The Hopkins Scholarship of Norman White

Brian Arkins

Issue 378, vol.95, Summer 2006

For wealth of detail concerning external events, White is unrivalled. As to his efforts at sketching-in the various background contexts, the verdict is mixed : He is good on Hopkins’ student years at Oxford, on his classical studies, on his time in the Jesuit Order; but he could have filled out the picture regarding the Church Of England, the philosopher Duns Scotus, Irish politics.

However it is as a guide to the influence of Hopkins’ inner life on his poetry, that White proves sometimes very unsatisfactory : he fails to deal sympathetically with the reality that this is a Jesuit priest expounding Roman Catholic doctrine in his poetry. Nor is White alone in revealing such a blind spot : “Explicitly religious themes in contemporary works of literature are frequently ignored in critical scholarship”, notes one critic, “their religious significance apparently being played down”.

When Hopkins writes, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God”, White comments : “The extended descriptions record joyful experiences, although they were nothing to do with his [studies] or any part of his Jesuit mind”. But both Catholic and Protestant theologians had long held that the created world of nature is a mirror, however inadequate, of the divine world. With regard to “Pied Beauty”, White again strikes the reductionist note, citing the poem as “an attack on the idea of God as the god of the conventional” – whereas Hopkins’ sole aim here was to extol the variegation of God’s creation.

Indeed, alluding to the poet meditating on the creator in the traditional way, White informs us that such a thing is only possible by ignoring Evolution ! His inability to suspend, even temporarily, his own disbelief gets in the way when analysing the volta or “turn” in a great sonnet of Hopkins (“That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection”) : the first part of the poem, says White, “is followed by its rejection and replacement by a conventional Christian panacea message”.

The poem, “Carrion Comfort”, according to White, represents a “clash between Hopkins’ poetic and priestly personae”. However, one critic who has not censored-out the religious dimension, can report that the poem is an Ignatian/Jesuit meditation at whose end “the full and affective realization dawns on the speaker that his dark night truly was a struggle with the Son of God and that he has emerged transformed”.

 “The Wreck of the Deutschland” of 1875 – 76 can be adjudged an improvement on Hopkins’ earlier sub-Keatsian adumbration of it : it was not until, precisely, he joined the Jesuits that Hopkins became a great poet.

Brian Arkins is Professor of Classics at NUI, Galway.