Courage in the Flux

…The golden echo works instead to make the question redundant by proposing willing surrender.  Its attitude is that we do not own what appears to be most ours, have no claim on it, may sleep at nights, as it were, with unlocked doors because what is at risk does not belong to us anyway…This is not resignation, it is a sort of courage in the flux, …It is the providential lesson of the lilies of the field and the fall of the sparrow and the regenerative principle that even ‘the mere mould’ will waken life; but it is a lesson which takes us ‘yonder’ out of the ‘tall sun’ which ‘shines too long and withers the harvest’ and the air which ‘carries the poison of disease’.  It takes us also out of the world visibly charged with the grandeur of God---and that is ominous.

…in The Wreck…as a disaster …strengths and weaknesses…the idea that God’s loving purpose is so constantly present as to be found even in the activity of destruction---is settled…as something for our unearned acceptance.  Instead of resolving the difficulty involved in seeing love in the hostile processes of the storm, Hopkins tries to win our support at this crux {!} with one remarkable coup…the supreme significance of the wreck is not as a calamity but as a revelation. 

…further developed in the superb hourglass image of the fourth stanza, with particular focus on the poet’s own physical life:

                        I am soft sift

                    In an hourglass---at the wall

                 Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift,

                      And it crowds and it combs to the fall;

                  I steady as a water in a well, to a poise, to a pane;

                  But roped with, always, all the way down from the tall

                                     Fells or flanks of the voel, a vein

                         Of the gospel proffer, a pressure, a principle, Christ’s gift.

…He is secured by Christ as the ‘ropes’ of streams secure the valley waters….(in one note Hopkins speaks of the redemptive effect of the incarnation in these terms: ‘A 60-fathom coil of cord running over the cliff’s edge round by round…40 fathom already gone and the rest will follow, when a man sets his foot on it and saves both what is hanging and what has not yet stirred to run.  Or seven tied by the rope on the Alps; four go headlong, then the fifth, as strong as Samson, checks them and the two behind do not even feel the strain’).6  Did ‘the million of rounds of thy mercy not reeve even them in?’  Hopkins fancies that the cry of the tall nun may have alerted the other passengers to the reality of their situation (stanza 31), for their time of suffering is, in fact, the moment of their inevitable confrontation with God….he builds on that fancy…~Inspirations Unbidden, Chapter 4, ‘The Cavernous Dark’

"1 go among the fields and catch a glimpse  of a stoat or a fieldmouse peeping out of the withered grass--the creature hath a purpose and its eyes are bright with it."

~Keats, in an 1819 letter