'A billion times told lovelier' : the struggle for correspondence in Gerard Manley Hopkins's poetry

Abstract

This dissertation sets out to explore Gerard Manley Hopkins‘s struggle to find pattern and unity against the background of his acute awareness of the manifold variety of nature, and how this struggle is played out in his poetry. The relation between these two contrasting aspects of his sensibility shaped his thought, as shown by the writings in his early notebooks and journals. Moreover, this relation was defined by his struggle to establish a connection with God, which he describes as ‗the wish to correspond‘, ‗the life and spirit of man‘. My research tries to understand the way Hopkins attempts to write poetry which does justice to his vision. The first chapter of the dissertation focuses on the nature of the relation Hopkins perceives between unity and ‗piedness‘, through his journals and papers, analysing the background against which he starts to write his mature poetry. Hopkins‘s distinctive concept of inscape, which is at the basis of his vision, is examined. The second chapter seeks to investigate the ways in which Hopkins attempts to write in a language which could carry his vision of a unity achieved through ‗piedness‘ into poetry. In the third chapter, I attempt to trace the way the tranquillity of his earliest poetry, which is characterised by a desire to withdraw from the world to be closer to God, gives way to a poetry which struggles to achieve a connection with God through the very dissonance and multiplicity of that world. Hopkins senses that looking closely at the ‗selves‘ of individual objects of nature is the only way in which he can hope to achieve a truthful correspondence with God, and this is reflected in the rich and distinctive language of his poetry. The fourth chapter of this dissertation seeks to investigate the poems in which Hopkins deals with the distinctiveness of his own self: 'more distinctive and higher pitched than anything else I see.‘ The patterns of his previous poems seem to break down, leaving the poet trapped in his own self-enclosure. The struggle for unity seems to have led to a painful awareness of the jarring of the self with what is outside it, rather than to a connection with God, yet is this jarring all that is left at the end of Hopkins‘s poetic trajectory? My research attempts to explore whether Hopkins‘s poetry allows for the possibility of a vision of unity which does not discard the dazzling variety Hopkins perceived in the world.