familiar biblical motif: the righteous person l%hall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season" (Psalm 1:3). Christ uses the same analogy when he declares that O1every tree is known by his own fruitM (Luke

6~43).With these words, Christ equates the faithfulness of his disciples with their £ruitfulness. The narrator of the poem accepts this judgement and, recognizing himself as barren, declares "It must be so - / 1 do not love."

And yet, the poet affirms, he does love. He declares that "although / Self-sentenced, still / 1 keep my trust." Despite his fruitlessness, he declares, he has kept faith with God. To this paradox, the narrator has no solution: unable, in this instance, to believe the words of Christ, and equally unwilling to disbelieve them, the narrator can only exclaim I1will no one show / 1 argued ill?" To this question no answer is given, and the poem remains unfinished, fading out in an incomplete parenthesis. A year later, in 1866, Hopkins wrote a further poem on his 14 O "Battling with God," and with more success. To fortify himself for the conflict, Hopkins enlists the support of the prophet Isaiah, prefacing his poem "Nondumfgwith a verse which perfectly describes his crisis: "Verily Thou art a God that hidest Thyself (Isaiah 14 : 15) . The poem opens with a stanza lamenting the hiddenness of God: God, though to Thee Our psalm we raise No answering voice cornes £rom the skies; To Thee the trembling sinner prays But no forgiving voice replies; Our prayer seems lost in desert ways, Our hymn in the vast silence dies. In ~Nondum~Hopkins assumes the first person plural, not singular. By writing Itwel1not 1, l1 Hopkins f rames his I1Battlingwith Godu as a universal, rather than a personal, condition. The second stanza most clearly explains the nature of this conflict: We see the glories of the earth But not the hand that wrought them all: Night to a myriad worlds gives birth, Yet like a lighted empty hall Where stands no host at door or hearth Vacant creation's lamps appal. These lines proclaim a paradox that haunted Hopkins throughout his life: the goodness of the Creation argues for 141 the existence and goodness of the Creator; and yet the very materiality of the Creation cornes between us and God. ~hus creation plays a paradoxical role, both revealing ~odto us, and strictly limiting that revelation. The affirmation of the first line of the poem ("We see the glories of the earthm) is countered by the negation of the second ("But not the hand that wrought them allu). The creation which reveals God to us also separates Him from us. This is, £or Hopkins, a most potent paradox, and one with ample biblical warrant; for while it is true that "The heavens declare the glory of Cod; and the firmament sheweth his handiwork" (Ps.19:1), it is also true, as God says through Isaiah, that 'las the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and rny thoughts than your thoughts" (1s. 55:8). Hopkins' ambivalence towards nature, his love for the creation as well as his suspicion of it, squares precisely with Troeltschts description of the religious life as "an ellipse with two foc use^.^ Hopkins, like Troeltsch, holds to "a conception of the world both optimistic and pessimistic.ll His poetry testifies to both "a severe antagonism, and a close interior union, between the world and Godu (Troelsch 200). John Henry Newman has described the paradoxical nature of religious knowledge in quite precise terms. He says: A revelation is religious doctrine viewed on its illurninated side; a Mystery is the selfsame doctrine 142 viewed on the side unilluminated. Thus Religious Truth is neither light nor darkness, but both t~gether.~~ Hopkinst early poetry speaks to us of the perennial tension within the Christian faith between Our knowledge of God and Our ignorance of Him, between divine truth and our faulty

human perception O£ that truth. The disjunction between the human and divine realms was not solely, or even primarily, a philosophical problem for Hopkins; but rather it bodied forth a profound moral

dilemma. As Robert Martin describes it: To put too much love into the perception of one flower or into the feeling for one friend was to neglect man's primary duty of love of God; his love of the specific would probably be antagonistic to

his devotion to the Divine. (Martin 206) Simply put, Hopkins worried that his love for nature was idolatrous, distracting him from the primary task of loving God. And yet (we seem to hear the poet arguing), although bid to love God before al1 else, how can we know Him except at one remove, through his creation? This cleavage between the material and spiritual realms split Hopkins' psyche in half. Hopkins, Robert Martin says, "was both in love with the phenomenal world and aflame with fear of it" (Martin 77) .

78 JohnHenryNewman, Tract73 (1835), citedbyJohnCoulson in Relision and Tmaqination (126). 143

While Hopkinsf early poetry laments how the creation separates him from God, his Journals celebrate the opposite and complementary aspect of nature: its revelation. It can be said with irony and accuracy that Hopkins' early Journals are more poetic than his early poetry. Not only do his

Journais reveal more originality in thought, but they are often written with more graceful rhythms, and are much more sensitive to the sound of words. An 1866 entry, written ostensibly to describe trees, reveals the poet undeniably practising the sounds and rhythms of his future poetry. He writes : Blunt buds of the ash. Pencil buds of the beech.

Lobes of the trees. Cups of the eyes. Gathering back the lightly hinged eyelids. (W.H.Gardner 91)

The clipped syntax of such language, its percussive rhythms and chiming consonants, betray an incipient I1sprung rhythm." It is significant that this poetic development happens in Hopkins' prose, when, freed £rom the constraints of conventional poetic forms, he simply fits words to the external natural world. Hopkins becomes a strikingly original poet precisely because he is concerned with origins. He seems at times to retain an elemental innocence in relation to the natural world. Like Adam waking up on the first day of creation, Hopkins both accepts and questions everything. One reads, at first with surprise, and then with growing admiration, his notebooks filled with page-long 144 descriptions of the changing colours of sunsets, the sound and light of thunderstorms, the shifting patterns made by the wind blowing through long grass. He describes the forms of nature as if determined to see, beyond their mere appearances, the sources of their beauty. The Journal entries progress, in a characteristic pattern, from general to very specific observations, and

£rom aesthetic to religious concerns. In early 1867, Hopkins wrote Journal entries describing the beauty of various kinds of trees. A further entry describes oak trees specifically, their leaves, and buds and boughs. Hopkins' next entry begins, 'Oaks: the organization of the tree is difficultt1I and analyzes the difficulty of this '~rganization.~This series of entries reveals Hopkins' concern, not just to recognize the beauty of an oak tree, but to understand how its particular beauty is created, and apprehended. A week later he exclaims, "1 have now found the law of the oak leaves" ( Out of these observations Hopkins eventually wrote an assignment for his tutor Walter Pater: "On the Origin of

Beauty: A Platonic Dialogue" (W.H. Gardner 92). It is rich in natural observations, convincing in its argument, and completely charming. This combination of observation and contemplation directly affects the nature of Hopkinst poetry. One senses in these descriptions of nature the poetfs passion for what he would cal1 "inscape.I1Although Hopkins never cleariy 145 defined the term nor used it with complete consistency,

general remarks can be safely made. An objectls inscape refers to its individual and distinct beauty, "the outward

reflection of the inner nature of a thingfl(Peters 2) . such a definition compares neatly with the definition of "sacrament" which Hopkins would have learned £rom his Anglican catechism: "the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.l17' Inscape bears an innately sacramental quality. In Hopkins' use of the term, "inscapeH is always beautiful, with a beauty that is both natural and supernatural, sençual and religious. He wrote in his

Journal: "1 do not think 1 have ever seen anything more

beautiful than the bluebell I have been looking at. 1 know the beauty of our Lord through itu (Notebooks 133). Although captivated by the inscapes of the natural world, what puzzles Hopkins above al1 is his own nature and existence: he is obviously part of the natural order created by God, and yet he is a thinking, self-conscious part. If Hopkins wonders how the beauty of God is manifest in a bluebell, he wonders also how his own human nature reveals Godls nature. Hopkins1 individual existence, and his participation in the existing world, is to him a perennially new Sact, which he both affirms and questions again and again. Although in his lifetime such self-concern was

79 IlThe Catechism,l1 The Book of Cornmon Praver (1662) revised 1962 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1962) 550. 146 occasionally mistaken for arrogance, one comes to think of it, in Hopkins' case, as the mark of a determined innocence: he seerns to ask "Who am I?" again and again. Neither the witness of Hopkins' Journal, emphasizing the revelation of God through nature, nor the witness of his poetry, emphasizing the absolute transcendence of God, is sufficient in itself; but together they grant us a composite view of his mind. Like Jacob in his early days, the young Hopkins seems to exist in a kind of suspension: both men recognise the promise of a full and vital communion with God, yet they do not know that communion in any palpable and mani£est way. Hopkinsf early life, like Jacob's, is a wrestling between the "already givenu promise of covenant, and the "not yet fulfilledu reality of that covenant. For Hopkins wanted the grace of God made as unmistakably present: in his daily life as it was in nature. To use his own fluid terminology, Hopkins wanted Christ to be 5nscapedU within himself, and himself to be uinscapedllwithin Christ. Such, it may be argued, is the condition of every Christian seeking to perfect the "imitation of Christ"; yet Hopkins is remarkable both for his persistence in pursuing his "net yet f~lfilled~~communion with God, and for the testimony he has left of that pursuit. Alternating unhappily between transcendent and immanent realitie~,'~Godin Heavenu and "man on Earthu in Buber's terms, ~opkinssought "the ellipse" which would coordinate and sustain both realities. 14 7 Hopkins did not need to be told that he must love both his Creator and the Creation, and that these loves are not mutually exclusive. What he did need, and desperately, was a structure of thought, a theology, which would integrate these loves. It seems appropriate that the first poem which suggests the solution of Hopkins' struggle is among his most accomplished early poems. In "The Half-way HouseutHopkins achieves a flexible, not slavish, iambic pentameter. The poem is graced further by an insistent, prayerful repetition of the word "Love.

The Half-way House

Love 1 was shewn upon the mountain-side And bid to catch Him ere the drop of day.

See, Love, 1 creep and thou on wings dost ride: Love, it is evening now and thou away; Love, it grows darker here and thou art above; Love, corne down to me if thy name be Love. My national old Egyptian reed gave way; 1 took of vine a cross-barred rod or rood. Then next 1 hungered: Love when here, they Say, Or once or never took Love's proper food;

But 1 must yield the chase, or rest and eat.- Peace and food cheered me whewe four rough ways meet. 148 Hear yet my paradox: Love, when al1 is given,

To see thee 1 must see thee, to love, love; 1 must ofertake thee at once and under heaven

~f 1 shall overtake thee at last above. You have your wish; enter these walls, one said: He is with you in the breaking of the bread.

The title of the poem "The Half-way Houseu is perhaps the clearest expression of Hopkins' spiritual dilemma: the poet is neither content with the revelation of God through nature, nor united with God directly, but finds hirnself suspended uhalfwayllbetween the promise and the fulfilment. In the opening stanza the narrator laments the inaccessibility of spiritual fulfilment. "Love," the love of God, is characterised as an elusive bird which "on wings dost rideH beyond the narratorts reach. The stanza ends with the declaration that, since the narrator cannot ascend to %ovetu %oveu must descend to him. In the second stanza Hopkins states his dissatisfaction with the "broken reedM of the Anglican Church in which he was raised. Hopkins could not accept the Via Media, the "middle roadN of Anglicanism, which seemed to him, and to many at that tirne, an inconsistent compromise between a fully sacramental Roman Catholic faith and the liberal Protestantism of his time. The stanza ends with Hopkins 149 af firming the centrality of %ovet s proper food," the bread and wine of the Eucharist. In the final stanza Hopkins affirms clearly both the paradox under which he has been suffering, and its solution: if the materiality of the created world hides the Creator £rom us, then the Creator himself must corne down and reveal himself materially in that 'creation. The narrator can "overtakeU God "at once and under heavenu only if God Eirst comes dom to him. With the promise of just this communion, the poem ends: You have your wish; enter these walls, one said: He is with you in the breaking of the bread. The speaker of these consoling words was, for Hopkins, the Roman Catholic Church. Of course al1 Christians affirm that, in the Incarnation of Christ, God has descended into the creation; and this belief was central to Hopkins' faith and poetry. Equally, al1 Christians affirm that God is always present with us in the Holy Spirit. For Hopkins, though, and for many in his time, the celebration of the Eucharist, the mani£estation of Christ in bread and wine, was of particular importance. In the Eucharist, the spiritual mystery of the Incarnation is encountered physically: the body of Christ is touched, and tasted, and swallowed. The tension between the material and spiritual realms is fully acknowledged; and then it is transcended. 150 Hopkins gravitated naturally to a conception of the Eucharist which deiined the presence of Christ in the Eucharist in the boldest possible terms: transubstantiation. In this theology, the bread and wine of the Eucharist are not considered just a memorial to the passion of Christ, but as "the complete change of the substance of bread and wine into the substance of Christ's body and blood."" Although the two glaccidents"of creation, the bread and wine, remain, they constitute the "substanceH of Christ, his body and b10od.~' Thus, within the Eucharist, the creation not only contains the Creator, but becomes the Creator. The rift between creation and Creator, a rift which Hopkins felt within himself, is healed. For Hopkins, the doctrine of the Real Presence was not an abstruse doctrinal concern, but a living reality which was to sustain his spirituality and his poetry. Just after his forma1 conversion to Roman Catholicism, Hopkins wrote a letter to his father whaich reveals how passionately he held to this doctrine: the least fragment of the consecrated elements in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar is the whole Body of Christ born of the Blessed Virgin, before which the whole host of saints and angels as it lies on the

80 llTransubstantiation,loPocket Catholic Dictionan, ed. John A. Hardon, S.J. (Toronto: Doubleday, 1985).

a 1 l"Accidents,"Pocket Catholic Dictionarv. 151 altar trembles with adoration. This belief once got

is the life of the sou1 and when 1 doubted it 1 shd.

become an atheist the next day. (Further Letters 92) In a letter to his friend E.H. Coleridge, grandson of the famous poet, Hopkins writes that, whereas a religion without the doctrine of the Real Presence !lis sombre, dangerous, and illogicaltUa religion with this doctrine becomes I1loveablen (Further Letters 17). Shortly after his conversion to Roman Catholicism, Hopkins made two decisions which effectively ended the first period of his life: he resolved to become a Roman Catholic priest, and, in what his Journal refers to as IlThe Slaughter of the Innocents," he burned al1 his poems. In doing so, Hopkins was emulating one of his heroes, the fifteenth- century preacher Savonarola, who consigned to his Ifbonfire of the vanitiesI1 al1 earthly things which were thought to impede a soulls hunger for heaven. After lighting his om bonfire, Hopkins wrote in his diary, "by Godts grace 1 resolved to give up al1 beauty until 1 had His leave for itI1

(Journal Nov. 6, 1865). If such an act seems senseless to us today, it seemed also thus to Hopkins1 friends. To R.W. Dixon, Hopkins proclaimed: vocation sets before me an ideal so high. that no higher can be found.I1 Dixon, himself an Anglican priest and a good poet, protested, 'Surely one vocation cannot destroy another' (The Correspondence 88, 90). Dixonts example recalls for us the tradition within English Literature of men who fully reconciled the dual vocations of priest and poet, John Donne and George Herbert being the most obvious examples. Yet Hopkinsf temperament was such that he could not allow himself an unqualified "yestlto the vocation of a priest, without balancing that with an unqualified to the vocation of poetry. One senses that Hopkins needed a certain ballast of sorrow in his life, a consciousness of pleasures forgone, to keep his religious aspirations steady. Fortunately most of Hopkins' early poems survived the bonfire of his vanities: some he had copied and pasted in notebooks which he did not have at Oxford, while others were included in letters to friends. Yet the survival of these poems does not diminish the significance of Hopkins' gesture. By destroying his early poetry, in gesture if not in fact, Hopkins was formally rejecting the IvBattlingwith GodI1 which characterised his early poetry. Like Jacob, Hopkins ended the first part of his life by forfeiting the cornforts and advantages he had grown up with, and entering into a kind of exile. Robert Martin has written that "In 1866 a man was shaken loose from his position in the rigid English social structure if he became a Catholicu (Martin 121), and Hopkinsf conversion certainly cost him many friendships and isolated him from the mainstream of ~nglishsociety. At Oxford, Hopkins had earned 153 a I1Double First," a degree so distinguished that he would certainly have been elected to a Fellowship in an Oxford College, had he wished. If, instead, he had chosen to becorne an Anglican Priest, Hopkins would certainly, with his Oxford background, have achieved "the comfortable social position of the higher Anglican c1ergyl1 (Martin 157). Yet as a Catholic, Hopkins was eligible for neither. Like Jacob, Hopkins was exiled Erom his home and friends and family - his past, in short - and had to make his way into what must have seemed a foreign country. Indeed, like Jacob, Hopkins was a bit of a wanderer for the rest of his life. He took much of his Jesuit training in Wales. As an ordained priest, Hopkins was moved often and widely within Britain. He worked in parishes in London, Oxford and Liverpool, before eventually ending up in Dublin, a city he hated. Hopkins longed for a permanent appointment somewhere in England, but as he wrote to Bridges about the Jesuit order, "permanence with us is ginger-bread permanence; cobweb, soapsud, and frost-feather permanencen (Letters 55) . Hopkins was unlikely, perhaps, to find himself completely at home anywhere this side of Heaven; and yet if his temporal life was impermanent and transitory, his spiritual life was becoming more solidly grounded. During the summer O£ 1872, Hopkins discovered the work of the medieval theologian John Duns Scotus, whose theology of the 154 Incarnation was to become £or him a great solace and strength. Scotus became what Hopkins must have longed for, but never expected to find: a kindred spirit, an ally. While fully affirming the redemptive role of Christ's death, His atonement for the sins of humankind, Scotus believed that the prime purpose of Christ's life and death and resurrection was as revelation, rather than redemption. Scotus held that the Incarnation of Christ would have occurred even if humankind had never suffered a Fall. Hopkins summarized this doctrine by saying:

The love of the Son for the Father leads him to take a created nature and in that to offer him sacrifice. The sacrifice might have been unbloody; by the Fa11 it became a bloody one. (Sermons 257) The prime purpose of the Incarnation, Scotus argued, was to manifest God physically to humankind, to reveal God, through Christ, in a specific tirne and place of human history; in short, Ittomake God available to the human sensesu (Martin

207). In his theology of whaecceitasu,or Vhis-ness," Scotus extends this understanding of the Incarnation even further, arguing that al1 created things serve as a revelation of God. Just as Christ is present in the Incarnation, and just as the Incarnate Christ is present in the Eucharist, so Christ is present, Scotus argues, in each particular thing He created. In Scotus' theology, everything in nature serves as a unique and distinctive revelation of Christ." Certainly Hopkins had long felt this sacramental quality of nature. One recalls the simple and passionate

judgement Hopkins had rendered years before: "1 do not think

1 have ever seen anything more beautiful than the bluebell I

have been looking at. 1 know the beauty of Our Lord through

it1I (Notebooks 133). Scotust theology, founded on the Incarnation of Christ, but extended to al1 individual created things, fully corroborated Hopkinst ideas of inscape. For Hopkins, so easily distressed by the apparent divorce between physical and spiritual worlds, Scotus' theology came as a great encouragement. Hopkins was loflush with a new stroke of enthusiasm." "It may corne to nothing or it may be a mercy from God,I1 he writes in his Journal, "But just then when I took in any inscape of the sky or sea I thought of Scotus1I (Journal July 19, 1872) . Indeed nature, understood through Scotist theology, was to become for Hopkins what Bethe1 was for Jacob: Ilthe House of God.I1 Nature became Hopkins' ladder between Heaven and Earth, the link between the material, created world and the Creator. Scotus renewed Hopkinst faith in the sacramentality of nature, which in turn renewed his faith in poetry; and in 1876, after a ten-year silence, Hopkins wrote "The Wreck of

82 John Pick, Gerard Manlev Hopkins: Priest and Poet (Toronto: Oxford UP, 1966) 33-7. 156 the Deutschland." Easily Hopkinst most complex and ambitious poem, "The Wreck of the Deutschland1I is written out of, and seeks to transcend, the same religious paradoxes which compel his earlier poetry:

Thou mastering me God! giver of breath and bread; World's strand, sway of the sea; Lord of living and dead; Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me f lesh, And a£ ter it almost unmade, what with dread, Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh? Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.

"The Wreck of the Deutschlandv opens with nothing less than a description of the presence of God - and not an abstract or obscure metaphysical description, but a fearfully tactile one. If, in Hopkins' earlier poetry, God seemed alien and remote, ensconced in "a brazen heaven,I1 in "The Deutschlandu He seems frighteningly immediate. The presence of the Creator seems, paradoxically, a destructive as well as a creative force, for the narrator becomes acutely aware of the terrible contingency of his own physical life. In the narrator's creaturely awe and fear, we recall Jacob's cry at Bethe1 when he too felt the terrible immediacy of God: 157 Jacob woke £rom his sleep and said, "Truly the Lord

is in this place, and 1 did not know it." Then he was afraid and said, "How fearsome is this place!

(Genesis 28 : 16-17] The opening stanzas of IfThe Deutschland" are "terrible" in the same way the "terrible sonnetsM are. They present, with biblical immediacy, "a palpable Godfl (Price 1). In the third stanza, the early climax of the poem, the narrator, like Jacob, gazes upon the face of God and seems not to know Him:

The frown of his face Before me, the hurtle of hell Behind, where, where was a, where was a place?

1 whirled out wings that spell And fled with a fling of the heart to the heart of the Host . My heart, but you were dovewinged, 1 can tell,

Carrier-witted, 1 am bold to boast, To flash £rom the flame to the flame then, tower £rom the grace to the grace.

There is fear, undeniably, in such an encounter, arising from the narratorts extreme vulnerability; and yet such fear is not incommensurable with love, The power of God which inspires such fear is a creative as well as destructive power. Creation and destruction are themselves but predicates of Godfs omnipotence. Fear, then, is not a moral reaction to the nature of God, but rather the narratorfs acknowledgement of his creatureliness. If he knows anything about this confrontation, it is that he is fully known. His limitations have been rneasured and overwhelmed. From the fear of God, "the frown of his face," the narrator escapes "with a fling of the hearttlto the love of God, "the heart of the Host.ll The narrator escapes £rom the terrifying vitality of God to the peace of God, as bodied forth in the stillness of the Eucharist. Although rendered in language far more powerful than in his earlier poetry, the resolution achieved in this passage is, at least doctrinally, equivalent to the resolution achieved in "The Half-way House1I: "He is with you in the breaking of the bread. l1 In IlThe Wreck O£ the DeutschlandI1 Hopkins reveals the reality of God in two complementary ways: first, in the tension between Our frai1 humanity and the supernatural vitality of God; and second, in the reconciliation of that tension within the Eucharist, wherein spirit and flesh repose in the same substance. While the first revelation inspires fear, and the second peace, they speak of the same reality. In IlThe Wreck of the Deutschlandn God is bodied forth as the reconciliation of such paradoxical truths: fear and peace, creation and destruction. IlThou art lightning and 159 love,' Hopkins says of God, '1 found it, a winter and warmU1

( lfDeutschlandll70 ) . The paradoxes of this creative, destructive God, and his relentless energy, seem bodied forth by the unpredictable pulse of llsprungrhythm." This new rhythm destroys at a stroke both the conventional iambic meters and the predictable end-stops of Hopkins early poetry. For the first time in his career, the tension in Hopkinsf thought speaks through the syntax of the poetry. llSprung rhythm1I seems to manifest truly the "warfare of my lips in truthI1 which Hopkins proclaimed so calmly and abstractly in the early poem "My prayers."

Such is only the introduction to "The Wreck of the Deutschland," a poem which outwardly concerns the sinking of a German ship, The Deutschland, off the Coast of England in

1877. Hopkins juxtaposes his persona1 spiritual struggles with the struggle of the ship, its crew and passengers, and with the suffering of Christ upon the cross. The struggle with God which opens the poem is clearly paralleled by the struggle of the ship's passengers as they succumb to the storm: They fought with Godfs cold - And they could not, and fell to the deck (Crushed them) or water (and drowned them) or rolled

With the searomp over the wreck. (I1Deutschlandt1129-32) ït seems unimaginable that such a struggle could allow even a moment of peace, or that the poem which describes it could achieve a consolation of any kind. Yet just as Hopkins achieves resolution in the first part of the poem by focusing on the Eucharist, so he finds peace in the midst of the storm by focusing upon one of the £ive Franciscan nuns on board. Survivors of the shipwreck reported a woman who

Igkept exclaiming, in a voice heard by those in the rigging above the roar of the storm, 'My God, my God, make haste, make hasteuf (Poetical Works 335). In the nun's cry for Godls help, Hopkins recognises both the reality of the woman's suffering, and a heroic affirmation of faith. In the midst of her crisis and almost certain death, the nun ca1l.s out for her saviour, a saviour whom Hopkins also recognizes as his own: Sister, a sister calling / A master, her master and mine!" ("DeutschlandH 145-46). Hopkins recognizes in the nunts heroic faith a pattern for his own faith. He says of her: Ah! there was a heart right There was a single eye! Read the unshapeable shock night And knew the who and the why. (vlDeutschlandfl225-228) With 'la heart right" and "a single eye," the nun seeks and finds the presence of God, even in the midst of terror. God is "the who and the why" of every situation, however 161 terrible. The nunfs heroism prompts Hopkins to ask, "is the shipwrack then a harvest, does tempest carry the grain for thee?I1 (lfDeutschland"248) . With the courage borne of such faith, the poem proclaims that every tragedy can be transcended. In "The Wreck of the DeutschlandooHopkins has created the most violent and paradoxical poem he could write; and then argues that, out of those tensions and paradoxes, peace can be found through faith in Christ. A shipwreck can indeed bring a harvest. Within the poem Hopkins encounters and then transcends the contradictions which had so troubled him in his earlier poetry. The I1Battlingwith Godtlwhich Hopkins had pronounced with such regret in an earlier poem, he now proclaims with conviction and gratitude.

After the difficult victory of writing "The Deuts~hland,~~poetry came readily to Hopkins, almost al1 of it in his new Itsprung rhythm,I1 and al1 of it written with the "heart rightl1 and the Ifsingle eyeIt of his heroic nun. Indeed the praise of God became the Ilsingle eye" with which Hopkins was to interpret his world. As a Postulant in the Society of Jesus, Hopkins found expressed in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola an ideal which was to sustain the great nature poems of his maturity, and against which the anguished poems of his last years achieve their full meaning. The opening 'Principle or FoundationH of the Exercises begins: 162 Man was created to praise, reverence and serve God

Our Lord, and by doing so to Save his soul. And the

other things on the face of the earth were created

for man's sake and to help him in the carrying out

of the end for which he was created. 83

These are, of course, only the opening words of Loyolats

document, but it is fair to Say that this small excerpt, and

even perhaps the first five words, proclaim the ideal to

which Hopkins aspired in his mature poetry. Hopkins found

liberty in the bold, unequivocal terms in which the

"Foundation" affirms the purpose of human life: "Man was

created to praise.' The phrase recurs through his persona1

papers, and seems to have served Hopkins as a kind of touchstone, a principle in which he could trust absolutely.

During a retreat in 1881, Hopkins wrote a meditation on

the ItFoundation" in which he improvises ecstatically on the

theme "Man was created to Praise" (Sermons 238). Hopkins

performs ,variations on a theme by Loyolat; for not only

does God create,

But MEN OF GENIUS ARE SAID TO CREATE, a painting, a

poem, a tale, a tune, a policy; not indeed the colours and the canvas, not the words or notes, but the design, the character, the air, the plan. How then? - from

83 Ignatius Loyola, IlThe First Principle and Foundation, trans. Christopher Devlin, The Sermons 122. 163 themselves, £rom their own minds. And they themselves, their minds and all, are creatures of God. In commenting on the creations of "men of geniusH Hopkins is undoubtedly thinking O£ himself. Yet he speaks not of himself, but praises God for having created human beings, that they might in turn have the privilege of creating works which praise Him. Hopkins celebrates the reciprocity between Creator and creature, and indulges, perhaps, in the cheerful confusion which attends such a relationship; for it is a relationship always in motion: Godts creatures fulfi.1 themselves only by the constant surrender of their selves, and al1 their gi£ts, to their Creator. This vocation of praise Hopkins considers a uniquely human privilege: The Sun and the stars shining glorify God. They stand

where he placed them, they move where he bid them. 'The heavens declare the glory of Godl. They glorify God, but they do not know it . The birds sing to him, the thunder speaks of his terror, the lion is like his strength, the sea is like his goodness, the honey like his sweetness; they make him known, they tell of him, they give him glory, but they do not know they do.

i23 9

If creatures "glorify God, but they do not know it," yet Hopkins knows it, and as a poet he accepts t.he celebration 164 of the inscapes of the world as his uniquely human role in creation : But AMIDST THEM ALL IS MAN ... man can know God, can mean to give him glory. This then was why he was made, to give God glory and to mean to give it; to praise God freely, willingly to reverence him, gladly to serve him. Man was made to give, and mean to give, God glory. (239) And finally, as if he can contain himself no longer, Hopkins exults I1I WAS MADE FOR THIS, each one of us was made for this. The phrase "Man was created to Praise," free of paradox or compromise, and as self-su££icient as a mathematical equation, seems to have struck Hopkins as an irresistible persona1 truth: Hopkins was created to praise. The generosity of the conception, allowing both self-identity and self-expression, appealed to his deepest impulses: to praise the beauty of the natural world, and to praise God through that beauty. Thus Hopkins Eound himself authorized to do what he had done al1 his life, and yet had felt strangely guilty for doing: writing poetry. III WAS MADE FOR

THIS,If he exclaims. Beginning with "God's Grandeur" in 1877 and ending perhaps with "Ribblesda1en in 1882, Hopkins wrote his most celebrated poems, celebrating the integration of the natural and spiritual worlds. Al1 readers familiar with Hopkins' 165 poems will immediately think of numerous examples, one of which will serve: Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things - For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles ail in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finchest wings; Landscape plotted and pieced - fold, fallow and plough;

And al1 trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

Al1 things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, Sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.

"Pied Beauty" could not be simpler in conception. The poem opens with the directive I1Glorybe to God for dappled things.' It then offers a small catalogue of creation, an apparently random sampling of unique, distinctive things, both natural and man-made, which fulfil that directive, which reveal Godts glory. The second part of the poemm offers another catalogue - though of attributes, not of things - celebrating the variety of creation. Al1 created things, the poem argues, however contrary and confusing in themselves , however kounter, original, spare, strange , " 166 find their purpose in that command which Hopkins took so to heart, and with which the poem ends : IlPraise him. A poem as joyous and con£ident as "Pied Beauty1I does not need the imprimatur of a systematic theology, yet it is worth pointing out how readily the poem fulfils Duns Scotusl view of the sacramentality of creation. For Scotus and for Hopkins, God is revealed not only through the Incarnation, in the unique person of Christ, but also through each unique thing that Christ has created. Everything in nature reveals Christ, and praises him. Though Hopkins could never have preached such a doctrine as a priest, as a poet he treats the natural world very much as if it were unfallen, as if the harmony of the Garden of Eden had never been broken. When Hopkins writes in "GodfsGrandeur" that "The world is charged with the grandeur of God,I1 he is speaking quite literally. The natural, created world bears within itself the sustaining energy of the Creator. Speaking sacramentally, we might Say that the "substance" of Christ, the second person of the

Trinity, can be found within the ltaccidentsllof creation - the fields and clouds and rocks and plants - just as they are within the bread and wine of the Eucharist. Through Duns Scotus, Hopkins came to understand nature as a sacramental reality. Nature became his Bethel, his "house of God." In Loyola's pronouncement that "Man was created to praise,' Hopkins found an elegant and orderly conception of hirnself as a creature of God, as a priest, and as a poet. Hopkins would have agreed with George Herbert that God has made humanity the "SecretaryI1of his praise (Herbert, I1Providence").There seems nothing in Hopkinst theology of praise, nor in the mature poetry which it inspires, which asks to be justified or developed. Indeed, in Hopkins' nature poetry, and in his conception O£ himself as a poet, we find restored the original conception of the word "poetl1 - taken £rom the Greek I1Poietesf1meaning "one who makesI1 or "a maker.llM Thus man is a maker, who is himself made in the image of God, who is the Maker of all. As a poet, Hopkins clairned to participate with God in the further creation of the world. Not even Wordsworth, the greatest English prophet of nature, and a poet deeply loved by Hopkins, had so elegant or flexible a conception of the religious value of creation. Both Hopkinst poetry and his life, we feel, should end thus, having fully resolved the spiritual and artistic problems of his early poetry, and glorying in the giving of praise to God. But of course it was not to be. The spiritual crisis revealed in the "terrible sonnetsw is strangely foreshadowed in notes which Hopkins wrote

during his retreat of 1884. As is the custom in Jesuit retreats, Hopkins spent the first day contemplating Loyola's

" Sir Philip Sidney, An Apolocrv for Poetry, ed. Charles Kaplan, Criticism: The Maior Statements (New York: St .Martints, 1975) 113. 168 Spiritual Exercises, particularly its opening lines. Unlike his previous meditations, however, the surviving notes £rom 1884 are disjointed and wandering. Unable to expound on the theme "Man was created to praise,I1 Hopkins simply wrote the phrase in his notebooks again and again, as if seeking reassurance. And then, in the words of the editor Humphrey

House : In the last sentences he stopped on the word createdt and wrote it again, twice the size, in a huge sprawling, childlike hand; crossed it out, began again

'CRr still bigger; crossed that out too, and in the

same hand wrote ' CREAt. That was in Dublin, August or

September 1884. 8s If it is impossible to know what Hopkins meant by such writing, it is impossible also not to wonder. The word "createdolwas the one word which, beyond al1 others, signified the poetts intimate dependency on God, and granted him an active role in Godts creation. Hopkins praised because he was "createdH to praise, and created poetry which, in some small measure, reciprocates God's creation of him. Yet for some reason, during his retreat in 1884, Hopkins found himself incapable of even writing the word "created" except in grotesque and abbreviated caricature. The journal entry suggests Hopkins' unavailing struggle to believe in the covenant of praise he felt he had established

Humphrey House, "Notes on Sermons,l1Sermons 417. with God. The "terrible sonnetsn which Hopkins was shortly to write signal his return to the realm of paradox, to the

llBattling with Gad" which he thought he had finally overcome . Chapter Six The Poet at Penuel

What we cal1 the beginning is often the end ~ndto make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. T.S. Eliot, "Little Giddingn

In material terms, Jacob's exile in Padan-Aram was easily the most successful period of his life. Through hard work and luck and the grace of God, he had acquired two wives, many servants, eleven sons, and great wealth. Jacob's family and material wealth would seem to be the proper and inevitable conclusion O£ his covenant with God. The prosperous land of Jacob's exile, much more than the land which he had fled in fear and poverty twenty years earlier, seemed like the promised land of biblical refrain, "a land flowing with milk and honeyu (Ex. 3:8). Indeed, Jacob had probably come to think of Padan-Aram not as a land of exile at all, but simply as home. Jacob would likely have thought that he could best safeguard his covenant with God by carefully maintaining the family and wealth which covenant with God had granted him. In opposition to this human logic, however, stands the paradoxical logic of covenant with God, a logic which, implicit through the Hebrew scriptures, finds its most explicit expression in the New Testament: 171 Except a corn of wheat fa11 into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but i£ it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep

t. (John 12:24-25) Under this divine paradox, Jacob must give away what he wishes to retain. He will risk his family and wealth and al1 the benefits of the covenant only if he tries to keep them safe from God. It is only at the very beginning of the Bible, in the unfallen Garden of Eden, that the material and spiritual worlds exist together without tension and without paradox. The fallen, paradoxical world that Jacob inhabits is to serve him as a place, not of fulfilment, but of struggle and redemption. The material success God has granted to Jacob is no doubt a proper and necessary stage in the covenant which is developing between them, but it is only a stage. Jacob is to fulfil his covenant with God, not by proving himself self-sufficient in his material wealth, but by transcending a material conception of his covenant with God. The author of Genesis tells us little of Jacob's ambitions for himself; and even Godfs intentions for His covenant with Jacob are not always evident. The biblical account is, as Erich Auerbach claims, mysterious and "fraught with backgroundv (15). In its biblical context, however, it would seem that the great defect of Jacob's 172 exile may simply have been that it was too successful. Being surrounded on al1 sides by the prosperous family and wealth which covenant had given him, perhaps Jacob thought that this was al1 he might ever know of God. More dangerously, perhaps he began to think that this was al1 he needed to know of God. Whatever the reason, at the height of Jacob's prosperous exile, God tells hirn to leave: IfThe Lord said to Jacob, 'Go back to the land of your fathers and to your kindred. I will be with you"' (Gen.31:3). Jacob can be forgiven if he is confused by Godls paradoxical position: that his future lies in his past; that the way forward is the way back; that the covenant must be fulfilled by returning to the difficult, contrary land he had fled twenty years before. And yet Jacob goes. He brings his family and wealth with him, of course, but by forcing them to leave Padan-Aram, he puts them at great risk. And at Penuel he does more: Jacob separates himself completely from his family and wealth, sending them ahead O£ him into the promised land, while he returns, alone and unarmed, across the river. If it seems an unlikely and dizzying leap to move from the life of Jacob to that of Hopkins, yet the same paradoxical logic applies to both: for the poet as for the shepherd, the way forward was the way back. Succeçs was to come, paradoxically, by giving up success, and by journeying back to an impoverished and difficult country long since 173 abandoned. Hopkins' "terrible sonnets' signal the return of his poetry to the difficulties and paradoxes he thought he had overcome: the 'Battling with God" which, stubbornly, rernains a form of prayer. We know as little about Hopkinst motives in writing the "terrible sonnetsIl as we do of Jacob's motives for leaving his comfortable exile. This crisis which led Hopkins to write the "terrible sonnetsu - indeed, the crisis which is the "terrible sonnetsH - has occasioned many contradictory explanations. The witness of the poems, however, and Hopkins' declaration that they came as "inspirations unbidden," suggest that the poet, like Jacob, was simply responding to the will of God. "Go back to the land of your fathers and to your kindred. 1 will be with youv (Gen.31:3). And the reason for such an injunction may indeed be the same for Hopkins as it was for Jacob: perhaps Hopkins abandoned the successful poetic of his middle period precisely because it was too successful. Hopkins aspired in his nature poetry to make the God of Creation as immediate and as comprehensible as creation itself, and in many ways he succeeded. Through the sacramental theologies of the Roman Catholic Church, the theologies of Duns Scotus and Ignatius Loyola in particular, Hopkins had indeed provided himself with an immediate, certain and comprehensible God. 174 It is in this success that his failure lay; for as Hopkinst early poetry and Journals and letters argue, God can never be made truly comprehensible. We recognize God in His mystery, in his ~incomprehensiblecertaintytu or not at all. And should we fashion for ourselves a comprehensible God, we forfeit the creaturely fear and love and awe inspired in us by the recognition of God's transcendence. Hopkins perhaps felt this loss in his poetry. By having his religious perceptions so thoroughly mediated through the natural world, perhaps Hopkins felt his poetry to be withdrawn from the supernatuxal, the "reserve of truth beyond what the mind reaches, and still feels to be beyond.It To put the paradox differently, the very self- sufficiency of Hopkinst sacramental poetic may have rendered it without need of God. Instead of the ItThoumastering me / GodH who is celebrated and feared in "The Wreck of the Deutschlandt1Ithe God of HopkinsJ nature poems does seem, at times, not llmastering,l1 but mastered. Within the poetry, God has become an attribute of the natural world, rather than its Creator. He has become I1inscapenand so has been diminished. All that we say about Hopkinst motives, and the meaning of his "terrible sonnetsJttmust be pronounced under an overarching "perhaps." In the words of Helen Gardner, these are ltquestionsto which clear, simple and universally satisfying answersu simply cannot be given (Gardner 13). It seems reasonable, however, to explain the complexities of his last poems, not by questioning the integrity of the poet, but by affirming the paradoxical quality of the faith which inspires and sustains the poetry. Martin Buber, whose existential theology comprehends so readily the paradoxes of Hopkins' early poetry, may also tell us much about the limitations of Hopkins' middle poetry. Buber warns us that he who thus begins to provide himself with a comprehensible God who is made thus and not otherwise, runs the risk of having to despair of him in the matter-of-factness of life, or of falling into inner

£alsehood. (Buber 22) Just as Hopkins had defined a religious mystery as an nincomprehensible certainty," so Buber sees religious faith as a dialectic between our knowledge of God and Our ignorance of Him. The more we truly understand who God is, Buber argues, the more we realize that we can never understand Him. The more we know about God, the greater His mystery becomes. This paradoxical relation between Our knowledge of God and Our ignorance of Him Buber refers to as "the fear of

Godu (Buber 21). "The fear of God," he states, "is the dark gate through which man must pass if he is to enter into the love of Godw (Buber 22). And yet, Buber warns prophetically, the "fear of God is just a gate; it is not a house in which 176 one can comfortably settle dom. Religious f aith, Buber argues, can never achieve a permanent or static form, ~t iç rather a continuous, active encounter with mystery. To be faithful, we must continually enter and re-enter "the dark gateu of faith. We must make ourselves vulnerable to the creaturely Vear of Godu over and over again, In the "terrible sonnetsu Hopkins perforrns this movement of faith. Withdrawing £rom the sacramental poetic of his nature poetry which emphasized the certainty of God, he re-enters "the dark gateI1 of the fear of God in order to

affirm the incomprehensible nature of God. In this way, Hopkins1 last poems serve balance and complernent his sacramental nature poetry. In Hopkins' conception, as in Buber's, £aith is a performance of paradox: a continual dialectic between Our certainty of God's existence and nature, and Our recognition that God is yet incomprehensible. Hopkinst poetry, from first to last, demonstrates this paradox. From the incomprehensible "Battling with Godu of Hopkinst earliest poetry, to the sacramental certainty of his nature poetry, and returning

again in the "terrible sonnetsw to the "wrestling with (my God!) my Gad," al1 of Hopkins' poetry performs the dialectic movement of faith between certainty and incomprehensibility. With the "terrible sonnetsIl Hopkins enters "the dark gaten of "the fear of Godu one more time. 177 Textual evidence suggests that "To Seem the Strangerv was both the first of the "terrible sonnetsM to be started and the last finished (Harris 71, and this parenthetical chronology seerns appropriate for the poem. "To Seem the StrangerI1 is not, in itself, a wrestling with God, but the poem presents vividly the indispensable condition which allows for the wrestling to corne: the poetts great vulnerability before God. Just as Jacob cornes to Penuel divested of his family and wealth and stands defenceless before God, so Hopkins begins the "terrible sonnetsu with a poem lamenting his estrangement £rom human society and his profound vulnerability:

To seem the stranger lies rny lot, my life among strangers. Father and mother dear, Brothers and sisters are in Christ not near And he my peace / my parting, sword and strife. England, whose honour O al1 my heart woos, wife To my creating thought, would neither hear

Me, were 1 pleading, plead nor do 1. 1 wear- Y of idle a being but by where wars are rife.

1 am in Ireland now: now 1 am at a third

Remove. Not but in al1 removes 1 can Kind love both give and get. Only what word

Wisest rny heart breeds dark heavents baffling ban Bars or hellls spell thwarts. This to hoard unheard, Heard unheeded, leaves me a lonely began. 178 The poem begins as a simple confession of the narratorts status as a stranger. First, he is estranged £rom his family: his I1Father and mother dear, / Brothers and sisters are in Christ not near." Second, as a Roman Catholic, Hopkins finds himself estranged £rom the spiritual life of

Protestant England, which "would neither hear / Me, were 1 pleading, plead nor do 1." The lithird remove" under which the narrator suffers is the simple but absolute remove of geography, which makes his separation £rom family and homeland seem decisive: "1 am in Ireland now," he says with great resignation, Wow 1 am at a third / Remove." The Irish Sea separates Hopkins from England even as the Jabbok separates Jacob £rom his family and homeland. Although the narrator acknowledges and grieves these three ~rerno~es,~they do not form the true subject of the poem. The narrator can still, as he says, "kind love both give and get." The narratorts estrangements, £rom his farnily, from the spiritual life of his countrymen, and £rom his nation, serve as analogies for what becomes the central "remove" of the poem: "dark heavenls baffling ban." The narrator finds himself a stranger to God, for whose sake he has suffered the previous three urernoves.u It is this final estrangement which he must 'hoard unheard,I1 or which, if it is heard, yet remains "unheeded" by God. AS a listranger,wthe narrator comes before us as a familiar biblical figure: he is, like Moses, 'a stranger in 179 a strange land" (Ex. 2 :22); he is the desert wanderer, a man given to prophetic visions and prophetic speech; he is the loner who, by distancing himself £rom human relationships, seeks to draw closer to God. There is a great mystery in the narrator's determined isolation, a suggestion perhaps that one must I1seem the strangerI1 in the human world in order to provoke the otherworldly strangerrlof Penuel to come and wrestle. "To Seem the StrangerN is not a poem of great spiritual wrestling; it is, rather, a poem in which the narrator prepares for a great struggle, as a soldier dispassionately appraises his courage and strength before being compelled into battle. As a poem of preparation, 'To Seem the StrangerI1 fulfils itself only in its last lines: This to hoard unheard, / Heard unheeded, leaves me a lonely began." This final phrase, "leaves me a lonely began," is one of those constructions in Hopkins' poetry which escapes definitive analysis. Yvor Winters finds it %O grotesque as to be ruinousil(Winters 149). while Virginia Ellis claims it is Ilthe one great inspiration in the poem1I (Ellis 279). Hopkins uses the word "beganI1 as a substantive; it is a verb that functions as a noun. With this construction, Ellis claims, verb that should imply both action and future possibility is doubly deadened - arrested as noun and frozen in the past tense1I (Ellis 279) . Under Iidark heavenls baffling banI1lthe poet is prevented from enjoying an active 180 role in his own life. The process of estrangement in the poem has corne to its conclusion: The narrator is destined "to seem the natural and supernatural, incomprehensible and certain, begins abruptly, without prologue:

Not, 1/11not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; Not untwist - slack they may be - these last strands of man

In me or, most weary, cry '1 can no more.' 1 can; Can something, hope, wish day corne, not choose not to be.

But ah, but Oh thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me Thy wring-wowld right foot rock? lay a lion limb against me? scan

With darksome devouring eyes my bruised bones? and fan,

O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee? Why? That rny chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.

Nay in al1 that toil, that coil, since (seems) 1 kissed the rod, Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, cheer . Cheer whorn though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, foot trod Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night , that year Of now done darkness 1 wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) rny God. "Carrion Cornfortu is a poem of reaction. There are seven negatives spoken in the first four lines of IiCarrion Cornf~rt,~~a belligerent repetition of the defiant tlNotll which begins the poem. As the poem begins, the narrator, like Jacob, does not know who or what he struggles against. He struggles only to oppose the one who opposes him, to deny the absolute denial that the stranger seems to carry with him. Thus the narrator can express certitude only with the double negative: he will "not untwist," he will not cry '1 can no more, he will I1not choose not to be. The opponent is presented initially as demonic. He brings only "carrion comfort, Despair." Equally, the narratorts determination to 'hot f east on theeli suggests his refusal to partake of a corruption of the Eucharistie feast. Yet the opponent's nature cannot be more discerned. He seems, paradoxically, more the presence of an absence, than a personality in his own right. He is perhaps the personification of 'dark heavents baffling ban," under which the narrator in "To Seem the Strangern suffers. The narratorts refusal to give in to Despair clearly recalls Jacob's refusa1 to release his opponent: "1 will not let you go until you bless me." In "Carrion Cornforttu however, the nature of the narrator's reaction is best frarned with the kind of double negative which characterizes the early part of the poern. The narrator "will not untwist.I1 He refuses to deny his su£fering. Or, in Edith Spitzer's 183 interpretation of Jacob's demand, he declares: "1 will not part from this experience unless 1 find a meaning to my sufferingI1 (Spitzer 23). In any interpretation, it is clear that the narrator proceeds on faith. He is deterrnined to wrestle good from evil, and a blessing £rom his suffering. The similarities between Jacob's wrestling and l1Carrion Cornfortu continue throughout the poem. Just as Jacob's wrestling progresses £rom a physical to a verbal contest, the mutual inquiring of names and purposes, so the abrupt negations which begin Varrion CornfortIf give way to an extended interrogation. In contrast to the defiant "NotI1 which characterises the first quatrain, the second quatrain contains a series of four questions, al1 compressed into one long, complex sentence, and founded upon an initial llwhy?":

But ah, but Oh thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lion limb against me? scan With darksome devouring eyes my bruised bones? and fan, O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?

The narratorrs questions function paradoxically, both affirming the divine nature of his opponent, and questioning His purposes. The narrator addresses his opponent by invoking the l1thou terriblet1God of the Hebrews, the "lionn of Daniel, and the Yempesttlof Jeremiah and Job. These assertions of His divinity are expressed, however, within interrogations of His divine purpose. With 'bruised bones,' the narrator lies "heapedl before his opponent, and is Vrantic to avoid thee and flee." The narrator has, like Jacob, been grievously injured by the stranger. But why? Inevitably the meaning of "Carrion Cornfort," like the meaning of Jacob's wrestling, turns on the question of suffering . The series of questions which make up the second quatrain culminate in the "Why?" which begins the sestet. Why must there be al1 this torment? One expects of a sonnet that the sestet will answer any questions raised in the octave; and this seems to happen in Tarrion Com£ort.It The tlWhy?ltis, at least temporarily, answered: I1That my chaf f might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.It The winnowing image offered here is clearly an image of purification, and one with strong biblical resonances: Christ "will gather the wheat into his garner; but the chaff he will burn with fire

unq~enchable~~(Luke 3:16-17). The narrator daims that his torment is a purification demanded of him by God, a separation of his wheat from his chaff. The narratorfs true nature, his dependence upon God and vulnerability before

Him, will be made "sheer and clear." The narratorts claim that his suffering is a purifying

trial imposed on him by God has been readily adopted by 185 critics as a way of excusing the narratorts suffering, both in IncarrionCornfortu specifically, and in the "terrible sonnetsN generally. The narrator himself, however, having provided this solution, immediately refuses to agree with it. Instead, he reacts to the winnowing image with a violent flNay,nand follows this up with a great confusion of images, alternately encouraging and disheartening, which effectively negate whatever momentary consolation had been achieved:

Nay in al1 that toil, that coil, since (seems) 1 kissed the rod, Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, cheer.

The narratorts clah that he has "kissed the rodM is offered as proof of his submission to God; yet the clah is compromised by the ambiguous ln(seems)tlwhich precedes it. His claim to have "lapped strength" recalls the warriors of Gideon, who "lappedItthe waters of the well of Harod and proved themselves the conquerors of Midian (Judges 7:l-7). The narratorts further daim that he Itstole joy, would laugh, cheeru clearly suggests a warriorts celebration after achieving victory. And yet the narrator of Varrion Cornfortln is engaged in a deeply paradoxical and ambiguous battle, one in which such simple heroic gestures seem out of place. His heart , he says , "would laugh, cheer , yet , "Cheer whom 186 though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, foot trod / Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one?" The narrator of "Carrion comfortl1 does not know whether he should properly win or lose this battle. He does not know who is fighting whorn, or why, or even what a victory might consist of. This paradoxical relation between the narrator and his strange opponent lies at the heart of Varrion Cornfort," just as it does in Jacob's wrestling. For the narrator of Ilcarrion Cornfort," as for Jacob, the nature of his opponent is revealed only in retrospect, after he has departed. The epiphany is granted, but perhaps not wholly understood, for it is a most paradoxical revelation: the stranger who has come to wrestle and wound the shepherd and the poet is also their Saviour. 5Jacob called the place Peniel 'becauset, he said, '1 have seen God face to face and my life is sparedul (Gen. 32 :3O) . The narrator of Tarrion ComfortIt declares, ItThat night, that year / Of now done darkness 1 wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my Gad." Their opponent is their deliverer. The one who wounds them is He who has created thern and who sustains them. It is a measure of the ambiguity of "Carrion Corn£ortN that even those critics most sympathetic to its paradoxes have misunderstood the poem's conclusion. Their errors proceed from demanding too much clarity from a poem whose integrity lies in its determined confusion. Virginia ~llis 187 recognizes Hopkins' allusion to Jacob's wrestling in the final line, but rather piously misrepresents its meaning.

Ellis writes : whether man is the prone victim or, like Jacob, erect in heroic combat, he is always and inevitably "trod hard downlI by the mighty foot of God, flung to the ground by Christ's I1heaven-handling,"and can only rise

again when he abandons the presurnptuous battle. (263) Ellis' judgement of "Carrion Comforttland of Jacob's wrestling is cloquent, yet false, for Jacob's encounter at Penuel was not a llpresumptuousbattle." His only presumption was to wait alone on the banks of the Jabbok, where it was God who assailed him. Like Jacob, the narrator of "Carrion Comfortu is presumptuous only in his determination to play out the paradoxes of the situation God has placed him in.

"Carrion Cornfortu offers a vision of relationship with God far more strange and frightening and beautiful than we can readily understand. Like the story of Jacob's wrestling, Ifcarrion Comfort" does not resolve readily into a single comprehensible meaning. The poem is a wrestling, not a recipe; a struggle for meaning. rather than an achieved meaning; an existential rather than an ontological description of the mysteries of human relationship with an incomprehensible, yet certain God. To claim that "Carrion CornfortIf is a confusion, however perfectly framed, does not mean that the narrator 188 experiences failure, at ieast not failure alone. In the Christian universe it is precisely through recognized human failure that real success is made possible. "My power is made per£ect in weaknesstn God tells St. Paul (TI Cor.

12:7), to which St. Paul immediately responds by framing a paradox of his own: "Most gladly therefore will 1 rather glory in my infirmities,I1 he declares, Vhat the power of

Christ may rest upon mela (II Cor. 12:8-9). The admission of human failure becomes an invitation for grace. Hopkins recognized the same paradox when, in a letter to R.W.Dixon, he wrote that Christ I1was doomed to succeed by failure"

(Correspondence 138), £or only by suffering a human death was Christ able to overcome death. The resolution of "Carrion Comfort1I is achieved through just this paradox: the poem succeeds through failure. Only the narratorts repeated £aiLure to understand the nature of his opponent allows him to recognize Him at the poemts conclusion as I1my Gad." The last words of the poem, "(my God!) my God,I1 are adapted £rom, and inevitably recall, the opening words O£

Psalm 22, IlMy God, my God, Why hast Thou f orsaken me?, and its subsequent recurrence in the Passion of Christ. Unlike the Psalmist and the Gospel writers, however, Hopkins makes of this repetition a contrast, rather than an emphasis. It is, moreover, a contrast achieved simply through judicious punctuation. With its exclamation mark, the first I1(my God!)" suggests a cry of astonishment and, perhaps, of fear. 189 The narrator has just understood who his antagonist is. The parentheses suggest the involuntary nature of this revelation. The second "my Gad" is more modest than the fi'rst, and therefore more mysterious. With its simple concluding period, it seems an acknowledgement of Godts reality which is both intimate and calmly factual. The first cry plurnbs the deptn of the narratorrs ignorance, and the limitations of the human mind. He stands appalled, as Jacob was, to recognize that he, a mere creature, has been fighting with his Creator. The narratorts second cry, however, is not directed at himself at all, but reaches towards the God it names, reaches into "the reserve of truth beyond which the mind can reach, yet still knows to be beyond." And this second cry, of worship and not despair, this final yielding of human calculation which is the glory and consolation of the poem, is possible only because of the Eirst cry. It is only as the narratorts faith is stretched beyond what his mind can reach, that he can recognize the divinity who exists beyond human understanding. It is only by experiencing the "(my God!)" of shock and momentary disbelief, that he can encounter the "my Godflof assured faith. In Buber's words, it is only by entering again "the dark gatevfof the fear of God, the recognition that God is beyond human comprehension, that the narrator can "enter into the love of GodI1 (Buber 22) . 190 The story of Jacob's wrestling ends on a deterrninedly paradoxical note: "Lhe Sun rose as Jacob passed through Penuel, limping because of his hipN (Genesis 32 :23-31) . Jacob is wounded, yet he walks victoriously into a new day.

AS Jacob he has been physically defeated, yet as Israel he has "prevailed against God and man1#in spite of his woundirg (Gen. 32:28), and enters the promised land bearing a renewed covenant. Jacob was, in Hopkins' words, "doomed to succeed by failure." So too is the narrator of "Carrion Cornfort." He exits the poem as a study in paradox: he has failed, throughout the wrestling of the poem, to understand the nature of his opponent; and yet, by acknowledging this failure, he finally recognizes, in retrospect, the God who exists beyond his understanding. IfcarrionComfortn is a convincing description of conflict between humanity and God because the wrestling which is the subject of the poem is reproduced by Hopkins' poetic technique. The narrator's struggle seems built syntactically into the language of the poem:

But ah, but Oh thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lion limb against me? scan With dawksome devouring eyes my bruised bones? and fan, O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid

thee and f lee? 191 Such an excerpt shows Hopkinst verse at its most intense and unsettling. In sprung rhythm as here employed, the reader counts only the stressed, not the slack, syllables in each line. Thus a metrical foot carrying one stress may carry no slack syllables at all, or as many as four. The verse of Ilcarrion Cornfortu is usually described as being in sprung alexandrines (MacKenzie 455); that is, each line carries six stresses and an variable number of unstressed syllables. In practice, however, it is difficult to read a line such as "0 in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?" with fewer than seven stresses; and a reader accustomed to iambic rhythms will probably pronounce eight. The variability of sprung rhythm grants a trernendous tautness and expectancy to the unstressed syllables and a . I1sprungI1quality to the stressed. This unpredictability demands the constant vigilance of the reader, especially when, as here, sprung rhythm is combined with a violent enjambment of lines. While it is true that al1 good poetry is best read aloud, it is almost impossible to read Hopkinst sprung rhythm any other way. The reader needs the full participation of breath and tongue - even occasionally a gesturing hand - to realize its rhythm. And, it rnust be admitted, that even with such help, the rhythm can be lost, and the conscientious reader forced to start over. When reading sprung rhythm, one is never quite at ease; and this, of course, is al1 to the purpose. Sprung rhythm is a kind of wrestling. The unpredictability of the Hopkins1 verse struggles against the natural iambic rhythms of English poetry. Sprung rhythm, Yvor Winters writes, "is a rhythm based on the principle of violent struggle with its governing measure, and it contributes to the violence of feeling in the poetryl1 (Winters 112). Although Winters intends this as censure, we need not take it that way. Only a violent poetic technique can properly convey the spiritual struggle which is the poemfs concern. Sprung rhythm helps to achieve what W.H. Gardner has called the "creative violence" of Hopkins language (Gardner xiv) . Given the violence of sprung rhythm, it is surprising, perhaps, that the "terrible sonnets" should be sonnets at all, for Hopkins has cast a poetry of tremendous dissonance in the most disciplined of poetic forms. Certainly the sonnet form does not seem to arise naturally out of 'sprung rhythm, but seems irnposed on the language £rom without. With most poets, such a claim would stand as harsh criticism; but with Hopkins, the effect is more cornplex. The struggle of sprung rhythm achieves particular force precisely because it seems shoehorned within strict sonnet form. As Robert arti in puts it, Hopkins chose one of the most disciplined verse forms because it best held his explosive emotions in check. These poems shock doubly because of the contrast between the decorum of the sonnet form and the dark energy pulsing against its restraints. (Martin 383) The "violent struggle" which Winters claims characterizes sprung rhythm itself, and the wrestling between "the decorum of the sonnet form and the dark energyrlof sprung rhythm, recreate verbally the struggle between the narrator and his divine opponent. Varrion Comfortn is the most narrative of the "terrible sonnetstuthe only poem of the group which details the encounter, struggle and resolution of a wrestling. The "terrible sonnetsN which follow achieve greater focus, emphasizing particular aspects of the narratorls struggle. ~lthough"Carrion Comforttfis itself a highly introspective poem, the remaining sonnets probe even more deeply into the narratorts psyche. "No worstvlis probably the second of the "terrible sonnetsIl to be completed after Ilcarrion Cornfort, l1 and is a poem more concerned with suffering than resistance:

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief, More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring. Comforter, where, where is your comforting? Mary, mother of us, where is your relief? My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing - Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling- ering! Let me be fell: force I must be briefl. O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fa11 Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap May who neter hung there. Nor long does Our srnall Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep, Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: al1

Life death does end and each day dies in sleep.

Though this is undeniably a poem of great con£lict, the narrator of IlNo Worstll does not wrestle with an unknown opponent; rather, his pangs of suffering wrestle with him. As Mariani notes (226)' the opening cry "No worst, there is none" recalls Edgar's speech in Kins Lear (IV.i.27-

8) : lfAnd worse 1 may be yet," Edgar cries; "the worst is not / So long as we can Say 'This is the worst."I By crying "No worçt, there is none," Hopkins' narrator denies himself even the bleak consolation that things will not get worse. They will. His pangs of suffering "will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring." Agony will Eeed upon itself. Like Job, caught in Godls terrible bet with the Adversary, the narrator of "No Worstn appeals from God to God, seeking divine help in his struggle against the divine:

Comforter, where, where is your comforting? Mary, mother of us, where is your relief? 195 The narrator appeals for help from the Cornforter, the ~oly Spirit, and £rom Mary who, he believed, would intercede on his behalf with God. With these questions, these cries for help, the narrator of Wo Worstl1 acknowledges that he is involved in a conflict he cannot escape £rom or reçoive himself. There is no ambiguity or complexity as to his motives. He seeks mercy, not victory. The narrator's cries for help signal the return of Hopkins' last poems to the themes O£ his early poetry. IlMy prayers must meet a brazen heaven," Hopkins had written as a young man, "And fail or scatter al1 away.I1 In llNondommthe speaker cornplains: "Gad, though to Thee our psalm we raise, / No answering voice comes £rom the skies. In "No Worstl1 Heaven answers the question "Cornforter, where, where is your c~mforting?~~with the same devastating silence. No cornfort, no relief, "No answering voice comes from the skies." These unanswered questions haunt the rest of the poem and, indeed, the rest of the "terrible sonnet^.^^ It is within such questions, therefore, that the meaning of the poetry must be f ound . Images of wringing, heaving, huddling and wincing dominate the second quatrain; yet it is not the narrator who wrings, heaves, huddles and winces, but his cries of suffering. With a disconcerting objectivity, the narrator describes despair in a most unlikely series of images. The first image is pastoral: like a herd of cattle, his cries 196 I1heave,herds-long. " They "huddle" together, like cows, vin a main, a chie£ / Woe, world-sorrow." By identifying his sufferings as a Mworld-sorrow,flHopkins suggests that humanity as a whole exists like a herd of cows: we stupidly, passively suffer affliction. The second image is industrial: like a piece of metai whi.rli GGS forges on His "age-old anvil, the poetls cries Ifwince and sing. We might hope the divine blacksmith is pounding the narrator in order to temper him, to make him stronger, but the narrator himself seems not to know. The final image is rnythological. The narrator likens his pangs of grief to the shrieks of a llFury,llan avenging deity who storms out of the ancient Greek universe in order to torment him. From what strange nightmare such disparate images corne, we are not told. More significantly, we do not ask. Hopkins disarms the readerls critical faculty by employing three powerful but incongruous metaphors. His suffering is described as being at once pastoral, industrial and mythological. Thus Hopkins effects a kind of metaphorical triangulation. Because the narratorts suffering partakes of a11 these realities, it must also transcend each of them. The reality of the narratorts suffering, like the reaiity of his God, lies beyond the signifying power of any one metaphor; it lies indeed, "beyond what the mind can reach, and still knows to be beyond." John Coulson, echoing T.S. Eliot, argues that such a cluster of metaphors is intended 197 "to keep the sense broken and in growth ... to dislocate the language into meaning" (31). Sprung rhythm also plays a part in keeping the sense of the poem Ifbroken and in growth." The uncertainties and compulsions of sprung rhythm, combined with violently enjambed lines, allow the reader, in Hopkinst words, IfNo ling- / ering!I1 The reader, having no leisure to scrutinise the poemts assertions, must submit to the rush of language and imagery, even as the narrator seems to. The sestet O£ "No Worstuldoes not provide a counter- argument to the confusions of the octet, as we might expect. Indeed, the narrator no longer appeals to God at all, nor consoles himself with the possibility of Godts grace. Instead he descends even deeper into the disoriented universe within himself. There is, in these famous lines, a sense of wonder and despair at the magnitude of the mysteries within his own mind: O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs O£ fa11 Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap May who ne'er hung there. Nor long does Our small Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep, Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: al1 Life death does end and each day dies in sleep. In these lines the narrator no longer tries to describe his suffering, but rather to describe his mind as it suffers. Wis earlier objectivity towards his own suffering now 198 deepens into a fully divided consciousness. The mind of the poet that suffers, the same mind that earlier in the poem had cried out uComforter, where, where is your ~omforting?,~ is now held within another, larger and dispassionate mind, which objectively considers that suffering. The poet both hangs upon the I1cliffsof fa11 / Frightful, sheer, no-man- fathomedtf1and watches himself hanging there. He is at once terrified, and £ascinated by his terror. The divided consciousness which characterises the sestet of "No Worst" is precisely the same divided consciousness which characterises Hopkins' understanding of mystery, and indeed arises out of it: the I1reserveof truth beyond what the rnind reaches, and still feels to be beyond." The narrator of "No Worstl1 holds within his mind that other mind, also his, which suffers so painfully. Re recognises that this suffering must fulfil itself in a final meaning, yet it is a meaning Ifbeyond what his mind can reach.' By faith he affirms the existence of a truth - the truth about suffering, and about Godis place in suffering - and yet he cannot quite comprehend it. The narrator, stranded on his own mental "cliffs of fall," is like a mountain climber who reaches for a hold which, to adopt Hopkins' phrase, lies "beyond what his hand can reach, but still knows to be beyond." Unable to reach that further hold, yet knowing it is there, and unwilling to abandon it, the narrator is paralysed on the rock face. "Nor 199 long does Our small / Durance deal with that steep or deeplU the narrator tells us. The poem concludes with the narrator pinned to the rockface, as Prometheus was, his only consolation the bitter welcome of death: the Ifcarrion comfortH that "al1 / Life death does end and each day dies in sleep. With his cry "O the mind, mind has mountains," the narrator of "No WorstU confronts both the enormous mystery of human relationship with God, and the lirnited reach of human intelligence in understanding that relationship. We feel ourselves situated in the mental landscape of paradox; and in this description Hopkins perhaps takes us further into the human psyche than the biblical account can readily describe. The sestet of "No Worst,I1 with its mountains of the mind, renders the critic aware of the limitations inherent in al1 literary analogies and forms of interpretation. We may agree that Jacob's encounter at Penuel was a tlno-man- fathomedv experience, and imagine Jacob clinging to Hopkins' I1cli£fs of £alPt during that strange wrestling match; and in doing sol we find ourselves interpreting Jacob's experience through Hopkins1, rather than the other way around. Hopkins experience in the "terrible sonnetsM, although comparable to Jacob's experience at Penuel, is not perfectly equivalent. While the "terrible sonnetsw are present tense, first-person reports of a spiritual wrestling, Jacob's wrestling is 200 presented objectively, in the third-person, past tense O£ narrative history. There is simply no subjective description, no fully articulated interior world, in the story of Jacob's wrestling which can help us interpret the sestet of "No Worst .Io The sonnet "1 Wake and feelu does not resolve the tensions of "No Worstttland yet it seems a much more hopeful poem, largely because of its well-defined artistic structure. The suffering remains, but the narrator has imposed order on it. His suffering, and his struggle against it, is presented in three particular modes: sight, time and taste. Because his subject is suffering, however, the three modes of experience are cast in specifically negative terms: darkness, absence, and bitterness:

1 wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. What hours, O what black hours we have spent This night! what sights you, heart, saw, ways you went! And more must, in yet longer lightfs delay.

With witness 1 speak this. But where 1 Say Hours 1 mean years, mean life. And my lament

1s cries countless, cries like dead letters sent To dearest him that lives alas! away.

1 am gall, 1 am heartburn. Godls most deep decree Bitter would have me taste: rny taste was me; 201 Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse . Selfyeast of spirit a du11 dough sours. 1 see The lost are like this, and their loss to be

As 1 am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

The opening line of the poem strongly suggests a nightmare experience. The narrator wakes and feels the Yellll of dark. The word VellU suggests not only the descent of darkness, but its texture as weL1, for the word signifies "a covering of hide, an animal skin (MacKenzie 447) . Thus "1 Wake and FeelH opens, not with the paradox of "darkness visiblen found in Milton's Paradise Lost (I:63), but with the comparable idea of "darkness palpable." Building upon this idea, many critics (MacKenzie 447, Mariani 219) interpret Ilthe fell of darku as referring to the ninth plague of Egypt during the biblical exodus. The Lord spread "darkness over the land of Egypt, even darkness which may be feltgl

(Exod.10 :21) . The narrator of "1 Wake and Feel,II it is suggested, feels himself under God's judgernent, even as the Egyptians did.

The references to darkness in the opening lines of "1 Wake and Feelm obviously parallel Jacob's experience of darkness as he wrestled the stranger at Penuel: "So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him there till daybreak." Being exhausted, yet full of wonder, Jacob might 202 easily have spoken the words of Hopkins' narrator: "0 what black hours we have spent / This night! what sights you, heart, saw, ways you went! / And more must, in yet longer light's delay." Like Jacob, the narrator of "No WorstB1 suffers through the dark hours, waiting for daylight to dispel his dark struggle. The second quatrain develops the temporal aspect of "yet longer light's delay." The narrator cornplains that the absence of light, which signifies the absence of God, is not a temporary condition, but is the pervasive quality of his life: he has endured many "black hoursu already, "But where

1 Say / Hours 1 mean years, mean life." Although this cornplaint seems a touch melodramatic, Hopkins makes the idea vivid with a compelling simile: "my lament / 1s cries countlesstqlhe claims, "cries like dead letters sent / To dearest him that lives alas! away.I1 Tn these lines, God is compared to an unfeeling, unfaithful friend who I1lives alas! awayu and who will not answer the letters of a desperate friend.

As in IlNo Worstttlthe sestet of "1 Wake and Feelu presents the narratorts deepening encounter with his own nature. Like a correspondent who receives no news £rom the outside world, the narrator is trapped within a first-person universe. His 'Icries countlessn have become like the Ildead lettersw held by the Post Office, letters which can be neither delivered nor returned. Hopkins' prayers and 203 questions achieve no real communication beyond himself, but rather form a powerful, claustrophobie incantation of ll~u and "men and flmine":

I am gall, 1 am heartburn. God's most deep decree Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me; Bones built in me, £lesh filled, blood brimmed the curçe. Selfyeast of spirit a du11 dough sours. I see The lost are llke this, and their loss to be

As 1 am mine, their sweating selves; but worse. The narratorts profound self-consciousness is not an indulgence, a proud or vain celebration of the self, but rather the opposite. It is "God's most deep decreetNthe poem argues, that we encounter Our %weating selvesu in al1 Our sin and insufficiency: "my taste was me,I1 the narrator complains, and the taste is "bitter.

The nightmarish opening line of the poem, "1 wake and feel the fell of dark, not day," and the narrator's encounter with his llbitterlland "sweatingflself, strongly recall an 1873 entry from Hopkins' Journal. The entry is a remarkable description of a wrestling, one which combines many of the central motifs of both the "terrible sonnetsIl and Jacob's wrestling: darkness, struggle, the absence of God, the presence of an attacking stranger, 'cries for deliverance, and a final epiphany. Hopkins writes: 204 1 had a nightmare that night. 1 thought something or someone leapt ont0 me and held me quite fast: this I

think woke me.... 1 could speak, whispering at first, then louder .... 1 cried on the holy name and by degrees recovered myself as 1 thought to do. It made me think that this was how the souls in hell would be imprisoned

in their bodies. (Journal 238)

"1 Wake and Feelflseems, in many ways, a transcription of this experience. The narrator of the poem is awakened when he is attacked by "something or so~neone,~~a palpable form of darkness, perhaps. The Vries countless~of the poem echo how Hopkins, in his Journal, "cried on the holy name." The narratorts awareness in the poem of "Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the cursen seems a poetic rendering of Hopkins' j udgement in his Journal that l'the souls in hell would be imprisoned in their bodies." Both I1I Wake and Feelu and Hopkinsf experience with the I1somethingor someoneH recounted in the Journal entry seem to be descriptions of Hel1 or, in the Roman Catholic dispensation, Purgatory: a state of darkness, of the absence of God, and of profound self-pity. Such a state also recalls Jacob's wrestling. If Jacob, crippled on the very boundary of the promised land and apparently prevented entry to it, had given voice to his thoughts, he might have said, in Hopkins' words, IlThe lost are like this." 205

If "1 Wake and Feei" describes the most abject and despairing moment of Jacob's wrestling, then the sonnet "Patience" describes the moment that follows, the moment when Jacob dares to hope that his deliverance might yet come, even from the stranger who has attacked him. When the stranger at Penuel commands Jacob l'Let me go, for day is breaking," he is offering Jacob an end to the irnmediate conflict. And yet Jacob refuses. Deliverance £rom conflict is one thing; the kind of deliverance that follows from patiently persevering through conflict is another. The first conclusion offers relief, the second, victory. Jacob chooses the latter, saying to the stranger, "1 will not let you go unless you bless me.' If Jacob begins the conflict as one who is chosen to wrestle, yet he finishes it as one who patiently chooses to continue wrestling.

The sonnet Vatience" seems a meditation on just this kind of choosing. The narrator begins to discipline the desperate riot of his mind. He begins to think more carefully, to react less violently, and to recognize the divinity that lies within his struggle:

Patience, hard thing! the hard thing but to pray, But bid for, Patience is! Patience who asks Wants war, wants wounds; weary his times, his tasks; To do without, take tosses, and obey. Rare patience roots in these, and, these away, Nowhere. Natural heart's ivy, Patience masks Our ruins of wrecked past purpose. There she basks Purple eyes and seas of liquid leaves al1 day. We hear our hearts grate on themselves: it kills To bruise them dearer. Yet the rebellious wills

Of us we do bid God bend to him even so. And where is he who more and more distils

Delicious kindness? - He is patient. Patience fills His crisp combs, and that cornes those ways we know.

Paul Mariani remarks that "it is the paradox of patience that it is a virtue not for the weak but for the heroic and iron-willed" (Mariani 234). This paradox of patience is brought out fully in the poem. Patience, the narrator tells us, is a "hard thing. It is hard to be patient, and hard even to pray for patience. Patience demands that we endure wounds already given for the sake of blessings that have not yet been given, and may never be. Like Jacob, the narrator chooses to be patient, and to sustain the con£lict he has been placed in. Thus the one who asks for patience "Wants war, wants w~unds,~~and however "weary his times, his tasksH may bel he is determined to endure the struggle he has been given. He does not find peace by quitting the struggle, but will Ildo without, take tosses, and obey." The discipline O£ patience is chosen but not achieved in the opening quatrain. The tone of the second quatrain, 207 however, is markedly di££erent. In contrast to the strident proclamations which open the poem - "Patience, hard thing! - the second quatrain seems to achieve the patience it speaks of. Patience is not insisted upon, but allowed to grow. If we disallow the barren, vertiginous "cliffs of falln in "No Worst," "Patienceu is the first of the "terrible sonnets" in which the narrator invokes the beauty of the natural world: Rare patience roots in these, and, these away, Nowhere. Natural heartfs ivy, Patience masks Our ruins of wrecked past purpose. There she basks Purple eyes and seas of liquid leaves al1 day. "Rare patience roots," the narrator says, in the kind of conflict described in the first quatrain. It is rooted in "warn and wounds,ll and it grows in us when we "do without, take tosses, and obey." And what it grows into is beautiful, is "Natural heart's ivy.I1 Unlike the nature imagery of Hopkins' rniddle poetry, the image of "Naturd heartls ivyl1 is too consciously metaphoric to be interpreted in sacramental terms. IlNaturai heart's ivy" invokes a human, not a divine reality. Hopkins is no Longer attempting an objective description of the Creation in which God the Creator is inscaped and manifest; it is, rather, the fallen and compromised human heart, with al1 its "ruins of wrecked past p~rpose,~~to which the image ref ers. 208 When patience is allowed to grow, it not only "masks / Our ruins of wrecked past purpose," but becomes beautiful in itself: "There she basks / Purple eyes and seas of liquid leaves al1 day." Hopkins' recognition of the beauty of patience, and his description of it as a plant, recalls patience (referred to as ulongsufferinglin the King James Version) as one of the fruits of the spirit (Galatians

5:22). Thus the narratorts desire for patience becomes another form of his desire for God's presence in his life. The sestet describes his paradoxically "heroic and iron-willedll struggle to let patience root in him. I1We hear our hearts grate on themselveslUthe narrator says: 'lit kills / To bruise them dearer.I1 Such lines attest to the difficulty of choosing to suffer conflict when, like Jacob, we could simply give up the struggle. Our "hearts grate on themselvesn because Our hearts are divided, caught between opposing sides of a paradox: we choose to continue the conflict with God because it will, we trust, fulfil itself in peace . Though !lit kills / To bruise [our hearts] dearer, we suffer such wounding for the sake of a future blessing. This paradox is developed, although obscurely, in the lines: "Yet the rebellious wills / Of us we do bid God bend to him even so.I1 Hopkins' passion for compression leads hirn here to obscure a complex idea. The I1rebelliouswills / Of usu differs from the tlwellwhich "do bid God.I1 These are not the same self, but are the two halves of "our hearts" which 209 I1grate on themselves.~Simply put, we ask God to bend Our "rebellious willsI1 to conform to His will. Thus the paradox the narrator speaks of is a paradox within himself, a paradox he bids God to resolve. We ask that God may hurt us now in order that He may heal us later. Like Jacob, we seek to endure Godts wounding, in order that we may be granted his blessing. And where is the God who must help us to sustain this conflict against Himself? It is a sign of Hopkinst courage as a poet that he asks the difficult question himself: I1And where is he who more and more distils / Delicious kindness?" Where is the God who alone can give us patience to endure our wrestling with Him? In V?atience," as in rnany of the "terrible sonnets," the narratorts faith is revealed most powerfully in the asking of questions. In IlNo Worstl' the zarrator asks two pointed questions which are not answered: "Cornforter, where, where is your comforting? / Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?" Between his asking of these questions and his determined waiting for an answer, the poetts faith is stretched tight like a violin string, "pitched past pitch of grief," as the narrator says; and it does not break. In "PatienceM the narrator asks the same essential question: Where is God? And this time an answer is given. It is, however, an answer which, like the absence of an answer, demands a patient, faithful acceptance: God, the narrator 210 claims, is not fully present, nor is He fully absent; but rather, We is patient ." It may be the supreme moment of faith in the "terrible sonnetsu that the narrator can offer and accept this as an answer, for "He is patient" is, on any reading, a very ambiguous answer to the question Where is God?" In its most obvious interpretation, "He is patientN means that God patiently withholds himself from us. Less obviously, the answer suggests also that God is present in the patience He gives us to endure His absence. To put this differently: patience is, in itself, the form in which God is present, when He seems to be absent. To Say l'He is patient" means He is present within patience. Understood in this way, patience would seem to play a paradoxical role within the poem, signifying both the presence and the absence of God, with the one balancing the other: God is present in the narratorts patient suffering of Godfs patient absence from the narrator. This simultaneous presence and absence of God within patience recalls Calvin's judgement of how God struggles both with and against Jacob in the wrestling at Penuel: "We do not fight against God," Calvin says except by his own power, and with his weapons; for he, having challenged us to this contest, at the same time furnishes us with means of resistance, so that he both fights against us and for us. (Calvin 196) 211 Just as God wrestles with Jacob and helps him to wrestle back, so in "Patienceu God patiently withholds hirnself £rom the narrator and, at the same time, gives him the patience he needs to endure that absence. Thus God is fully present, even in His absence. The paradoxes of "Patience," like the paradoxes of Jacob's wrestling, would seem to be both created and resolved by God. There is a further possible interpretation of the answer "He is patient," and one which takes us even more deeply into the mysteries O£ Penuel. In his early poetry Hopkins persistently, longingly asks the question: I1Where is God?" In his middle poetry, the famous sonnets of nature, Hopkins believes he has found an answer: "The World is charged with the grandeur of God.I1 God the Creator is present within the creation, even as Christ recreates Himself in Our human lives. How very different is the answer IlHe is patient" given in the poem "Patience." How cautious an answer it is, and yet faithful, and positively framed. We should not infer from such an answer that Hopkins had become totally disillusioned with the sacramental understanding of creation, or had ceased to believe in the perpetual creativity of Christ; but it seems that, in the poem "Patience" at least, he begins to ask the question "Where is

Gad?" in a different way, a way that requires a different kind of answer, or perhaps no answer at all. 212 If "He is patientu is the only possible answer to the question, "Where is God?,Iq then perhaps the question itself is at fault. Perhaps the ambiguity of the answer simply reveals the ambiguity inherent in the question. The answer itself partakes of the mystery which it purports to explain. Such an ambiguous, paradoxical answer raises what Phyllis Webb calls, "a question of questions.v86 Webb adopts the phrase "a question of q~estions~~£rom a passage in the book The Self and Others by R.D. Laing. Laing, a psychotherapist, discusses a group O£ patients who were greatly troubled and who demanded that Laing tell them why. The Ildominant phantasyu of the group, he says, was that Yhe therapist had 'the answerl and that if they had 'the answerr they would not suffer."" In this situation the therapistts task, Laing says, is then like the Zen Master's, to point out that suffering is not due to not getting 'the answer,' but is the very state of desire that assumes the

existence of that kind O£ answer, and the frustration

of never getting it. (Laing 105) Suffering, Laing suggests, is a natural, inevitable part of life. Suffering is not a question that can be cured by an answer .

86 Phyllis Webb, I1A Question of Questions," Selected Poems (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1982) 126.

87 R.D. Laing, The Self and Others, 2nd ed. (London: Tavistock, 1969) 105. In "Patience" Hopkins seems to be acting as such a therapist to himself. He has been suffering under the question "Where is God?I1 and has presumed, perhaps, that if

he had "the answew1I he would not suffer. Yet the answer he eventually arrives at, "He is patient," is in a sense not an answer at all, but rather a questioning of the question. The question vhere is God?" is comparable perhaps to the questions posed in Zen koans: I1What is the sound of one hand clapping?I1 or What was my face before my parent's birth?[lg8The value of these questions lies in the fact that they cannot be answered. The questions provoke in the questioner an awareness of the limitations of human reason, and of the nature of transcendence. In its contemplation of unanswerable questions, the mind is freed from the %tate of desire that assumes the existence of [an] answer, and the

frustration of never getting itU1(Laing 105). The question "Where is God?" asked in "Patiencen functions in a similar way, signifying to the narrator a mystery which he cannot comprehend, and which therefore he is not responsible for comprehending. If there is an answer, it must lie, as Hopkins would Say, "beyond what the mind can reach, yet knows to be beyondn (Letters 187) . The "question of questionsH is not peculiarly a Zen concern, but a biblical concern as well. At the end of his

88 Philip Kapleau, The Three Pillars of Zen (New York: Harper & ROW, 1969) 138. 214 wrestling, Jacob asks a question of God which is similar to Hopkinst, and the answer Jacob receives highlights the particular beauties and difficulties of Hopkinst 'terrible sonnets." Having been wrestled by the stranger at Penuel, wounded and interrogated by Him, and having finally surrendered his own name to the stranger, Jacob then asks

Him, "Tell me, 1 pray, your name." God answers Jacob, not with a simple answer, but rather with "a question of questions11: I1Why do you ask my name?" He says. He does indeed bless Jacob and grant him a renewed covenant, but he leaves Jacob's question unanswered. There is another incident in the Hebrew scriptures in which God is asked His name, and although the question is answered, it is an answer as fully mysterious as "He is Patient.'! Moses discovers a bush that is burning, yet not being burnt. And a voice comes from the bush instructing him to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. Moses speaks to the burning bush, asking: If I go to the Israelites and tell them that the God of their forefathers has sent me to them, and they ask

me his name, what shall 1 say? (Exodus 3:13) Moses must give his people a name for the God who is to lead them. God answers Moses by saying "1 Am. That is who 1 am.

Tell them that 1 Am' has sent you to them1I (Exodus 3 : 14) . The Hebrew people transcribed "1 AmIl with the four letters 215

YHW, which we translate as VehovahU or I1Yahweha1(McKenzie Dictionary 316) . Like Moses, we must accept "1 amt1as a proper name, for we too need words and names to make spiritual realities intelligible to us. And yet the name "1 Amu suggests, not a proper name, but a being that is, itself, pure Being, beyond the signifying possibilities of a name. Upon being told "1 am," we inevitably ask "You are what?I1 The subject "1" and the predicate "to belf need a complement in order to be comprehensible. Without such a complement, the statement "1 amttseems to exist more as a question than an answer. For us who dwell in a material and temporal world, purely transcendent, timeless Being is not comprehensible.

By declaring Himself "1 am," the Hebrew God, the Creator of al1 beings and, indeed, of the very possibility of being, claims that He transcends the signifying possibilities of a name. Perhaps this is why the question Jacob asks O£ God, "What is your name?", cannot be satisfactorily answered, at least not in the way Jacob wishes. There is no single name that can sum up the nature and identity of God in the same way that ltJacoblfsums up his. It is, paradoxically, the absence of a sufficient name for God that best signifies His nature, His omniscience and omnipotence. In Hopkinsf texms, the absence of any one sufficient name guarantees the proper incomprehensibility of God. Like the fire which burns without consuming the bush, the naming of God will continue forever; yet God will never be fully named, nor will the bush ever be consurned. Could there be a more perfect image of eternity? It is with the unanswerable question "What is your name?" or I1Where is God?," rather than with an insufficient answer, that we can best express the rnystery of Godts reality. While an answer can express, at best, a partial truth, the unanswerable question leads the mind, as Hopkins says, "beyond what the mind can reach, but still knows to be beyond . The question Hopkins asks in "Patience," the question I1Where is God?" must always be a necessary and proper response to suffering. It is Job's question, and Christ's upon the cross, and everyonefs question. And yet, as both Laing and the narrator of I1Patiencel1suggest, an answer to this question is sufficient only when it is as fully mysterious as the question itself. "We answer a mystery by positing a mystery,I1 says the philosopher William Barrett.8g Or, as Hopkins himself wrote when discussing the nature of

mystery, I1How must it be when the very answer is the most tantalising staternent of the problem, and the truth you are to rest in [is] the most pointed putting of the difficulty"

(Letters 187).

89 William Barrett, Death of the Soul: From Descartes to the Com~uter(New York: Doubleday, 1986) 31. 217 In the sonnet "My own heartftlthe narrator seems to reevaluate further his understanding of suffering and bis relationship with God: My own heart let me more have pity on; let Me live to my sad self hereafter kind, Charitable; not live this tormented mind With this tormented mind tormenting yet.

1 cast for comfort 1 can no more get By groping round my comfortless, than blind Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find Thirst's all-in-ail in al1 a world of wet.

Soul, self; come poor Jackself, 1 do advise

You, jaded, let be; cal1 off thoughts awhile Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile

's not wrung, see you; unforeseentimes rather - as skies

Betweenpie mountains - lights a lovely mile. In the opening quatrain, the narrator admits he can no longer continue the struggle of the "terrible sonnet^.^^ There are no questions, either answered or unanswered, in the poem, only a determination to accept patiently his suffering and the mysteries of relationship with God. IlMy own heart let me more have pity on,If he tells himself, Although the two halves of the narratorts consciousness, the 218 two halves of his heart which "grate on themselvesM remain, he counsels their peaceful coexistence, rather than conflict. There is perhaps an ironic note in hic determination to be "Charitablev to himself, a suggestion that he must grant to himself the charity which God will not grant. The narratorts determination to 'not live this tormented mind / With this tormented mind tormenting yetu seems a poetic, as well as an intellectual, refusal to struggle further with the question of suffering. There is no pressure of language in the line, no syntactic struggle or surprise of diction. The poet seems to have grown tired of his task and, by mentioning his "tormentw three times, succeeds in making even torment seem repetitive and dull. The narrator loses his patience briefly in the second quatrain. He VastsI1 for comfort "By groping roundI1 his ~~comfortlessnself, but can find none. He can no more find comfort than IlBlind / eyesu can find day in the dark. He thirsts for water, which is "Thirst's all-in-all," and yet can find none "in al1 a world of wet." Such images effectively convey spiritual hunger in comprehensible material terms; and yet, despite their effectiveness, the narrator is doing little more than complaining. It is powerful, poetic complaining, but it does not help him. And so in the sestet he instructs himself again, as one might a spoiled child, to stop: Soul, self; come poor Jackself, 1 do advise You, jaded, let be; cal1 off thoughts awhile Elsewhere .... With a mocking, gently condescending tone, he counsels himself in the thlrd person to "cal1 off thoughts awhile." Although "My Own Heartr1seems, in some respects, the weakest O£ the "terrible sonnet^,^^ it delivers one of their most graceful moments. On a first reading, the narratorts advice to himself to "let joy size / At God knows when to God knows whatN seems dismissive. In colloquial speech, the phrases "Gad knows whenu and "God knows whatIf suggest impatience or disillusionment. To Say that "Gad knowsn usually means that no one knows, or that something is unknowable. And yet he might intend the words literally, thus reinvigorating a tired turn of phrase. If the narrator does not know when or in what form "joyU1will come, yet "Gad knows when" and Wod knows what . The narrator cannot understand God, yet he can repose in God's understanding of him. Thus there seems to be an intentional ambiguity between the colloquial, dismissive, sense of the words, and their literal meaning, which powerfully affirms the narrator1s £aith in God. In Hopkins1 poetry, such ambiguity is always meaningful. The narratorts resolve to Illet joy size / At God knows when to God knows whatl'bears both negative and positive implications, and should be read with both in rnind, 220 The narrator both acknowledges the limitations of the human mind, and affirms God's unlimited knowledge of him. As the readerfs mind moves dialectically between these human and divine realities, the mystery of human relationship with God is reawakened and reaffirmed. "My Own Heartn ends with the narrator accepting the mystery, the uincomprehensible certaintyI1 of relationship with God. The smile of "joy,lfor perhaps the smile of God, is "net wrung," he tells himself, not wrestled £or, but reveals itself at nunforeseentimes,llfor which one must wait patiently. The poem closes with an image of one such

~~unforeseentimeN:Ilas skies / Betweenpie mountains - lights a lovely mile." Hopkins' rather odd syntax obscures what is otherwise a lovely and compelling image of God's grace. Norman MacKenzie has traced the source of this image to a passage in Hopkinst Journals in which the poet's intentions are made clear. Hopkins is counselling himself to be patient: "a time of happiness can't be £orced £rom Godt you see; no, quite unexpectedly, like sunshine dappling between mountains, it lights up a lovely mile of roadI1 (Journals 196). Specific manifestations of God's grace, Hopkins suggests, are as real, and yet as unpredictable, as fine weather. Grace cannot be forced, but must be waited for, in faith, and with patience. 221 IlMy Own HeartI1 was the last of the sonnets which

Hopkins transcribed in Folio 35 (Harris 1471, and thus the "terrible sonnetsN conclude with the rather wistful image of ~od'ssmilel1 as it "lights a lovely mile." ït is, as seems appropriate to the poems it concludes, an image at once hopeful and melancholy. With this concluding image, the "terrible sonnetsu have both corne very far £rom the concerns of Hopkins' early poetry, and returned near to them. The early poem "The Half- way House" begins with Hopkins declaring "Love 1 was shewn upon the mountain-side." The narrator recognizes that %ove,1t the grace of God, is real, and yet remote £rom him. He is llshewnulove, but cannot grasp it. Grace is a mystery "beyond what the mind can reach, yet knows to be beyond." Very quickly however, even in the second line, "Loveu becomes transfowmed into a bird which the narrator tries "to catcht1Iand which later he commands, "corne dom to me if thy name be Love." In "The Half-way House," and in Hopkinst early poems generally, an ambitious and impetuous narrator tries I1to catchu God, to "otertake [Him] at once and under heaven." Though Hopkins, as a young poet, clearly senses Godts absolute transcendence, he yet believes that he can, somehow, overcome it. This early ambition seems to have been realized in the nature poems of Hopkinst middle period. We feel that something of God's gram and presence lies incarnate in 222 words and image and rhythm. God seems present within the poet's praise of God. In the "terrible sonnets," however, Hopkins seerns to recognize yet again how the fullness of God lies always lUbeyondwhat the mind can reach, yet still knows to be beyond." "My Own HeartM concludes with the "smileJ of

God, as it "Betweenpie mountains - lights a lovely mile." We have returned again to the idea of Love Ifshewn upon the mountain-siden with which "The Half-way WouseM begins. And yet, if the spiritual geography of this late poem is the same, if the fullness of God seems still rernote and inaccessible, yet the narratorts reaction to this distance has changed profoundly. At the conclusion of "My Own Heart," which is the conclusion of the "terrible sonnets," the narrator does not try "to catchf1God, or llotertake[Him] at once and under heaven." Instead, having wrestled with Him through a long darkness, the narrator is content to gaze upon the light of that "lovely mile," the "tirne of happiness" with God, that lies ahead.

The "terrible sonnetsM of Gerard Manley Hopkins do not end with a climactic "sense of an endingu (Kermode 4), nor is their essential meaning easily expressed. Hopkinst last poems reveal none of the joy that characterises the nature poems of Hopkins' middle period. Hopkins' last poems are 223 always inhibited and disciplined by the recognition of his own human limitations and of the unknowable nature of ~od.

And yet the very gravity O£ this poetry suggests a greater intimacy with God than that achieved in Hopkins' earlier poetry. In the "terrible sonnets" Hopkins has, like Jacob, and like Job, wrestled his way to a relationship with God which transcends the asking and answering of questions. It might be the lack of an authoritative %ense of an endingl1 to the "terrible sonnets" which best expresses their nature and concern. Hopkins' last poems end in mystery because the truths they reach for, the reality of God, the meaning of human suffering and of Godts participation in suffering, are true mysteries; they are incomprehensible, yet certain. The "terrible sonnets" conclude with the poet looking far into the distance, towards Godts usmilellas it Iflights a lovely mile,I1 because the truths of which he speaks lie beyond him, "beyond what the mind can reach, yet knows to be beyond."

It is perhaps in the words O£ another poem, the "two- word poem pressed from Jacob in the damlu (Price 31), that we find the meanings and intentions of the "terrible sonnetsu expressed most succinctly. Jacob called the place of his wrestling llPenuel,llllGodrs face,I1 and it is in these two words that we find expressed most succinctly the mystery of human relationship with God. The first word, nGod," signifies the spiritual realm and Being that mere words, 224 being material things, cannot properly contain: the world of the Creator beyond the creation. The second word, "face," signifies that created, material realm which we mere creatures inhabit and are constrained by. And connecting them both is the miracle of a possessive, the assertion of faith that the second reality belongs to the first; that our fallen, human world, however constrained by material £orms, is yet fulfilled in God. With its unlikely combination of the divine and human,

'fG~dt~face1' seems as much a question as an answer. Inevitably we ask ourselves, does God have a face? How can the transcendent, immaterial and invisible God who Created al1 things be said to have a face? There can be no face of God, we think, which is not ultirnately a rnask. And yet by faith Jacob proclaims, "1 have seen God face to face, and my li£e is spared." The "terrible sonnetsu arise from a similar faith, and aspire to achieve just such a miraculous union: to use the material means of poetry to overcome the materiality that separates humanity £rom God. Hopkins struggled in al1 his poetry to express this mystery and to repair this division between the human and divine, the material and spiritual realities. Just as there is no end to the contemplation of a mystery, but rather a perpetual dialectic between question and answer, between inconceivability and certainty, so the "terrible sonnetsM become most meaningful when we allow them 225 to escape "the sense of an ending.I1 Contemplation of the "terrible sonnets," like the contemplation of mysteries generally, leaves the mindl as Hopkins says, llswinging; poised, but on the quiver.. . (Letters 187) . To end with a mystery is, in Eliot's words, "to make a beginning. / The end is where we start £rom ("Little Giddingn 217-18). Works Cited

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