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).
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