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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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on the subject.2Moreover, in addition to these works of literary criticism, a

number of recent studies have added to our understanding of the cultural
situation of Roman Catholics in the period. In particular, Mark Knight and
Emma Masons Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature, Michael Wheelers
The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century British Culture, and
Charles Taylors magisterial A Secular Age, to name only a few, offer fresh
and exciting perspectives that Hopkins scholars may profitably expand
upon. Taken together then, this growing body of research offers the scholar
interested in the ways in which the cultural situation of Victorian Roman
Catholics may have helped to shape Hopkinss work a variety of paths to
take. Though limitations of space preclude an extended consideration of
these here, as an example of one such path I want to offer a reading of
Duns Scotuss Oxford as an instance of the potential insights gained from
such a perspective.

Although Duns Scotuss Oxford plainly addresses the university, it is the

university considered in 1879 from the perspective of Hopkins the Roman
Catholic priest, not that of the Anglo-Catholic student of the mid-1860s.
In its ambivalent attitude towards Hopkinss alma mater, the poem serves
as an apt example of the ways in which his struggles as a marginalized Ro
man Catholic may add to our understanding of his work. Indeed, I want
to argue here that the poems central ambiguity concerns the estrangement
from home and self felt by Catholic converts in general and Oxford alumni
like Hopkins in particular. Such alienation can be observed in broad terms
in the broken relationship between town and gown evident in the sonnets
octave.
Beginning with the first quatrain, the beauty of the city is presented as a
harmonious balance of town and gown. In line 2, this harmony suspends
time: Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmed, lark-charmed, rook-racked, riverrounded (L III142). Situated between two colons, the line should be a clause
of its own, with the apostrophized Oxford as its implied subject. However,
by making the verbs of the clause participial adjectives, each compound
epithet could be described as both its own clause as well as an item in a
catalogue describing an Oxford in which cuckoos echo, bells swarm, larks
charm, rooks rack, and rivers round eternally. Indeed, the sound repeti
tions within the epithets, particularly the consonance and alliteration of
Cuckoo-echoing, rook-racked, and river-rounded, create a doubling
effect, as though the music of the city were caught in a perpetual, timeless

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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)

Here the sourness of Hopkinss response is rooted in his ambivalence over

the encroachment of the newer brick buildings in east Oxford and Cowley,
where he ministered to soldiers at the military barracks, upon the medieval
and renaissance colleges of the university. Such division is apparent in the
second quatrain, where town is set against gown.
Thou hast a base and brickish skirt there; sours
That neighbour-nature thy grey beauty is grounded
Best in; graceless growth, thou hast confounded
Rural rural keepingfolk, flocks, and flowers. (Pit 142)

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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Literature

use of behovely in Four Quartets, archaism can be effective in presenting a

belief that has itself fallen out of common usage.4 As the recently revised
entry for the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary shows, realty pos
sesses two sets of significations, one a synonym for reality and the other for
royalty. Moreover, in a usage particular to Scotland, and hence to Scotus, the
former could also be used to designate royal land. Though both strands are
touched on in Hopkinss employment of the term in the poem, the second,
with its Scottish sub-definition, has been out of use since the seventeenthcentury, while the former, though rare, still appears as a legal term and in
relation to real estate. In his choice of realty then, Hopkins inflects the
contemporary usage with the former, itself more familiar to the medieval
Scottish philosopher. In doing so, the sonnets closing seeks to recover an
aspect of the past by bearing witness to it in the present. In other words,
the realty, real estate, reality of Oxford is here imaginatively reclaimed by
Hopkins as royal land, as a place which fostered the likes of Duns Scotus
and the Roman Catholic understanding of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In
this way, by asserting the endurance of Scotuss Marian doctrine and of
the larger Roman Catholic tradition in Oxford, Hopkins gleans from the
live air, as his later poem on The Blessed Virgin has it, a correspondent
vitality. That it is the life of a counter music is made clearer through the
materiality of the poem. Take, for instance, the opposition emphasized by
the sprung rhythm of the final line: Who fired France for Mary without
spot. As Meredith Martin has demonstrated, Hopkinss metrical marks
extend beyond the poem itself and into the public domain of national
salvation and the very private domain of spiritual identity. 5 Such national
and private concerns are evident here in the way in which the juxtaposed
stresses direct one to read the line. Dramatizing the utterance with an un
usually athletic form of apologetic, metrical marks highlight Scotuss role in
the poem and, by virtue of his inspiration and allegiance, Hopkinss also as
affirming a counter argument, one replete with its own complex imaginary.
In this way, the unusual stress on the second syllable of without appears
as daring as any of Hopkinss rhythmic experiments. His inversion of the
usual pronunciation here emphasizes the spotiessness of Marys soul, the
doctrinal point which frequently separated Anglo-Catholics from their Ro
man Catholic counterparts. Such separation, I want to claim, animates the
poem as a whole and continues to challenge our responses to it.
In closing this discussion of the poem, however, one further note must
be made in regarding Scotuss role in Hopkinss attempt to uncover and
celebrate a counter imaginary. Ever attuned to the etymological pitch of
a word, Hopkins was certainly aware of Richard Chenevix Trenchs history
of the epithet dunce:

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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.

As I believe my reading of Duns Scotuss Oxford shows, then, new

perspectives on Hopkinss work can be gained from a closer engagement
with anti-Catholicism and the culture of Victorian Roman Catholics.
Though there are certainly a host of other interesting paths worth pursuing,
approaching Hopkinss writing through the lens of this context offers new
insights as well. And this extends not only to his experience in isolation but
also to his relationship with other Roman Catholic writers. How, we might
ask, does Hopkinss imaginative experience relate to that of other Roman
Catholic poets in the period? How might the work of Coventry Patmore,
Alice Meynell, and Ernest Dowson, to name only a few, help to clarify
our understandings of Hopkins? And what, more broadly, might we learn
about Victorian and Modernist poetry by viewing Hopkins in this way?
Though space precludes an engagement with these or other related issues
here, I would suggest, as my last question implies, that their answers offer
to enrich not only our understanding of Hopkins, but of nineteenth and
early twentieth-century poetry as well.
B elm ont A bbey College

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NOTES

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

In one of the first biographies of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Geoffrey

Grigson characterized the poets realism as a persistent reconnaissance
with the outward world: With letter-leaves, ants egg clouds, and rop
ing ooze...we are divorced from the averagely fine poetic diction of the
nineteenth century. Here and almost everywhere in Hopkinswe knock
our sensibilities against exactitudes and starknesses which may still repel
or dismay either those who live aesthetically in older, gentler modes or
those who do not require to live outwardly at all. 1The experience of be
ing knocked against the world as readers of Hopkinss poetry comes for
Grigson precisely from the spirit of living outwardly or earnestly, yet
the moral imperative subtending such attention, the self-reflexive tension
that girded the outward turn, has received less attention from critics
considering Hopkinss aesthetic principles. Critics since R. K. R. Thornton
and J. Hillis Miller have tended to put the poets aesthetic and religious al
legiances in opposition (or, as with most current critics, put aside the moral
pull completely in favor of more material interests). What I posit here, in
an effort to promote the re-connection of moral and aesthetic criticism of
Hopkins, is the role of his Jesuit training as a bridge between his aesthetic
and moral activity. The principle of obedience of thought in particular,
trained into him during the novitiate years, brought a reflexive practice of
mind startlingly similar to the exercises of inscape-seeing recorded in his
journals and encoded in the poems. Both the self-conscious mental work of
turning the mind outward to see inscape and the rigor of Jesuit media-

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