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Smith, Philip E. II, and Michael S. Helfland, editors. Oscar W ildes Oxford Notebooks. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Sylvester, James Joseph. Fliegende Blatter: Supplement to The L aw s o f Verse. London: Grant, 1876.
. The L aw s o f Verse or Principles o f Versification E xem plfied in M etrical Translations. London:
Longmans, 1870.
Tennyson, Alfred. In Memoriam, in The Poems o f Tennyson. Edited by Christopher Ricks. 2nd
edition. Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1987. Vol. H, 315-459.
Yeats, W. B. The Poems: A N e w Edition. Edited by Richard J. Finneran. London: Macmillan,
1984.
H O P K IN S AND T H E C A T H O L IC IMAGINARY
Joseph Pizza
Perhaps the most inexhaustible context for Hopkinss work is his religion.
Although there has never been a shortage of scholarship seeking to under
stand the influence of religionand particularly his Roman Catholicism
on his writing, most work in this vein has tended to focus on the more or less
abstract theological import of his metaphysical poetics as opposed to the
lived experience of Victorian Roman Catholics. In attending, therefore, to
the larger theological sources of his writing, such scholarship often overlooks
the more mundane but equally revealing circumstantial pressures felt by
individual believers. Among the many paths, then, that Hopkins scholar
ship may take, I want to propose here that a closer look at his attempts to
reimagine a space for Roman Catholics within the larger Victorian social
imaginary will offer significant insights into our developing understanding
of his writing.
Several recent works have opened up new possibilities for such a consider
ation either by focusing on Hopkins and nineteenth-century Roman Catholic
culture or by considering it as part of an exploration of a related subject.
In the past two years alone, monographs by Michael Tomko, Meredith
Martin, and Kirstie Blair all demonstrate the importance of Catholicism as
a cultural and political force negotiated through the re-imaginings of poets
and novelists in the nineteenth-century, the latter two with special attention
to Hopkins. 1 Standing alongside these, of course, are established readings
of the subject byJill Muller, Margaret Johnson, Hilary Fraser, George Ten
nyson, and Stephen Prickett, all of which make for helpful starting points
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reverberation.
In the second quatrain, however, this harmony is confounded. As Hopkins
explained to Bridges, his return to the city as a Roman Catholic was not
altogether j oyous.
You will see that I have again changed my abode and am returned to my Alma
Mater and need not go far to have before my eyes...the charm of Oxford, green
shouldering grey, [though it] is already abridged and soured and perhaps will soon
be put out altogether. (LII1 20)
By omitting the pronoun and placing the verb at the beginning of the sec
ond clause of the passage, Hopkins makes the subject of lines 4 through 6
elliptical, creating a momentary confusion of identity, which, in the larger
context of the poem, is precisely the effect that the new architecture and its
larger moral significance bears, both for him personally and for the larger
character of the city. This dissolution of character, of the relations which
maintain for Hopkins the amicable interdependence of town and gown,
results in the blurred perspective of the octaves last two lines: graceless
growth, thou hast confounded / Rural rural keepingfolk, flocks, and
flowers (PII 142). The confounding here overthrows and corrupts the
previous lines sense of Oxford as grounded in the graced beauty of a
neighbour-nature made all the friendlier by the hyphen that compounds
them. The last line bears this out with its repetition of Rural rural, which
seems intended to confuse and so suggests a lack of distinction not only
between different senses of the word rural but also concerning whether
it is to be understood as an adjective or an adverb. Victorian Oxford thus
appears to Hopkins after his conversion to have confounded the friendly
relations between town and gown. As the flady descriptive summary has
it, Oxford has degenerated into folk, flocks, and flowers, the alliteration
slurring even these together. Though there is certainly a Ruskinian critique
of the utilitarian here, I want to claim that there is a crisis of self underly-
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ing this critique, one created by the effects of Hopkinss conversion and
evident more fully in the sonnets sestet. Consider, for example, that only
after the Universities Tests Act of 1871 could Roman Catholics begin to
take up places at Oxford. As a result, the majority of Hopkinss parishioners
at the time would have come from the Irish labourers inhabiting the brick
townhouses decried above. This surely complicated his response, as other
poems from his return to Oxford attest, such as The Buglers First Com
munion (P II 146). Thus, while on the surface the poems criticism seems
purely architectural, reading his response here in light of the situation of
Roman Catholics in Oxford helps to shed new light on the poems central
conflict by connecting it more clearly with the resolution, as a closer look
at the sonnets sestet will show.
The sestet moves forward by looking back, turning on the speakers
breathless recognition of his predecessor.
Yet ah! this air I gather and I release
He lived on; these weeds and waters, these walls are what
He haunted who of all men most sways my spirits to peace. [PII 142)
Couched within the concessive Yet, it is the air and not the life of town
or gown that inspires the speaker. Air in fact is a key term for Hopkins
in his writing on the Blessed Virgin Mary and functions as a locus for her
inspiration, both here and in the later poem The Blessed Virgin Compared
to the Air We Breathe. There, it can be argued that the speakers prayer
to be folded, in thee isled, responds to the lack of positive material
spaces for Roman Catholics to inhabit in Victorian Britain {PII 158-61).
As the exchange between Pusey and Newman would have demonstrated
for Hopkins during his undergraduate years, it was belief in the doctrine
of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary that divided
Tractarians from Roman Catholics most sharply.3 Considering the sestet
then in this light, one may read the conjuring of air here as both a response
to the periods anti-Catholicism and as a mark of his allegiance to neither
town nor gown but to a counter imaginary, one isled in resistance to his
alma mater and what it represents for the larger Victorian social imaginary.
The poems closing explores the nature of that resistance more fully.
O f realty the rarest-veined unraveller; a not
Rivalled insight, be rival Italy or Greece;
Who fired France for Mary without spot. (PII 142)
Surely realty sends most to the dictionary for a second look, and its archa
ism is significant. As Christopher Ricks has noted concerning T. S. Eliots
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At the revival of learning, however, [Scholastic] works fell out of favour.... [I]t
was mainly in their authority that the Romish Church found support for its periled
dogmas; on all which accounts, it was considered a mark of intellectual progress
and advance to have broken with them and altogether thrown off their yoke. Some,
however, still clung to these Schoolmen, and to one in particular, Duns Scotus...
while the others would contemptuously rejoin, Oh, you are a Dunsman, or, more
briefly, youre a dunce [A]nd in as much as the new learning is ever enlisting
more and more of the genius and scholarship of the age on its side, the tide became
more and more a term of scorn . 6
In his praise for Duns Scotus then, Hopkins turns an English commonplace
on its head, carving out an ironic space for Victorian Roman Catholics to
inhabit. Read in this way, the poem marks one instance of many in which
Hopkins can be shown to have broken with the conventions of the English
language and its literature in order to give voice to his own and his com
munitys ambivalent place within nineteenth-century British culture.
152
1. See Tomko, British Romanticism and the Catholic Question; Martin, Rise and Fall o f Meter,
Blair, Faith and Form in Victorian Poetry and Religion.
2. See Muller, Gerard M anley Hopkins and Victorian Catholicism', Johnson, Gerard M anley
Hopkins and Tractarian Poetry, Fraser, Beauty and Belief, Tennyson, Victorian Devotional Poetry; and
Prickett, Romanticism and Religion.
3. See Pusey, Church o f England a Portion o f Christs One H oly Catholic Church, and Newman,
Letter to Pusey.
4. See his T. S. Eliot and Prejudice, 258. However, it should be noted that, unlike Hopkins,
Eliot is here alluding to an earlier text, Julian of Norwichs fourteenth-century Sixteen Revela
tions o f Divine Love.
5. Martin, Rise and Fall o f Meter,
6. Trench, On the Study o f Words,
76.
85-86.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blair, Kirstie. Faith and Form in Victorian Poetry and Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2012.
Fraser, Hilary. Beauty and Belief: Aesthetics and Religion in Victorian Literature. Cambridge: Cam
bridge University Press, 1986.
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. The Further Letters o f Gerard M anley Hopkins, Including his Correspondence
with Coventry Patmore. Edited by Claude Colleer Abbott. 2nd edition. London: Oxford
University Press, 1956.
---- . Gerard M anley Hopkins: The M ajor Works. Edited by Catherine Phillips. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009.
Johnson, Margaret. Gerard M anley Hopkins and Tractarian Poetry. Aldershot: Ashgate Publish
ers, 1997.
Knight, Mark and Emma Mason. Mneteenth-Century Religion and Literature: A n Introduction.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Martin, Meredith. The Rise and Fall o f Meter: Poetry and English National Culture, 1 8 6 0 - 1 9 3 0 .
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.
Muller, Jill. Gerard M anley Hopkins and Victorian Catholicism: A Heart in Hiding. London: Routledge, 2003.
Newman, John Henry. A Letter to the Reverend E . B. Pusey, on H is Recent Eirenicon. London:
Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1866.
Oxford English Dictionary, realty Last modified December 2008. Edited by James Mc
Cracken. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Prickett, Stephen. Romanticism and Religion: The Influence o f Coleridge and Wordsworth on the Vic
torian Church. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
Pusey, Edward Bouverie. The Church o f England a Portion o f Christs One H oly Catholic Church,
and a M eans o f Restoring Visible Unity. A n Eirenicon, in a Letter to the Author o f The Christian
Year. Oxford: John Henry and James Parker, 1865.
Ricks, Christopher. T. S. Eliot and Prtyudice. London: Faber & Faber, 1994.
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Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
Tennyson, G. B. Victorian Devotional Poetry: The Tractarian Mode. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1981.
Tomko, Michael. British Romanticism and the Catholic Question: Religion, History and National Identity,
1 7 7 8 - 1 8 2 9 . London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Trench, Richard Chenevix. On the Study o f Words: Five Lectures addressed to the Pupils at the Diocesan
Training School, Winchester. London: 1851.
Wheeler, Michael. The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
T H E O B E D IE N T M IN D O F G E R A R D M ANLEY H O P K IN S
Sum m er J. Star
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