“The Widow of an Insight”: Poetry and the Ministry

                       Physician, heal thyself.  Luke 4:23

        Because its speaker cannot bear or transmit Christ the Word, “To Seem the Stranger” enacts, intimately, Hokins’s failure in ministry; since the “woman clothed with the sun” is an allegoricaly type of the Catholic Church as well as of the Virgin, it broaches this theme from a broadly institutional, as well as personal, perspective.  Yet although the poem is the only one of the “terrible sonnets” to engage this theme directly, the concern is common to them all.  “Carrion Comfort” can speak about Hopkins’s past conversion and reception into the priesthood, but it cannot actually perform a priestly function in the present.  Though Hopkins may complain, in To Seem the Stranger,” that England does not hear him, he himself makes no effort to breach the silence.  None of these poems postulates, as part of its rhetorical form, an individual human audience, much less a society or congregation whom the speaker serves as priest though his poetic capacity; their isolated self-enclosure is too absolute to permit those priestly and ritual gestures towards an implied audience through which he had previously fulfilled his ministry.  The poems thus render the disintegration of the Christian community and, in microcosmic form, the dissolution of the visible Catholic Church.  Although commentators have attended exclusively to Hopkins’s relationship with God, and sometimes to its breakdown, the collapse of his connection to the religious community---no less significant than the more obvious but more private disaster---is also enacted in these poems.  It is frankly a spectacle of some pathos to consider this impotence in his public institutional capacity as the concluding episode, if only in the poetry, of a man who had repudiated the Anglicanism of his family and nation, converted to Catholicism, entered the most demanding of its orders, and striven, often under adverse conditions, to serve adequately in a social role for which he was not temperamentally suited.  The separation between the priest and his community that the “terrible sonnets” mirrors is the earthly correlative, within the process of daily religious life, of Hopkins’s inability to sustain his communication with Christ.” ~Daniel Harris, Inspirations Unbidden, Chapt. 4

[ In 1877 Hopkins “failed his final theology exam because of Scotus’ theology which meant he would not move up in the Society.]

    Although he burnt most of his poetry when he became a Jesuit and frequently insisted that the practice of poetry was opposed to his true vocation as a priest,⁴ he was equally convinced of his religious duty not to stifle the poetic talent given him by God:

                           

Art and its fame do not really matter, spiritually they are nothing, virtue is the only good; but it is only by bringing in the infinite that to a just judgment they can be made to look inifinitesimal or small or less than vastly great; and in this ordinary view of them I apply to the, and it is the true rule for dealing with them what Christ our Lord said of virtue, Let your light shine before men that they may see your good works (say, of art) and glorify your Father in heaven (that is, acknowledge that they have an absolute excellence in them and are steps in a scale of infinite inexhaustible excellence). ⁵

When, writing to Dixon, he called Christ “the only just judge, the only just literary critic,”⁶ he was implicitly characterizing Christ as the arch-poet {Yes.} and thus justifying both his own work and his creative role by a theory of Christian imitation.  Indeed, so high a premium did he place upon his poetic activity as the satisfying of Christ’s desire that, in the midst of his jaded summer of 1885, he could write with desperate fervor to Bridges, “if I could but produce work I should not mind its being buried, silenced, and going no further; but it kills me…

⁹ Hopkins, Letters to Bridges, p.66; see also Hopkins, Correspondence of Hopkins and Dixon: “You see then what is against me, but since, as Solomon says, there is a time for everything, there is nothing that does not some day come to be, it may be that the time will come for my verses” (p. 95).