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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Sonnet 65 by Gerard Manley Hopkins, “No worst, there is none,” has been criticized by Yvor Winters in the Hudson Review (Winter 1949) as an instance of late romantic emotional over-emphasis without a statement of the generating concept, of the motive, of the nature of the experience. Hopkins, says Winters, “cannot move us by telling us why he himself is moved”; therefore the poet urges, in effect, “ ‘Share my fearful emotion, for the human mind is subject to fearful emotions’.” Hopkins' skill in metaphor and in metric variation succeeds in stirring the reader occasionally, admits Winters, but since we are being led “blindfold into violence,” the poem becomes a “violation of our integrity.”
1 “Gerard Manley Hopkins,” i, 466. Part ii of this article appears in the Spring 1949 issue.
2 “According to my own view, the poem is a rational statement about a human experience, made in such a way that the emotion which ought to be motivated by that rational understanding of the experience is communicated simultaneously with the rational understanding: the poem is thus a complete judgment of the experience, a judgment both rational and emotional.” “Gerard Manley Hopkins,” Hudson Rev., ii (Spring 1949), 77.
3 The Hopkins critics generally prefer to dismiss the entire group of sonnets with a single appreciative but unanalytical comment. Thus John Pick states that these sonnets are “among the most personal and introspective of all Hopkins' verse … expressions of a man anxious to unload his desolate heart” (Gerard Manley Hopkins: Priest and Poet, New York, 1942, p. 143). Other critics do no more than locate the central critical problem in the identification of the “conflict” which underlies the poems. C. C. Abbott indicates that the struggle for supremacy of poet with priest provides the background of suffering against which the poems are written. “It is perhaps not fanciful to feel that this sacrifice of self aroused a measure of regret and a realization that his persecuted gifts should have been more fully used” (Introd., Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, London, 1935, p. xl). W. A. M. Peters, S.J., limits himself to the same problem, locating it, however, in the interior trials mentioned in the Hopkins letters of this period (Gerard Manley Hopkins, London, 1948, pp. 45–48).
4 Letter to A. W. M. Baillie, 14 Jan. 1883, in Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott (London, 1938), pp. 105–106.
5 “The underthought which plays through this is that the Danaids flying from their cousins are like their own ancestress Io teazed by the gadfly and caressed by Zeus” (Further Letters, p. 106).
6 Gerard Manley Hopkins (New Haven, 1949), i, 178.
7 The Notebooks and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Humphry House (London, 1937), pp. 4–5. The direct influence of Aeschylus on Hopkins has been traced in an article by W. B. Stanford in Studies, xxx (Sept. 1941), 359–368. Stanford notes Hopkins' theory of the underthought and overthought in Aeschylus as an instance of the poet's perceptions in regard to the Greek dramatists, but he does not relate it to the source of the puzzling poems. He finds, instead, the source of a single image in Sonnet 65, “O the mind, mind has mountains” in the Suppliants, 794–797:
For Stanford, the “brilliant and vivid epithet lonely-minded suggested … Hopkins' mountains of the mind” (p. 361).
8 “I am afraid you object to being critic of MS poetry; on one occasion I remember when I shewed you some, only a translation of a chorus in the Prometheus Bound, you would give no opinion on it. Indeed, I believe you were right, it is the only safe course. I hate being asked to criticize what I cannot praise” (letter of 6 Sept. 1863, Further Letters, p. 59).
9 Shelley's drama, writes Hopkins, is “as fine as, or finer than, the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus—though perhaps a little too fantastic” (Gardner, ii, 404).
10 “Have you read Prometheus Unbound? Do you know I admire it extremely. I think Simcox has not got much realist definiteness of image, but that is not a necessity” (letter of 15 Sept. 1867, Further Letters, p. 82). Prometheus Unbound was published by Smith, Elder & Co. in 1867.
11 In June 1882 Hopkins undertook the work of revision for Bridges, and in Nov. and Dec. of the same year wrote lengthy letters of criticism to him. See Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, pp. 161–167. Hopkins' understanding of the responsibilities of his position as critic for Bridges is reflected in further letters, pp. 200, 201, 243–344. Hopkins' high regard for Prometheus the Firegiver is shown in a letter to Patmore: “to me it appears a work of standard and classical beauty, rather to be named with Comus and Samson Agonistes than with other attempts in the same line” (letter of 16 Aug. 1883, Further Letters, p. 148).
12 See note by Bridges in Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W. H. Gardner, 3rd ed. (New York, 1948), p. 245. See also note by C. C. Abbott in Letters … to Robert Bridges, p. 221.
13 Letter of 17 May 1885, Letters … to Robert Bridges, p. 217.
14 Letter of 23 Oct. 1886, The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott (London, 1935), p. 147.
15 The passage from Tertullian is found in context in 2 Sept. Flor. Tertulliani Adversus Marcionem, Tertulliani Operum, Pars ii, Patrologiae Latinae, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris, 1844–1903), p. 271.
16 Quoted in Karl Heinemann, Die tragischen Gestalten der Griechen in der Weliliteratur, Band i (Leipzig, 1920), 17.
17 Introd., Prometheus (New York, 1905), p. 71.
18 This doctrine is again brought out in the Epistle to the Romans: “I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercy of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, pleasing unto God” (xii.1).
19 “In order to become the Saviour of men, Jesus Christ willed to be a Victim. But since He has a Mystical Body, it follows that if the Head is immolated, all the members likewise must become living victims.” Serm. pour la Purif. de la Ste. Vierge, quoted in Raoul Plus, S.J., The Ideal of Reparation (London, 1936), p. 17.
20 A modern writer states the point thus: “The priest, therefore, who is charged to prolong, as it were, the role of Christ, ought to imitate Him by offering himself with Christ as an evidence of adoration and expiation. The priest who consecrates will therefore be a victim with Jesus” (Plus, p. 90).
21 The Love of God and the Cross of Jesus (St. Louis, 1951), p. 171.
22 The Love of God and the Cross of Jesus, p. 172. Of such souls, Juan Arintero, The Mystical Evolution in the Development and Vitality of the Church (St. Louis, 1949), ii, 473, writes: “She [the Church] suffers these sorrows principally in her healthiest members which are full of life and feeling … These must suffer as expiatory victims for the malice or luke-warmness of the rest. They suffer incessantly so that all may be healed.” Saint Catherine of Siena, who suffered intensely in this manner for the sinners of her own day, relates that she was told by Christ: “… take thy tears and perspiration … for I assure you that her [the Church's] beauty will not be restored by the sword … but … by the sweat and tears of My servants.” Quoted in Arintero, p. 473.
23 It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that the name of Anne Catherine Emmerich, a mystic known for the physical conformation she bore to the suffering Christ, occurs three times in the Journal of Hopkins, once when he relates how he wept on hearing her description of the Agony in the Garden. See Notebooks and Papers, pp. 128, 339, 348.
24 No attempt is being made here to identify the speaker of the poem as Hopkins himself, although the chief Hopkins critics appear to agree that the “terrible sonnets” are personal and parallel the expressions of suffering in the letters during the period of their writing. See esp. Peters, pp. 47–49. It suffices for the purpose of this paper to establish the fact that the state of vicarious suffering, which might be considered analogous to the sufferings of Prometheus, is recognized by theologians, and is so commonly known in the Church as to be eminently familiar to Hopkins.
25 All references to Prometheus Bound are from Herbert Weir Smyth, trans. Aeschylus (London, 1927).
26 Prometheus the Firegiver in Poetical Works of Robert Bridges (Oxford, 1898), i, 54.
27 One such cry appears in the fragment of Prometheus Desmotes translated by Hopkins himself:
See Notebooks and Papers, pp. 4–5. Shelley writes:
28 In Bridges' drama, Prometheus prophesies their future meeting and the wanderings of Io to the child and her parents (ll. 1063 ff.). In the Greek drama, Aeschylus portrays the frenzied Io standing before the suffering Prometheus as he prophesies her wanderings yet farther (ll.700 ff.). In both cases, the impression of vast areas of the earth traversed by Io is conveyed by the lengthy geographical catalogues.
29 See Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, ll.30–35, and Shelley, Prometheus Unbound: “Three thousand years of sleep-unsheltered hours” (i.12).
30 See above, p. 64.
31 See above, p. 58.