"ME THOUGHTS I HEARD ONE CALLING": TALKING TO GOD IN THE POETRY OF JOHN DONNE,

GEORGE HERBERT, CHRISTINA ROSSETTI, AND GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

Sarah Fiona Winters

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Griduiitt Dcpuhnat of En@& Univdty of Toronto

O Cowght by Sa& Fiona Winters 1999

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Abstmct

"Me thoughts 1 heard one calliagtt: TallMg to God in the Poetry of John Donne,

George Herbert, Christina Rossetti, and G d Manley Hopkins

Sarah Fiona Winters

Doctor of Philosophy, 1999

Graduate Department of English

University of Toronto

niis snidy approaches the religious poetry of John Dome, George Herbert,

Chnstina Rossetti, and Gemd Manley Hopkins h m the viewpoint of an atheist or

agnostic reader who believes thst when these poas speak to G d they are ceally speaking

to themseives. 1 draw on the theones of Ludwig Feuerbach and Julia Kristeva to examine

the dialogue of the subject with itseîf in the fonn of a poan consiructed as a prayer. 1

concentrate on cwo central aspects of religious poetry: the construction of the self. and the

aatlue of poetry.

Chapter One contextualizes Feuerbach's idea that G d is humanity's

extemaîization of itseif within the history of Christian theology, showing that the four

pets Wer in the degree to which they regarâ God as "human" and therefore close to the

self. or "Othe?' and thmfon distant and tenifying. The more "human" the pet's God

is, the more k l y it is that the poet wili inscribe God's speech and mctions into his or

her pocm.

Caapta Two ttxkics the f o d wtia of the p~etry, dnwing Spccincaily on

Knstcva's catcgorits of tht symboüc and the d o t i c , in an aücmpt to c ù m c t e b

thymt, rhythm. alliteration, pudox, puns, and so on us one or the o h . It concludcs

that stculp theory clmaot arbspd, but cm @y iiiiimiiuibc, the mcaning of rcligiws

poctry-

The third chaptcr appmches the poctry by means ofthe theologid dwtincbion

bawffn agqw-love anci sros-love, a d a n d s distinction ktunen idcaiistic and

missistic love. 1 attcmpt to demonsmb both thc diffcllcnt ways in which the pocts

express both love and hate towards God, and the way the poets unconsciously use God as

a means by which they can achKvc self-lovc, or txprtss self-hate.

Thc fint ducc chaptcn concentrate on ways to nad the pats agaimt themselves;

the fourih and nnal chapter rrtimis to the poets' own intentions in examining their

attitudes towardo the compatibility or othtrwist of poary d religion, It situates

Kristeva's argument, tht pocûy is dway subversive of nügion, w i t h the iargt boây of

critichm which iirgues for tk close relation of ~OCQY and religion.

Acknowledgments

The most indispensable contribution to this dissertation was of course the

financial one, for which 1 would Like to thank the University of Toronto for a Conaaught

Scholarship, the goverrunent of Ontario for an Ontario Graduate Scholamhip, and the

English Department for an Open Fellowship and especidy for the Dissertation

Fellowship which dowed me the rare luxury of working exclusively on the thesis for a

Year-

1 was very forninate in my dissertation cornmittee. Julian Patrick responded with

enthusiasrn and interest to whet 1 had to say. Michael Dixon was simultaneowly gentle

and tough in raising Unportant questions. My supe~isor, David Shaw, led me through

this thesis with kindness and genemsity, and somehow always managed to get my drafts

back to me quickly in spite of al1 his other work. 1 am very gratefbl to him for his

puidance and support.

I owe a gnat deal to family and fnends for their support. Anna, Tony, JO, Katy,

and Jack have all encouraged me for many years, even though I live thousands of miles

away h m them. My fellow students h m the University of Chgo, New Zealand,

Andrew Fieldsend, Elizabeth Hale, and Alice Petersen, have al1 inspired and reassured me

by their example, as they too aim for a North American PhD d e p . Chantet Lavoie and

Karin Peterson bave k e n grmat feilow-travelers to have during the W1iting pmcess.

E l a k Ostry and Carrie Hintz both gave me much good advice during the whole progress

of the degree, and led by example. I owe speciai thanlw to Carrie for d g the

pendtirnate dtaft and commenting with such wit and genmsity.

Finally, my thenLs go to Man Plamondon for advice and help both practical and

emotional. in tribute to his qualities as an excellent editor and proof-readet, a cornputer

whiz, and a wonderhil k s t fiiend, 1 dedicate this dissertation to him.

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. The Human God

II. Symbolic and Semiotic: Religion in Poetic Language

m. Love and Hate: Ambivalence in Religious Poetry

IV. The Validity of Religious Poetry

Conclusion

Works Consulted

Introduction

Prayer is the selfaivision of man into two beingsra dialogue of man with hinw& with his heart. (Feuerbach 123)

It is ditncuit to imagine how any late twentieth-century nonbeliever could

disagme with this statement by the nineteenth-century atheist philosopher Ludwig

Feuerbach. For if there is no God, then who could a man be talking with but himself?

This dissertation is not, of course, concemed with trying to prove the existence or non-

existence of God. Rather it attempts to provide some ways in which seculas =aciers,

whether atheist or agnostic, c m r d religious pets who clearly bekve that prayer, and

theù poems that enact prayer, are dialogues not with themselves, but with a living God.

Whni a religious pet taks to God he is maily t a b g to hirnsetf.

The title of this dissertation is taken h m the end of George Herbert's "The

Collar" :

But as 1 ravld end grew more fierce and wilde At every word,

Me thoughts I h e d one calling, Childl And 1 reply Id, M y Lord. (33-36)

As a number of commentatocs on this poem have pohted out, Herbert's own

chterizatioxt of Gd's speech as something that he thought he heard, casts into doubt

the objective nature of that speech.' Did Herbert acnially hear Goà cal1 "Chiid!" or did he

' Richard Tocid, for exemple, points out that "This comment on his own perceptions, its vay canfulncss indicative of some clarity of vision, does not teN his teader that he

2

just think that he did? None of us have any way of kmnowing for sure, but 1 approach the

poems h m the assumption that it is the religious poet, not God, who speaks Gd's words

aud Wntes Gd's actions and reactions into the poem.

In applying Feuerbach's dictum to religious poeûy I am confiating poetry with

prayer. In the case of religious poetry mitten by devout klievers, such an identification

is valid, perhaps even compulsory. Men a Christian pet addresses a poem to God, she

regards that poem as a type o f prayer. Anything less would be a sacrilegious use of God

for the purpose of creating a human work of art . A. D. Nuttali, wtiting about Herbert,

highlights the problems of regardhg the religious poem in the same category as other

pows, as "fiom first to last dramatic fictions, with (as commonly) a fictional addressee

within the poem-God-and a ml adâressee outside the poem-the d e r " (ûverheard by

God 9). Nuttail argues that Wuse Herbert offers his poems to G d as if they were

prayers, his attitude "at once confounds our neat resolution of dficulties whereby God

was allowed to be the addressee within the poem whiie outside it was the d e r who was

adâressed (1 8). Foliowing Nuttall, 1 hold the position that the religious lyric addressed

to God has more in common with prayer than with other types of poems? When God

actuaUy heard auything, only thet he thought k did, says so, and tesponds accordingly" (56). Michael Schoenfeldt rea& the lines as recording "a ü n g e ~ g solipsism, where h e r and outer, imagination and Wty, are diencuit to distinguish" (108). Richard Strier goes so far as to argue that "Whether the cail to which Herbert pnsents himselfas nsponding is objective or subjective does not matter" (Love ffiaun 226). The existence of this dissertation is evidence of how much 1 disagree with Strier on that point.

Thus my argument thaî the poet's relationship to ûod is a relationship to himseîf does not n e c e d y have to be extended to secuiar poetry- When Dome, for example, writes his mistress's reactions i n . a love poem, he has the memories of the speech and actions of nal women kfoce him, even if he departs h those memories in the poem.

speaks or reacts in these poems, he npresents the unconscious reaction of the poet to his

own prayer. Tbat is, the poems describe or enact a real, not a fictional, experience. They

describe th experience of a past prayer, or are themselves a prayer. The Christian and

the atheist may agm thus far, they an only f o d to part Company on the nature of that

real experience.

The Christian reada might a g m that religious poems are prayers, arguing that the

God who speaks to the poet is the real Gd, acttdiy taking part in the F m . The non-

beiieving reader has to appmach the poem samewbat differentiy. She cm take refuge in a

purely aesthetic appreciatioa of the f o d qualities of the poem, of course. But many

teaders waat more than beauty h m Iiteratue; they want "ûuth," that is to say, a

representation of a recognizable humao experience. What h u m expesicnce is described,

or enacteci, by poems which present an interaction with God? The aaswer 1 suggest is

that the poem describes the experience of the subject's relationship with itself.

The poets 1 have chosen to test this thesis are John Donne, George Herbert,

Christina Rossetti, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. 1 have chosen these four poets in

But ody the Christian would Say thet he also has the memory of the real God's speech and actions. Even iftbe "she" or "thou" of any given love poem is merely a composite of many different women, and many different cultural ideais about women, the poet is stili tra~sfonniog "real" expience into his poetry. Of course it is quite possible that a love poet (or a satirical poet) might consciously or unconsciously create a "thou" who is merely an extension of the '7" of that poem (whether that "1" is identicai with the poet or not), but this seKdvision is not a necemuy consequence of secular paeûy, as it must, to the non-believing reader, be a nneccssary co~l~equence of sacred poetry. Moreovet, M e a love poem may k aâdressed to a reaI petson primarily and other d e r s secondariiy, it may ais0 be addressed primariiy to the public, with the addtessee, real or fictional, merely an excuse for the pem's existence. The nligious poem, on the other han4 h y s places God in the position of prllnary addressee, with the human readers as secondary, anà incidental to the poem's existence.

4

particular for two reasons. F i i they are certainly among the most weli-known Christian

poas in English. Second, the Werences and similarities between them serve to usefllly

complicate my approach. Two are seventeentb-cenhtry poets, two nineteenth-century.

Donne and Herbert p w up in an age where denominational Merences could get people

lùlle~i;~ for Rossetti and Hopkins the ciifferences between Catholic and Protestant had

begun to pale b i d e the much grrater divide between believers and fkeethinlrers. Thne

are Anglicans, one Catholic, but two are converts: Hopkins's conversion to Catholicism

h m Anglicanism parallels D o ~ e ' s move to Aagiicanism fkom Catholicism. Three were

men and priests, one a woman and a member of the laity. D o ~ e and Rossetti wrote

secuiar as well as sacred p t r y ; Herbert and Hopltins concentrated on religious verse.

The dserences between the pets challenge any approach which attempts, as mine does,

to read them al1 as enacting the same psychical and artistic process in their poetry.

1 engage with these poets through the theories of Ludwig Feuerbach and Jdia

Knsteva. Feuerbach's centrai argument in his 1841 Wesen des Christenîums is that "God"

consists of certain human ptedicates extedised and worshipjxd: "Mm first

uncoasciously and involuntarily mates God in his own image, and afkr this G d

consciously and voluntanly crrates man in his own image. . . . the revelation of God is

nothing else than the revelation, the self-unfolding of human nature" (1 18). Feuerbach

does not prove that an objective deity does not exist, but merely points out how probable

John Carey has specdated convincingly on thc Lürely psychologicd effccts upon Donne of the fect that his gnat uncle, Thomas Heywood, and his uncie, Jasper Heywood, were both executed for king Jesuit priests, and his bmther, Henry Donne, died of the plague in Newgak Prison a f t . having been arrested for harbouring mother Jesuit p r i a

5

it is that the God h d t y worships is a reflection ofitself. Probabüity, however, is not

p m f , as Haas Küng points out: "It does not follow-as mme theologians have mistakenly

concluded-hm man's pmfound desire for G d and e t e d Lifc tbat God exists and

eternal life and happiness are mal. But those atheists who think that what foliows is the

nonexistence of God and the unreaiity ofetemd life are mistaken too" (79). Just as

Feuerbach's argument says evetything about h d t y ' s nlationship to God, but nothiag

about the existence of that God apart h m h d t y , so too do 1 concentrate on the ways

in which the poets colistruct a God within the poetry, without attempting to deny that an

objective God may well be listening to, reading, or even co-writing that poem.

Feuerbach's psychological b m d of atheism was introduced to nineteenth-centuy

England through the 1854 translation by George Eliot (under her real name of Marim

Evans), and fond its way in disguised fom into ber novels. Rossetti and Hopkins,

therefore, iived in an atmosphere where his ideas about God were known among

intellecnial circles. Feuerbach has also k e n enormously influentid upon twentieth-

cenairy atheism, through the two conduits of Marx and Freud. As K h g puts it: "Like

Maoc's opium iheory at an eariier stage, Freud's illusion theory is grounded in Feuerbach's

projection theory" (75). Feuerbach therefore makes a good pair with Kristeva, since his

psychologicai atheism anticipates her psychoanaiytic atheism.

Feuerbach's mode1 for examinhg the dationship of the subject to God is

complemented by the tools psychoanalysis provides for discussing the seif's relationsâip

to the selt The effort to subdivide and label the self gocs back at least as far as Plato

whose tripartite stcuctm of appetite, spirit, and reason anticipates Augustine's memory,

6

bowledge, and a, Fteud's id, ego, and superego, and Lacan's real, imaginary and

symbolic. Binary divisions of the self, however, are more usefbi than tertiary division for

the piirposes of viewing the relationship between self and God as a relatiomhip between

one part of the self and another. Such binary, or dudistic, divisions have included body

and soul, passion and reason, heart and dnd, feeling and intellect. Freud, in addition to

his tripartite division, fomulated the dualism of conscious and unconscious in bis

construction of the self. Psychoanalysis, the interpretive method that he fouaded, has as

one of its strengths the ability to ernbrace d transform previous categories of thought

about the complexity of seLniood (the abject). I want to take psychoanalysis as an

approach to studying the relationship between God and self in this dissertation, while not

forgetting those earlier ideas about ~e~division. The particular psychoanalytic

h e w o r k 1 shall use is that of Juba fisteva, and her mode1 of the symbolic and the

semiotic. 1 prefer fisteva's mode1 over Freud's or Lacan's partly because, as 1 have said,

1 prefer a blliary to a tripartite division, but dso because fisteva is informed by her

psychoanalytic predecessors.

Psychoanaîysis and Christianity are highly congenial to the study of poetry

because in ôoth psychodysis and Christianity, there is no such thing as an accidental

occurrence. Even minor details are tremendously signincant and meaninm. IW as

psychoanalysis sees every act or uttetance as teveaiing repressed desire, so too does the

Christian see every event as part of Gd's divine plan. Ifa poet should create paradoxicai

ambiguity h u g h a subtle pua, the psychoanalytic critic might rrad it as proceeding fiom

the poet's uaeonscious. The Christian, however, is b o d to regard it as a contniution by

G d to the poem.

My approach to religious poetry, as shodd k clear by now, constmcts an

imaginary d e r who is an agmstic or atheist.' This d e r is not entirely a pmduct of

my own imagination of course, but makes up a significant proportion (probably

impossible to quanti& e d y ) of both the gened reading public, and out undergraduate

class~ooms. How wili these readers approach religious poetry? How should we teach it

1. A. Richards encountered this very problem with his students. He includes some

It is not my purpose in this thesis to discuss the experiuice of the non-Christian believa in nading Christian poeûy, even though, as Gene Edward Veith points out, in the classroom situation the problem "is not that our classes divide thcmselves into believers and non-believers. Rather, our classrooms are richly pludistic. There are Catholics. Baptists, Methodists, Mormons, Jews, Musüms, and possibly devotees of the guru Mahara Ji" ("Teaching about the Religion of Metaphysicai Poets" 56). To study the ceactions of non-Christian believers would be a dissertation in itself,

Veith's 1990 article refers to a recent Gallup poil which suggests that non-believea make up a very insignificant proportion of undergraduates: "More than ninety percent of coliege students believe in God; only fifteen percent said that religious beliefs were not important to them" (54). (1 am intngued by the five percent who apparently believe in God but do not find theù own belief important to them.) These statistics refer only to the United States; it would be interesthg to compare them to other Western countries, wherP 1 imagine the rate of non-belief is much higher. It is not only nonbelievers who are chellenged by the presence of God's voice in nügious poeûy, however. Let us imagine, by the side of my atheist shident, a Christian da. What is that person to do with a poem in which God speaks, such as George Herbert's 'Pidogue?" if she reaily believes that G d has helped Herbert mite the poem, and actualiy spoken the words that Herbert assigns to him, then surely she must cease to regard "Dialogue" as merely a poem, and raise it to the status of the Bible, a sacted text directly inspired by God We would then have Christian institutions offixing literature-as-Bible courses alongside secular universities offering classes in the Bible-as-literature. IfChristian naders have not done this with religious poetry, it must be b u s e they, tao, klieve that Goâ's speech is somehow fiitered through the poets min& that nligious poetry is, to some extent, a record of the p e t talkiag to himse& and not God tellriiig to the m.

8

reactions to religious poetry in his Practicai Criricim (1929). One reader responds to

Donne's "At the round earths imagiad corners" with the comment "Too religious for one

who doesnt believe in repenthg that way" (46). another with the opinion that "somehow

the poem does not raise as much emotion as one feels it ought to have raised. I think this

is because it seems to progress downwards fimm greater emotion to less. First one has the

temr of the Judgment Day: then one has what is realS, a selfshfijght on the purt of the

writer, trhrr he personullly muy be damned' (47; Richards's emphasis). A vaguely

religious poem called "The Temple" by J. D. C. Peflew elicits the following

condemnation: "I dont like to hear people boast about praying. A b d de Vigny heid that

to pray is cowmdly, and while I don? go ar fm ar this, 1 do think that it is rude to c m

religious ecstasies down the throat of a sceptical age" (94; Richards's emphasis).

Richards does not have much patience with these reactions, commenthg acidly upon the

last that: "The violence which such prejudices cm do to poetry will be remarked. Writîng

a modest piece of verse is hardly cramming religious ecstasies down out throats" (94).

But he obviously took the antipathies of these readers seriously enough to respond with

his formulations of the question of belief and poetry. The m e r he cornes up with is his

fmous distinction between inteflectual and emotional belief. A gwd poem should

ovemde our intellechial beliefs, demanding our emotiod assent to the beliefs expressed

withio it:

Coleridge, when he remarked h t a "willing suspension of disbelief' accompanied much poetry, was noting an important fm but not quite in the happiest ternis, for we are n e i k aware of a disbelief, nor voluntarily suspending it in these cases. 1t is better to say tbat the question ofbelief or disbeîief, in the inteUectud sense, aever arises when we are rradùig weii. Ifullfore~aately it does arise, either through the poet's fâdt or our own, we

have for the moment ceaseâ to be rrading poetry and have becorne astronomas, or theologians, or moralists, persons engaged in quite a Metent type of activity+ (277)

Richards's theory is borne out in the testimony of many nonChnstian readers of

nligious poetry. In the case of George Herbert, for example, twentieth-century readers

have tended to give the Lie to Coleridge's famous c l a h that Herbert can only be M y

Herbert is a true poet, but a p e t sui generis, the merits of whose poems wili never be felt without a sympathy with the mind and chatacter of the man. To appreciate this volume, it is not enough that the d e r possesses a cultivated judgment, classical taste, or even poetic sensibility, d e s s he be likewise a Christian, and both a zdous and an orthodox, both a devout and a devotioll~ll Christian. But even this will not quite sutfice. He must be an affkctionate and d u t - child of the Church, and h m habit, conviction, and a coIlStitutional ptedisposition to ceremoniousness, in piety as in mannets, find her foms and ordinances aids of redigion, aot sources of fonnality; for religion is the element in which he lives, and the region in which he moves. (Patrides 170; Coleridge's emphasis)

Yet it is clear that not only many non-Anglicans, but many non-Christians, have been

moved and delighted by The Temple, thus proving Richards's position rather than

Coleridge's. iiona Bell points out that Herbert's non-Angiican contemporaries had no

trouble responding to his poetry: "Everyone seemed to love Herbert's poetry, and many

claimed him as a posthumous aliy. Herbert was no less an inspiration for the Puritan

expatriot Edward Taylor than for the Angiîcan Henry Vaughan, and many devout English

piintans embraceà him" (64). Twentieth century non-Christians have been no l e s

detensd by Herbeit's ~ngiïcanism than seventeenth-century Catholics and Puritans.

Joseph Summers observes that practising Anglicans iike himseifmake up the d e s t

p u p of Habat scholers (aAa non-Angiican Christians, and non-believers) and that

religious beiief is not an issue for his -dents: "Among my own students 1 have been

fhquently astonished at the intensity and understaadhg of the response to Herbert's

poems of d e r s who came h m almost every Christian group, who were beüeving and

non-beliewig Jews, and who wac agnostics and atheists" ("George Herbert and Anglican

Tdtions" 36). Helen Vendler deciares that "Herbert's poetq is as valuable to those who

share none of his religious beliefs as to those who share them all" (The Poetry of George

Herbert 4). Chana Bloch, who is lewish, writes:

Some critics have maintained that in ordet really to understand Herbert, you have to believe what he believes, to share his views on doctrine and ceremony. How, then, can 1 presume to nad The Temple? . . . 1 have always =ad him not oniy as a great poet but also as a spiriîual teacher, and I've taken his words very seriously. . . . 1 c m only disagree strongly with the view that says Herbert's best readers must be those who share his beliefs. ("Respoase" 5-6)

Elizabeth Bishop, Wnting to Summers, describes her appropriation of Herbert's poetry to

her own secular vision: "Even if 1 don't believe in God-1 b d it nght, & I'm afniid 1 often

chat on He- in this way" (Suuners, "George Herbert and Elizabeth Bishop" 57).

If these voices are to be beiieved, my attempt to nid a way of reading religious

poetry which appds to nonbeiievers is mecessuy, since these nonbelievers are quite

happy to believe for the duration of their resding of a poem, to give the poem their

emotiod, ifnot intellectuai, assent. But while 1 personally have great sympathy for

Richards's cldm that the d e r of poetry shouid lave behind his inte1Iectuai belief

systems while reacüng, such a view is generally discredited in contemporary critical

pTaCfice. Richards's claim that we should not becorne "moraüst9" while reading iiteratute

has ken denied by those critics who clairn thet ai l reding both is, and shouid be,

inescapably poiiticai, and that the desh to leave moraiity and politics behind is itself a

politicai stance. Feminist and pst-colonial Cnticism, for example, have both occupied

themselves with the question of how a reader can engage with a tuct which expresses

beiief systems that are totally foreign to her. Why shouid not an "agnostic" criticism

spring up to approach religious texts in the same way tbat post-colonialism critiques

colonial texts such as Heurt of Darhess, or femlliism attac:ks the patriarchal assumptions

of Prrradr'se Lost?

Ann Baynes Coiro's essay on teacbg Donne, in the 1990 collection Approoches

to Teaching the Metaphysical Poets, is a prime example of how femlliism has

eansformed the reading and teaching of love poetry. Coiro begins her essay by

describing the situation that awaited her at her new job:

1 began my teaching caner at an old liberal arts college that had recently and painfully gone c d . When I was interviewed for that job, the facdty memben wanted to know how 1 would teach metaphysical poetry to the young women who were appearing in their classrooms so angry with the sexual assumptions of some ~wenteenth-cnitury p~etry (John Donne's "Elegy 19" and Thomas Carew's "Rapture" had precipitated the conflict) that they argueci such sninshouid no longer k read by politically correct people. (81)

Coiro goes on to describe how her teaching strategy adâressed the hidents' discornfort

and made it part of the lesson:

an uncriticai fht rrading of persona in D O M ~ and many other seventeenth-centwy poets caa-indeed, shodd-aiienate the cumnt generation of students, who are begînning to be alert to the male bias of the canon. . . . We need to taik with our students about the gender of any persona, about how we as readers form the persona's gender, about how the gender fomis the poem, and about the implied but silent other who is ais0 shaped by the gender of the speaker and by us. (84)

ïfwoman d e n t s are jusfifjed in feeling aiienated by the "maie bias of the canonn why

should not atheist or agaostic d e n t s also be justified in feeling alienated by the

Christian bias of the canon? However unlikely it might be that such d e n t s would

actuaiiy caii for a ban on religious poetry the same way women students called for a ban

on Donne's "Elegy 19," it would seem in today's climate that they might be justified in

doing so. And if Coiro can continue to teach the love-poetry by foregrounding the pets'

construction of gender, should we not also teach the religious poetry by foregrounding the

pets' construction of God? Coiro's vision of well-taught d e n t s is that "As one gender

reads, the other gender reads them reading" (88). if love-poeûy nanually splits its

audience into male and female, religious poetry splits its readers into believen and

atheists. And if atheist readers, by giving the poem their "emotional belief' automaticaily

read the Christian reading* then should not Christians try to read the atheist reading, just

as Coùo wants her male students to imagine the experience of a woman reading Donne's

"Elegy 19"? Just as women are no longer asked to give their "emotiod belief" to a poem

in which they are constnicted as the object, non-believers should not necessarily be asked

to give their "emotionai belief' to poetry in which atheism is regarded as evil!

An essay by Gene Edward Veith, in the same volume, does adcùess the teaching

1 find myself here arguing a position to which 1 do not necessarily give my full assent 1 have little sympathy for Coiro's female students' desire to ôan Donne's "Elegy 19" fiom the canon, and in the UnlikeLy event that non-believing students were to t e k

to read He* or Hopkins, 1 wouid be ductant to pander to such close-mindedness. I believe that the poetry of Donne, Herbert, Rossetti, and Hopkins is of more than sufncient gnaâiess to carry any moderately intelligent, open-mindeâ d e r into a tempomy state of emotionai belief in God. But the stuây of literanire is ail about the process of re- reading, of examuiin6 anâ questionkg texts affa the initiai experience of pleesurr in sunendering to them. 1 believe there is m m for opdy agnostic readings of religious poetry that do not demand surrendet to the God of that patry.

of religious poeûy to non-religious students. Veith begins by talriDg G d out of the

poem, before later putting him back in, a process iilustrated in his comments on teaching

Herbert's "The Collar":

The Coliar" can be understood, at first, apart fmm its specificdy religious refances. Its basic emotioI18L content is universal, even for peopie with Iittie religious background. Everyone has felt the pressure of obligations and y m e d to escape. . . . 1 want my students to understand the emotional dynamics of the poem, the sense in which dissatisfaction cm be transfigureci when at the heart of the o n e m responsibiiities is a loving personai nlationship. . . . I then go on to the theological level: Herbert believed that the human king's relationship with God is like that. (55)

1 want to go one step M e r than Veith, to question the nature of "the human king's

relationship with God" if that God does not exist. W h e m Veith makes sense of the

poem for his nonbelieving d e n t s (although since he teaches at a Lutheran college, most

of his students are believers) by comparing the pet's relatiomhip with God to the

subject's reiationship with other people, 1 want to compare the pet's relationship witb

God to the aibject's relationsbip with himself.

This dissertation thus allies itself with one of the two traditional types of approach

to religious poetry. Since these two approaches have been identified by several

seventeenth-centiny critics as exemplified in the debate between William Empson and

Rosemond Tuve over George Herbert's "The Sacrifice," I fnune my comments on my own

approach h m maialy within the context of the criticism on Herbert. Good descriptions

of the exchange ktween Empson and Tuve and its implications can be found in the

inttoductions to Barbara Hmmads CostZy Monuments and Richard Todd's The OpPcty of

Signs. Briefiy, Twe reactcd to E m p d s contention in Sewn Typcs ofAmbigurgty that

Habert's matment of Christ's Passion was "unique" (287) arguhg instead, in A Reading

of George Herbert, that Herbert was drawing on litwgical traditions of which Empson

anci 0 t h twentieth-centwy critics were ignorant, and that "a poem is most beautifid and

most meanin@ to us when it is d in tems of the tradition which gave it birth" (22).

Empson replied that Herbert may have been using tradition, but the use he made of it was

stiil his own, and ihat the task of a critic was more than contextualipng the poem in terms

of tradition: "He should entirely concentrate on how the poem was meant to take effect by

its author and did take effect on its first d e m . But this formula includes the way in

which it took effect on them without their hiowing it, and that opens an Aladdiri's Cave

of a positively lirnestoae extent and complexity" ("George Herbert and Miss Tuve" 738).

The confiict between them seems to be over the relative velue of scholarship versus

criticism. John Roberts saw the debate as also characterizhg cntical approaches to

Donne, employing the tems "re-coverers" and "dis-coverers," coined by Kemeth Burke,

Empson and Tuve, 1 think, are fall representatives of the major split that continues to divide critics on Donne; the recoveren still regard with nispicion the discoverers as daagerously clever, overly imaginative, unscholarly dilettantes, while the discoverers s t i i l dismi*ss with some contempt the recoverers as pedantic, literal-minded, harmiess antiquarians who have nothing signifiant to contribute to the centrai, important issues of modern criticism. If forced to do so, 1 rather imagine 1 couid divide the 1ûûû items in my updaîed bibliography roughly according to the two major appmaches-re-covery and dis-covery. ("John Donne's Poetry" 65)

Since Roberts's updated bibliography covers the years 1968-78 his comments on the

opposition between historical and ab.isto&d approaches are possibly outdated. Criticism

today, after the advent of the New Historicism, tends to klieve that both approaches are

necessary, and should k complementary rather than antagonistic. Criticism has two

tasks: to set the text in its omi the , and to reinterpret it for subsequent generations and

world-views. My appmach is certainly one of reinterpretation rather than

contextualization, of "dis-covery" rather than "re-covery," to use Roberts's (and Burke's)

ternis (although I caawt promise any dangernus clevemess).

Richard Strier, another d c of Herbert, raises an important question about the

need for understanding the specifically theological contexts of nligious poetry:

1s a Ml appreciation of Herbert's poetry unavailable to those who do not shme its (or any) religious perspective? 1s Herbert a great poet or a great celigious poet? Must we invoke the special category? Helen Vendlet's The Poetry of George Herbert. . . has rajsed îhese questions sharply. Vendler attempts to distinguish the "hum8aft h m die docüinal context of Herbert's poetry. My study suggests that we c m grasp the human content of Herbert's poetry only through, not apart nom, the theology. (Love ffiown xxi)

But who is this "we" that Strier refers to? Speciaüsts on George Herbert? Critics of

seventeenth-century poetry? Scholars of religious litentute? 1 agree with Strier that

teaders who belong to those categories need to engage with the theological backgrounds

of the pets they are studying. But is Strier suggesting that the general d e r , or the

undergraduate student, needs to be totally familiar with Luther before he caa read

Herbert? Whm then does the enjoyment evidently experienced by those who tead

Dome without howhg Augustine, Hopkins without knowing Duns Scotus, or Rossetti

without king familar with Keble, spring h m ? Surely the piemue these readers obtain

h m the poetry is not compieteiy invaiid because they do not ncognize a specific

dramatization of the doctrine of justification by faith alme. Clearly, a knowledge of the

theology behind the paetqr can add to the reader's appreciation of that poetry, but it does

not account for aü of i t Most rraders, on the 0th han& know something about self-

conflict, whïch al1 these pe t s dramatize so weH.

Strier distinguishes his approach from Helen Vendlei's; 1 take my cue fkom her

reading of Herbert's struggles with God as an intenial stniggle with himselfi

His is the purest intimacy and vulnerability, not clothed in the powerful eroticism of St John of the Cross and of Crashaw, but simply the bare and divested converse of the soul with itself. I Say "itself" because for Herbert God does not seem a powerful other existing in a tension with the self comparable to the tension berneen lover and beloved; he is rather, potentidy at least, Herbert himself. (The Poehy of George Herbert 152)

Vendler goes on, in an essay on Hopkins, to suggest that the "converse of the sod with

itseîf" can be read in secular, psychological t e m : "We may, if we wish, secularize the

ethical choice between 'good' and %ad' selves by using psychological words like

'authenticity' in place of theologicd words like 'salvation"' ("The Wreck of the

Deutschland" 47). Psychoatialysis can, I believe, complement such a psychological

approach by examining the forms this "converse of the soul with itself" can take in

religious poetry.

ln following Vendler's suggestion that "we rnay, if we wish, secularize," the

dissertation departs significantiy fiom the interdisciplimy approach to literature and

religion as defined by one of its foremost theorists, David Jasper. Jasper believes that we

may not "secularize" as the spirit takes us:

Mead of living dangerously withiii a mative dialectic-literature and theology-the industry has tended to claim cornpetence in an odd new discipline, "îiterature and reiigion," with an apparent desire . . . to abandon theologicai categories d study religion as a phenornenon within culture, sociological, anthropological, even psychoIogica1. . . . The tendency is to banish the eatire theological enterprise . . . its philosophy, spirituality and sense of the finite and inf?nite, to vague tams iike "otherness" and "alterity.' Religion (and literature) without cornmitment, (1-2)

17

1 am guilty of ushg such vague tmns as "othemess," as Veder is guilty of using such a

vague term as "authenticity." But Jasper's comments seem directed towards the

specifidy Christian critic, for why shouid any other type of critic k expected to possess

"religion with cornmitment''? (Why, for that matter, should a la& of cornmitment to

niigion bply a la& of commitment to literature?) This dissertation attempts to "live

dangerously within a creative dialectic" between liteninire aad psychology (specifically

psychodysis), partly because it is not attempting to contribute to the "odd new

discipline" of literature and religion as such, but engaging instead in the non-religious

analysis of religious literatwe.

Existing psychoanalytic studies of religious poetry include John Steig and

William Kemgan on John Donne; Donna Modets and James Earl's readings of Hopkins,

and John Schad's specifically LaCanian reading of The Wreck of the DoutschZand; and

some of the cnticism on the sexual meanings of Goblin Mmket, such as that of EUen

Golub (aithough these do not always mat that poem as specifically religious). These are

al1 articles, not book-length studies. Specifically Kristevan reaâings of poetry are

overwhelmingly concentrated on twentieth-centwy iiterature: a survey of MLA books,

articles, and dissertations from 198 1 to August 1995 which apply Kristevan theory to

Literary texts yields 88 works on twentieth-century literature!, 22 on nineteenth-century

and 18 on pre-nineteenth century? Critics have been slow to apply her theocies to older

fiterature, probably for the admirable ceason that they are mutious and hesitant to read

' Of those 18, seven an w o h of English litemtute, newly me Drem ofhe Rood. Julius Ceasar, Heto anà LeClllCjer, Paradise Los& A - w ManteII's Uiorhmate Lover, Thomas Nashe's Uhjhrrhmte Traveller, and ïïte Fora Zws.

18

literahue in tenns that the writers of that literature would not have understood. But

psychodysis itself is, at least in its Freudian fonn, ahistorical; it claims to be ûue for ai l

periods. While 1 would not go so fm as to argue that the psychic pmcesses Freuà

analysed in nineteenth-century Viennese middle~class men and women wodd necessarily

be identicai to those of seventeenth-centwy English aristocratie pets, 1 do feel that a

psychodytic reading of the religious poetry of the past cm Numinate the texts for the

secular d e r s of today.' Laurence Lemer, who glances at the argument of Rosemond

Tuve that "the poetry of the metaphysicals should be related to thek poetic, not ours"

(137) concludes: "As far as she goes, Tuve is unanswerable, but it is impossible to stop

readers fiom using the pmctice of modemism to search for elements in -lier poetry that

its own poetic did not admit" ((138). if it is impossible to stop readers 6om reinventhg

poems as they read, then the task of the critic is to make sure that aich reinventions be

examined aiongside the original contexts of the poetry. Such is the aim of my

dissertation, in that 1 try in each chapter to anchor the theoretical and atheistic language of

Feuerbach and fisteva in the theological thought f d a r to Donne, Herbert, Rossetti,

and Hopkins. Accordingly, I relate the Kristevan concepts of syrnbolic and semiotic to

muon and passion in chapter two, and her categories of ideaîization and narcissism to the

distinction ktween eros and agape in chapter t h .

It cannot be denied, however, that the dissertation is contentious in reading the

poeûy against the poets' authorid intent. 1 O& especiaiiy in chapters two and t h e ,

See Elizakth J. Belfamy's essay, "Psychoadysis and the Subject idoî7for the Renaissance" (1992) for an persuasive defence of the application of psychodysis to Renaissance texts.

read the poetry as yielding meanings very diffint h m those the poets intended to

express. While rrading secular writers ageiilst themselves is a contentious issue ia itself,

rrading reiigious poetry from an agnostic and psychoanalytic viewpoint would be seen as

nothhg less than sacrilege in the eyes of the pets. Since so many of the theoretical

debates about the nature of reiigious poetry can be found in Herbert criticism (perhaps

because Herbert himself fongmmded the issue in The Temple), 1 again cite one of his

commentaton, Stanley Stewart, on the subject. Stewart recognizes the potentiai for

reading texts against authorid intent: "Did-could-Herbert h o w what he said? Modem

thought permits, but does not compel, us to say that Herbert's poeûy expresses ideas and

attitudes of whkh Herbert and his audience were not aware" ("Investigating Herbert

Criticism" 145). But he thinks that when cntics go too far in that direction, they becorne

reductive, projecting theù own agendas onto Herbert's t h e and his texts: "Does Herbert's

espoused belief only hide his sexual embarrasment? Or his guilt? Or his resentment?

Or-perhaps more to the point-his atheism?" (1 55)?

Stewart's use of the word "only" here betrays his misunderstanding of the

psychoauaiytic approach which argues that Herbert's belief might weii hide his s e d

embarrasment, his guiit, his nsaitment, and bis atheism, but that it carmot be reduced to

Diane D'Amico and G. B. Tennyson maice sirnilar objection to critics of Rossetti's poetry. Tennyson's comment that "The biographical appmach to her poetry, the straage, modem view that d longing must be se&, especiaiiy if it is the longhg of an unmarried Victorian woman, bai obscurrd the extent to which Christina Rossetti's poetry illustrates not Freuâ's theory of art but KeMe's" (202-03), is e c h d by D'Amico: "As a consequence of such Ipost-Fieudan] views, the sincerity of h a religious poetry is questioned: the voice we hem in her jmetry is not to k interpreted as the sou1 longhg for the Divine Bridegroom, but the voie of a nustrated woman longing for an esrthly lover" (274).

20

them. Belief may hide atheism within it at an unconscious Ievel, but does not thenby

cease to be belief. Emotions might contain quel and opposite emotions, but cannot be

reduced to them, and aie not cancelled out by them. If love contains hate within it, it does

not stop being love.lo

Psychodytic approaches should, thenfore, discuss the -est meaniog of the

text before delving into its latent content. As William Kemgan says of his own approach:

"Although he broadens the usual notion of intentional meaning to iaclude the

unconscious, the psychoanalytic cntic cannot find this extended intentioaality without

nRt having found the customary one: the intended meaning, the minimal possession of al1

iiterary study, is the meanhg he interprets" (The Sucred Cornplex 3). nius 1 try to avoid

reading the texts reductively, bringing each and every poem d o m to the level of the self,

constantly c e f d g to God as a "construct" or "projection," treating the text as if it is

there to illuminate the theory, rather than the other way mund. Mead, 1 first approach

the poems as the poetls expression of his relationsbip with God, before 1 attempt to show

ways in which we can read the poems as an unconscious expression of the pet's

relationship with himseIf.

The dissertation fds into four chapters. The fïrst, "The Human God,"

contextualjzes Feuerbach's theory of God as a projection of humanity through a

discussion of the ways in which Christian theology has dways debated the humanness or

Io Stewart goes on to ask "WeU, does the materiaiist's certainty ofdoubt merely hide the profomdest depth of yeaming for and embrace of beiief?" (155). This question would not ody be answered in the &innative by many psychoanaiytic cntics, but has been so by the meny Christian mitics who have sought for hiddm responses to God in atheistic rnodernist and pst-modernist texts.

21

ûthemess of God The de- to which a poet conceives of God as similas to or Werent

h m himseifdetermhes the degm to which he will be able conceive of himselfand God

in dialogue. Obviously, the more "human" G d is, the more vuhierable that God is to the

Feuerbachian atheism that reads bim as merely a projection of humanity.

Chapter two, "Symbolic ami Semiotic: kligion in Poetic Language," applies the

Kristevan concepts of the symboiic and the semiotic to the poetry, both in ternis of poetic

content and poetic fom. Although it is my most theoretical and ahistorical chapter, I try

to avoid framing the d y s i s in t e m that would be totaily foreign to the poets, by

comparing the psychodytic dichotomy of symbolic and semiotic to oppositions such as

reason and passion which the poets themselves would understand. My centrai clairn in

this chapter is that the poetic text destabilizes oppositions between symbolic and

semiotic, in such a way that the relationship between God and pet can never be

designated as exclusively one or the other.

While severai critics have discussed the different constructions of love in religious

poetry, no one has devoted much attention to the hate that is also expressed by the poas.

In my third chapter, "Love and Hate: Ambivalence in Religious Poetry," 1 examine the

ways in which the pet's love and hate for God reflect on her own self-love and seif-hate.

1 draw upon both Feuerbach and Kristeva in this chapter, using hem to complement

Anders Nygren's classic distinction between eros-love and agape-love.

Whereas the fht t h chaptexs read the pets ageinst themselves to a large

de-, The Vaiidity of Religious Poetry," my fourth and last chapter, seeks rather ta

examine the poasr own feelings about the legihimacy or o t h d s e of their work. This

chapter is less concemeci with providing new ways to look at religious poetry, as the 0 t h

three are, than with engagkg with the large amount of criticai attention which has been

devoted to the intersection b e e n Chnstianity and poetry. In particuiar, it takes up in

more detail some of the questions raised at the start of this umoduction, about the status

of religious poetry es distinguished fiom other poetry. Where the nst of my thesis

examines the issues involved in reading religious poetry, chapter four looks instead at the

particular challenges posed by writing it.

Chaptns one and thrce, therefore, concenûate on the Feuerbachian vision of the

relationship between man and God as between man and self, while chapters two and four

concentrate on fisteva's theories about the incompatibiiity between religion and poetry.

Religious poetry is always about the self. and about itself?'

The dissertation cannot hope to do full justice to Donne, Herbert, Rossetti, and

Hopkins as individuai writers. Becaw my focus is on religious poetry as a whole I

compare these four practioners of that poetry much more than 1 contrast them. The

contrasts that I do make h m tirne to time between the poets shouid be ngarded as

" It is dm, of course, always about lmguage, the aspect of religious poetry which has received the most (and the most sophisticated) critical and theoretical attention, with the deconstructionists fighting it out with those critics who point to the incamational nature of Christian language. Hopkins has received the lion's share of attention in this ana, as Rachel Salmon points out: "The deconstnictionist presupposition about the inevitability of a languoige of absence (metaphor), which predicates an unbridgeable gap between sigaisers and signifie&, challenges the incamationist or sacramentalkt conception of a language of presence (metonymy), which can embody its r e f e n t as the relationship between God and man as bodied forth in Cbtist1"89). Typicai representatives of these two schOOls of criticism wodd k J. Hillis M e r for the deconstnictionists, and ELeamr McNees for the incarnationists. Although 1 do examine the nature of poetic Ianguage, my focus is uponpwlic language, rather than WC Iunguage, and the dissertation therefore does not engage in the decoIlStCUCfionist debate.

23

suggestive rather than exhaustive. Since I do not attempt to explore the work of each pet

in full, the generdizations 1 d e about Herbert, for example, may k based on ody a

few of the 167 poems in The Temple. (Clearly, Herbert and Rossetti suffer more h m my

moresr-less arbiûary selection of poems for discussion since they wmte much more

nligious poetry than Dome or Hopkins.) 1 would argue, however, that for each of the

poets, the methods 1 use to read one of theu poems cm also be applied to the others.

Using twenty poems, rather than two, to iilustnite one point wouid, apart nom quickly

becoming b o ~ g for the ceader, tend to focus the analysis on the theory rather than the

poetry. l2

The poetry, indeed, cannot be exhausted in meaning by my Feuerbachian and

psychoanalytic theory. 1 wouid be homfied if people read these pets only in the ways I

suggest. A good reader should be able to believe in the God the pets addnss when she

is reading the poems for pleasure. 1 offer an agnostic approach as a complement, not a

corrective, to other, more receptive, ceadings of religious poetry which are based on

surrender to the poet and belief in his beiief.

l2 1 have tried not to discuss poems more than once, even though such complex works as The Wreck of the Deurschl'could be discussed with profit in each of the fint three cbapters, although I oniy examine it in the fht and fouri&. "Afflictiont' 0, which 1 treat in chapter one, wouid cry out to be looked at in chapter ihne, "Love and Hate," if it were not for the fact thet Helen Vendler has already analysed Herbert's ~e~hatred in that p e m (The P w of George Her6ert 43-48). Poems which 1 do tmat in more than one chapter include Donne's Holy So~meîs 1 ( t h times) and 7 (twice), Hopkins's "temile sonnets" (aU twice). it is because Donne and Hopkins wrote Iess religious poetry thaa Herbert and Rossetti that 1 am dtawn to discuss certain of th& poems more than once.

Chapter One

The Human God

Since, tho' he is mder the world's splendeur and wonder, His mystery m u t be instressed, stressai.

(Hopkins, The Wreck of the Deutschland, st 5 )

1s God a human Gd? Or is he so above and beyond us that the human mind

cannot grasp the nature of his ûthemess? These questions have concemed and haunted

Christianity for two thousand years and they inforni my approach in this chapter to the

poetry writtea by Donne, Herbert, Rossetti, and Hopkins.

Ludwig Feuerbach saw the history of Christianity as a tension between a

conception of God who is human and anthropomorphic, and a God who is so radically

Other as to be beyond human understanding. Feuerbach argues that anthropomorphism

was the starting point of reiigion, and that in spite of increasing theological sophistication

over the centuries, Christianity could not entirely repudiate its Jewish beguinings: "The

celigious consciousness of a later age is no longer satisfied with a Jehovah who is f?om

head to foot a man . . . Nevertheless, every relation is simply a nvelation of the nature of

man to exisîing men" (207). Religion is caught, he theorizes, ktween quantitative and

qualitative views of Gd's ciiffince from humanity: "The difference, however, between

God and mm, which is or ig idy only quantitative, is by nflection developed into a

quaiitative Memice" (217). And whereas religion consciotlsiy stresses God's divule

strangenesq it unconrciously emphasizes his humamess: "The essence of religion, its

latent nature, is the identity of the divine being with the human; but the form of religion,

or its apparent, consciou nature, is the distinction between them1' (247).

The history of Christian thought certainly beers out Feuerbach's vision of a

religion tom between a human God and a mysterious divinity. The doctrine of the

Incarnation, central to this debate, was mirrd in controversy and haesy fiom the early

days of Christianity, some believers arguing that Christ was not fully human, others

denying his divinity.' Not until the Couacil of Chalcedon in the year 45 1 was the

doctrine of the two natures in one person, the belief that Christ was both fully human and

M y divine, upheld as orthodoxy.

Clearly, it is easier to grasp the concept of an incarnate God, if we can beiieve that

we are indeed made in God's image, that God is not a completely UDkllowabie ûther.

Thomas V. Moms wites of the Incamation wntroversies that "Ali other things king

equal, it would seem that the more extreme a conception we have of deity, the more

trouble we are going to have mapping out a coherent account of a di+ Incarnation "

(163). The Incarnation seems to contradict our sense of a divinity who is, as Feuerbach

puts it, "qualitatively different" h m h d t y . Moms goes on to Say: "But 1 do not

think critics of the Incarnation usually go wrong by having too exalted a conception of

Ebionitism, for example, denied the divine nature of Christ, atguing that he was a normal human being, the son of h k y and Joseph. The opposite heresy, Docetism, held that Christ was totaiiy divine and oniy seemed to talre on human nature. The thid century Anus taught that Christ was not W y divine, but rather the fïrst among God's matutes. Appolinanus of Leodicia argued in the fourth centiiry that Chnst had a human body, but a divine mind and soul.

26

divinity. Rather, 1 think they most commoniy come to judge the Incarnation an

bpossibüity mainly on account of an incorrect, metaphysidy flawed conception of

humanityt' (163). Rather than seeing God as too much of an Other to the human self,

then, these "critics of the Incamation" see the human as tw much of an Other to God.

The problem is stiU thc gap between the human and the divine.

Another theological debate that centres on whether or not God can be conceived

of as in any way human is the relation of reason to revelation. Can we know God through

the operations of human reason, thus implying that we are indeed made in God's image,

or is he so alien h m us that we can only know him through what he chooses to reveal to

us of himself? Most theologians have taught that we can come to know God through

both reason and revelation, but the different emphasis they give to the wo categones

serves to distinguish ktween those who conceive of God as human and those who think

of him as kyond humanity. The Catholic ûaâition puts its faith in reason as well as

revelation, drawing on the philosophical methoàs propounded by such thinkers as

Thomas Aquiaas. Vatican 1 in the ninaeenth century upheld this position, distinguishing

"between nanual knowledge of God and saiutary faith and nmily defendling] the power

of the nanval mson to arrive at certain knowledge of God" (McCwl454). The

Protestant Reformers Luther and Calvin, on the other hancl, insisted that reason be

subordinate to revelation. The Reformation position was to deny "the possibility of

naturaf knowledge of God in man's present fatlen state" (McC001454). Catholicism

ranks reason fiu higher dian Ptotestantism dœs: "For the Catholic, contact with G d does

not take place k u g h faith alone. God does not stand over against h m muan as the

27

Whoiiy Mer. Maa's nature is intrinsically atTected by grace auâ the theological Whies.

Thus he can gmw in his inûinsic capacity to know and love God" (McCooi 455). The

confïict between nason and mrelation in Cbristianity stems dvectly h m conflicting

views over Gd's similarity to, or difference km, the human.

Amther theological issue which bears on the question of whether God is human

or Other is the debate over whether God exists in time or etemity. Augustine and

Aquinas, for example, both argue that God ûanscends tirne, existing outside of humaa

time. Such a God does not square very well, however, with the interactive God of the

Bible. Morris points out that the atemporalist view "will not allow for a convincing

p i c m of Gd's acting in respone to creaturely developments, creaturely needs a d

creatureiy nquests. The Old Testament presents many dialogues between God and

human beings. Can any ûue dialogue be held ôetween an atemporal and a temporal

being?" (1 32; Morris's emphasis). As this last question makes clear, the presence of

dialogue in religious poetry impües that the poet must believe, at least while Wnting the

poem, that God c m change and respond in the , that G d is therefore more human than

Mer.

Any attempt to divide Protestantism and Catholicism down the lines of belief in a

human or Other God is likely to founder on the many complexities involved in gauging

the character of each. One codd argue, for exampie, that since the Reformation it has

usually been the Rotestant church that is most likely to envisage God as ûther, through

its insistence on the primacy ofthe Scriptures over theology ( t h is, of revelation over

teason), and through its rejection of good wodrs in nivour of jusfification by fàith done, a

doctrine which impties that humans cannot try to imitate a G d who is recognizably also

human, but must rely on grace given by a God who would othewise remah totally

inaccessible and alien to them. Moreover, the Protestant njection of Catholic statues,

saints, and the veneration of Mary, serves fùrther to remove Christian worship h m the

realm of the coacretely human.

Yet Catholicism contains aspects that stress God's ûtherness just as Protestantism

embraces God's humamess. The issue of priests, for example, can be interpreted in two

different ways: either the Catholic priest provides a human mediation between beiiever

and God, thus representing the human side of God to the congregation; or the Catholic

priest semes to keep the believer at a greater distance h m God than the Protestant

worshipper, thus reiaforcing Gd's remoteness and inaccessibility. Protestantism cm be

chanicterized as human-centred in its emphasis on translating the Bible into the

vernacular, suggesthg a desire to bring the word of God down to a human level, not to

keep it mysterious and Other, only capable of king interpreted by anointed priests.

Even mysticism which is more common, historicaily, in Catholicism than

Protestantism, nuis into contradictions. One tradition of mysticism is the via negativa,

the practice of d e m g God only by what he is not, a vision of the divine which sees him

as so fet removed h m the hwnan realm of understanding that he cannot be endowed

with any human qualities at all? But the via negatnta is balanced, or contdicted, by the

The via negativa tradition presmts such problems for Feuerbach's thesis tbat he goes to the rather extreme length of claiming that the mystics who practice it are Gd-hating atheists: "The alleged religious hormr of limiting God by positive predicates is only the inciigious wish to hrow nothing wm of Goâ, to banish God fiom the miad" (15). (Of coins+ 1 too am attributin8 haüed and atheism to four deepiy religious people but I am not

Medieval and Cornter-Refomition mystic traditions which approach God in a highly

sensud way, envisaging hlln as bridegroom, father, mother, ôaby, or other human

incarnations. As Arthur L. Clements points out: "Christian mystics paredoxically see

G d as both transcendent and immanent" (8).

Feuerbach seerns to have regarded Protestantism as much more focussed on the

human aspects of religion than was Catholicism:

Catholic moraiity is Christian, mystical; Protestant morality was, in its very beginnhg, ratiodistic. Protestant modity is and was a carnal mingiing of the Christian with the man, the natural, political, civil, social man, or whatever else he may be called in distinction h m the Christian; Catholic morality cherished in its heart the mystery of the ullspotted virginity. Catholic morality was the Maier Dolorosa; Protestant morslty a comeiy, fnitfbi matron. (1 39)

Indeed, Eric C. Meyer stresses the fact that Feuerbach's attack on Christianity was

specifically an attack on Pmtestantism's focus on the human dimension of religion:

Protestantism has so accentuated the subject of faith, man, that it has neglected the object of faith, God. Besides stresshg personal salvation, it ruled out speculative philosophy and good works as avenues to God; it concentrated entirely on the faith of the believer where the revelation of God is near and manifest . . . Feuerbach could stress how close such an approach to faith brought theology to anthropology and claim that taik about God is really only tak about man. (798)

WhiIe it is âiflicult, then, to designate Catholicism and Protestantism as two separate and

different approaches to the nature of Gd, 1 would nevertheless argue that the overall

trend of Catholicism does seem to be towards a more s e d and human representation

attempting, as Feuerbach does, to argue tbet theü negative féeüngs towards God actualîy disphce their faith in, and love for, him. 1 assert ratha that the two opposing aninides coexist in the poetry.)

30

of God, whiie Protestantism stresses the awe and fear nquireâ on the believer's part?

CM we expect, then, that the Protestants, Donne, Herbext, and Rossetti wiii ai i

conceive of God as a non-human ûther, while the Catholic Hopkins alone wiH relate to a

very human Gd? Or that the seventeenth-century poets wii l be more impressed or

oppressed by a sense of the Otherness of God than the post-Enlightenment Victoriaas?

Cm we look for the influence of specific theologians such as Augustine, Aquinas, Luther,

or Calvin, finding in the poetry an attitude to God's approachability or Othemess which

rnirron the attindes of these thinken? Or does God reflect the temperament of the p e t

rather than the theology of the pet's the?

One way of trying to pinpoint the human God in the poetry is to explore how the

"pemnality" of God seems to refiect the "personality" of the p e t writing about him.

This approach immediately nuis into two inSunnouatable diffIcdties. The first is that we

canmt biow the personaiity of the poet through his or her poetry. The attempt to do so is

kwwn as the biographical fdlacy. The second problem relates to the Feuerbacbian

inconsistency of claiming both that God reflects an individual just as he is and that God

compensates the individual for all that he is not. Feuerbach claims both that "Such as are

a mm's thoughts and dispositions such is his God; so much worth as a man has, so much

and no more has his Gd. . . . By the God thou lcnowest the man, and by the man his

Peter Homans argues that twentieth-centuy Protestantism continues this stress on the otherness of God p d y by appealing to psychoanalysis: "there is a tmuicb of Protestant thought characterized by emphash on God's extnme othemess that has its mots in St. Paul and Et Augustine and then in Luther, Pascal, and Kierkegaard. Those theologians who derive h m this tradition 1 caü theologicai existentiaiists, and it is they who have been cùawn to Freud" (15). Homans suggests that while Protestants relate to Freud, Caîholics are more attracted to Jung.

31

God; the two are identical" (12). and that "Religion is the disunithg of man h m himseif;

he sets G d before him as the antithesis of himself' (33). Therefore, if God appears

similar to the poet's own persona in charactet then we cm say God mirrom that pet. But

if God is the opposite in character to the poet, we can just as easiiy say that God

complements the pet. In both cases he reflects the pet himself, thus maLing a

Feuerbachian approach impossible to disprove and &et useless.

h Donne's Holy Sonnet 1, for example, God appears both as Donne's h r and

bis opposite. in the lines "1 resigne I My selfe to t&ee" (1-2). Donne plays the part of a

woman surrendering herself sexually to her seducer, as weli as of the son or servant

tendering obedience to his father or master. As seducer, God minors the speaker of the

love poems, the Donne who biographers have speculated was offen successful in love

&airs. But as the male authority figure, God complements rather tbaa minors the

biographical Dome, the young man negotiating his way around the authority of older men

and father figures such as his me's father, Su George More, and his patron Sir Thomas

Egerton, not to mention the king himselfl Donne also shows God to be both his mirror

and opposite in the lines: "Except thou rise and for thine owne worke fight 1 Oh 1 shall

soone despaire" (1 1 - 12). It is really Donne himself who desires to fight fm what he

knows to be right, yet cannot musfer up the sttength to do so. G d hem is totally capable

John Stachniewski draws a biographicai connection between DOM~'S attitude to God and his feeling towards his paûoiis: "Donne felt his dependence on G d to resemble his dependence on seculsr patronage with its attendant fiutration, h d a t i o n and despair' (703). George Parfitt argues simüariy, although he focusses on Donne's re1ationship to his female patron, the Duchess of Bedford: "God becornes the patron: if Bedford was deifIed in verse lm, ha power to m e the poet-figure has passed hto Gd's bands" (John Donne 93).

32

of fighting to win (unlike Donne) yet inexplicably unwiuing to do so (me Donne). God

is Donne both as he should be and as he actuaUy is. He has ôoth the strengths and

wehesses of the poet's pemnality in g d meesme. IfGod is both made in Donne's

image and made ieto his opposite, it becomes pointless to try to iden@ him as Donne's

own personality extenialized*

The same problem holds true for the other three pets. Herbert often presents

himseifas the victim of his love, made nilnerable by his desire for God. He certainly

gives this same quality to the cheractet of God in his poems, but is just as likely to make

God into the buliy as the victim. As Michael Schoenfeldt puts it: "Herbert imagines the

self not just as the der ing object of divine power but aiso as the director of ardul

aggnssion against God" (1 57). in "Sion" God needs to be loved vey much as Herbert

There thou art stniggiing with a peevish heart, Which sometimes crosseth thee, thou sometimes it:

The fight is hard on either part. Great G d doth fight, he doth submit. (13-16)

But the apparent equality of the opponents in their mggie a c W y serves to make God

more pathetic. Two mortal opponents, being e q d y matched, couid respect both

themselves and each other, but Gd's omnipotent status makes bis occasional submission

shocking, an eff- heightened by the use of "Great Gd" in the h e that describes bis

defeat The fact that &xi even bas to fight for the soul, instead of receiving it as his due,

is bad enough, but his iiability to &fat makes him a most pitiful victim of love. But in

"Discipline," for example, Herbert moves h m the idea of G d as the Sad, victimised

lover, to God as the bbuy who forces him into the victim mle. The poet is so ~~y

loving ("Yet 1 cnep I To the throne of grace" (1 5-1 6)). and God so cniel with his rod and

-th, that the p e t appeals to the =lier state of things when God was the victim of his

love for the poet and al1 other human beings:

Who can scape his bow? That which wrought on thee,

Bmught thee low, Needs musi work on me. (25-28)

Within the confines of this puem, however, Herbert is unable to bsing God to his knees,

and is left when he started, the victim of an angry, bullying God, who r e b s to let

Herbert's own victim-like quaiity be projected ont0 him.

Rossetti, like Herbert and possibly as a result of his influence, engages in exactly

the same dichotomy of making God the rejected lover in some poems and the rejecting

beloved in othets. The Christ of "Despised and Rejected" (1 178-80), mistreated by the

speaker of the poem, bears some resernblance to the Christ of Herbert's "The Sacrifice."

But in " Weary in WelCDoing" (1 182) it is Rossetti who plays the part of the persistent,

loving, reasonabie, and long-dering victim, misûeated, as Herbert is in "Discipline," by

a perverse and even sadistic God:

1 would have gone; God bade me stay 1 wouid have worked; G d bade me rest.

He broke my wül h m day to day, He read my yearnings unexpresseci

And said them nay.

Now 1 wouid stay; G d bids me go: Now 1 would rest; God bids me work.

He breaks my heart tossed to and h, My soui is mung with doubts that l&

And vex it so. (1-10)

Like Herkit's, then, Rossmis God is both the poet's helplessly loving image ad her cold

and unloving enemy.

Hopkins, tw, makes his Gd both his double and his opposite. The Hopkinsesque

God appears in "The Soidiet" where Christ appears drawn to the vitility of the soldier in

much the same way t b t Hopkins responds to the male strength and beauty of Felix

Randall or the d o r s of the Eurydice. The sestet of "The Soldier" begins to present

Christ as a soldier, but tums quickly to a Chnst who is more of a soldie?s sweetheart:

Mark Christ our King. He knows war, served this soldiering thmugh;

He of ail cm reeve a rope best. There he bides in bliss Now, and &hg somewhére some mhn do dl that man can do, For love he leans forth, needs his neck must fd on, kiss, And cry 'O Christ-done deed! So Gd-made-flesh does too: Were 1 corne o'er again' cries Christ 'it shouid be this! (9-14)

It is d l y women who are pictured hanging on a man's neck, kissing him. Christ is

very like the homosexually inclined Hopkins here. On the other hand, Hopkins also

writes of a Christ who is, like D O M ~ S God, a virile male seducer. in staaui 28 of The

Wreck of the Deutschland the p e t exuits in the nunts vision of Christ as her master and

He was to cure the e~eemity where he had cast her; Do, deal, lord it with living and dead;

Let him ride, ber pride, in his triumph, despatch and have done with his doom there.

The Uiiepe of the lord and master ndhg in his triumph, doing, dealing, lotding,

despatching, suggests a H e , impatient ravisher of the nun.' One dmost expects Christ

As J. Hiiiis Miller says of stama 30: "Christ's 'having giory' of the nun is also an image of s e 4 pos9essionm (Ine Disappmunce of God348). David Anthony Dowms suggests tbat Hopkins sees himseff in the place of the ravished nun: "Hopkins, his imagination fiooded with his own love of God, here poeticaiiy traasfiises the feelings of

35

to swing her up ont0 his horse with him. Moreover, i fwe read "Let him ri&, her pride, in

his tciumph" without commas, as "Let him ride her pride in his triumph" the image of

sexuai conquest becomes much clearer. Hopkins's Gd, then, is both like and dike his

poetic creator.

It is, therefore, a misguideci enterprise to try to pmve diat "by the God thou

knowest the man, and by the man his Gd; the two are identical," since, at the m e tirne,

"Religion is the disunithg of man from himself; he sets God before him as the antithesis

of himself" (Feuerbach 12,33). Any quaiity exhibited by Goci, therefore, cm be counted

either as a reflection or an antithesis of the poet and the result is meaningless. We cm

keep a Feuetbachian approach, however, if we take on his definition of God as a

reflection of the human species: "Ali divine attributes, al1 the attributes which make God

God, are attributes of the species . . . With the Christi- God is nothing else than the

immediate unity of species and individuality, of the universai and individual beiag" (152-

53). Instead of relating God to the individuai poet's personality, therefore, a better

approach is to examine the ways in which he takes on or resists the qualities of humanity

as a species. Does he appear comfoaing, easily undefttood within the concepts of human

Wtut and human affections, or is he temfyingly alien and ûther?

G d s hction as "self' or "Othet" reveals itseif in several merent aspects of the

poetry. 1 bave already detailed the issues of the Incarnation, reason and revelation, and

the nuas in the shipwreck; his tnumphant fulnlment becornes theirs in the p m " (The Greut Sircrifice 74). Thaïs E. Morgan deveIops the theme of W s "erotic violence" (86) toW8tdS the nun and the poet, arguing that Hopkins identifies with both the f d e who surrenders, and the mak who ravishes.

God's relationship to t h e and dialogue, di of which have implications for the degree of

interaction with God expressed in religious poetry. Although God does not speak at all in

the majority of the religious lyrics of these four pets, he often appears to act and react in

some way, much like the silent auditor in the genre of the ciramatic monologue.6 Men

the pets attempt to reason with God, they betray theû belief that his mind works dong

the lines of human ratiodity. When they include his reactions in their poetry they

clearly rely on his existing within t h e just as they do? Even when God seems silent, the

poet's approach to him ofbn assumes that he cm be susceptible to nason, rhetoric, logic,

persuasion, thteats, and bribes in the same way that any human subject is. Poems in

which these approaches break down reveal the poet's overwheiming sense of God's

weachability and difEerence.

One other issue 1 fhd relevant here is that ofgender. In the Judeo-Christian

tradition, of course, it is the ferninine gender that has been marked as Other. We might

J. Wis Miller argues that the very existence of an address to God implies the poet's beiief in a responsive deity:

And a prayer or other fom of dinct addnss to God might be seen as in some way constrainiag God, at least in the minimal sense of putthg him in the position of having to say yes or no to the prayer . . . Even to address God as "Thou" . . . is to assume God might m e r back and to invite or even demaod an m e r . ("Naming and Doing" 176)

Miller again: Moreover, as Augustine long ago recognized in Book Eleven of The Confesons, there is pst difncuity in thinking how God's speech, that must have the dl-at-once quality of etefIljty, a t h e out of t h e to which d times are copresent, am get transIated or transposecl into human tirne where wotds must foliow one another in temporal se~uence and whcre meaning depends on rhythmic diffkentiations within tirne. ("Naming and Dohg" 179)

expect then that for Dome, Herbert, and Hopkins God fùnctions as a h u m God when

he is acting in a masculine way, but reveals himselfas the Other when he takes on a

feminine dimension (although for HopLias this neat equation is problematized by his

possible homosexuality), while for Rossetti the whole idea of the feminine as Other is

both inescapably present in her cultural heritage, and impossible to sustain fully since for

her the feminine is dso the self. This equation of masculinized God with humanized

God, and feminized Ood with God-as-mer does not completely work, however.' For

one thing, any gendering at al1 of God serves to hum- him at once, since,

theologically, God has no sex or gender? For another thing, if a male p e t conceives of a

male God in a p a m which equates spiritual with sexual experience, then he usually has

to take on the feminw gender himself 4th the context of that poem.1° He might be

Set, for exampie, my d y s i s of Dome's "What if this present were the wodds 1 s t night?" below.

Leo Steinburg convinchgly demonstrates the way in which Renaissance palliters deliberately included the penis of the Christ child in their work in order to stress the Incarnation, that G d became Mly humaa precisely because he took on sex.

'O The ment emergence of queer theory poses a significant challenge to my argument here. George Klawitter, for example, argues for a homoerotic reading of Dome's love poetry, a ie9diPig Richard Rambuss extends to the religious poetry of both Donne and Herbert, arguing that "Accouats that feshion a paraâoxidy 'fende' or 'bisexed' Jesus ofken do so at the cost of too quickly effacing the primaiy maleness of his body and its operations, as weIi as, peihsps more important, the possibilities a male Chnst a£Kot& for homoeroticized devotional expression" (38). Against Rambuss's assertion that "compuisory hetetosemaiity is ceaallily not the d e in Christian devotiod relation to Christ" (46) 1 would point to the primery importance of the heterosexual Song of Solomon in Christian eroticism. When the poets cast th& relationship with God into the language of erotic love, they meLc that love hetemsexuai rathet thaa homoerotic, because the tradition of Cbtistian eroticism is based on the love beniveen male and female found in that Biblical poern.

38

making God more like himseW, but he is making the whole experience one that is ûther

to him. Fixdy, both masculine and ferninine quaüties cm serve to make God seem

mer: the '"dine" q d t i e s of power and sttength attnbuted to God d e him

transcendent and distant h m the weak human worshipper," while the more "feminine"

qualities of irrationality and mystery also alienate God fkom the self. The gendering of

God, therefore, is a highly complex amibute of religious poetry. Each poem must be

treated on its own me&, in its attribution of gender to God, rather than viewed as part of

a consistent trend. in discussing each p e t 1 refer to, when relevant, these issues of m o n

and revelation, reactivity and silence, gender, and, of course, Catholicism and

Protestantism.

Donne

The moments in Donne's poetry that an most cornfortable with the idea of a

human God clearly derive h m his early Catholicism. La Corona lends itself better than

many other Dome poems to a consideration of the way in which the Catholicism in

" For example, Richard E. Hughes and Stanley Fish both see Donne's attribution of maieness to God as a displacement of Donne's own love of male power. Hughes writes: T h e image that so fiequentiy comes through h m the sonnets is not that of a penitent cooperating in his own creation, but that of an actor in a hideous travesty of Petrarchan passion. Donne's voice at times becomes the plaintive voice of the d e d [sic] woman, compliant, desirous, and rnghtened; God becomes the male lover, intransigent, elusive, and cruel'' (1%); while Fish is even more disapproving, claimiag that the Goâ Donne mates in his own image is a jeaious, ovnbearing buMy, and that "One might aimost thbk that the purpose of the sonnets, in Dome's mind, is retroactiveîy to j o justify . . the impulses to cruelty and violence . . . [ t h ] he display so lanshly ia his earlier poetry" ("Donne and Verbal Power" 241). ûod becornes Mer, that is, pomrful and fnghtening, by taking on the charactenstics, magnined and <iistorted, of Dome himseIf.

39

which he was r a i d works to make his idea of God more human than a strictly Protestant

approach might do. He h m G d thtough his fwus on Maq, and his use of

Ignatian meditative techniques. In the "Annmciation" Donne catches God up into

paradox:

That All, which alwayes is Ai every whm. Wbich cannot sinne, and yet ali sinnes must beare, Which cannot die, yet caanot chuse but die. (2-4)

The repetition of "cannottl and emphasis on "must" serves to obscure, even deny, God's

omnipotence. Caught in the grip of a duty and destiny which confîict with bis qdities,

God sounds very üke a kwildered and helpless humaa being. The next line reveals that

this hummization is all due to Mary, to whom God, in the Incamation, will becorne a

prisoner: "Lw, faithfiill Virgin, yeelds himselfe to lye / in prison, in thy wombe" (5-6).

DOM~'S tnatment of the hcamtion focuses on Mary's mie in niaking God human.

In the thkd stenza of the poem, "Nativitie," DOM~ uses the Catholic technique of

meditation, identified and descnbed by Louis Martz, to place himself in the scene:

Seest thou, my Soule, with thy faiths eyes, how he Which fils dl place, yet none holds him, doth lye? (9-10)

The result of this composition of place is a feeling of tendemess on behalf of the pet

towards the baby:

Was not bis pity towarâs thee wondrous high, That would have n d to be pittied by thce? (1 1-12)

The pet can feel pity for Ood only when he brings himseIf, by means of Catholic

meditation, so close that he can see him in his huxnan d i t y . Thus the Catholic elements

of ve-g Mary and engaghg in meditation both aiiow Donne to embrace the human

side of God and to bring Goâ closer to the experience of his own self.

The Catholic focus on Mary also appears, this time indirectly, in 'Since she

whome I lovd," where the dead Anne Donne fhctions in the same way as the V h g h

She figures both as a temptation into idolatry (Donne imputes to God a fear that he,

Donne, will give his "love to saints and Angels" (12)), and the mediator who brings

Donne to God: "Here the aômyring her my mind did whett / To seeke thee God; so

streames do shew the head" ( 54 ) . Donne's fear that his love for his d e is idolatrous

springs h m bis Protestant njection of Maian devotion; his belief that his wife has led

him to G d originates with the Catholicism of his youth. The Protestant fear of idiolatry

and rejection of Mary is an attempt to maintain a distance and distinction between God

and his creatures: we canwt venerate the merely human becaw God is so above and

beyond the human. The Catholic reliance on the d a t i o n of saints, however, testifies to

a belief that humanity is closer to divinity than Rotestantism aiiows.

The genderiag of God characterizes Donne's Holy Sonnets 1,2,9, and 10, the nrst

of which 1 have already discussed. In Holy Sonnet 2, "Oh my blacke soul," the speaker

first presents himself in the male roles of traitor and thief, as Richard Rambuss points out

in an attempt to argue that Renaissance pets did not always characterize the soul as

ferninine (50). But the last four l k s negate Rambuss's use of this poem to prove his

point:

Oh maice thy selfe with holy mouming biacke, And nd with blushhg, as tbw art with sinne; Or wash thee in Cbrists blooâ, which hath this might That bnag rsQ it dyes d soules to white. (1 1-14)

Donne sees his soul as a scarlet woman, mi with sin, who must blush red Wte a virgin in

41

order to counteract the scarlet red of the whore. DOM^ takes on d thme of the stages of

womanhd in ordet to experience every type of love for the maie Christ: the tnisting

adoration of the wglli (white), the passionate desire of the lover (red), and the yearning

grief and somw of the widow (black). God fiinctions hem as both a reflection of Donne's

self, the male husband and lover, and as a representation of the Mer, since he is the

opposite suc to Donne's feminiae soui. By forcing himself iato the role of the Mer, the

female, Dome creates a sense of the strangeness of his relationship with the divine. He

cm corne as close to God as to a human partner in d a g e , but he cannot do this without

distancing himseif fiom his own soui by making it female. This sonnet celebrates the

human God, but without denying the aspect of ûtherness in the relationship of the human

with the divine. The same process characterizes sonnet 10, "Batter My Heart," where

God is the male ravisher and Donne the female bride.

Holy Sonnet 9, "What if this present," also attributes gender to God but this t h e

the gender is ferninine. Donne, remaining masculine, kens Christ to the women he has

loved:

No, no; but as in my idolatrie 1 said to al1 my profane mistresses, Beauty, of pitty, fouinesse onely is A signe of rigour: so 1 say to the, To wicked spirits are homd shapes assign'd, This beauteous forme assures a pitious d e . (9-14)

These iines certainly sme to &e God closer to the human self, implying that he will

act just Lüre human beings that Donne is familiar with. In bringing God d o m to a human

Ievel, they echo lines 5-6:

Tearrs in his eyes quench the amasing l i a

42

Blood fiils his fmwnes, which h m his pierctd head feu. (5-6)

Human tears quench the amePng iight of the divine Other; h m blood fills the fiowns

of the distant and severe divine judge. In this somet Donne uses the traditionaiiy

ferninine qdties of beauty, pity, and, iacidentaily, susceptibility to flattery, to make God

more human than divine. The "otbet sex" is not as m e r as is the divine; women are not

as Wereat firom men as God is h m humanity.

The God of D o d s poeûy is far less reactive than the God of Herbert, Rossetti,

and Hopkins. Herbert and Rossetti both write Godts reactions into theu poeûy, while

Hopkins chooses instead to describe the actions of God to which he reacts. Donne makes

many requests of Go& but never really shows God's r~actions to his pleas and demands.

In Holy Sonnet 5, "Ifpoysonous mineralls, and if that ûee," Donne begins his address to

God in the languqe of logic and reason. Being a g d Protestant, of course, he soon

rejects bis powers of reasoning, backing off with the cry "But who am 1, that dare dispute

with thee?" (9). John Carey mites of Donne that he, "like every other Protestant of his

day, was deeply infiuenced by Calvinism, but he was an aâmirer of Aquinas too, and this

means that he was caught ôetween two irreconcilable estimates of human reason" (69).

The CalWiist attitude to mason wins out in this sonnet, Donne apparentiy njecting the

whole teason-based octave in the groveilhg sestet. It is signincant however, that m o n

is not replaced with revelation. It is Donne who has the change of heart d by himseif.

not God who d d e d y appcars upbraiding him for his ptemmption. Donne grovels in

feer and remorse before a God who does not nspond or react in any way to his near-

blasphemous use of reason. Wall four poets he has the weakest sense of God as a

43

ciramatic character. God is quite blotted out by Donne himself." Consequently, the

strangeaess, distance, and othemess of God is at its strongest in his poetry. Donne's God

is, out of the four poets, the God least close to the self."

Herbert

The exact nature and degree of George Herbert's Protestantism has been the

l2 Anthony Low sees Donne's focus on himself as ùinuentiai on other seventeenth- century religious poetry:

This focus on relationship as well as object, on the observer, lover, and worshipper, as well as the God who is worshipped, is, of course, characteristic of the period. It was Donne, the lover of women, who tumed his poetic eye no< so much on them as on his own love and its interior processes, who gave major impetus to the Engîish devotionai poem. (Love's Architecitue 7-8)

While Lods cornparison of Donne's religious egotism to his sexual self-centredness is illuminating, 1 feel that he does not make enough distinction here ktween the silent God of Donne's poetry and the interactive God of The Temple. As Donald M. Friedman points out, the two pets put a vey different value on personal interaction with God:

However relentles in pursuit of the beloved (or demned) sinner, Dome's God is largely a dent one. . . . Donne does not hear God's voice, nor does he even Listen for it; in fat the word "listent' occurs nowhere in Dome's poetry, nor does "silent.". . . There is nothing in Donne before he began to speak h m the puipit to compare with the note of cold despair Herbert sounds in "DeniaIl" when he remembers God's "dent eares" 0.2). (14 1)

Even when Donne concentrates on Christ, rather than God the Fatha, his poetry sti l i does not celebrate a human God, accorcüng to Margaret M. Blanchard, who argues that Donne m o t see the humanity of Christ because of "Christ's dering, which, however human, distorts every other human quality" (41).

For an aitemative view of Donne's appmch to Gd, see Wiiam Kemgan's argument in "The Fe& Accommodations of John Donne" where he argues that Dom cmtes God in a human image, employing a "crude antbmpomorphism" that is just "another name for outright blasphemyn (431, part of this blaspbemy king the attribution of human sinfùiness to Ood: "Human terms were the only ones he had. D o w could not conceive of God without discovehg, somewhere in the fol& of& conception, human vice" (47).

44

subject of vay lively debate for some tirne ~ o w , ' ~ although it seems d e to say that he

wouid probably k coasidered the most Protestant of the four poets in this study. While

we might expect, thetefore, diet his G d wouid show the most signs of ûtherness, the

opposite is the case: Herbert's God is the most human of al1 the pets. Those poems

which do stress his ûthemess, however, are also poems which are most strongly

Protestant. In "To Ail Angels and Saints," for example, Herbert rejects, reluctantly, the

mediating hction of Mary and the saints. In this poem the usual Herbertian

characterization of God as '%end" and partner in dialogue rnakes way for a description of

a rather remote and powemil king, who stands in the way of Herbert's relationship with

the human Mary and o t . saints. Herbert would like to address his prayers and petitions

to hem,

But ww, alas, 1 dan not; for our King, Whom we do al1 joyntly adore and praise,

Bids no such thing: And where his pleasure no injunction layes, (Tis your own case) ye never move a wing. (16-20)

Gd's only action in this poan is not to act. He does not forbid recourse to the saints, he

simply does not bid it. His only quaiities in this poem are nmoteness and silence. Even

the saints in heaven only get to see a stmngely impassive and passive God:

I4 See, for examp1e, Gene Edward Veith's "The Religious Wm in George Herbert Criticism: Reinterpreting Seventeenth-Centwy Angiicanism" (1988) for an o v e ~ e w of the state of debate ten y e m ago, and Michael Schoenfeidts 199 1 Prayer md Power (279-80 n.48) for a list of the main critics on eidia side of the debate over Herbert's Anglo-Catholicism or Iadicai Calvinism. As Elizabeth Clarke puts it in her 1997 book: "Within the past thiay years critics have assignecl Herbert to every religious and political category fimm revolutiomy Puntan to enthusiastic ratdian" (12). The same debate has ken fou@ ove Donne, but aot to the same extent.

Oh glonous spirits, who after alî your bands See the smooth face of God without a fiown

Or strict commaidS. (1-3)

Goà's fme is smooth, without emotion. He is not d i n g , just not hwning. He does not

even give commmds. He is dehed in this poem only by negatives. It is as a by rejecthg the aspect of human mediation in Cathoücism, Herbert loses, for a while, any

sense of a human and d v e Gd. The God of this poem is merely the statue of a king,

remote and distant fiom any human quaiities.

"The Holdfast" b been identifiai by severai critics, wtably Richard Strier and

Gene Veith, as one of Herbert's most radically Protestant, Calvinist lyrics. Every human

strategy that the speaker proposes as a way of getting close to God is rejected as useless.

He cannot obey God, trust in him, or even confess that he cannot do anything. Hearing

that he cannot do anything, the speaker "stooâ amaz'd at this, I Much troubled" (10-1 l),

lost without his human karlligs, troubled by the extrerne ûtherness of this Ood. He is

comforted by a "friend" who tells him

That ai i t h g s were more ours by king his. What A h had, and forfeited for ail, Christ keepeth now, who ccuinot fail or f d . (1 2- 14)

It is not that the Redemption grauts the qualities of the divine to humanity, givhg us

immortality and the ability to relate to Ood and k saved, but that the sacrificiai Christ

takes aU the originai gifts of humanity, those forfeited by Adam, unto himself. God

subsumes humanity, but humanity cannot even partake of divinity to the siig&test degree.

The Mer embraces the human but remains unknowable ancl wuleachable because the

humaa caaaot take iato itseifany part of the ûther. Herkit's Protestant reliance on the

justification by faith alone, and deniai of human agency or ment in salvation, brings him

to a point where he can only psively position himself in front of a God towards whom

he c m show no human action at all, a result which is of course denied by most of the

poems in The Temple.

Like Donne, Herbert attributes gender to God in a number of poems. In

tlAfnicti~n" 0, for example, he stresses Goà's maleness, while in "Prayer" (II) and "The

Bag" he makes God feminine.l5 In "Afiliction" (I) Herbert talces on the persona of a lady

seduced and abandoned by a male God The poem begins with a narrative of a seduction:

When fh t thou didst entice to thee my heart, 1 thought the service brave:

1 looked on thy fiuniture so fine, And made it fine to me:

Thy glorious houshold-M did me entwiney And %ce me unto thee. (7-1 0)

Men are not enticed to women by the splendeur of their households; it is women who are

wooe& traditi~nally~ through expensive and luxurious gifts. Herbert cornes across here

like nothing so much as a mistress established in her own little love nea Terry

Sherwood's investigation into the etymology behind the poem supports this reading of a

male God who seduces an innocent female for dishonest ends:

the lmguage of "delightn and "entice" share the same discoloured etymology: delectutio (deiight) never works Eree h m its source delicto (durement or enticement h m the right path), which in tum recalls

Is Elizabeth Stambler mites that "Herbert's G d appears in The Temple very much as the beloved woman appears in the courtly lyrics, charactnizcd indirectly, via the reactions ofthe protagonist" (330). In wncentrating on the Petrarchan tradition, and igwring the Christian tradition of Christ as the bridegroom of the soul, Stambler misses out on half the equation. God changes h m the beloved woman to the maie seduca/abandoner and backagai&

delicere and lacere (to allure h m the nght way). The undertones of enticement accuse G d of using delight to allure man to his didvantage, of tncking bim into believing that he will reach an immediate, pleasurable end. (108)

Herbert goes on to cbarscteb his soul as explicitly ferninine in the lines: "Therefore my

sudden soui caught at the place, I And made her youth and fiercenesse seek thy face" (17-

18). But the seducer God proves unfiaithfiil, and neglects his bride. Like a helpless

woman, Herbert tries to confiont his lord and master only to be condescended to and aot

Yet, for 1 t h t n e d oft the siege to raise, Not simpring al1 mine age,

Thou ofien didst with Academick praise Melt and dissolve my rage.

1 took thy sweetned pill, till 1 came where 1 could not go away, nor persevere. (43-48)

Reinforcing the suggestion that Herbert feminizes himselfin this poem, is the speaker's

longing to be a txee which grows M t and wodd provide a household for a bird:

1 reade, and sigh, and wish I were a tree; For sure then I should grow

To fhit or shade: at least some bird wouid trust Her houshold to me, and I shouid be just. (57-60)

Uniilce the tree and the bird, Herbert numires no young; he is like an infertile wife who

cannot bear her husband children.

The finai stariza begins with the speaker's iesolution to take refuge in meehess

and weakness, exemplary femaie virtues, befoce suddenly exploding into rebeiiion:

Yet, though thou troublest me, 1 must be me&; In weaknesse must be stout,

Weii, I wiii change the Senrice, and go seek Some other master out. (6 1-64)

48

But what sort of rebeiiion is the desire to simply replace one master with anothu? It is

the rebeUion of a servant or a courtiet, certaialy, but it is also the nbeilion of a woman

who, as much or more so than the servant and courtier, depends foc her econornic

livelihood on king kept by a man. Michael Schoedeldt, nading the poem as a portraya1

of a Renaissance courtier who finds -self "the victim of the capricious will of an

inScnitable monarch who rewaids devout service with needless suffering" (73). argues

that "The speaker mistakenly supposes that the= is some other master worth serving"

(76). The speaker is not mistaken to suppose that there is anothei master open to him; the

devil is waiting to receive his service shouid he offer it. Herbert threatens to betroth his

soui to the devil, mther than God, following the example of Donne who describes his

female soui as held in the bondage of betrothal to a devilish master in "Batter my heart,

three-personed God": "Yet deanlyl love you, and would be lov'd faine, / But am betroth'd

uato your enemie" (9-1 0).

In "Atniction" 0, therefore, the speaker is a woman, who has been seduced and

kept, but negiecteà, by a man; who is trapped therefore in uahappy dependence; and who

must c d on the specifically female vimies of passive resignation in order to survive. By

portraying his relationship with God as dogous to the relationship between two human

beings, Herbert h d s his God completely. By making God so male, and therefore

so human, he is more able to express bis anger at the way God has treated him, than if he

was reacting to a mysterious and unknowable deity. A man who treated a woman in the

faphon describeci by "Affliction" (I) wodd indeed be a suitable object for angry and seW-

righteous reproaches. Towards a mysterious and unfathomable Goâ, however, the ody

appropriate nsponse is the resignation of "niy will be done" ("The Crosse" 36). Herbert

makes God into a human d e , like himseif. in order to express bis feelings of nbelIion.16

By contras& in feminuing Chtist in "The Bag," Herbert stresses the ûtherness,

d e r than the humanness of God." The second staaza describes the Incamation as a

divine undtessiog:

Hast thou not heard, that my Lord JESUS di'd? Then let me tell thee a strange Stone. The God of power, as he did ride In his majestick robes of giorie, Resolv'd to light; and so one day

He did descend, undressing al1 the way. (7-12)

By calling the Incarnation a " m g e story" and by defamiliarizhg it through a parable of

unhssing, Herbert transforms the doctrine most conducive to im-g God's humanity

into a concept that stresses the strangeness of God. The last tiuee stanzas of the poem

nmilarly defamiliariz the well-known story of the Crucifixion by leaving out al1 mention

of the Cross, and describing the wound given to Chnst's side as iaaicted by one man with

a spear, seemingly acting alone. This wound is then somewhat ferninized in the

if ye have any thing to send or write, i have no bag, but here is mm: Unto my Fathers han& and sight, &leeve me, it shall safely corne.

l6 Helen Vendla reads the God of "Afliiction" (l) as not just a humanized deity, but as Herkrt himseifi "This cruelty of the self to the self continues throughout the rest of Afliction, and though the attacks of the self against itselfare projecled ont0 God, they are, to speak psychologicaiiy, Herbert's own doing" (48).

'' His feminization of ûod is thefeforr deliberate, not, as Robert Graves argues, an unconscious s e d fantasy.

That 1 shaU minde, what you impart, Look, you may put it very neare my heart. (3 1-36)

And Christ fiuther stresses his passivity and open availability to di sinaers in the next

lines:

Or if hereafter any of my fiiends WU use me in this kinde, the doore Shall d l be open; what he sen& 1 wiii present, and somewhat more, Not to bis hurt. (37-41)

Offering himself to be "used" by anyone, holding o p his gaping wounà, Christ does

seem like a s e d y avdable woman. By making Christ into the other sex, and linking

the feminine with the wounds o f death, Herbert stresses the Othemess of God, even while

his Christ is offering himself as a mediator between the human and the divine. While

Schodeldt, for one, d s Herbert's feminizing of Christ as a strategy by which "the

almighty Gad of power becomes a dnerabIe and compassionate deity" (249), 1 argue

that the ferninine Christ also w o h to shock the d e r into considering the Incarnation

and Redemption in an unfàmiliar light, to evoke fiom the d e r a sense of awe at the

strangeness and wonder of the overfamiliar Christian narrative.

In "Prayer" @) Herbert fémlliizes G d again, but this the to make him more

human, more accessible to the human soul. It is only in the nrst stanza of the poem that

God appears acting in a feminine way, but this initiai image petvades the rest of the

poem:

Of what an easie quick accesse, My blessed Lord, art thou! how Suddenly

May our requests thine eare invade! To shew that state dislikes not easinesse, If1 but lift mine eyes, my suit is made:

5 1

Thou caast no more not heare, than thou caast die. (16)

Human prayers "invade" Gd's ear in an image suggestive of male semai penetration of

the femaie, especiaiiy of a female who is generous with her favours, of "an easie quick

accesse." Unlike the lady of the Petrarchan love sonnet convention, this object of desire

responds immediately to het lovers, not even waiting for hem to put their requests into

speech: 'VI but liA mine eyes, my suit is made." The final line of the staaza stresses

God's lack of power, M e r removing him h m the traditional male quaiities of might

and sûength. God, unable not to hear, is like a captive womsn, even a wife sworn to

obey. When in the next stanza, thetefore, Herbert describes the "supreme almightie

power" (7) of a God whose am %pans the east and West, I And tacks the centre to the

sphere!" (8-9). his evocation of G d s power is not too overwhelmingly strange and

fnghtening because of the rnemory of the captive feminine divinity of the first stanza.

nie second haif of the poem concentrates on Gd's liberality and the value of prayer as a

way to access that liberaîity. Because Herbert establishes G d as feminine in the nrSt

stanza, his exultation in the power of prayer for easy access gains credibility: God is so

iike a wornan that he is dehitely human and understandable, not remote and inaccessible

to humaa prayer.

Schoenfedt secs Herbert's genderhg of God as both male and fernale as a

coascious choice on Herbert's part, meant to show Gd's excellence: "The presence of

masculine and feminine ttaits in Herbertts deity, then, is a manifiion of àivine

@&on, not the proâuct of poaic deficiency or psychologid coafusion'~266). 1

wodd argue that Herbert makes God both male and femaie in order to express both God's

closeness to, and difference hm, the human.

Herbert's God is fm more reactive than either DOM& or Hopkins, and neady as

m t i v e as the very takative G d of Rossetti. Helen Gardner writes that "it is rare to find

in the seventeenth centiiry either a direct ap@ of God to the soui, or dialogues, whether

undisguiscd or disguised as little drama9. In the great majority of nügious lyrics the

centre is man, s h in prayer, or meditation, or wrestling with temptation" (186). Her

description seems to me to hold tnie for Donne, but not for Herbert.

Herbert's immense desire for a reactive and interactive God is revealed in "Decay"

which wistfùily evokes the days of the Old Testament in which God was so human that

he would physically interact with his creatures:

Sweet w m the dayes, when thou didst lodge with Lot, Struggle with Jacob, sit with Gideon, Advise with Abraham, when thy power couid not Encounter Moses strong cornplaints and mone:

Thy words wen then, Let me done. (1-5)

But now thou dost thy self Uaniiae and close In some one corner of a feeble heart: Where yet both Siane and Satan, thy old foes, Do pinch and sûaiten the , and use much art

To gain thythids and M e part. (1 1-15)

Schoenfeldt points out how curious it is that Heibert should prefer the God of Judaism to

the incarnate deity of Christianity: "Surprisingiy, the obsolete modes of Old Testawnt

devotion seem at once more powerful, and more intimate, than New Testament

interiority" (174). The Ood who is closer to the selfby acnialy dwelling inside that self,

seems paradoxidy less able ta date to the self, because, it seems, he is ovemhelmed

by the sinful persotlE1Lity of the soui. Herbett's choice of the words "Mmure and close" to

describe Goâ's dwehg within the soui betrays his feeling that by coming closer God has

actuaiiy becorne more distant and unknowable, bas imrnured himseif, and becorne "close"

as in secretive* and "close" as in closed off. The transformation of God h m the

anthropomorphic Yehweh of the Old Testament to the more mysterious and divine entity

who dwelis within the soul, but carmot k scui by the humaa eye, results in the t e d j h g

vision of the last stanza:

1 see the world grows old, when as the heat Of thy grrat love, once spread, as in an uni Doth closet up it self, and di reûeat, Cold Sinne forcing it, till it retum,

And calling Jtcstice, al1 things bum. (1 6-20)

Herbert regrets Godk Wonnat ion from Old Testament to New Testament God even

though that transformation is an essential part of the Redernption. Herbert's unconscious

need for a human God overrides his conscious belief in doctrine, and recalls Feuerbach's

d i c m that the theological sophistication of Christianity can not entirely repms the

"The S d c e " is the poem in which God gets the most to say, speakuig without

interruption for 252 lines. As a consequence, the Christ of this poem is very human

indeed. 1 have always found "The Sacrificetr one of the least successfûl poems in The

Temple prrcisely because Christ sounds t w much like a human being feeling sorry for

himself. Even the paradoxes he gives voice to, sormd, because of the use of the first

person, like iadignant self-pity. The h t stanza, for instance, expresses Christ's dismay

over bis invisibility to those he died for:

Oh ail ye, who passe by, whose eyes and minde To worldiy things are sherp, but to me bhde;

To me, who took eyes that 1 might you finde: WasevagrieflilECminc? (1-4)

The npetition of the "to me* in line 3, sounds d k d n g i y like human bluster, Lilrc an

egotist n f d g evcry(hing ôack to bis own situation. Hcrbat was of course Wfiting h m

a tradition as R o ~ o n d Twc points out, but, as Wiiiiam Empson argues, the tradition is

his to transform as he will," and 1 think he faüs in The S d c e " to achieve his poaical

alln, which was to brhg his audience to repentance and cemorse based on the shock vaiw

of the paradoxes he employs. But it is dificuit for any human king to respoad to

rqroaches h m another human king, without feehg nsentfbi or suspecthg the

reproachfid one of =@pi t y. Such a response dcm not apply to God of course, but

Herbert har bem unaôle to makc Christs voie hat sound Mercnt enough h m a

human voice to banish the fctling of irritation on khaif of the da. The stapzas in

which Christ describes his pain without ais0 reproaching his audience are far more

surcessfuî in my opinion. Stanza six, for example, concentrates solely on Cbrist himself:

Thncfore my sou1 mtlts, and my bcarts deare eeas~n Drops bloud (the onely beads) my words to measme: O let this cap passe, f i i be thy pleawe:

Was ever grief Iürt h? (21-24)

The lack of nprorh invests these words with the dignity and pomr we expect to b u

ccp~oach and self-pity are aot. W c The Sacrificen does succecd in its cvocaîion of the

when hc attempts to apaiopMa Goci's voioe.

l8 See the Introduction for a more detailai daniption of this h o u s d c b .

55

The sonnet "Redemptiont' is a rare example of a Herbert poem in which the

reaction of G d to the speaker does not trsnsfom his Otherness into an accessibility to

the self. As the poem kgins God is both unknown and absent. The speaker seeks him at

his mansion ody to be told that he is gone "about some land" (7). Undetemd by the

vagueness of this description, the speaker seeks him eveywhere, "In cities, theatres,

gardens, ptuks, and courts1' (1 1). Al1 these places have the glamour of the unknown, the

promise of distance, discovery, and adventure. When God is finally founà, it is not in the

homely and everyday sunoundings of the stable and Bethlehem, as we might expect, but

in the sûange and unfamiliat wodd of crime: "At leagth I bard a ragged noise and mirth 1

Of theeves and murderers: there 1 him espied" (12-13). This den of thieves bas

connotations of danger and adventure, which makes it even more daunting and

frightening than the gnat courts the speaker visited W. So far, God has not bad a

chance to react in any way to the speaker, but has ôeen the passive, md absent, object of

the speaker's se8~:h, an ûther who has k e n hard to h d and impossible to preâict or

how. But in the lest line of the somet, God suddenly reacts to the speaker, in both

speech and action: "Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, & died" (14). Yet this

interaction with God on the part of the speaker does not serve to humania him, and bring

him closer to the speaker, but ody to stress bis eextrerne sûaogeness and Otherness. He

both anticipates the speaker's request, and acts on it instantiy, without any of the fuss we

might expect h m a feiIow humen king. As Schoenfeldt puts it: "God eclipses the

nocial metaphors mortais generate about hi& (79). Severai critics have commented on

the Protestant chamcter of this som its reworking of the Catholic technique of

56

meditation SQ that everything bppens so f~ that the speaker is left stunned by the

arbitrary nature of Gd's grace, rather than faling a part of the Redemption by king

there in spirit and shariag Christ's e~perience.'~ "Redemption," by reduchg the central

action o f both the sonnet, and the meditation it dudes to, to the last two words ("aud

died"), defamiliarizes the Christian story and leaves the d e r amazed at the strangeness

of its central character, who disappears at almost the exact moment he is f d y glimpsed.

Herbert's attribution of human reactions to God usually resdts in different effects

than in "The Sacrifice" or "Redemption!' Gd's direct or hplied reactions or speech

most oflen work to make him more human without making him unattractively so, or

divesting him of ail his divine qualities. "Love" (III), one of Herbert's best-loved poems,

presents a very reactive God who becomes human without ceasing to be divine. The

action of the poem is simuitaneously an allegory of the Eucbarist and a vision of heaven.

God, calied "Love" in the poem, takes the initiative in acting W. "Love bade me

welcome." Love, or God, exemplifies many beautifid m e s in this poem: generosity,

kindness, tact, humour, and gentleness, al1 of which spring fiom Love's very human role

of a good host. Love is so understanding and so gentle in his interactions with the

l9 As Martin Elslry mites, ia relation to Donne: "Very often in Protestant devotiod poetry the focus of attention shifts b m the object to the pemiving subject. The center of reformeâ meditative verne is not just Christ, but Christ as expaienced by the meditatort (72). "Redemption" descxibes the experience of the speaker, not the action of the Crudixion. And Ilona &Li says of "Redemption" that "In fact, the whole stoiy avoids the traditionai language of b l d and wouads. In 'Redemption' Christ's Passion is not visuaiid; and he is seen not as a der ing man but as a gracious redeemer" (80).

speaker that he (or she) does not seem divine at allem In no other poern in The Temple do

Herbert and God appear so vey much on the same level, so very similac to each other. It

is fitting that "Love" @i) should be the last poem in a collection which tries so hard to

bring the strange and distant God d o m to the level of the poet and d e r .

in spite of such poems as "Redemption" and in spite of being arguably the most

Protestant of the four poets in this stwly, Herbert creates God in the human image. The

sense of God's personality is much stmnger in Herbert's than in Donne's or Rossetti's

poetry, and much more human than in Hoplrins's. Herbert's God is a God who can indeed

be conceiveci of as a "fneed." Margaret M. Blanchard makes the point that the humanity

of Herbert's God is somewhat surprising for a seventeenth-centwy poet:

Genedy it seems easier to see why Donne was more removed fiom and more f e . of his God than to see why Herbert was not. Numerous seventeenth century [sic] characteristics tended to sever man fiom God: a theological overlemphasis of doctrinal and inteilectual aspects of religion (minimidng the imaginative appeal of Christ's human life); the dogma of justification by faith aione and the resultant stress on steady, unwavering faith (giWig rise to de*, guiit and fear of damnation); the sense of the "othemess of Gad" throughout the Protestant Reformation; the emphasis of the legalistic aspects of God and de-emphesis of His immanence; the loss of the f'histofical concrete," and particuiarly the rejection of tradition [sic] Eucharistie dogma, the continuous-incarnational aspect of Cbrist's presence in t h . (49)

The difference between the God of thew two seventeenth-century poets, then, seems to

corne down to something as intangible and difficuit to explain as the pasonaiity and

temperament of the poet.

S e v d critics bave pointecl out how Herbert gendas Love as fernale in this poem, thus bringing G d into a human sexuai nlationship with the speaker. See Chana Bloch, Jaais Ladi, and Michael Schoenfeldt, in piuticuiar.

Rossetti

Chnstina Rossetti, like Herbert, needs her God to be a very human one. She does

evoke a seme of Clthemess in her poetry, but almost always applies this Othemess to her

vision of heaven, mther than of Gode2' Her many poems about the new Jenisalem that

awaits the faithful &et death dwell on the fantastic elements of gold and pcecious Stones

which belong to the least human and most mysterious book of the Bible, the Book of

Revelation. A good example of Rossetti's poetic treatment of heaven is the uutitled

sonnet beginning "Lift up thine eyes to seek the invisible" (II 285):

Lift up thine eyes to seek the invisible: Stir up thy heart to choose the d l unseen: Strain up thy hop in glad perpetuai green

To scale the exceeding height where aii saints dwell. -Saints, it is well with you?-Yea, it is wel1.-

Where they have reaped, by faith kneel thou to glean: Because they stooped so low to reap, they lem

Now over goIden harps unspeakable. -But thou purblind and deafened, lmowest thou

Those glorious beauties unexperienced By ear or eye or by heart hitherto?-

1 know Whom 1 have tnisted: wherefore now Aii amiable, accessible tho' fenced,

Golden J e d e m floats fiill in view.

A tension exists in this poem between Rossetti's need to fhd heaven an exotic and

giamorous place totaîiy Werent fkom her cumnt earthly existence, and her reliance on

God as knowable and familiar. The Othemess of heaven is stressed in the first quatrain

Her vision of Heaven as mystuious and mange is opposed to that of Herbert, whose purpose, in the words of Mary EUni Rickey, "is to d i v a Heaven of any shred of exoticism," and who "dem'bes it in ternis remarkable ody for their eartbliness" (168). Certainly "Love" @I) supports Rickey's opinion hen, with its vision of heaven as a kind human host, and a cornfortable meai.

59

with the words "invisible," "unseen," and "exceeding height." A heaven which embodies

these quaiities is clearly unknowable and unhmghable. Because she is a pet, Rossetti

tries haginhg it anyway, even crrsting dialogue with the saints who dweli there. Yet the

saints who "lean" dom to spcak to her, do so over "golden harps u~lspeakable." A barriet

stiil exïsts between the pet and the object of her imaginative desire. As she asks herseif:

-But thou purbiind and deafened, knowest thou Those gloriou beauties unexperienced

By ear or eye or by heart hitherto?- (9-1 1)

The afterlife is so Other, so unimaginable, that the p e t might as well be deafand blind.

And yet Rossetti does not stop hem, accepting the rnystenes of her religion as

unfathomable, but appeals ta God hirnself as the means by which she can comprehend

heaven. "1 know Whom 1 have tnisted," she announces codidently, placing G d in a

different d m fiom that of the distant and elusive heaven. Because of her trust in a

humanly approachable God, she cm now receive a vision of the heretofore unimaginable

dwelling place of that God:

wherefore now AU amiable, accessible tho' fenced Golden Jenisalem floats full in view. (1 2-1 4)

Rosseni's mixed feelings about Christianity are summed up in the phase "accessible tho'

fenced." While she nee& God himself to k accessible, she can still pay tribute to the

mysteries of her religion by tramposhg them onto a strange and exotic heaven which

remains fenced off h m her until after death.

"Accessible &O' fend" also expresses the major doctrid Muence on Rossetti's

poeûy, the Anglo-Catholic doctrine of Reserve, the belief that, as 0. B. Tennyson

summarizes it, "since God is ultimately incomprehensible, we caa know Him only

indirectly; His ûuth is hidden and given ta us only in a marner suited to our capacities for

apprehendhg it" (45). Believing in this doctrine, Rossetti can relate hilly to the human

side of God while merely impiying his divine ûthemess, knowing she does not have to,

indeed cannot, comprehend the hill nature of Gd. Sonnet 11 of "Later Life" (II 143)

demonstrates Rossetti's use of &serve in order to shield hetself fiom God's ûthemess:

Lifelong our stmbles, lifelong our tegret, Lifelong our efforts failing and renewed, While Lifelong is our witness, "Gd is good:"

Who bore with us tiil now, bears with us yet, Who still remembers and will not fotget,

Who gives us light and wannth and daily food; And gracious promises half understood,

And giories half unveiled, whemn to set Our heart of hearts and eyes of our desire;

U p W g us to longing and to love, Luring us upward h m this world of mire,

Urging us to press on and mount above Ourseives and al1 we have had experience of,

Mounting to Him in love's perpetual fire.

The essence of Resnve hem is expressed in h e s 7-8, which describe the "half

understood" promises and "half unveiled" glones of Gd. Because the glories are only

"halfunveiled," they serve as a beacon rather than blinding anyone with their light. And

b u s e these glories are only mentioned a f k the d g üst of God's homely, buman

concem for his people in giWig them "Light, and warmth and daily food," they do not in

any way overwheIm the Christian sou1 with fear. The last two lines of the sonnet

combine the human and divine aspects of Christianity in stnssing that it is as ourselves,

with "aii dlpt we have had experience of." with di our human experience and quaiities

intact, that we wiü be embrired hto the divine, God's 'perpeniaI fire." The sonnet bears

61

witness to the belief that the Incarnation works two ways: that G d became human so that

humans could becorne divine.

More than any of the other pets, Rossetti needs a God who is not just a human

God with whom she can have a human relationship, but is so close to her that he becomes

merged with her, part of herseIf. Herbert, who is most Lüre ha in trying always to make

his God a human God, always main- a distance between himseff and bis deity,

aithough it is more the distaoce between fiiends, than that between God and creature.

Rossetti goes M e r , in desiring a God who is not just a fiiead but a lover. However, she

almost aiways envisions her union with God as an event which takes place after deatb, in

the exotic heaven which I have just discussed.

In achieving a merging between God and herse& Rossetti relies on the tradition of

Christ as bridegroom of the soul, which leads her to often gender God as specifically

male, using the pronom "he" in a sexuel, rather than generic, sense. Gender does not

play as big a part in Rossetti's poetry as it does in that of Donne or Herbert, partly because

she faces less of a conflict than they do. haginhg Chnst as the bridegroom of her soui

is not difncult for her because she herself is the right sex for a bride. God always appears

as "he" in her poetry, but usually his rnaleness is not an issue. Exceptions include "Atter

Communion" (1 228-29). Sonnet 15 of "Later LXe" (II 144-45). and "T'he Heart Knoweth

its ûwn Bittemess" (Lü 26566), where God is specifidy gendered as male for a

purpose, and "Despised and Rjected," a rare example of a Rossetti poem which amibutes

ferninine qualities, although not the feminine gender, to 006 In " M e r Communion"

Rossetti clearly d e s God male as a way ofmalring her relationship with hirn a more

human one:

Why should 1 calî Thee Lord, Who art my Gd? Why should 1 c d Thee Fnend, Who art my Love? Or King, Who art my very Spouse above?

Or c d thy Sceptre on my hart Thy d? Lo, now Thy banner over me is love,

AU heaven flies open to me at Thy nod: For Thou hast lit Thy flame in me a clod,

Made me a nest for dweUing of Thy Dove. What wüt Thou cd me in our home above,

Who now hast called me fiiend? how wiIi it be When Thou for good wine settest forth the best?

Now Thou dost bid me corne and sup with Thee, Now Thou dost make me lean upon Thy bnast:

How wiil it be with me in tirne of love?

Rossetti rejects the non-gender-specific term "fiiend" for the more sexualized "Love."

She rejects the hierarchically superior and distant "king" for the intimate "spouse." She

goes on to speculate about the even pate r intimacies that will occur in heaven, when she

is not separated h m God any longer: "What wilt Thou call me in our home above, I Who

now hast called me fiend?" (9-10). She contrasts the intimacies of "now," which include

eating with G d and resting on his breast (actions she couid perform with a feaiinine

figure) with the ecstatic union of the future, in the "the of love," which, placed as it is

after the preliminaties of eathg and gently embming, sounds very much like intercourse

after foreplay. In order to m&e God so close to her that he joins with her, Rossetti makes

him male in order to draw on the Wtion of Christ as the bridegroom of the soul.

She makes Christ male in soma 15 of "Later Life" in order to dtaw on another

tradition, this time the characterization of Christ as the second Adam:

Let woman fm to teach and bear to Ieam, Remembering the first w o d s fbt mistake. Eve haâ for pupii the inquiring snake,

Whose doubts she answered on a great concem; But he the tables so contrived to turn,

It next was his to give and her's to take; Tiii men deemed poison sweet for her sweet d e ,

And fW a train by which the world mut burn. Did Adam love his Eve fiom fh t to last?

1 thid so; as we love who works us ill, And wounds us to the qui& yet loves us still.

Love pardons the unpdonabie past: Love in a dominant embrace holds fast

His M e r self, and saves without her will.

nie last three üow personify Love, a personification which is clearly gendered male. It is

not just Adam who is embracing his Eve, but Christ who is holding on fast to the female

poet, Rossetti, saving her without her wiii. That Rossetti can p i c m herseif as the

"fiailer self" of Christ revds her intense need to d e God so human that he can join

with her and kcome part of herseK Moreover, the f a t that God is so close to her by the

end of the poem pady negates her stem advocacy of femaie submission to men. Being

held fast within God's embrace is no inferior position.

"The hart kmweth its own bittemess" contrasts Christ with the speaker's

uiisatisfmory male lovers on earth. She desenks dieu inadquacies in terms which

d e them sound lacking in mascuünity: "You scratch my surface with your pin; l You

stmke me smooth with hushing breath" (33-34). This effeminate fussiness is show up

for wtiat it is by the passionate desire expressed in the next two lines: "Nay pierce, nay

probe, nay dig within, I Probe my quick con and sound my depth" (35-36). Rossetti

wants to k possessed by a viriie masculinity. She wiU find that surrender to a lover only

in the arms of Christ, whom she evokes at the very end of the poem: I'There God SM

join and no man part, I 1 full of Christ end Christ of me" (55-56). The pendtimate line

64

evokes Chnst's words on d a g e that "What therefore God bas joined together let not

man put asunder" (Matt 19:6). In her d a g e with Christ, a d a g e which will take

place after her death, Rossetti imagines a complete inte~netration. Both full of the

other, Christ and the sou1 have merged to so great a degree that they are practidy one

self.

Rossetti almost never genders God as female. One exception is "Despised and

Rejected" (1 178-go), where Christ, while male, takes on feminine chamteristics of

passivity and helplessness. Dolores Rosenblum argues that the Christ of "Despised and

Rejected" b e a ~ great similarities to the Victorian woman: "the social suffering of the

outcast female is illuminateci, as through a stained-glas window, by the sufferhg of the

uaheeded Christ" ("Christina Rossetti and Poetic Sequence" 143). He is lonely, sad,

pleacüng, and poweriess. Rossetti gives Christ feminine quaiities hem in order to d e

him mirror, rathet than merge with, herseK Thus she genders God as male when she

wants to make him the bridegroom of her soul, and female when she wants to make him

the minor of her soui. in both cases she brings hh d o m to the human level, but only

when he is male does he bring her back up with him to the divine level. Only when he

takes on the masculine gender, does he merge with her omi self.

God is more reactive in Rossetti's poetry than in that of any of the other three

poets. Not only does Rossetti d e him take part in many dialogue poems, she ais0 gives

him whole p m s of his own to speak, a strategy which even Herbert practices only once,

in "The S d c e . " A good example of a dialogue poem is "Love is Stmng as Death'"

164), in which God is qyick to react and nspond to the speaker's despairiog cry:

"1 have not sought Thee, 1 have not found Thee, 1 have not thirsted for Thee:

And now cold billows of death surround me, Buffethg billows of death astounâ me,-

Wilt Thou look upon, wilt Thou see Thy perishing me?"

"Yea, I have sought thce, yea, 1 have found thee, Yea, I have thirsted for thee,

Yea, long ago with love's bands 1 bound thee: Now the Everlasting Arms surround thet,-

Thro' death's darkness 1 look and see And clasp thee to Me."

The first two lines of God's reply in staaui 2 pd le l the first two lines of the speaker's

cry in the tint stanza. "1 have not sought Theet' (l), is answered by "Yea, I have sought

thee" (7). God's immediate respoase and aid, couched in the same language and syntax of

the human speaker, d e s him very rrassuring and close. Yet, as so often in Rossetti's

poetry, God can only be embraced by the human sou1 afkr the separating border of death

has been crossed: "Thro' death's àarkness 1 look and see I And clasp thee to Me" (1 1-12).

God may talk like a transfomtive echo of the speaker, but he still does not clasp her to

himself until the moment of death. The human God resides in the non-human tealm of

heaven.

The sonnet "Surely He hath borne our griefs" (II 203) shows Rossetti wanting, for

once, more of a m h r God than a merging God. She conceatmtes on the cornfort that

Christ's der ing provides for the Christians who d e r after him:

Christ's Heart was wnmg for me, if mine is sore; And ifmy fect are weary, His bave bled; He had m place whmin to lay His Head;

If1 am burdencd, He was burdened more. The cup 1 drinlr, He dranlr of long before;

He felt the unuttered anguish which I d d ;

He hungered Who the hungry thousin& f& And thirsted Who the world's ce-ent bore. If grief k such a lwking-giass as shows

Christ's Face and man's in some sort d e alike, Then grief is pl- with a subtle taste: Wherefore should any fiet or faint or haste?

Grief is not grievous to a sou1 that hows Christ cows,-and listeas for that hour to strike.

The Lines that begin the sestet are cather sufprising. Grief makes Christ human enough to

m h r the face of man, which is a f d y standard use of the Incarnation to stress God's

closeness to, rather than distance h m , the humm, but Rossetti owns up to hding a

pleasure in this mirroting. It is more important to her, in other words, that Christ be

human, than that the Gd she loves should avoid suffering. God's de r ing gives her

pleasure because it brhgs him dom to ber own level.

When God does keep his distance fiom her, she cannot stand it, as evidenced by

the following uatitled sonnet (XI 205):

Have 1 not striven, my God, and watched and prayed? Have 1 not wnstled in mine agony? Wherefore s t i l l turn Thy Face of Grace from me?

1s Thine Arm shortened that Thou csnst not aid? Thy silence breaks my heart: speak tho' to upbraid,

For Thy nbuke yet bids us follow Thee. 1 grope and grasp not; gaze, but cannot see.

When out of sight and reach my bed is mde, And piteous men and women cease to Mame

Whispering and wistfbl of my gain or loss; Thou Who for my sake once didst feel the Cross,

Lord, wiit Thou hua and look upon me then, And in Thy Glory bring to nought my shame,

Confessing me to angels and to men?

Rossetti even treats God as she would a human king by asking "1s Thine Arm shortened

that Thou canst not aid?" In her need for God to respond to her on her own level, she

67

stumbles into blasphemy, ascribing powerlessmss to an omnipotent Gd. It is clearly

Rossetti who feels that her a m is too short to rrach God at his immense distance, but in

her customary habit of making God minor her, she projects ber inability onto him.

Rossetti declans that she wouid d e r deal with God's anger than his silence (5-6). for at

least anger is a more human trait Uian silence and incomprehensibility. Rossetti feels

only frustration and loneliness, not mystic exhilaration, before a God who hides himself

fiom her, amazhg in his Othemess.

in reading Rossetti as a poet who desires union wîth a human God, 1 am departlng

fiom the critical majority. Jerome Bump argues that Rossetti was atûacted only to a

traascendent God: "The idea of the immanence of God or the Ideal in this world, for

instance, is almost completely alien to her" (3). And Rossetti's poetic style is usually read

as priviIeging the ûtherness of the divine. Both Jerome McGann and Dolons Rosenblum

speak of the empty refmnt in her verse: "They are humen words, but because their

nferents are fiaally not human at dl, they are emptied of meaning and acquVe instead a

portentous but obscure import" (McGann, The Achievement of Christina Rossetti 8);

"Thete is a sense, also, in which devotiod language is language that has been emptied

out: it consists of sacred words and sacred names, but their meaning is less Unportant than

their utterance" (Rosenblum, "Christina Rossetti and Poetic Sequence" 152). David

Shaw, too, reads Rossetti's language as trying to express a God of ûtherness: "Chasms

keep opening, and a power she can neither name or comprehend is contiaually iwading

and breakhg down the refiige of her spare, demanding fom. . . . the instabiiity of the

forms genemtes a sense of mystuyl ("Poet of Mysteryl' 23). I apee that Rossetti's

68

language is more ritualistic than expressive or denotative. It is not the case that, Ne

Herbert, she can imagine herselfengaging in a little witty and gentle conversation with a

fiiend who happeas to k divinesz2 but that in king unable to recopia? God as

immanent, she look to death as the meaus by which she cm mage with a transcendent

God in heaven. Anthony Low describes how Herbert uses the language of s e d love in

his poetry as a means by which "to figure forth what we may cal1 the 'courtshipl stage of

the divine-human love flair, never the consummation or the marriage stage" (The

Reinvention of Love 88). Herbert courts a God that he sees incarnate in the world;

Rossetti, lacking this vision, skips the courtship and looks forward to the consummation,

codating the bridegroom Christ with that other bridegroom, Death.

Hopkins

Hopkins differs startlingly fiom the other three pets in that he desires his God to

be Other rather than hwnan. He is Wre Donne in dwelling heavily on God's strangeness

and t e m g power, but unlike Dome in eXUIting in that power. What John Carey says

of Donne's sermons, that "it is Goci's destructive power that Dome particdady relishes

dwelling on. . . . It is G d as killer and puiverizer that Donne celebrates" (123), is also

tme of Hopkinsk poetry* It is oniy by the time of the "terrible sonnets" that Hopkins

begîns to find bladcness and despair rather than excitement and ecstasy in the fact of

Ha dialogue poems are far more ambiguous and impersonal than Herbert's. See my discussion of "Üphilll' end others in chapter four.

Hopb's Catholicism does not seem to make hirn more nsponsive to a h u m

God at aii. The only poem I couid fhd where Catholic doctrine resuits in a humanizing

of God is "The Blessed Virglli comparai to the Air we Breathe." By cornparhg Mary to

the atrnosphere, Hopkins sets her up as the protective medium by which we can shelter

Whereas did air not make This bath of blue and slake His fke, the sun would shake, A blear and blinding bail With blackness bouad, and al1 The thick stars round him roll Flashing like flecks or coal, Quartz-&$, or spafks of salt, In grixny vasty vault.

So God was god of old: A mother came to mould Those limbs like ours which are What must make oui daystar Much dearer to mankind; Whose glory bare would blind Or less wodd win man's mind. Thiough her we may see hun Made sweeter, not made dim, And her band laves his light Sifted to suit our sight (94- 1 1 3)

This is one of the few poems in which Hopkins confesses that the Incarnation makes God

* Allison Suiioway points out, however, that in his semons, if not his poetry, H o p h imagines God in very human tams: "Sometimes one is Iefi with the impression that Hopkins's Christ, especially in the sermons, is a supernaturai college don, handsome to look at before the cmcifixxon, and atterwatd, more to be loved and cherished in His apparent downfiaii than ever befote" (Gerard MmIq Hopkins and tk Victorim Tempr 27). Perhaps H o p b creates a non-human ûod in his poetry and a human one in his prose because he sees poctry itseIfas W i t and ûtha to muadaae humsn existence and expriene.

"much deam to mankind" (107) than he would have been if he had not taken on

humanity. Significantiy, it is only tbrough a specificaiiy CathoLic focus, the veneration of

Mary, that Hopkins is able to express UUs idea at all. Mary makea the sun the Son, and

thus makes God human end accessible to the human seltz4

The ody 0 t h poems where Hopkins auly celebrates Gd's humanity are "Pied

Beauty" and "As kingfishem catch h." The finit of these celebrates the double nature of

"dappled things"(1). dluding to the double nature of Christ who is both divine and

human. His being is as "couple-colour[ed]" (2) as the skies that Hopkins loves. Yet even

in this sonnet Hopkins ends by glorifjing the transcendent divinity, rather than the

humment incamationality, of God: "He fathersoforth whose beauty is past change: I

Praise him" (10-1 1). "As kingfishers catch fire" is much more celebratory of the

hcmtion, to such an extent tbat God becornes not only human, but the self, as in so

much of Rossetti's patry :

f say more: the just man justices; Keeps me: Mt keeps al1 his goings graces; Acts in Gd's eye what in G d s eye he is- CMst. For Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the fea- of men's faces. (9-1 4)

24 Jerome Bump suggests that "it was pr imdy such a vision of the W e family that Ied Hopkins to convert to Catholicism. . . . H o p h must have seen the many statues of the Holy Family in Cathoüc churcheq and his a m y poems to Mary and Marian figures reveal his need to see tbe ideal incarnate in the reai in women as well as men and chilâren" ("Ceacier-Cented Criticism" 82). This idea of Hopkins's hummization of God through Mary makes an interesting contrast to John Schad's reading of Tho Wreck of the Deutschland, in which he sees God figrind as the ferninine and the m a t e d : "the ~11~0IISCio~~OthaofOodisthoughtofintnmsofthmotherofGod ... Ifthe uncotlscious in Hopkins is dominstsd by one sip it iq it seems, tbet of Mary or 17teotokosn ("Hopkins, Lacan, and the Unconscious" 145-48).

Christ is not only human, he is ten thousand different humaas.

Hopkins docs gender his God on a number of occasions, but almost always as

male? (riideed, the two Renaissance poets are much more likely to aîtribute feminuiity

to God than are the two Victorians.) I have already discussed., at the beginaing of this

chapter, his atûibution to God of virile rnasculiaity in The Wreck of The Deutschland?

Another poem in which God seems s e d y rather thaa generically male is "Hurrahing in

Harvest" where the landscape is gendereà, unusuaily for English poetry, as male: "And

the anirous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder 1 Majestic-as a staîiion stalwart"

(9-10). Gd's sexuai conquest here is the speaker who is hurleci to the grouad by the

force of his own attraction: "The heart mars wings bold and bolder 1 And hurls for him, O

haif hurfs earth for him off under his feet" (1 3-1 4). Because the gender of Christ is

displaced onto nature!, howevei, the chantcterization of God as a virile and sexually

attractive male does not really hurnanize him at ail. His male qualities are those of a

stallion, as they are those of a falcon in "The Wîndhover," not of a human male?

The Wreck of the Deutschland pnscnts God as the Mer mainly through

One of the few exceptions is the ferninine Christ of The Solder," a poem I discussed at the begianing of this chapter.

26 For an detsjled anaiysis of gender in Tlie Wreckof Tho DeutschIa~ see Thaïs Morgan's essay, "Violence, Creativity, and The Femjnine: Poetics and Gendet Poiitics in Swinburne a d Hopkins" (1992).

See chapter two for my comments on HopLias's ûeatment of his own genàer before this male God.

Hopkins's Romantic identification of God with the sea and the storm." The fitst stanza

positions God immediately as the speaker's master ("Thou mastering me f Goci!") and

associates him, in the thVd liae, with the ocean that will assert its mastery over ail human

endeavour in the poem ("World's strand, sway of the sea"). The second halfof the stanza

sets up the paradox wbich wiil iafonn the rest of the poem, the pamdox of a God who is

ôoth human and m e r :

Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh, And after it ahost unmade, what with dread,

Thy doing: and dost thou touch me &sh? Over again 1 feel thy fïnger and find thee.

God fht makes the pet , much like a human artist mates his art, than almost destroys

him with dread, cûead of his Otherness and divinity. The last line combines the image of

a transcendent and threatening pointing hger , which hovers "over" the pe t , and puheps

evokes the terrifying mowlg 6nger which wrote on the wall of Belsbazzar, son of

Neb~cbadnezzar,~ with the very different image of a baby grasping his father's finger in a

** Jerome Bump rrads the stonn as a representation of God as the sublime: "Another convention of the representation of the subiime in nature, the emphasis on temr and dreaà, also saved Hopkins' proselytic purposes. He w t e d not only to inculcate a sense of Gods presence, but especidy to cal1 upon that fear of a destructive God which the religious iibetals of the time wished to forget" ("The Wreck of the Deutschland' and the Dyaamic Sublime" 116). John S W s mading of the poem emphasizes its Romantic mots: "For the Victoriaas . . . the heritage of Rommticisrn, with its privileging of the spontaneous and irratiod, means that there is an increasing tendency to iden- G d with the unconscious" ("Hopkins, Lacan, and the Uriconscious" 142). Marylou Motto, on the other head, argues that Hopkins's scw of G d as ûther sprang h m his rejection, rather than embrace, of Romanticism: " W e the Romantic wüls himseifto lmow the othcr thugh a hision of the self ami the other, H o p k celebetes Goâ-given othemess" (1).

" The stoty of the miting on the waü can be found in Daniel: In the same bour came forth hgers ofa ma's haad, and mote

reflex action. The stanza strains under the tension of quai feat and tnut on the pet's

piut towaràs his God, a strain which is also evident in the similar paradoxes of stanza 9:

Thou art üghtniiig and love, 1 found it, a wiriter and warm; Father and fondlet of heart diou hast munp:

Hast thy dark descendhg and most art mercifid then.

God is both ûther and humaii, both a father and a storm?'

The second stanza goes fùrther in establishg God as the ses, and in sûessing

God's terror, mastery and othemess. Hopkins reveals an almost masocfistic desire to

experience the might of God, which he expresses in imagery of sea and storm, thenfore

linking his own expenence to that of the Deutschland:

1 did say yes O at lightning and lashed rod;

Thou hearâst me mer dÜui tongue confess Thy terror, O Christ, O Gd;

Thou knowest the walls, altar and hour and night; The swoon of a heart that the sweep and the hurl of thee trod

Hard down with a horror of height: And the midrifhstrain with l e h g of, l a d with fire of stress.

God, like a wave, sweeps the p e t up and huris him dom again, and the language reflects

the poet's excitement at behg so treated. "1 did say yes," says Hopkins, and that yes

over against the cmdlestick upon the plaister of the wall of the king's paiace: and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote.

Then the hg 's countemce was changeci, and his thoughts mubled him, so that the joints of his loins were loosed, and his knees smote agaiast one another. (Daniel S:54

30 ALison Sulloway atgues that Hopkins genders ûod in such a way that "God is 'master' but he is also a 'fathm and fond,' and his fatherhood includes what Hopkins usuaiiy thinLs of-or rather fals archetypaiiy about-as mother love" ("Gerard Manley Hopkins and %men and Men"' 45). Even i fûod is parentai. the f a t that he is both father and mother, means tbat the very humanity of his feelings is still d d y different h m mything a singie-sexed human king can offn.

74

seems to be not re~uctahî, but exultant,

And in the first three lines of stanza t h , Hopkins goes so far as to equate his

tenor of God with his terror of hell:

The fiown of his face Before me, the h d e of hell

Bebiad, whm, where was a, where was a place?

God's temfying Otherness, symbolized here by his fiown, is not a very comforting refuge

fiom the terrors of hell. Hopkins expresses his terror and confusion before this distant

and imposing God by stuttering through line three, showing how human language and

syntax are! inadequate as ways in which to reach God.

Hopkins's m w e r to God's terrifj6ng fiowns is indeed to focus on the incarnation.

which he does in stanzas 6 to 8, but his treatment of it stresses not Christ's reachability as

a human being, but the mystery and passion of his human existence. The Incarnation,

accordhg to Hopkins, is a

stroke dealt- Stroke and a stress that stars and stonns deliver, That guilt is hushed by, hearts are fiushed by and melt-

(a 9

Guiit is hushed and hearts melt, but this vision of a relaxation and surrender to God's love

sits oddy with the idea of king dealt a stroke, especialiy one which is deiivered by such

temfyiag and destructive storms as the one that wrecks the Deutschland. Furthemore the

Incarnation leads straight to the Passion: "The dense and the driven Passion, and fnghtfùi

sweat: I Thence the discharge of it, there its swelling to be* (st. 7). For God, experiencing

h d t y is as "fiighthl" as Hopkins's experience of Godos divinity. The encounter of

divinity and humanity is, for Hopkins, one which will always lead to the "~welling'~ of a

In Part Two of the poem, God is present not only in, but as, the stom. In spite of

Hopkins's empathy for the people who were terrified by the sca, the poetry here expresses

a delight in the sea's wild power, as in the finai iines of staiiza 13:

Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivelled snow Spins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps.

The assonance and aüitemtion of the nrst line is so overwhelmiag aad skilful that the

d e r or listener is far more likely to think "how beautiful! how exciting!" than "how

a-!" This snow atûacts rather than repels.

The same attraction towaràs the destructive power of the sea is evident in stanza

One stined h m the rigging to Save The wild womatl-kind below,

With a mpels end mund the man, bsndy and brave- He was pitched to his de& at a blow,

For ail his dreadnought breast and brai& of thew: They could tell him for hours, dandled the to and fro

Tbtough the cobbleâ foam-fleece. What couid he do With the burl of the fomtains of air, buck and the flood of the wave?

The stomy sea plays carrlessly with the dead man. "Dandled" suggests a parent playhg

with bis or her child. It is God, in the form of the stormy sea, who almost playfully, and

quite blindly, dandles his dcad son. 1s this a human father, or does the miment of God

in this poem redefine his fatherhd into sometbing incornprehensibly diffennt from our

idea of that human relatioaship?

The God of this poem is predominantly a wild and dangrnus master. One of the

ways in which he d B i âom, say, Herbert's Goâ is in the fact that he h y s wins his

batties with the poet, and by extension with aü humanity. Hopkins couid not have Wntten

"Great G d doth fight, he doth submit" ("Sion" 16). In "Camion Comfoit"od does

condescend to d e with the poet, but he certainly does not submit. The shipwreckeà

victims of the Deutschland, like the speaker of "Carrion Cornfort," fight with God and

They fought with God's cold- And they could not and fell to the deck

(CNShed hem) or water (and drowned them) or rolied With the sea-romp over the meck. (st. 17)

The sea romps playfully, and in its amoral joy in its own power the deaths of the

Deutschland pasmgers are reduced to parentheses. Hopkins identifies with God's power

and victory, not with the weak victims of that power. This stanza ends with an evocation

of the potential for divine Othemess in the human being:

Night mared, with the heart-break hearing a heart-broke rabble,

The woman's waiiing, the crying of child without check- Till a lioness arose bceasting the babble,

A prophetess towerd in the tumult, a virginal tongue told.

The nun is portrayed as a lioness, a t o w e ~ g prophetess. Although Hopkins will melt

into tears of pity for her in the followhg stanza, in these lines he is nnnly in hem-

worship mode, praising her for her fierce strength, just as he admires the sea for its wiid

and vital power. As a "lioness" the nua partakes of the non-human power of God.

The n w are tcurther made M e r in stanza 21, where they are described as

Loathed for a love men knew in hem, Banned by the land of their bkth,

Rhine cefiised hem, Thames wodd ruin them.

As outceses and d e s , the nms are âeprived of what makes them human, king part of a

society. Loathed and bamed, they have become the M e r . It is therefore fining that the

rest of the stanza should extol the non-human quality of the God wbo accepts them and

takes them in:

Surf, snow, river and earth Gnashed: but thou art above, thou Orion of light; Thy unchancelling poising palms were weighing the worth,

Thou martyr-master: in thy sight Storm flakes were scroll-leaved flowers, lily showers-sweet

heaven was astrew in them.

Suddenly God is no longer part of the stom, but far above and beyond it. However, he is

not the less Other because of this rnove, but rather changes fiom being part of the nature-

Other to being a truly transcendent God. Hopkins achieves an arnazing change in tone,

pace, and volume in these lines, as he removes both God and reader fiom the gnashing

storm of the natural elements to a den t and remote height where God's srniting hand

becomes a iboughtfully weighing hand where the whirling snow becomes sofüy falling

flowers. Althou& God has lost al1 the violence and passion that he possessed as part of

the stom, his very mnoteness and dispassion in seeing the h a d stonn flakes as

beautifhi and gentle flowers underlines his distance h m human experience. This God

might be beautifhi in his Otherness, but he is even more ciifficuit for the human being to

relate to than when he is as threatening and violent as the Storm at sea.

Stanza 34 tunis again to the Incarnation:

Now bum, new born to the world, Double-natdd name,

The heaven-flung, hem-fleshed, maiden-fured Miracle-in-Mary-o&flame,

Mid-numbedd he in t h of the thunder-tbrone!

The language used to describe the Incarnate Christ does not evoke any humaa

78

associations at dl, but e d t s in its own stmgeness and in the beautifid strangeness of the

second person of the "thunder-throne!" It is partly because of the originaiity and

sûangeness of Hopkins's poeûy, that the subject of his poetry, God, is dways so strange

and wonderful. The last L w s of this s t a r i ~ i do attempt to distance God h m the storm,

but oniy to associate him again with nature:

Not a dwms-day dazzle in his comuig nor dark as he came; Kind, but royally reclaiming bis own;

A released shower, let flash to the shire, not a lightning of fie hard-hurled.

Even though God approaches the human category of a kind and gracious king in these

lines, the kindness is picnued only in tems of natural, ratbet than human, gentleness.

The fjnai staiua of the poem attempts to develop the aaalogy of Christ as King, but the

syntax of the final lim Mies the language used to humanize God:

Our hem ' cbarity's h d s fin, our thoughts' chivalry's throng's Lord. (st. 35)

The Iist of possessives makes the joumey to the subject, God, so long and difficult, that it

is clear that he is far h m our hearts and thoughts, that he is the cooly wondrous "master-

martyr" of staiiza 21, unreachably transcendent and powemil, and not a kind and humm

aiend sitting by our hearth. David Aathony Domies poses the question of whether "the

Christian spirit of the poem [is] submissive and fearful, or. . . assertive and joyous?" His

ansmr is that "The Christian vision has a Good Fnday which involves submission and

feer. It has an Easter Sunday, individual and joyous. There is no dichotomy, only a

paradox, which is throughout all the gospels" (The IgMtun Perso~liily of Germd

M d e y Hopkins 54). 1 wouid suggest, mther, that the joy of the poem does not co-exist

with the fear, dtemating with it in a Christian rhythm, but is instead the resulr of that

fear. me Wreck of the Dewschland is a poem in which the fear of Gd is something not

to avoici, but to exult in. Hopkins wants his G d to be Mer."

The "terrible so~ets," however, show an intense change in attitude on Hopkins's

part. Suddeniy he approaches Gd's Othertless not h m the position of celebratory awe

and ecstatic admiration, but h m panic and despair. This change is due to the fact that in

Deutschland and the other poems Gd's ûthemess is expresscd through nature, and the

pst-Romantic in Hopkins exulted in that n a m . But the "terrible sonnets" are, as Daniel

Harris has pointed out, attempts at Ignatian meditation which fail because they cannot

achieve colloquy. The elements of absence, distance, and non-nsponsiveness which

make up part of God es Other, and which Hopkins is able to sidestep in the poeûy thet

makes God immatieat in nature, come to the fore when he codkonts a God who should be

immanent in himself, but is not. In "Carrion Cornfort'' Hopkins does succeed in

irnagining God as part of nature, this tirne as a lion, and consequently, in spite of his

temr of this lion-, he is able to corne to some sort of recognition of God's presence in

his life by the end of the sonnet. God is indeed very fiightening in his non-human aspect

of the lion:

" nie more ûther God is, the easia it may be for the non-Christian d e r to relate to him. Paul Mariani d t e s of Zk Wiock of the Drurschld that it "demauds at least a momentary (fictive) assent to what it says or else the emotiod intensity is bound to strike the reader as not only strange but wearying and even repuisive" (48). But 1 do not think this assent is requimi ifthe d e r takes the poem as a description of the sublime and knifjhg aspects of a Storm at sea. Because Hopkins descri'bes a God who is part of impersonal nature mther than a human and persona1 ûod, the emotiomi intetlsity seems an appropriate nsponse to the tcnifying and beautiful forces of nature.

But ah, but O thou terrible, why woddst thou d e on me Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me?

scan With darksome devouring eyes my bdsèd bones? and fan, O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me fiantic to avoid thee

and flee? (5-8)

(Note the r e m of God-as-stom in line 8.) Where in "The Windhover" Hopkins delights

in the power of a bùd of prey, he now cowers befote d e r fierce carnivore. But the

poem does not merely chart the distance Hopkins has come in r e a b g the full

implications of God's distance h m the human; it tums on itself to make God part of the

poetrs human self, and make that more temfying than the lion-limbed deity. HopLias

suddenly realizes that he is not sure whose side he is on in the struggle between himself

and God:

Cheer whom though? The hem whose heaven-handling flung me, f6ot trod

Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year

Of now done darkness 1 wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God (12-14)

The transformation of God fkom a lion to a human hero with whom the human Hopkins

cm wrestle distubs the pe t greatly, because he suddenly cannot distinguish between

himself and God. God is so like him and so dose to him that he cannot make out whose

limbs are whose in tangle of the wrestling bodies, and if he cannot distinguish between

himself and God, then maybe God is nothing more than himself.

"1 wake and feel" also shows Hopkins stniggling with the hidden implications of

the previously attractive Clthemess of God. God is so mer, so removed from Hopkins,

that he is unable to make any contact with him:

And my lament 1s cries countless, cries Like dead letters sent To dearest him that lives alas! away. (6-8)

God is so far h m the human self of Hopkins that the result is, paradoxically, an

ovenvhelmingly m n g sense of that self on the part of the pet:

I am gaîi, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me; Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.

Selfyeast of spirit a duIl dough sours. 1 see The lost are like this, and their scourge to be As 1 am mine, their sweating selves; but worse. (9- 1 4)

Because God c m o t be part of his self, Hopkins feeis that the self is totally unredeemed

and unbearable. Only God's redemption of humanity by his taking on of a human self,

can redeem the "lost" fiom king "their sweating selves," but in this sonnet the

incarnation might as well have never taken place. Hopkins reaiizes that God's Othemess,

which he previously celebrated, has a very dark side and terrible implications for himself.

The m e r to the question of whether the poets' emphasis on the humanness or

Othemess of God springs primarily fiom their denomination, or religious context, would

appear to be no: the seventeenth-century Protestant D o ~ e and nineteenth-century

Catholic Hopkins both stress God's Othrness, Dome in fear and Hopkins, for the most

part, in ecstasy; while the seventeenth-cenniry Calvinist Anglican Herbert and the

nùieteenth-century high Anglican Rossetti both reveal an intense desire to relate to a

82

human Gad?* The attraction to a human God depends upon an individual poet's

temperament more than upon his or her theology. In this sense, if in no other,

Feuerbach's proposition that "Such as are a mm's thoughts and dispositions, such is his

God" (1 2) is indeed me.

I2 in comparing Donne to H o p b and Herbert to Rossetti 1 am doing nothing new; many cntics pair them up in exactly this formation. Jerome McGann is one example: "At the bacic of Hopkins's That Nature is a Heraclitean F i n . . ! are the pyrotecbnics of Byron or Donne . . . In sharp contrast, Rossetti's poetry is always nonpemd (not exactly impersonal) in the moderated style of Herbert. just as its address is simple, cool, even at times severet' (The Achievernent of Chrisfina Rossom' 5); David Shaw is another: "Ifone £in& the art too ingenuous, then one simply does aot care for Rossetti's kind of poetry. But then one would not, I think, can for George Herbert either: one wouid prefer Hopkins or Do& (Toet of Mystery" 55). These are just two of many instances.

Chapter Two

Symbolic and Semiotic: Religion in Poetic Language

Art thou dl justice, Lord? Shows not thy word

More attributes? Am I al1 throat and eye, To w q or crie?

Kristeva intmduces and defines the two tems "symbolic" and "semiotic" in

Revolution in Poetic Language (1974). She deals nrSt with the semiotic' which consists

of the bodily ârives which move through the infant's body: "Discrete quantities of energy

move through the body of the subject who is not yet coastituted as such." (25). The

subject is "not yet constituted as such" because the infant has no sense of existing apart

from, or separate h m , the mother* In a pre-Oedipal state, then, the human king is

entirely semiotic, a site of conflicting and undifferentiated drives. Knsteva calls this

place, this collection of drives bounded by the Uifant's physical body, the choru: "a

nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and theu stases in a motility that is as fidl of

movement as it is regulated. . . . an essentially mobile and extremely provisional

articulation constituted by movements and their cphemeral stases" (25). In the course of

an infmtrs development, physical drives and energies "are arrangeci according to the

In naming this modality "semiotic" Kristeva usurpeâ the wods established theoretical meaning of "field of signs." She c l a h that she uses it in its original Greek sense of trace or imprint (Rewiution 25).

84

various constraints imposed on this body-always alnady involved in a semiotic process-

by farnily and social stiw:n~es" (25). This arrangement of drives accordhg to social

sûuctums is the symbolic.

The symbolic occurs chronologically aAa the semiotic and is fixed in place

duiing the acquisition of language. as the child separates itselffrom the rnother. A

subject cm never be totally semiotic or symbolic. Both people, and the ianguage they

form themselves through, hction within the intersection of the two. But this

intersection is by no meaus a peaceful, harmonious one. Kristeva States that al1 discourse

"moves with and against the chora in the sense that it simuitaneously depends upon and

r e k s it" (Revolution 26). We have to suppress our sense of feeling a dozen different

impulses at once, or seehg ten differrnt meanings in a sentence, if we are to get anything

accomplished, but if these meanings wem to vanish completely, we wodd fiel nothing,

mean nothing, and, in fact, die. The semiotic is the energy that lets us make or do

anytbg; the symbolic is the societal structures thet charnel our making or dohg into

something "usefiil" or "understandable" by others. While human society does need both,

they are always in conflict.

More 1 approach the poetry itself, I want to address an important issue reganiing

the use of the semiotic and symbolic to analyse religious poetry: the difference between

the semiotic as poetic content and poetic fom. Kristeva does not make a clear distinction

in Revolwion in Poetic Langirage between the semiotic operathg as a theme, or as a

mode, in artistic practice. Do texts talk about or through the semiotic? For example,

when she says that "in 'artistict practîces the semiotic-the precondition ofthe symbolic-

85

is revealed as that which also destmys the symbolic" (Revolution SO), she does not

indicate whether it destroys the symbolic by making the language not make seme, or by

attacking symbolic structures Iüre paiarchy, the unifieci subject, or theology, h u g h

languaee. I believe she means both. The semiotic is at its most powerful when it attacks

society's structures at the same t h e as attacking grammm and logic, but it is possible to

find the semiotic drives in the content as well as the fom of a text.

In this chapter 1 analyse the semiotic in poems in tenns of both fom and content,

suggesting ways in which they can be read in light of the Knstevan categorics of symbolic

and semiotic, while at the same the attempting to show how this schematic dichotomy is

not always adequate to analyse the poetry. 1 shouid stress that I am not cailing Kristeva

herself schematic in ber own maLyses of poetry (she does not exactly err on the side of

clarity and reductiveness), but rather 1 am suggestiag that the employment of her

categories of semiotic and symbolic can lead to a mechanical approach to different poems

in the case of the critic, if he is not careful.

Without the attention to poaic fonn, the fistevan dichotomy of symbolic a d

semiotic might well be abandoned in favour of more traditional thematic oppositions,

such as nason and passion, intellect and imagination, the Apollonian and the Dionysian:

* While Freud owes mwh to Nietzsche, he must have balked at Nietzsche's quation of the Apoîioniaa with dnems: "To mach a closer unâerstandiag of both these tendencies, let us kgin by viewhg them as the separate art italms of dkem and intonCa?ï8n, two physiolopicaî phenornena standing toward one mther in much the same nlatiomhip as the Apollonian and Dionysiacn (19; Nietzsche's emphasis). From a psychoanalytic point of vim, dnams sureiy klong p r i d y to the Dionysiaa dm.

cattgory of symbolic, and tbosc which qualify as saniotic. In diis chepter I attempt to

supply that IUf although, iike Kristeva, 1 aim to k suggestive ratht than exhaustive.

Kristeva's preaninent semiotic poetic device is rhythm; she defines the semiotic

chora as "rupture and articulations (rhythm)" (Revolution 26). and claims that "Poetic

rhythm &es not constihite the acknowleâgcment of the unconscious but is instead its

expendintre and implementation" (Revoîaitioo 164). Symbolic meanhg is destabüued by

poetic metre: "the uni@ of reason which consciousness sketches out will always be

shattered by the rhythm suggestect by drives: repctitive rejection seeps in through

'pmsody,' and so for& pmenting the stasis of One mcaning, One myth, One logic"

(Reyolution 148; Kristcva's emphasis). The key word hm is "npetition": :&va

identifies those poetic devices that nly on repetition as semiotic. For that reason she

W rhythm with alliteration, as in ber &finition of the d o t i c in Tales of bue: "an

economy thaî privilqcs orality, vocaüzation, allitmation, rhythmicity, etc!' (16).

qnaüfy as semiotic. Kristcva's stress on the sound of poetry might lead us to define the

See, for example, ha d y s e s of MillrirmC at the ad of RevoItrtrfovl in Pocric Langwge, and 00fBaudelairt in Tdes of bve. H a discdon of N d in Black Sun, is the bea acirmple of a Kristevm rcadhg which dDu consider such formai deviees as allitçtation (161-62) cmd pimi.

poctic semiotic as the qedcllce a person might have who b listahg to a poem d

Yct KMItva does not stop at sound, but gocs on to discm aspects ofthe semiotic

in the text's mczLning. She identifies metaphor, a poctic &vice which relrites to the text's

content rather than sourd, as semiotic:

Phonic (lata phoncmic), WC, or chmatic units and WÇICLICCS an the marks of. . . stases in the &ives. Connections orftnctiom an thereby established betwccn these discrete marks which are based on drives and articulateci according to th& cesemblance or opposition, either by slippage or by condensation. Hem we find the plinciples of metonymy and metaphor indissociable h m the drive ecowmy derlying hm." (Rewlution 28; Kristcva's emphasis)

Kristeva foliows Lacan here, in eqiiah.ng Fmid's categories of drram displacement

("slippage") with metonymy and dream condensation with metaphor. Both, therefon,

because of their wmection with drrams, arc semiotic.'

Kiisteva identifies syntax and ~pammit as symbolic and tbose devices which

disnipt them as semiotic. She mites of "the inscparability of the thetic and syntax'

(Revoiution 55), and argues that the text kt ions to upaet that syntax:

We shaiî see that whn the spealting abject is no longer consideral a phenomenologicll ttanscendtntal ego nor the Cartahm ego but rather a abject I n p ~ ~ o n hial [syet enproc&s], as is the case in the practice of the texf, dcep sûuctm or at Ica& tnnsformational niles arc disairkd and, with hm, the possibility of semantic and/or grammatical categoricai

M e Freud's concepts of "identification" and "symboIismw mscmb1e metaphor. S a David Lodge's no& to Lacan's essay 'The insistcace of the Ietbct in the ide0 of the uncoasciousn in Mge's M d n r C'ct';cm ond ïkory: A Reodor. JakoobsoTs essry on The mctaphoric anâ metonymic polesa W aiso put o f LodgeTs rida.

interpretaîion. (Rewlution 37; emphasis is fisteva's and editorial addition is her translators).

Poetic devices which disnitb syntax, then, indicate the presence of the semiotic.

The foilowing lists of symboüc and semiotic devices can be schematized,

following these general comments by Kristeva. Symbolic: grmumu, syntax, argument.

Semiotic: uaspecified (by Kristeva) devices for dimpting syntax; devices of cepetition

such as rhythm, metre, alliteratioa, assonance, rhyme; and metaphor (charactexistic of

âreams and therefore the unconscious). These lists an both problematic in themselves

and fet h m complete. Before nassessing bisteva's categories, however, 1 would like to

first suggest some more poetical terms which might belong in these lists.

Symbolic aspects of poetry, those that work syntactically to build an argument and

c l w meanhg might include (and it is telling that I can find only one item for this list)

the hypotactic style "in which extensive subordination takes place, thereby allotting a

major d e to logical or temporal sequencing.""

Poetic devices which sanioticaily work to dimpt -, syntax, and clanty of

meaning include: parataxis, the opposite of hypotaxis, which refers to "a relative paucity

of W g terms betwecn jUXf8poseà clauses or sentences"; anacoluthon, a "terni of

grammar designating a change of construction in the middle of a sentence that leaves its

beginniag uncompleted" aposiopcsis, a "speaker's a b ~ p t hslt midway in a sentence,

accountable to his behg too excited or distraught to give mer articulation to his

thought"; asynâeton, the "omission of con.junctions between phrases or clauses";

' This definition, and the subsequent definitions of poaicai temis, are taken from The New Princeton Encyciopdia of Pocby mrd Poetics (1993).

89

hypabaton, the "altetation of nomial (th& i s ptose) word order"; and tmesis, the

"[ilnsertion of a word withh enother word or phrase."

Poetic devices that corne under the g e n d category of repetition include:

anaphors, the "repetition of the same word or words at the beginning of successive

phrases, clauses, sentences, or îines"; chiasmus, "[alny structure in which elements are

npeated in reverse, so giving the pattern ABBA"; and polysyndeton, the opposite of

asyndeton, the "repetition of conjunctions, normally and." Anaphont, chiasmus, and

polysyndeton wodd then al1 quaüfy as semiotic.

Ternis related to metaphor include: simile, pua, p d o x , and oxymoron, dl of

which can be fouad in dreams and al1 of which serve to express meanhg in surprising,

aad possibly unconscious, ways. AU of these tropes, then, qualify as semiotic.

fisteva's categories, however, are highly problematic. It shoufd be clear, for one

thing, that some devices of repetition, supposedly semiotic, can work to enforce, rather

than destroy, syntax, which would thus make them syrnbolic. Anaphora, chiasmus, and

polysyndeton, for example, cm al1 wodc to strengthen the syntactid movement of the

argument, as well as to weaken it. Anaphora, States the New Princeton Encyclopedia, c m

"be seen as one fonn of parallelism which uses the cepetitions to bring the metrical and

syntactic fiames into alignment." Making meûe align with, rather than eclipse, syntax is

m l y an example of the Kristevan symbolic! The Princeton cites one opinion that

W e 1 imply here that padelism is a device of the symbolic, Maria R. Lichtmann, who sees it as the basic stmcnirsl principle of Hopkins's poetry, descrii it in terms which suggest the d o t i c : "For [Hopkins], petauelisn stnick deep into the souk of readers and hearers, tapping into precomcious rhythms" (3). Yet, as she gaes on to say, pataUeIisrn is a way of strcngthening and supporting meaning: "Because it embodies

chiasmus is a device which "focus[es] attention on syntax" and "emphasizes both

m d g and grammar." Polysyndeton can work both to indiate "a sense of

breathiessness" and excitement (the semiotic), and "by slowing down a sentence . . . add

'dignity' to itt' (the symbolic). It is clear, then, that some poetic devices must be examined

in the context of a pariicular text before they c m be identifiecl as working in a symbolic

or semiotic way.

Some of the temis which Knsteva does explicitly identify as semiotic can a h , 1

would argue, operate in the service of the symbolic. The rhythm of a poem, for one thing,

gives pleasure aot oniy to the semiotic dimension of the reader or listener who hears the

movement of her own oscillating drives, but can hct ion as a controlling and regdatory

device keeping the pet's overflow of words and emotions under order and restraint.

Rhythm cannot be solely classified as semiotic, surely, or we could make no distinction

between a poem that employs perfectiy regular iambic pentameter, and one in which the

me& is ciiffernt in every 1ine.f AUiteration anà assonance rnight bear witness to the

tikeness in fom as it communicates ükeness in meaning, parallelism exemplifies the incamational ideal of matter as s p W (5). A re-enectment of the Incarnation Unplies the 'rtheological'l nature of paraiielism, thus b ~ g i n g it back into the realm of the symbolic. But it does not end there, for a fiuther comment by Lichtmmn semes to suggest the semiotic again: "In codormity with his poetics, Hopkins' poems, M e n with a kenosis of intellect in their perallelism aaâ simple comectives, invite not meditation but contemplation" (5). So paralielism does not stimulate the inteliect, which suggests that it is not a symbolic device. This short summary of Lichûnann's theory of pdlelism in Hopkins should serve to illustrate how difficuit it is to label poaic devices as either symbolic or semiotic.

This difficulty in assigning rhythm to one si& of the symbolidsemiotic dichotomy is due in part to the complexity of the fisteva's theory of the semiotic. On the one hand, she characterizes tûe d o t i c as the pre-verbal, pre-ûedipaî state of the M'ant, &fineci by the rhythms of its mother's heartkit, of its own sucking at the kwst, ofking rocked to

uncoascious desk for repetition, but they also lhk words together which the p e t wishes

to emphasize as meaningfbi, as part of ofs argument-

Oae more question which Knsteva's theoiy raises is that o f authonal intent. If the

p e t deliberately employs such semiotic devices as hyperbaton or irregular metre in order

to mirror the confiict of mind he is ûying to express in a certain poan, does that mean

that because he employs them cowciously, he is placing them at the service of the

symbolic, that is, the creation of meaning? Or is it only if these devices serve to create

unco11~ciot~~ tensions and ambiguities in the poem's meaning, that they can be calted

"semiotic"? These questions relate to a thud difncuity, that of deciding whether a

religiow poet delibetately intends to express ambivalence towards God, a question 1 fsce

in the next chapter, "Love and Hate." I do not atternpt to mwer the first two questions

here, because 1 think they deserve a whole study to themselves. My approach in this

chapter will be to look at what the text reveals about itself, mot about the pet's coascious

intentions.

Keeping in miad the süpperiness of poetry, 1 propose the following tkee lists of

sleep. Such rhythms have connotations of security, regularity, and cornfort. On the otha haad, however, Kristeva points to the semiotic as both the force which destioys the ülusory cornfort of the individual's enunciatory "1' (the thetic), and the social nvolutions which violently ovcrthrow law and otder. This seemingly conttadictory nature of th semiotic is due to the "extnmely provisionai" (RevoZution 25) nature of the i n f i s rhythms. The baby does not always feel d e or secure, but exists in physical sensations that are "as full of movement as [they are] regdateci" (Revolution 25). In other words the semiotic itseIfis always fighting a battie between order and chaos, between stasis and movement me order of the symôolic is a M i n t kînd of order h m that of the semiotic, one founded on meqning, Ianguage, and law, rathct than on the rhythm of breath or the hearkat). Poetic thythm, dien, is semiotic both when it is regular und when it is irregular. But that stiU laves us with the problem of the poct's tcrc of nguiar or ineguiar meûe for different pu~poses.

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poetic devices: symbolic, semiotic? and diose which cm bction in both ways and must

be anaiyseâ in context. Symbolic: argument, syntax, hypotactic strucnire. Semiotic:

ariacoluthori, aposiopesis, asyndeton, hyperbatm, parataxis, miesis (devices which disturb

syntax); and metaphor, metonymy, oxymomn, p d o x , pun, (devices which mate

mystery in meauing).' Symbaiic or semiotic, depending on context: alliteration and

assonance, rhythm, rhyme, me-, anaphora, chiasmus, polysyndeton, (dl devices of

npaition).

This List invites challenges, does aot pretend to be exhaustive, and will not be

applied in its entkety to the poetry. In fat, 1 tend to concentrate in my analyses on metre,

alliteration, hyperbeton, and puns.

"As due by m s ~ y titlesn and "Thou hast made me" both show D o ~ e pnsenting

his sinful self as tom by conflicting passions, opposed to a God who is an authority figure

and a unified source of meaning and order. In fistevan terms, these two sonnets express

the rebellion of the semiotic against the symbolic.

Holy Sonnet 1, "As due by many tities," relies heaviiy on hypotactic syntax,

Many theorists and critics of Cbnstian art have pointed out the importance of metephor and its relateci tropes for both religion and poetry. Eleanor McNecs is representative of this apptosch: " P d o x , metaphor, and hyperbole are the primary tropes that enable both poet and theo10gian to rupture ordinary Io&. AU three push words past their denotative boundaries and in so doing cnate a tension becmai denotation and the 'extra mesningv suggested by the poetic devicen (35). Denotation is emphatically symbolic; metaphor and paridox, in workiag to subvert it, quPlify as semiotic devices. Christian language, then, would be inherentiy semiotic, accordhg to McNees, despite fisteva's claim that "thcoiogy" is n p d v e of the semiotic.

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suggesting that DOM^ f d s God is best addressed in the language of logid argument, of

cause and effect. But the deman& of patic cepetition and rhythm work, as Kristeva's

theory suggests, to subvert Donne's owa argument and ktray his ambivalence over

submitting to divine de. The speaker's nrst statement is that he submits himself to God:

"As due by many titles 1 cesigne / My selfe to thee, O Gd" (1-2). The assonance in "titles

I nsigne ! My" emphasizes the word "1," betraying Donne's concentration on himself

rather than on God. The rhythm which demands a line break a f k the nfth iamb of the

fifft line works against the essonance to sepamte "1" fiom "myself," mhring the innet

contlict within the speaker, the split between two aspects of his personality (the ego and

the id pethaps?). This Lw break is echoed in lines 7-8 where the speaker declares how "1

beûay'd /My selfe."

The poem contains a pun in its second line which also suggests a semiotic revolt

on the part of th speaker. Donne declares that "fint 1 was made I By thee" (2-3).

"Made" is a pun on "maid" which con- God's lack of passion (he makes, and leaves,

D O M ~ a Wgin) with the devil of lims 9-10 who talces sermal possession of the speaker:

"Why doth the deviii then usurpe in mee? 1 Why doth he steale, nay ravish thatts thy

right?" The rhyme scherne Links "made" with "decay'â" (3) and "betray'd " (9,

suggesting strongly, and against the ostensible meanhg of the sonnet, that the speaker

prefers the dedk passion to God's standoffishness, since he feels his virginity is a

betrayal aud resuits in sterile deeay. I wodd argue tbat the assonance linlllng the fouah

rhyme worâ, "repid," with "paines: in the iine "Thy servant whose paines thou hast SU

npaid" (6), works agabt the manifest meaning to suggest a repressed meaning of "re-

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pained" as in "Thou hast kept incming my pain, pain upoa pain," tbus malring "repaid"

a word which is just as negaîive as its rhyme words "decay'd" and "betray'd."

The nnal couplet also employs the repetitive, anci, in this case, semiotic, devices

of assonance and diteration to imply that Donne is more e n a m o d of Satan than of

Gd: "That thou Iov'st mankind well, yet wilt aot chuse me, / And Satau hates met, yet is

10th to lose mee" (1 3-14). God's lack of passion for Donne (that is, Donne's lack of

passion for God) is emphasized by the fact that the words in line 13 are linked by no

resemblance in sound, whereas the nnal lime, describing Satan, revels in the pleasure

given the ear by the assonance of "Satan hates" and the alLiteration and near-assonance of

"10th to Lose."

Uisofar as the text echoes in sound and movement the speaker's passionate self-

conflicts and reveals his hidden rneaning, that it is he who rejects Gd, rather than God

who abandons him, the text is semiotic. But I do not mean to suggest that this sonnet

oniy expresses the speaker's resentment at God's coldaess unconsciously; on the conûary.

D o ~ e slcilfully hcorporates his sense of an author i th~ and passiodess God into bis

manifest meaning. He employs a pun on "by" for example, to enforce his characterization

of God as a participant in the human economic systern:

As due by many titles 1 resigne My selfe to îhee, O God, first I was made By thee, and for the, and when 1 was decay'd Thy b l d bought that, the which before mis thine. (1-4)

"By" is a (grammatidy unsupportable) pun on "buy" which anticipates "bought," and is

thus aa exampIe of the poet çonsciously p d g to support bis meanhg. That rneaning

is stiii, however, that God fimctions within the symboiic nalm of cconomics (even Godk

blood hctions as money). The sonnet expresses, therefore, both the conscious

resentment and unconscious rejection of a pasdonate man against an unfeeling God?

"Thou hast made me" also sets up a conscious contrast between a God of orda

and stability (comsponding to Knsteva's symbolic) and the poet's sins of passion (which

correspond to the semiotic), but daers h m "As dw by many tities" in that God seems

much more attractive, on the surfie, than the devil. God can save the speaker from the

terror of death aud hell, and is hence seen as an object of desire rather than a duty. Donne

presents his dilemma in this poem as a sexual quandary: he is tom between two lovers,

the masculine (and hence wholesome and sound) sexuaiity of God, and the ferninine (and

hence deathly and dangerous) sexuaüty of the devil. The p d s sexual embrace with

death, "1 m e to death, and death meets me as fast" (3), leads to impotence: "my feebled

flesh doth waste / By sinne in it, which it t'wards hell doth weigh" (7-8).1° Dome sbnvels

and droops, until mived by G d into male potency and strength: "Onely thou art above,

and when towards thee / By thy leave 1 can Imite, I rise againet' (9-M)." But this entry

into the symbolic realm by means of the potent phsllus is threatened by a devil who

empioys the female arts of subtlety, so that Donne cannot sustain his metaphoncal

Robert S. Jackson suggests thet this poem c m be nad as iilustrations of the way in wbich "the speaker seems to some degree to b o v a the unconscious in the -na of the devil. . . . that he hds this devii to be the persona for the unconscious is the sign that he is still in an impioper mlationship to himself" (105-06).

'O Thomas Docherty points out, in bis aaalysis of this poem, that the wod "hell" was a euphemism for the vsgina in Donne's day (135).

See Leo Steinberg's l7W ktuaiity of Christ (197-98,3 17) for sources of the Renaissance joke on the "risen fleshn as applyïng both to the maneaion of Chtist (or, in the case of this sonnet, the rcsunection ofthe soul after death), and to pede enction.

erection: "But our old subtle foe so tempteth me, / That not one ho= 1 can my selfe

Co-existhg with this opposition between God and the Devil as Merent lovers, is

a distinction betwem the two as contrasting artists. D o ~ e b e g h the poem by setthg

God up as his cadbma-creator: "Thou hast made me, And shail thy work decay?" (1).

God is an artist who, Donne suggests, does not wish to see his work change in any way,

even after he has f ished with it. God fbnctions for Donne as the guarantee of

permanence, or in the formulation of Thomas Docherty "a wiid, unchanging love . . . a

kind of guaranteeà papehial erection, a res-erection rather than a resurrection. The Word

or language in this case becomes entinly phallogocentric" (1 35; Docherty's emphasis).

But die devil is also an artist, one who keeps w o r b g away at his matenal, constantly

chipping away at it, never letting it nst.I2 The last couplet, by means of a pun on "draw,"

pulls together the sexual and artistic metaphors: "Thy Grace may wing me to prevent his

art, / And thou like Aàamnt draw mine im heart" (13-14). Dome desires to be

ttansfomed into iron, a hard and potent male who is thus dram into the symbolic reelm

by his equaily potent "sidamantf' Gd, but he also wants God to draw him (inscribe upon

him, within him) an iron heart that will k impedous to the devil's sculpture. At the

l2 It might be iliuminating to view this distinction alongside the distinction made by Roland Barthes between "worlr" and "Text." Barthes points out that the wotk is finished, it can "be hefd in the hand" whaeas the Text is nevet finished, and can be "expetienced only in an acrivity ofprodction" ("Fmm Work to Tean 157; Barthes's emphasis). Donne sees himself as the "worlr" of God, finished and circumsctibed, able to change only in the sense of decay, whik unda the han& of the devil-artist he is what Barthes might cal1 a Text, (and Kristeva rnight caii a szget-en-pds), an d s h e d art work, capable of change in any direction.

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seme the, however, by means of an exploitation of the various connotations of the word

%on," Donne implies that his "iron heart" is keeping him fiom God, that he is too harde

Iiearted to respond to Gd's Love. Donne is saying, in effect, thrre different things: "draw

a strong iron hemt on-and in-me, and the devii will have no power over me"; "like a

magnet, draw my tnie iron kart to you"; aad "destroy my hard iron hart by drawhg me

to you in love." As Murray Roston coments, this final line expresses "the strange

possibility that the stubbonmess of his iron heart, which seems to disquai@ him for

redemption, may pmve eventually to be the vezy quality making it susceptible to the

magnetic force of divine love" (156; Roston's emphasis). Donne's conhision over

whether the iroa hardness that constitutes male s e d i t y and power is the way to

salvation or damnation betrays the unconscious semiotic ambivalence of the poem.

These two sonnets are examples of Donne's positioning of himself as a passionate

sinner in opposition to God as a principle of order and control. This opposition is the

usual strucniring device of his religious poeûy, but he does write a few poems in which

God rivals him in degm of passion. Two examples of God f'unctioning as a semiotic

force are Sonnet 7, "Spit in my fece, yee Jewes," and "A Hymne to Christ, at the Authors

lest going into Germany*"

"Spit in my fact yee Jewes" begias with violence, as the speaker commands the

Jews to kat him as they did Christ. The metre stresses Donne's masochistic excitement

in the violence, for whüe the meaning of the first two hes is "Spit in my fàce, pierce my

side, cruce me rather than Christ, for 1 deserve it and he did not," the tbrre fïrst person

p r o ~ u n s d telce a malr stress in Donne's iines insteod of the sûong stress thaS tbe

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meanhg seems to requh. The sbrong stresses in each fwt f d Ilistead on the verbs of

violence, supporthg John Cany's clah that "It is the envy of the aucified Jesus, mther

than pity for him, that tbrills in that cry" (48). This desire to be the object of verbs of

violence Linlrs the speaker of this sonnet to the sllnüarly masochistic speaker of Holy

Somet 10, "Batîer My Heart," who asks to k battemi, b a t , broken, and burnt, not to

mention raped.I3

The second quatrain introduces some extreme hyperbaton: "But by rny death

caxmot be satisfied I My simes" ( 5 6 ) . This twisting of the syntax m e s mother purpose

than that of erwring the rhyme scheme: the line break between verb (be satisfied) and

subject (my sinnes) makes that subject, for an instant, ambiguous. [fa reader was

presented with the first five Lincs only he might well think that it is God who cannot be

satidied by the speaker's death. Such a rrading would be correct the~logically,'~ but it

would also emphasize the exûeme nature of God's demands: he cannot k satisfied by the

law of exchange, an eye for an eye, a death for a death. This God is so vengefid and cruel

that he demands more than a death; put in Kristevan terms, his desire is in excess of the

symbolic economy. The hyperbaton aiiows for the hidden presence of G d as the subject

of the verb "satisfied" and suggests that it is indecd God that Donac is addressing, rather

than the Jews. Moreover, Donne puns again on "by" and "buy" in "But by my death

I3 Both Terry Sherwood (107) and Michael SchoenfeIdt (130-3 1) emphasize Dome's masochism by contrastiag it with Herbert's fear rud dislike of pain.

l4 As a Protestant, Donne klieves that nothhg we can do, M merit on our part, can "satisfy" God, not even martyrdom. The sinnefs role is to humbly accept God's grace, not to try to wipe out his sins by dying.

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camot be satisfied," denying, in effect, the analogy of the Rcdemption as payment: "But 1

am not satisfied by your 'buying' of my death!' God did, in a metaphoricd sense, "buy"

us h m death, by his own deeth, but Donne r e k s to accept this metaphor (one that he

accepts wholeheartedly in Sonnet 1 1, " Wilt thou love Goà, as he thee!"), prefening, in

this sonnet, a God of passion and excess to a deity who works within the structure of the

human economic system.

My d g of these lines gains support h m the finai four lines of the sonnet:

And Jacob came cioth'd in vile harsh attire But to supplant, and with gallifull &nt: G d clothed himselfe in vile man's flesh, that so Hee might be weake enough to d e r woe. (1 1-14).

These lims set God up as a contntst to Jacob, who acts rationally in order to profit h m

his actions. But Donne stems not to ce& the fact that God did have a "gainfuil intent"

in the Incarnation, the intent of gaining human souls through "supplanting" the mie of sin

and death. Mead he unconsciously suggests that the Incarnation was impelled by a

masocbistic desire wbich echoes the speaker's m8sochism in the first two lines of the

sonnet. Gd does not buy souls h m sin and the devil, but rathet desires pain with

irratiod passion. Like the speaker, he operates within a semiotic, not symbolic,

hmework. in this sonnet, Donne desires a God who cannot be hown through human

structures such as reason or the economic system.

"A Hymm to Clrrist at the authors last going into Gemmyl' equates Ood with

death, and death with a state of pre-conscious~ess, like that of an infiant in its mothds

amis. The fht four lines set Gad up as a place of safety only to imrnediately transfona

him into danger:

In wbat tome ship somr I emberke, That ship shaU be my embleme of thy Arke; What sea soever swallow mee, that flood S M be to mee an embleme of thy blood. (1-4)

Donne transfom bis rickety ship into the ship of Chmh, of which Noah's ark is a type,

and the sea in wbich he might drom into Chnst's blood. But while the second line in

each couplet negates the threat of the first, when the four lines are taken as a whole,

another, hidden meaning emerges: the sea that the ark shall save D o m fkom, is the sea of

C W s b l d By putting his trust in the ship, he implies his fear of being drowned by

the sea, of being "swailowed" by God. The Old Testament covenant with a God who

saves, by means of Noah's ark, gives way to a New Testament sumnder to a God who

overwhelms and demys (thus reversing the traditionai Christian view of the relationship

ktween the Old and New Testaments.) But God does not swallow Donne as the whaie

swallows lonah, destroying him in powerful inciifference; instead he surrounds him with

his own blood. If God küls Dome, it is only kcause Christ himself has been kiiled first.

Such a God may show anger, but never idifference:

Though thou with clou& of anger do disguise niy facc; yet h u g h that masice 1 know those eyes,

Which, though they turne away sometimes, they never will despise. (5-7)

God, then, is the stonn at sea which may lrill Donne, but DOM^ welcomes such a

The Ood of this poem is an agent ofseparation, breaking the human and societaî

bonds which the speaker has formed:

1 sacrifice this Iland unto thee, And ai i whom I lov'd tke, and who lov'd mee;

When 1 have put o u seas Ywixt them and mee, Put thou thy sea kW my sinnes and thee. (8-1 1)

Donne wants God not oniy to separate bim 60m his society, but to split him off h m

himseif (by cutting him off h m bis sins). D o ~ e is d c i n g not only his island but

his "1-land," and he sees in God a destructive force sttong enough to break him. In the

second haifof this stanza the protean Ood, who has moved already fiom sea to sky, now

malces his pnsence felt underground:

As the ûee's sap doth seeke the root below In winter, in my winter now 1 goe,

Where none but thee, th'Etemai1 root of me love 1 may know. (12-14)

God is death, but also the warm grave of mother e h welcoming her son back for a

nowishing love which precedes and temains stronger than the societal bonds he has

fomed on his island. God represents a rem to his "mots," the preconscious bliss of the

infant's union with the mother, before the loneliness of consciousness sets in.

AAet the third stanza, in which DOM^ demruids h m God a totally exclusive

relationship, expressing the paradox that "Who ever gives, takes libertie" (20), he r e m s

to his request tbat G d sunder him h m al1 the facets of human society which have given

bis Me meaning:

Seale then this bill of my Divorce to Ail, On whom those fainter beames of love did fd; Mary those loves, which in youdi scatter'd bee Ch Fame, Wit, Hopes (false mistresses) to tbee. Churches are best for Prayer, that have least iight:

To see God oniy, 1 goe out of sight: And to scape stonny dayes, 1 chuse an Everlasting night.

(22-28)

To stal a divorce is a paradoxicai action, since to seai somcthing is to make it parnanent

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and bhding, but a divorce shstters bonds and denies permanence. Dome loolrs to a God

who cau be both a figure of autbonty and stability, and a destructive force; after the

divorce he desins a new d a g e , a new curtailment of his liberty. The last thne iines

are ricb in ambiguity, that haUmark of the semiotic. Donne decians that he chooses death

and God in order to escape "stormy days,lt but God has throughout the poem k e n

imagined in temu of a storm, h m the swallowing sea of blood to the ciouds of anger in

the sky. G d wem two faes of death: the terror and strife of the moment of death (if it

is a violent one, Lüre drowning in a stom at sea); and the dark and peaceful grave. God is

the p m e r and the refuge. Donne's ambivalence over the power of this God of death is

perhaps echoed in the syntactic arnbiguity of the prrvious line. The line CM ôe read in

un# diffixent ways: "To see God and nothing else, 1 go out of sight (die)"; or "1 would

not have to go out of sight (die) if it were not for God-he is the one and ody remn I am

going to die''; or "It is ody 1.1 alone, who has to die in order to see God!' The metre and

punctuation support only the fht two interpretations of course, but 1 believe the text

supports di three as a means of expressing Donne's own stormy and confused emotions

over the stormy G d he is both fleeing and pursuing.

God can be both reason and passion, both distant and gtasping, both judicious and

violent in Donne's poetry, a conclusion supported by the texhial complexities of the

poetiy which attempts to express him. For while it is possible to =ad the poetry as

enacting a semiotic revolt @ut a symbolic religion, it is just as possible to nad the

poetry as an act of irrationai and pasioiiate faith. Whereas Eleanor McNees supports the

second of these positions in declariag that Doaat "forces the nsdcr to exchange an

1 O3

inteilectual logic of reading for a seasuous logic of sound and rhythm that evenWy

leads to a logic of faith" (73),lS Anthony Low stresses the rationality of Donne's nligious

verse: "In the pst-Freudian era, many would prefer to Say that poetry and religion are

products of the unconscious, or reflet irratioaal currents in the cultutal background. . . .

Most authorities in DOM& time would Say that emotion is a subsidiary element of

devotion and that it shouid be controlied by the higher faculties of reason and will"

(Love's Architecture 3). Both McNees and Low are right, because both Christianity and

pets, thnve on such contradictions.

Herbert

In my discussion of Donne's poetry, 1 was able to make clear distinctions within

each sonnet between the symbolic and the semiotic. I could pinpoint different poetic

devices as expressing one or the other. In my discussion of Herbert, 1 have chom three

poems that resist to a much greater extent any effort to impose such a schematic reaàing.

"The Storm," "Conscience," and "The Collar" illustrate the way in which poeticai

ambiguity problemtizes fisteva's theoretical categories.

Is McNees's judgment is W a r to that made by Miehael McCanies, who argues that: One of the main notes which alI have recognized in Donne's poetry in general is its tendency to carry a given idea, metaphor, or assertion out to its logical extreme. . . . this extension of the logical argument has as its primary purpose the pusbing ofa given argument to the point where its inadequacy for reflecting reality becomes fdly recognizable. As such it then becomes an 'aiarum to truth,' as Donne says, and requires the mind of the d e r to taice a new look not only at the d t y but also at its own capabfities for grasphg tbat reality. (227)

Where McNees concentrates of Donne's poetic form, McCades focuses on his poetic argument Both, however, see bis poew as disruptive of the rationai.

On a first nading, 'The Stom" seems to lend itseifwell to a Kristevan readhg of

a semiotic subject who mounts a passionate assault upon a transcendent (and hence

If as the windes and waters here below Do flie and flow,

My si@ and tears as busie wac above; Sure they would move

And much affect thce, as tempestuous tirnes Amaze pore mortais, and object their crimes.

Stanes have their storms, ev'n in a high de-, As well as we.

A thiobbing conscience spuned by remorse Hath a strange force:

It quits the earth, and mounting mon and more Dams to assault thee, and besiege thy dom.

There it stands knocking, to thy musicks wrong, And dtowns the Song.

Glorie and honour are set by, ta it An m e r get.

Poets have mong'd poore storms: such dayes are k s t ; They purge the aire without, within the breast.

The first challenge to a schematic Kristevan reading cornes right at the beginning of the

poem. Herbert desires his tears and sighs to k as passionate as the winds and waters, but

those elements come h m M. If Herbert wants to be stomy, it is ody because G d

himself is a splendidly tempestuous stonn. God does not necessarily need to be moved

by sighs and tears, if t&e winds and waters (sighs and tears writ large) represent his own

cosmic passions.

The second stanza desctibes the pmgress of a "ttnobbing conscience," surely in

Kristevan temis almost an oxymomn since the conscience is part of the symbotic-in

Fteudian terms the repnssive superego-while the verb "throbn perfecty d d b e s the

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intense ebb and flow of semiotic drives? Should we read this phrase then as suggestùig

that Herbert has disingenuously manipulated the Merent parts of his pemnality in order

to maLe his attack upon God, as A D. Nuaall thinlu: "In the moral background of this

poem then lurks the repeUent and uldmately seKtefÙting idea of artificidly inducing

emotions because emotiom an non-aitificial and may therefore tum out to have

influenced Gad" (ûwerherud by God 65; Nuttall's emphasis)? Or does it suggest, &r,

that Herbert is transfonaing the ceasonable part ofhimseff, his conscience, into a physical

semation in order to de@ ratiodty and reach his G d h u g h feeling, as Richard Strier

argues: "The Refonnation cejection of aparhia as an ided for either God or man is made

explicit hem. . . . Herbert is not afhid of the conception of God being 'moved.' He is not

concemed with God's dignity. Ood is tender-and 'quick! . . . The Stormt is the clearest

statement in Herbert's poeûy of the pnvileged indecorousness of genuuie emotion" (Love

ffiown 186-7)?

A fiuthm problem presents itseifin the third stanza, where Herbert describes his

conscience as making such a racket that it completely h w n s out God's music. Kristeva

argues that music is more semiotic than symbolic (Revolution 24). but for a Renaissance

poet such as Herbert, music wouid have suggested order. John Houander, in his study

nie Uniwring of the S b (1961), demollstrated thet the classical conception of b o n y

involved "an idea of relative proportion, of an order that consists in the ratios of

quantities to each other, ratber than of a notion of blending that depends on the

" The conscience did not nccessarily belong to "reason" rather than "passiontn for Herkrt however; see my discussion of "Consciencen below.

106

simItaneous effects of sepamte or even wmhg elements" (27; HoIlander's emphasis).

It is the "blending . . . ofwarring elements" that Kristeva probably understands as

harmony and it is that, as much as music's "nonverbal" (Revolucion 24) status, thet leads

her to cal1 it semiotic. Fot Herbert though, music was likely to ernbrace characteristics of

the Knstevan symbolic." In this poem it functions to suggest a God of order, hannony,

and deconun, a God who is shaken out of a musical complacency by Herbert's loud

knocking. It is by dimpting music, not by ernploying it, that Herbert forces his God to

abandon the bierarchicai trappings of glory and honour and respond to his own urgent

desire. '" The Iast two lines, however, challenge this reading of unrestrained passion

overcoming a God of order and control. Herbert announces that pets have "wrong'd"

storms, suggesthg an anticipation of Romantic delight in tempestuous nature. But

Herbert defends stoms as a means to an end, in the same way that, as Rosemond Tuve

" In "Church-musick" Herbert declares that music enables hirn to escape the materiality of his body: Wow 1 in you without a bodie move, I Risiiig d falling with your wings" (5-6). and tbat it "how[s] the way to heavens doore" (12). He characterizes music as a system of howledge, a means ta an end, and an escape h m physicaüty, ali aspects of the Knstevan symbolic. On the other hand, Hoilander sounds as if he is describing a semiotic process when he declares that "It is as if the image of music were aiways running dong beneath the surface of al1 of Herbert's poems, breaking out here and the= like the eruption of some undergrr,~~id stnam, but exercising always an idorming, nourishiag function" (294).

lu It is essentiai, therefore, when applying Ktisteva's theories to poetqr to take into account the historical context of that poeûy, somabing Kristeva herseif is always very carefbi to do.

107

demonstmtes, Renaissance pets subotdinate imagery to That end is a

"purging" of sin, a process which has comotations both of cepression and of violent

tusrnoil, anà which Knsteva might therefore ascribe to either the symbolic or the semiotic

register. "The Storm" cannot then be read as a straightforward example of a throbbing,

clamouing, semiotic pet beating down the barners which separate him fiom a

transcendent and decorous God.

"Conscience," which seems on the surfiue to be Herbert's most unambiguous

rejection of asceticism and repression, nevertheless expresses a shultaneous desk for

order and control. The poem begins with a very effective a l l i tdon of the explosive

consonant p in "Peace pratla," suggesting a speaker spluttering in his rage and

f'nistration, and thus enforcing the theme of a passionate man fighting his repressive

conscience. And yet, the mention of music once again introduces, as it does in "The

Storm," a troublirig new dimension to this struggle between remn and passion:

Peace pratler, do not lowre; Not a fair look, but thou dost cal1 it foul: Not a sweet dish, but thou dost cd1 it sowre:

Musick to thee doth howl. By iisming to thy chatting fears 1 have lost bth mine eyes and -S. (1-6)

Conscience trsasforms music into a howl, drowning it out with its "chatting fears." Iust

as in "The Storm," then, music seems to symbolize order, aad another "throbbing

consciencet* personines disorder and cacophoay. Herbert ranges symbolic harrnony and

semiotic sensuai pleasure (his eyes and cars) a@st semiotic dimption and symbolic

I9 She sees Renaissance poets as "men Who thought of images as irrevocably peris of mean.ingsn (Elizabeth md Metaphysical Imagery 76).

asceticism, an opposition which dots not fit tidiiy with the symboiic/semiotic dichotomy.

Hakrt develops the theme of music in the second stanza:

M e r , no more, 1 say: My thoughts must work, but like a noiselesse sphere; Harmonious peace must rock them aii the &y:

No m m for pratlers thae. Ifthou persistest, 1 will tell thee, That 1 have physick to expell thee. (7-12)

The paradox of a noiseless hamiony refers to the music of the spheres, a "central image in

Christian musical thought" (HoUander 28-9), and suggests an impossible ideal state,

whiie the desire to be rocked in silence seems to arise h m a wish to be reunited with the

mother, either at the breast or in the womb* When Herberi tells his conscience that there

is "no room for prattlers the=))( that is in his pdoxicaily silent yet musical peace of

minci, he is delibaately echoing the "no m m at the inn" of the nativity story? in an

ingenious application of Biblical typology?' Herbert transfomis hirnseif into the antitype

of that exclusionary hm, except that he excludes conscience, and welcomes the Christ-

child in. Iust as harmonious peace rocks bis thoughts, Mary rocks her baby, leavi~g no

m m for conscience in this inn. Herbea longs for a rrligion in which the relationship

between God and the sou1 is the same as that ktween mother and infant, kfore language

*O "And she bmught forth ber first-bom son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no m m for them in the inn." (Lulre 29).

" Baiban Lewaiski points out bow much Protestant poets iike Herbert appiied typology to themselves. As she says, "Heiktts Ilie Temple is a mediey of voices which derive h m and play off against bib1ical voices. And Haberts speaker oAen presents himself as a New Testment version of (antitype of) various bibtical poets" (245-6). in "Conscience" H e r k t presents bimseff as the antitype mt ofa biblical person, but of a bibl id building.

and Law enter the subject in the form of conscience.

And yet the remedy Herbert auiis to for attacking conscience is, again, a purgative

act:

And the receit SM be My Saviours bloud: wben m r at his board 1 do but taste it, strajght it cleauseth me,

And leaves thee not a word; No, not a tooth or nail to scratch, And at my actions carp, or catch. (1 3-1 8)

As in "The Storm" where the semiotic tempest pesfomis the symbolic fhction of

cleansing and removing impurhies, the semiotic blood hem acts as a medicine, ejecting

the scratching, carping conscience. Not only is it difficuit to apply Knstevan catcgories

hem. it is almost impossible to identiQ sin with passion and vViw with reason, or vice

versa: Christ's blood simly c a b to mind the passion of the Passion, yet it works to

restore order and stasis; conscience would seem to represent mason and rationality, but its

prattling and physical violence suggest passion. indeed. the conscience for Herbert did

not necessady carry the connotations of repression which it does to the twentieth-centwy

d e r , trsined to identify the conscience with the super-ego. Sidney Gottlieb's reading of

the poem as a dramatization of the coaflict betwcen the moderate forces of the Angiican

church and the Putitans who threatened it, suggests ihat Herbert was more likely to

associate the conscience with the forces of social revolution than with repression:

"Herbert personines conscience as a non-conforming, raàicai Protestant, a danger not

only to one's peace of mind but also to one's church and society" (1 13-14). The same

Puritaus who attacked chmh and tate, however, also attacked music and memiment.

Conscience, then, seems to k both molutionq a d qsessive.

1 IO

The poem en& with a paradoXical invocation of violence to restore peace:

Yet if thou talkest d l , Besicles my physick, know thae's some for thee: Some wood and nails to make a stafTe or b i i

For those that trouble me: The bloudie crosse of rny deare Lord 1s both my physick and my sword. (19-24)

The previous stanza has just promised that Chnst's blood will stop coasciencels violence,

its scratchhg and carping, but in these lines Herbert makes Chnst's blwdy mss into a

weapon of violence. While the sword can also fbnction as cepresentative of the State, the

sword that defends and keeps the peace, Herbert's concentration upon the materiality of

this particular sword, made of blood-soeked wood held together with blood-soaked nails,

serves to eclipse the image of the gieamhg steel sword of law-andarder. 1s Chnst, then,

a force for order, removing the perverse and semiotic inner voice of conscience, as his

fùnction as "physick" seems to suggest? Or does Christ represent a passionate, violent,

and physicaiiy felt revolt on the part of the p e t against the restrictive constraints of a

symbolic religion, as indicated by his m s s becouhg a sword? Since the aaswer seems

to k both, the conclusion to be drawn is that the paradoxes of religious poetry

contiauaiiy escape the efforts of secular theory (at Ieast this particular secular theory) to

contain and quant@ them.

"The Coîiar" is equaily diflicult to anaiyse in a schematic way. The f h t fifteen

lines do not seem to pcesent much of a problem: obviously this speaker is in revolt against

his cepressive religion. The ~e~assertion of the speaker is ninforced by the poetry, for

example, the assomce in lines 3-4 where the regmiteci i in "sigh and pine," "liaes and

Iifè," emphasizes the spealrds focus upon bis own desires, his edtation of "1" above

111

God. And yet even in tbis sustained expression of passion, ambiguity cmps into the text

in lines 10-12:

Sure there was wine Before my si@ did drie it: there was corn

&fore my tears did cûown it.

Are si& and t e m marks of the semiotic, the pervemity of the melaacholic who refuses

to eat and drink, to sustain his body? ûr, alternatively, are Herbert's sighs and tears

indications of an asceticism which denies the sensual pleasures of wine and corn? Is his

rejection of lifie (and aiso of the Euchadst) a rejection of the symbolic by the semiotic,

which is what the context of the lines seems to suggest, or of the semiotic by the

symbolic, which is what the end of the poan, with its capitulation, expresses? Criticai

attention has long f o c d on the Eucharistie meaning of these iines, the way in which

the bread and wine of Communion are pnsent behiud the corn and wine. Michel

SchoenfeIdt points out how opinion has been divided as to whether the pet's intent here

is a blasphemous perversion of the Eueharistic elements or an acknowleâgment that God

is present with him during the duration of his nbellious not, dwelling in the corn and

wine. He offers the solution that the poem "swerves indecisively ktween both

pussibilities, aiiowing the temfying possibility of blasphemy to supply the vehicle for

submission" (106). Foiiowing Schoelifedt, I would argue that semiotic rebeliion CO-

exists with symboiic submission; neither interpretation wins out over the other.

Richard Strier identifies üne 17 as the turn of the pem, the change h m the voice

ofwsion to the voice of reason, arguing tbat it is the voice of reason that H e r M fin& a

greater threat to bis religion: "The striking feature of the second nenatad voie in 'The

112

Collar' mes 17-32) is its cornmitment not to passion but to reason. . . . fTh CoUar'

Qamstucs]ditwayinwhichrrasoncaaattempttocomiptdLchcrutbybuildinguponits

pcrfectly intelligible and '-' fh tdons and dcsùcs. Natuml d& U not what

since the Wery seema to support it. Heikrt njccts his religion as a "rope of suids"

(23, a peradox which suggcsts a miracuious compromise between stability and fluidity

behind the mon ostensible rncanings of the ninning out in an houglas, and a useless

and impossible entcrprise. It is Habai's own thoughts, not God, which have made this

rope into Wood cable, to enforce and draw, / And be thy law" (24-253, rather than the

ladder to heavcn which Herbcrt extols in "The Peari":

Yet through these labyrinths, not my groveling wit, But thy silk twist let âown fiom heavh to me Did both conduct, end tcach me, how by it

To climbe to thee. ( 3 7 4 )

Herbert then telis himselfta "tie up thy fears" (29). which again sugjpts that his sin is

one of mason, aîtempting to dcny and repnss any motion wbich does not suit its agenda.

1s it Goà, or sin, who mnkcs the rope of npression?

Thc pocm ends with a capihilation:

But as 1 mv'd anâ p w mon fiafe and d d e At evay wo*

Me thougbe 1 herrd one crlling, Chiid! And I tcply'd, A@ Lord* (33-36)

Apparentiy the rcbd is back in his coiiar. But k & st i l i in his chola? 1s uiis a happy or

tmhappy ending? Rcsimiibly Hakit would ay "happy," whüe Kristcva would mût the

opposite view, that tbc symboiic orck of niigion dwiys qmsscs the scmiotic viWty of

the subject searching for self-Mfihent. One way to argue against that interpretation

wodd be to remember that a child has two parents. 1s God calling "child" like a father

making a stem reproach, or like a mother fidi of tenderness and love? The pet's

response appears to be one of resignation but could also nsemble the exhausted and

tnistiag snuggling of a child who has just had a temper tant- and is allowing himself to

be held again? As Chana Bloch says, "This one word offers both rebuke and codon:

'You arr a child, not an aduitt; 'You are my child, not a stranger" (Splling the Word 166).

1 would argue that the first of these sentences is spoken by the father, the second by the

mother* "The Collar" is a poem in which Herbert's revolt against God faits, but it does

not conclusively teil us whether that revolt is one of semiotic fecling against symbolic

ceason, or a revolt by symbolic reason against semiotic feeling, nor whether this fdw is

a happy or bitter one.

Herbert's reügious poeûy expresses an experience which cannot necessarily be

reduced to a scheme or paraphrase. His God is both law and licence, both purgation and

excess, both order and chaos, while sin can be both reason and passion, both restriction

Michael Schoenfeldt reads the endhg in this way: "In The Coilar,' the voice of God dispels the stuitifyiag iilusion of independence and privacy, resulting in a genuinely gratifyiiig clausaophobia" (109). The idea of a "gratifying claustmphobial' suggests the pre-Oedipal semiotic. Schoeafeldt makes a brief refaence to Knsteva in his notes: "1 have leamt much h m this suggestive book [Powers of Horror] and h m Kristeva's Tales of Love" (328 n. 1 I 1).

Herbert is the only poet whom 1 have mt anaiysed in tams of s e d t y in this chapter. Whiie 1 believe îhaî he does use the tropes of sexuaiity in poaiis such as "Afaiction" (I) and "Raya' 0, which 1 discuss in chapter one, and "The Gbpse," which I look at in chapter the , 1 agee with Lewalski and Low Who both argue that

Rossetti

In Rossetti's poetry the contlict between aymbolic and semiotic oAen plays itself

out on the field of sexuality. When Rossetti f i t e s about the need to renounce passion

and desire in order to submit to a God of law, she often makes that passion and desire

expiicitly or impficitly sexd. On the other hand, when she expresses the ways in which

her love for G d transfoms her rigid self-control h o warmth and vitality, she

coiisistently uses erotic tropes (such as the imagery of the Song of Solomon). Two poems

which employ sexuality with raàically different resuits are "Thou, God, seest me" (II 190-

9 1) and "1 Kaow you not" (III 3 1 -3 2). while "The Convent Threshold" (1 6 1 -65)

problematizes the relationship benmen semiality and religion with pa te r complexity.

"1 Kaow you not" is a poem that mostly fits a framework of syrnbolic religion

vanquishing semiotic desire:

O Christ the Vine with living Fruit, The twelvefold fruited Tree of Life, The B a h in Gilead after strife,

Herbert does not p i c m his relationship with God in sexuai terms as much as other pets do. Lewalski posits that "'The Church' is in some respects a new version of the Song of Solomon . . . Herbert, however, transcenàs the Bridegroom-Bride relationship into an association of loving fiiends" ( 292). Low states that Herbert

o h cmploys the language of sexual love in his poctry, but . . . always uses it to figure forth what we may cail the 'cowtship' stage of the divine- human love && never the consummation ot the d a g e stage . . . In its place . . . he introduces another, appmntly incompah%le, love relationship, which is embodied in another traditional biblical trope-the trope of father and son. (Reinvention of Love 88)

Schoenfeldt, on the other hand, argues that 'lThrough~ut Tiie Ternple, Herbert's courtship of God plays on a complex set of homologies between social and sexual courtdip. . . . d c Ionging affotds Herbert a resomt vacabulary for expressing religious passion" (16). 1 klieve, as I ûy to show in chaptet four, that He- tums to the sexui to express his relationship with poetry more often than to represent his ~Iationship with God

The valley Lily and the Rose: Stronga than Lebanon, Thou Root, Sweeter tban clustend gtapes, Thou Vine; Oh Best, Thou Vineyard of red Wine Keeping Thy best Wie tiii the close.

Pearl of great price Thyselfalone And ruddier than the niby Thou, Most precious lightening Jaspet Stone, Heaâ of the cornet spumed befoce; Fair Gate of pead, 'ïhyself the Door, Cieat golden Street, Thyself the Way, By Thee we joumey toward Thee now Thro' Thee shall enter Heaven one day.

1 thYst for Thee, full Fount and F l d , My beart d s Thine as deep to deep: Dost Thou forget Thy sweat and pain, Thy provocation on the Cross? Heart pierced for me, vouchsafe to keep The pwhase of Thy lavished Blood; The gain is Thine Lord if 1 gain, Or if 1 lose Thine Own the loss.

At midnight, saith the parable, A cry was made, the Bridegroom came: Those who were nady entend in; The rest shut out in death and shame Strove all too late h t feast to win Their die was cast and nXed their lot, A gulph divided heaven h m hell, The Bridegroom said, 7 know you not.'

But Who is This That shuts the door And saith '1 h o w you nott to hem? 1 sa the wounded Hanâs and Side, The Bmw thom-tomind long ago: Yea, This Who grieved and bled and died, This Same is He Who must condann; He d e d , but thcy refiised to how, So MW He heam their ay no more.

The first stanza addresses Christ in terms drawn h m many diffèrent books ofthe Bible,

t 16

but which aii contribute to the same effect of lwninous SeOSuality. Cbrist is like M e , the

gnat remover of inhibitions and facilitator of love and pleasure. The next stanza is a

reiteration of the adorhg epithets of the îïrst, but this tirne the imsgery has changed; fiom

king associated with flowen, plants, grapes anû wine, Cbrist is now imagined in t e m

of jewellery ami ptecious metals. He has moved h m seasual softness to glinting

hardaess, h m Dionysias to Apollo, and from erotic satisfaction to economic power, in

an anticipation of the move h m the third to the fourth and last stanzas.

'Ihe thitd and central stanza is the only pemnal one in the poem, the only place

where the pet speaks in the nrst person. She ask for Christ to Mfi11 h a desire, but her

request is couched in terms of bacgain and exchange. She first reminds Christ of the pain

he has invested on her account and then tries to persU8de him into savhg ber out of self-

interest: "The gain is T h e Lord if 1 gain / ûr if 1 lose Thine Own the loss" (23-24). The

scruiza ûansforms the sweat, pain, and pierced heart of Jesus into the cunrncy of the

economic contract: Chnst's "Iavished Blood" becomes the money with which he

purchases the speaker's sod?

The fourth stanza seems at fht to be taking us back to the erotic ngister, evoking

the pareble that casts Christ as the Bndegmom to the soul, but by the fourth line, "the rest

shut out in death and shame" (ZS), we r e a b that the focus is on the "guiph divid[ing]

heaven h m heli" (3 l), not on the celebration of maritai or spirituai ecstasy. Christ is

24 This translation h m the body to money has been noted as a significant theme in Goblin Mmkt alm. Angela Leighton, for example, points out how Lizzie's pyment of a gold coin to the goblins, wkre L a m paid a gold cul, shiftP the tams of exchange " h m the Semiotic Order of the fmiak body to th Symbolic Orda of money" (136).

117

traiisformed suddenly h m ardent lover to stem judge. Rossetti seems to suggest that

Christ is bound by the law of the contract, the same law she invokes in stanza three in

order to plead for her own salvation, when she wcites that "This Same is He Who mupr

condema" (38; my emphasis). Christ is constrained by the exchange which bas taken

place in the past, when "He caiied, but they refbsed to know" (39). The enâing is both

shockingly unexpected and deepiy chilling after the beauties of the nrst stanza. The

strangeness of the poem betrays an ambivalence on Rossetti's part over the

uncompromising attitude of the doctrine of hell, but she nevertheless cornes d o m on the

side of law, the side of the g l i t t e ~ g gem-God, rather than the intoxicating and permissive

wine-God of her opening, perhaps because oniy a God of law can ensure her own

sakation. She employs the rnaniage trope but keeps ody its co~otations of a contract,

not its suggestions of erotic love. The poem describes the suppression of the erotic and

semiotic side of Chnstimity by its contrachial and symbolic dimension.

in "Thou, God, seest me" Rossetti uses imagery of erotic love, specincally that of

the Song of Solomon, to create a poem which moves in exactiy the opposite direction

fkom "1 Know you not." In this poem, a dialogue, the speaker repeatedly stresses God's

distance nom her, his fiightening stemness, and her state of abjection before him, but

each time Ood refuses to be thus characterized, and defines himseif in temis of erotic

and maternai love, what Kristeva would point to as the semiotic. h the fkst siaoza the

speaker expresses her fear of God in the ternis of a woman fearing semral possession by a

man, oniy to have God assure her that sunender to him wiU result in gioy for her:

Ah me, that I shouid be Exposed and open evetmore to The!-

'Way, shrialr not h m My light, And 1 WU make thee glorious in My sight With the overcoming Shdamite."-

Yea, Lord, niou mouldiq me. (1-6)

The second staiiza shows God taking on the d e of the mother, rather than the

lover:

. . . Without a hicüng-place To hide me from the terrors of Thy Face.-

"Thy hiding-place is here in Mine own heart, wherefore the Roman spear For thy sake 1 accounted dear."-

My Jesus! King of m e . (7- 12)

Paradoxicdy, God offers to bide her fkom himself; where his face is stem and temfjing,

his body offers a wam, dark refuge, like the mother's womb is to the fetus. Rossetti puts

into God's own mouth a rjection of his role as judge in favour of a much more instinctual

Stanza three renims to the wedding trope:

. . . Without a veil, to give Whiteness kfore Thy Face that 1 might 1ive.-

"Am 1 too poor to dress Thee in My royal robe of righteousness? Challenge and prove My Love's excess."-

Give, Lod, 1 wiil receive. (1 3-1 8)

Here God States that he is beyond the human capacity to quantify, that he can meet any

demand that the human imagination caa conceive of. that he can fulfiU my human desire,

b u s e he is excess. It is paradoxical that he should express this excess in the language

of humaa economics, promishg to buy his beloved a new dtess? His statement

in ais ûod resembles Rochester in cbapter 24 ofJime Eyre, buying his bride clothes fm more luxurious thsn she wishes: "ML Rochester obiiged me to go to a certain sik

"challenge and prove my Love's excess" would have ken welcome to the damned bride-

sods of "1 Know you not"; if Rossetti haâ included it them she would have corne up with

a very clifferent poaa.

Finally the last stanza chailenges the speaker's idees of purity and cleanliness:

. . . Without a pool wherein To wash my piteous self and make me c1ean.-

"My Blood hath washed away Thy guiit, and st i i i 1 wash thee day by day: Ody take heed to trust and pray."-

Lod, help me to begin. (19-24)

Rossetti employs the familiar Christian paradox expressed so well in Jobn Dom's "Oh

my blacke Soule!," that the blood of Christ "hath this might / That being red, it dyes ced

soules to white" (13-14), but stresses the endless process of this cleansing. God washes

the soul in his blood everyday, redemption is an ongoing pmcess, the subject is never

nnished but always in the process of becoming (the sujet-en-procé.r), of needing Goci's

help to continually begin again. Whereas in "1 Know you not" Rossetti sûesses tbat the

actions of the past are binding even on God, hem she opts instead for an open-ended and

dynamic digion, one which grants the subject liberty to eoostaatly cenew and redeem

itself. If the d e g e relation ktween Christ and the soul is seen as legalistic and hence

symbolic in "1 Know you not," it is expresscd in Thou, God, seest met' as erotic,

m a t e d , and d o t i c .

The ciiffixing attitudes to sexuaîity in these two poems clash within "The Convent

warehouse: th= 1 was otdered to choose half a dozen dresses" (2%). But wMe Jane cannot "bear king Qwscd Iü;e a &U by ML Rochester'' ((297), because of the degradation implieâ, the Christiaa soul in Rossetti's poem is delighted to receive the gift of a divine bridegroom.

'Ibnshold." The ostensLble theme of the poem is that the Christian duty is to nnounce

desire and sexual pl- in favour of the future Me in heaven. The first six lines set up

this opposition most effectvely:

There's blood between us, love, my love, Therets father's blood, there's brother's blood; And blood's a bar 1 cannot pass: 1 choose the stairs that mount above, Stav afkr golden sLyward stair, To city and to sea of @S.

The blood between the lovem suggests both murder and incest, both of which mount a

challenge to the patriarchal control of father and brother. But the speaker declares herself

unable to foliow h u g h on het transgression; ironically the blood which symbolises

instinct and passion now becomes a bar, a prohibition. Unable to move horizontally, in a

relation without hiemhy or control, the speaker decides to move vertically, to try to

transcend the physicality of ber blood. instead of a sea of blood she chooses a sea of

glas, a dm, cold mirror which gives ber her reflection, and thus gives h a distance h m

herself. The reflective sea of dass anticipates the image of the split selfwhich recurs

towards the end of the poem:

If now you saw me you wouîd say: Where is the face 1 used to love? And 1 would m e r Gone befon; It tarries veîled in paraâise. (137-40)

The speaker's own fae no longer belongs to her, but exists in a realm beyond death. It is

not ody the minion with her love that she looks f o d to, but the reunion with herseIf.

Her façe is the main site of the stniggie between renunciation (tbe symbolic) and sexual

love (the semiotic). She demi her rejection of her lover as a nniiiig away of her f e

h m him:

1 turn h m you my cheeks and eyes, My hair which you shall see no more- Alas for joy that went kfore, For joy that dies, for love that dies. Only my lips stil i tum to you, My livid lips that cry, Repent. (6 1-66)

It is an impossible wmching that allows cheeks and eyes to tum in one civection, and

lips in auother, the speaker is literally breakhg up into Picasso-üke pieces. That ber lips

tum to her lover when ail else has tumed away suggest for a moment her desire for his

kiss and his touch, but the next lhe denies that desire by making the lips fom a wamhg

rathet than a kiss. These blooâiess lips, echoing the speaker's desin to escape h m blood

in the first stanza, becorne the agents of mpression rather than emticism. If we cm

imagine the lover hearing these lines we cm imagine his leap of hope at the line "Only

my lips d l tum to you," and his chilling disappointment at the line that follows.

The poem betrays the speaker's inability to mke a pure renunciation of human

passion, however, in lines 17 to 45 which contrast heaven with earth:

Your eyes look earthwarâ, mine look up. 1 see the fmff city grand, Beyoad the hills a watered land, Beyoad the guifa gleacning strmd ûfmansions where the ri$hteous sup; Who sleep at ease among their mes, Or wake to sing a cadenced hymn With Chembim and Seraphirn; They bore the Cross, they draiaed the cup, Racked, maaed, aushed, wmched limb h m limb, They the onlicouring of the world: The heaven of s$ny k v e m dùrled, The sun before their f k e is dim.

You lookmg earfhward, what see you?

Milk-white, wine-flushed among the vines, Up and d o m leaping, to and h, Most giad, most Ml, made stmng with wines, Blooming as peaches pesrled with dew, Their golden windy hair afioat, Love-music warbling in theû k a t , Young men and women corne and go.

You linger, yet the time is short: Flee for your We, gird up your strength To flee; the shadows stretched at length Show that &y wanes, that night draws nigh; Flee to the moutain, tarry not. 1s this a t h e for smile and sigh, For songs among the secret trees Where sudden blue birds nest and sport?

The irony h m is that heaven is menly a somewhat distorted reflection of the sensuai and

erotic world which the speaker ostensibly renounces. The nghteous in heaven sleeping

among their trees and waking to "sing a cadenced hymn" (23) are suspiciously similar to

the c d lovers on eaah who sing "love-music" (36) among the vines, and "songs among

the secret trees" (44). The speaker cannot escape the semuality of earthly existence. Her

eyes are looking earthward just as much as her lover's are. As Anthony H. Harrison puts

it: "The speaker's intuition of her lover's vison here is more sympathetic and nostalgie

than derisive. Tndeed, her agonized quest to sublimate the sensuai and aesthetic

inchations this vison refîects, and to repress the erotic passion that is their corollary, is

designed primarily to ensure a transposed perpetuation of both sensuai and passionate

experience in the afklife" (139).

Lines 85 to 109, the d m of the spirit who rejects howledge foc love, are to me

the most baffhg part of the poem, raising questions that 1 have not seen satisktody

answered Un criticism, and have trouble answering myseifi

1 teU you what I dreamed last night: A spint with transfigured face Fire-fwted clornb an infinite space. 1 heard his hundred pinions clang, Heaven-klls rejoicing rang and rang, Heaven-air was thrilled with subtle scents, Worlds spun upon their nishing cars: He rnounted shrieking: "Give me light." Still light was poureâ on him, more light; Angels, Arcbangels he outsttipped Exultant in exceeding rnight, And troâ the skirts of Cherubim. Stiii "Give m e iight," he shrieked; and dipped His thirsty fixe, and drank a sea, Athirst with thirst he could not slake. I saw th, drunk with knowledge, take From acbing brows the aureole mwn- His locks writhed like a cloven snake- He leA his throne to grovel down And lick the dust of Seraphs' feet For what is knowledge duly weighed? Knowledge is stmng, but love is sweet; Yea al1 the progress he had made Was to l e m that al1 is small Save love, for love is al1 in dl.

1s the spirit Lucifer, the lover, or the speaker? Most critics do not address the identity of

the spirit, and thus fail to account for the significance of this dream to the whole p~ern.'~

The spint's desire for light, his relentless climb higher and higher in heawn, and his loch

that mithe B e a snake suggest that he is Lucifer. But the speaker's assertion that she

hamt of her lover twice suggests that this is the ntst &am, and that the spirit is her

lover. Meanwhile the bfwted ciimbing echoes the speaker's own intention to "mount

Dolores Rosenblum is an exception, equating the spirit with the speaker: "Overtly the beloved, this Faustian spirit stands for the speaker's own aspirations. At one pole are the b l d and mire that puii downwrud, at the other, pure energy, cosmic power that expads h u g h the universe to stop short at the mod limit" (The Poeis, of Endurance 192).

the kindled stair" (16). while the "ttansfigund face" (84) resonates with the 0 t h

refennces to her transformed and distorted visage. The question of the spirit's identity is

part of the larger problem of the meMing of the spÿlts pmgress and how it relates to the

rest of the poem. Is the spirit's ascent a s i . exhibition of seKassertion and the desire

for knowledge and power? Such a reading would suggest that his grovelling to love is an

act of Christian humility and self-sunender. But the rest of the poem is a description of

the speaker's attempt to c h b hi*, to receive "more light" (93) fiom the sea of glas

and the kindled stair of heaven, to reach to angels, to gain knowledge, in which case the

spirit's leaving of his throne to grovel before love implies the speakeis own backsliding,

het uaconscious renunciation of her renunciation. Lines 69 to 76 describe her vision of

her fiitute self in heaven sitting ~11comfortably in her own throne:

How should 1 rest in Paradise, Or sit on steps of heaven alone? If Saints and Angels spoke of love Shouid 1 not answer fiom my throne: Have pity upon me, ye my friends, For 1 have heard the sound thereofi Shouid 1 not tum with ycarning eyes, Turn earthwds with a pitiful pang?

Like the spirit, the speaker seems to wish to leave her thne to descend into love.

1s the spirit's "progress" of üne 107, then, a genuine progress, or does it ironically imply

the opposite, a f&g away? The semantic ambiguities of this passage pervade the poan,

casting the speakds attitude to her own renunciation in doubt, as weîi as calling into

question Rossetti's own faling about the story she is teiiing.

The climax of the siniegle between symbolic renunciation and semiotic desire is

For ail night long 1 dsleamed of you: 1 woire and prayed against my will, Then slept to dnam of you again. At length 1 rose and h l t and prayed: 1 m o t mite the wotds 1 said, My words were slow, my tears were few; But thro' the dark my silence spoke Like thunder. When this moming broke, My face was pinched, my hair was grey, And hzen blood was on the siU Whm stifliag in my stniggle 1 lay. (126-36)

These Lines express a central ambiguity towards the whole process of renuaciation. When

the speaker declares that she prayed agaiast her will, does she mesn that she had to force

herself to pray against her natural inclination which is to dream of, and indeed renim to,

her lover? Or is she suggesting that prayer swept her like a passion she could wt nsist,

that prayer is as irresistible an activity as the semai enjoyment she has renounced? The

first meanhg is surely the one intended by the lhes, but the second meaning is supported

by the s e d vision of heaven which 1 argued for above. Rayer seems to be an

experience which is less accessible to symboiic representation than àreams are, since the

speaker is able to describe her dreams, but cmot mite the words of her prayer. Those

words are slow, and indeed the prayer seems to consist mostly of a passionate silence

which canaot be represented. The "fiozen blood" thst results h m the speaker's prayer

indicates that the process of renunciation is not merely a stcaightfod translation of

emtic love to the spiritual plane, but that the effort to move h m the present satisfactions

of earth to the future hopes of heaven aimost destroys the speaker's saaity, and leaves her

a broken, faceiess woman, hzen in a living deah Rossetti employs the opposition

beniveen sexuaiity and rcügion in this pem to suggest that such an opposition cannot be

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sustained without resulting in the breakdown of meanhg (the first dream passage) and the

fragmentation of the self.

Hopkins

H o p b , i&e DOM^, bes long k e n a cntid favoete (especidy in the case of

the New Critics) because of his vimioso use of poetic language to create ambiguity and

complexity. 1 argue that he ernploys hyperùaton, alliteration, metre, and, especially, puns,

in order to emphasize the intensity of his relationship with God, who is sometimes

symbolic and sometimes semiotic. In fact, 1 would argue, Hopkins's G d hast always

occupies a position in the poetry comsponàing to the "semiotic," a position which also

embraces the idea of God as Other wbich 1 discussed in chapter one. But since this

chapter is meant to demonstrate the versatility of God in religious poetry, and not to

provide a survey of al1 the pets' complete work, 1 have chosen for discussion two poems

in which G d appears to be symbulic, "To seem the stranger" and "Thou art indeed jwt,

Lord," and one, "The WUidhover," in wwhich God suggests the semiotic. Like Herbert

though, these poems de& aay neat theoretical scheme meant to reveal their meaning.

And Lice Rossetti, they all employ wme suggestion of sexuality, with mering cesuits.

"To seem the straaget" coastnrts a speaker whose d e s h and cmtivity appear to

be thwarted by a npressive God. On the whole, the form of the poem very much

supports this mesning,* while ais0 sometimes serving to mâercut it. In the nrst line, for

Elideth Schneider points out, for example, how this SOM& diffeff h m what she cails Hopkins's "baroquen poems, which express the "language of elation, cheer, hi@ confidence" (177). In "To seem the sîranger," on the other hanci, "Severity of style and

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example, the t h worâs "seem," "stranger," and "lies" work, because of their close

proximity to each o t k , to suggest that the speaker's religion has caused him to become

unûue to himself, to "seemn rather than to be, to be full of m g e "lies," to feel estrangeci

h m him~eif("stranger~~ suggests both sûange and estrangedi). But l w b g beneath this

meaning is a suggestion that maybe the whole cornplaint ofthe poem is a lie, the

inauthentic vision of a sinner who cannot see the mith, precisely because he is not tnily

bimselfas he Wntes the poan.

The next semantic complexity aises in line 4: "And he my peace 1 my parting,

sword and Me." "Peace" is totally opposed to the other three nouas in the list, an

opposition that Hopkins emphasized in the manuscript with the downward stroke he

places between the diterated "peace" and "parting." That typographid stroke

(signifyuig a sword stroke?) serves to part the two pwords into two different pieces, thus

revealing the pun pcacdpiece, and suggesting that the parting is not just the sept ion

fiom family, but the splitting into parts of the speaker himself The line then sasses

Hopicinsls outrage that the God who is supposed to k his peace is actually the complete

opposite. But here we nui into a problem, tryiag to distinguish the semiotic pet h m the

symbolic God, for a ûoâ who destroys the pet's peace and sense of unified being, who

parts hirn into pieces, who fimctions as the violence of mord and strife, resembles the

dimptive semiotic rather than the W g nif~ingbolic.

condensation h m reach theü extreme limit Thrr is ~catcely an adjective, scercely an image, scatcely any metaphor, and t&n is not one vividly descriptive or senmous word" (190). Although Schneider maltes a vaiid point, 1 think she overSfcItes the case, as shouid be seen in my analysis of the poetic complexities of the sonnet

The next quatrain inttoduces the trope of the maniage, although on this occasion

H o p b does not apply thet trope to himseif and ûud, but to himseîf and England:

England, whose honour O d l my heart woos, wife To my creating thought, would neither hear Me, wen 1 pleading, plead nor do 1: 1 Wear- y of idle a king but by where wsts are rife. (4-8)

Hoplriiis would surely be aware here of his own culpability in his lack of inspiration,

since instead of wishing England, a secular subject, to be the wife to his masculine

"mathg thought" he shouid submit himself as wife to the mascube creator, Gd. It is

not for him to be the male creator. The pleading which Hopkins does not malte and

England would not hear even if he did make it, is usuaily r d as his desire to convert his

rnother country to Catholicism, a nading which certainiy fits with his lamentation that his

own family temains outside bis churcb. But behind this meaning lies another which

builds more closely on the marriage trope, that of Hopkins pleading with his wife for the

rights of the marriage bed, or rather not even bothering to plead because she would not

respond to bim even if he did. In this context the words "pleading, pleaâ" serve to

emphasize the semai meanings of the two words which corne later in the p m and

rhyme with plead" (without king part of the rhyme scheme): "breeds" (12), and

I am inIrelandnow; now I amatatbird Remove. Not but in ai l removes 1 can Kind love both give and get. ûniy what word

Wisest my hcart bncds derL heaven's m g ban Bars or heil's speil' thwarts. This to h d unbeatd, Heard unheeded, leaves me a Ionely ôegan(9-14)

Hopkins m o t breed poetry because àis M e wili not join him in ptocreation, and his

worcls are uiibeedeâ by heaven just as his sexual pleading is unheeded by Ehgiand.

"[Dlark heavents batiling ban'' (12) may not k so benüng afta ell, ifwe rralip that

H o p h , in his refusal to take the feminine mle. denies heaven its chance to impregnate

him with inspiration. Daniel A. Hams argues that Hopkins embreces a fe-e roie here

in order to develop "the theme of a btokm heterosexual love between the speaket and the

'dearest him' that is implied in 1 Wake and Feel"' (1 19). but I read the poem as tbrowing

the blame upon the speaker rather than upon God. It is not that God deserts Hopkins-as-

wife, but that Hopkins is unable to make himself into a wife in the fb t place. He refuses

to "kind love both give and get," in that he is unable to receive (get) in a passive, feminine

way (he refuses to let Gd "get" him with chiid), desiring only to bestow (give) in an

active, masculine m e r . While a superficial reading, therefore, may yield the

hterpcetation that Hopkins's religion leaves him both sexually and creatively fnistrated, a

closer look reveais that it is H o p b wbo docs not "heed" the sexual "pleadhg" of a God

who is prepared to act as a "creating thought." It is as a result of the poet's reluctance to

access creativity thiough femininity (through the semiotic?) that his language becomes so

"weady1' h t it begins to peter out into nothhg?

"Thou art indeed just, Lord" is lem ambiguous in its meaning: G d is the distant

Hopkins does manage to taâe on the female role in one of his last poems, "To R B.," in which he describes the mind as "a mother of immortai song" (4), but Uiat this particdm humbiing of himself befote Goà came hsrd to him is sbown by his infmous commeuts on the "maleness'' of the poetic güt: "Now this is the artist's most essential quaüty, ma~tefly executio~ it is a bind of male gift and especidy msrks off men h m women, the bcgetting of one's thought on pipa, on verse, on whatever the matter is" (30 Juae 1886, Selected Letfers 229 ). The masty of the male artist sits awhvardly with the obedience and surrrnder tcquircd of the Cbnscien poet who awab inspiration h m bis mastet, God.

130

and iuunoved master of the bighiy fiystrated pt, whose passions God thwarts at every

tum. The f o d t y of the pet's address to God, based on a verse of the Old Testament,

anci preceded by the Latin translation of that verse, aU suve to stress the hiemhical

nature of the nlationship behmtn God and pet. Significantiy, perhaps, this sonnet is

one of the very rate Hopkins poems that actuaüy addnsses God, the other exceptions

being The Wreck of the Deutschland and the disguiseâ adâress in "Carrion Cornfort."

Mer the intense colioquies of The Wreck, it seems as if Hopkins somehow lost his nerve

in aâdressing Gd duectly (Janet Denford points out how "he speaks to Him most oAen

in brief emotional asides or short addresses that are a form of cornmentary" (12) rather

than addnssing whole poems to God) so that he hides bebind disguise ("Camion

ComfortVt) or the extreme f o d t y of this sonnet. The fïrst line of the sonnet contains a

pun on "indeed," suggesting thet God is just "in deed" that is, in the leiter of the law, but

not the spirit. Hopkins cannot c lah that God is unjust according to the law, but he

desires a kinder, more loving Ood who places mercy before justice, a New Testament

Christ rathm than an Old Testament Yahweh.

The s e d trope rnakes its appearance at lbe 6 and continues to the end of the

sonnet:

Oh, the sots and thralls of lust Do in spen hours more thnve than 1 that spend,

Su, life upoa thy cause. See, bariks and brakes Now, ieavèâ how thick! l a d they ate again With fietty chervil, look, and fie& wînd &&es

'hem; birds build-but aot I buiid; no, but straia, T i ' s eunuch, and aot breed one work that wakes. Mine, O thou lad of W, send my mots tain. (6-14)

As in "To seem the stmger" Hopkins rejects the implication of the s e d trope when

applied to Gd, which is that he is supposed to take on the fanale d e . Iastead he

remairis obstinately male, maLUig senial puns on "spend" and "sûain'@ and attributhg bis

creative failtue to his failure in male s e d t y , his status as a eunuch. As a result, he

cannot see that the "sots and thralls" of lust are succeeding when he is failhg preciseiy in

their passive sumaQr to their desires. I am not saying that the tua argues that Hopkins

needs to sumnder to his s e d desire in order to write poetry (aithough Hopkins k e l f

is manifestly giancing at that possibility), but that the latent suggestion of the poem is that

H o p h needs to access his feminine side in order to surrender to a possession by a

semiotic

The male sewassertion that the poet displays in this sonnet LUll<s him, in my view,

to Milton's Satan. C. S. Lewis, in A Preface to Paradise Lost, points out how every time

Satan is about to lose himself in the contemplation of the beauties of God's creation he

" In nading Hopkins as nluctant or mble to take on the fernaie role before God, 1 am in total opposition to James W. Earl who argues that The mon obvious component of his relation to Christ throughout the p m s [is] his feminine abjection before Christts mastery" (559, and ihat "Hopkins's accommodation to loss, which Freud would cal1 his castration complex, nsults in a distinctiy ferninine sexuaiity, as fully repressed as the fexninine sexuaiity of the period was supposeâ to be, and Mly accustomed to the abjection that postmodem feminists Ue Kristeva are now d y z h g in men as welî as wown" (557). Neither do 1 agne with Donna Moâer who sees Hopkias as ârawn to androgyny: "many poerns h m aii phases ofHopkinsl career project a psychical fragmentation of gender in the speaker, a compulsion to vacillate between mascuüne and feminine identifications" (2). 1 wodd argue that H o p h achieves this femhization of himseif only intennittently, agreeing with Alison Sulloway who suggests that "It is one thing for an imperious embattled Oxford undergtaduate to want to foiiow the sacrificial way, but it is @te motber for him to undertake without stnss the role of Christ's handmaiden" ("Hopkins, Mak and F d e , and the Tender Motheruig Earlli'" 37-38). Like DOM~, Hopkins found it difficuit to see his soul as the f d e bride of a male God.

132

nsists this sumnder and hirris to dwell on hhself, like a hue egoist: "He sees the Sun; it

makes him thirik of his own position. He spies on the human lovers; and states his

position. In Book iX he jounieys round the whole earth; it reminds him of his own

position. The point need not be labouredIt (102). 1 see the same piocess in Hopkins, who

deîights for a moment in the "fktty chenil" and "fksh wind" of nature, only to break o E

in line 10, in a bitter ntum to bis own situation: "birds bdd-but not 1 build; no, but

strain." In fsct, the poem works hem through puns to suggest that the speaker never d y

loses sight of himself at ail in the description of nature, and that the sight is poisoned to

him by his own bittemess and jealousy. When Hopkins cries "See, banks and brakes /

Now," he is employing a secondary sense of the words so that they become verbs of

hdraace, rather than simple nouns. "See" he cries to God, "how you bank up my

creativity, and put the brakes on my desires" (with anotheer p u on break, as in "break

rnen)..'O The adjectives "leavbd" and "IacW also contain double meanings, dthough

without changîng their grammatical d e : Hopkins is saying "Look how 1 am left (leavéd)

forlom, and how you have laced w so I cannot act or breathe (no fnsh wind for me)."

These puns bear witness to the semiotic codicts withh the poet, but at the same tirne

they emphasize what at the beginning of this paragraph 1 caiied Hopkins's male self-

assertion, a quality which is difi6cult to assign to either the semiotic or the symbolic, since

it involves selfkentred desire (semiotic) but also masculine power and control

" "Banksn is a cornplex word indeed in this sonnet; Marylou Motto sees in it a pun on commaMd banks, üiiLing it to th pun on "spendn in iine 8, so thai "the negative vOC8buiary of business slips away, displad by the grneraiive natun to which it leais'' (90)-

133

(symbolic). The poern thus r e h a schernatic reading which attempts to identw the

poet with the semiotic and God with the symboîic.

"The Wuidhover," even more thsa the two sonnets I have just discussed, destroys

distinctions between bK symbolic and the semiotic. if the bird of the octave is divine

(and I argue later that it most ceaainly is), then this God clearly belongs in the reaim

of the instinctual, the kinetic, the rhy(hmica1, of amoral jouissance, in the realm, that is,

of the sedotic. And yet the diction of royal hierarchy, (minion (1). dauphin (2), and a

pun on "caught" (1) which makes the p e t "court" the bird) dong with the poetls vision of

the bird in "the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!" (8). places the bird in the area of

symbolic pown relations.

Hopkins expresses his response to Christ in the Ianguage of sexuaiity in the Lines,

"My heart in Ming / St imd for a bird,-the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!" Critics

have specdated for decaâes as to why the poet's heart is in "bidingl'; I suggest it is partiy

because Hopkins has managed in this poem, as he has not in "To seem the straagerI1 and

"Thou art indeed jus& Lord," to take on the role of the female to Christ's male. His heart

is in "hiding" because a modest woman should remah in the background, admiring the

male prowess of her lover from a distance. My reaâing hem is in agreement with those of

Alison Sdoway who hol& that "the feminine kar t in biding' and the humble earthiy

hction of the plow are deliberately conttasted with the fke-whaeiing fiilcon's

archetypaUy masculine 'achieve of, the mastery of the thing!'" ("Hopkins, Male and

Female1' 50); and Charles Lock who points to the wod "chevalier" as a marker of gender:

'?fia The Wiidhover,' . . . Chkt is addressed as 'my chevalier,' the pet mwt be

134

asaumuig a femaic persona, but senshg embacrassing implications, ears do not hem"

(134). For once, for Hopkins, the implications of playhg female to Christ's male were

not too embarrassing for him. if God can submit to the humiliation of becoming human,

then he can buckle under the humiliation of kcoming female.

Since I nad the i n f i o u "Buckle!" (10) in the sense of "submit, collapse under

pressure" 1 am faced with the problem of whether the bird's sacrifice is an act of the

semiotic or the symbolic. The tercet nans as follows:

Bnite beauty and valour and act, oh, au, pride, plume, here Buckle! AMI the fïre that breaks fiom thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangernus, O my chevalier! (9-1 1)

It seems at fint that the list of qualities which Hopkins ascribes to the bùd in line 9 are

most certainly the q d t i e s of the semiotic, in al1 its "brute beauty," in which case the

sacrifice calld for is one of denying passionate self-assertion in favour of service, m l y

a move requind by the repressive dimension of that symbolic system, religion. But, on

the other hanà, these qualities could just as easily specify the subject's "pride" in his

wholemss, his status, his sense of himself as in control over his own destiny (the âiabolic,

Luciférian quaiities which Sulloway and Emily K. Yoder both see in the bùd), in which

case the bucküag is a sumnder of a false consciousness of power and autonomy to an

authentic experience of the hgrnenteâ self in pmess, a sumnder, in other words, to the

tndh of the semiotic. Both mesnings coexist, for it is the Christian parador of sacrifice

that Hopkins wishes to meLe vivid: that in denying ouiselves the reaiization of our

passionate selves we break through to a new passion, a fire more lovely aad more

dangeious.."

Maay critics have argue& however, thet the falcon is not a symbol or embodicnent

of Christ, and that even if it is, its *buclding" does not represent any sacrifice. Yvor

Winters, for example, d e s the scomful claim that "there is no essential ciifference

between my dog and Hopkins1 bml; the bird has the advantage merely of the Romantic

and sentimental feeling attached to birds as symbols of the fke and unrestrained spW

(49). Michael Sptiaker argues that "Ifthe bird in the poem has a referent outside the

poem itself, it is not so much the kesûel as al1 those birds so pretemaRually present in the

Romantic lyric: Keats's nightingale, Shelley's skylark, Tennyson's eagle, Hardy's darklhg

thnrsh, Yeats's falcon and golden singing bird, and Stevens's blackbird" (6). Both

Witers and Sprinker, in th& concentration upon "The WUidhover" as a Romantic poem,

ignore the implications of the bird for a Christian poem. In Christian symbolism, the bird

suggests not the Romantic "spirit," but the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Triaity who

is traditionally represented in the fom of a dove. The windhover therefore represents or

emboâies not just Christ, but the Holy Spirit as well.

Reka Boyle argues that even if the fdcon is Christ, it does not represent Christ's

sacrifice: "The cmpled bird, in the context of this poem, cannot be a symbol of Ciuist

on the cross. Christ on the c m s is beautifid because of the hidden, W t e , and life-

John M. Wamer argues convincingly for a readbg of the poem whicb celebratcs the fdcon's synthesis of power and msüaint: "it is the paaicuiar combination of firedom and bondage that is shom by the birdts h o v e ~ g upon the wind which attracts the speaker. . . . h m the beginning the speaker perceives the bird's symbolic value not as that of simple uiuesaaint. . . but as a blending witbin itselfof needom and submission" (129-30; Wmer's anphasis). Thus the fdcon expresses neitha the semiotic not the symboiic exclusively, but exists within the tension ktmca îhe two.

giWig love which bursts out fiam His death, b l y accepted but not seKinflicteci, to give

üfe to the world" (89; Boyle's emphasis). Where 1 depart h m Boyle is in reading the

bM's act of bucküog as a mnactment not of the Crucifixion, but of the Incamatioa

Much Hopkins scholarship over the y e a ~ has been devoted to demoastrating the

centrality of the hcarnation to Hopkins's faith, and delineating the extent of his debt to

Duns Scotus who argueâ that the second person of the TMty became incarnate befoe

the creation.j2

1 therefore read the falcon's buckiing as n-enacting the Incamation. The central

action of the poem, in my view, is the dive of the falcon. Mmy critics argue that the bird

does not dive at dl, aad among those who do read "buckfe" as a dive, some, such as

Winters and Denis Donoghue, argue that this dive is very far h m approximating a divine

action:

the dive is not an act of self-sacrifice, it is an attack on the bird's prey. . . . it wodd k unfair to Hopkins to reaâ into his poem a m e h g for which the poem offen no evidence and which, once it is there, mins the poem. (Winters 46)

The falcon can easily k accepted as a conventionaily adequate pst- Romantic symbol of Energy, but 1 see no muon why we should sidestep the obvious f a t that it is Energy at its most destructive, most vicious. To accept the windhover without sheer biasphemy as a symbol of Chtist one would have to ignore the plain fact that îhe bud is a bird of prey, that when it dives it does so not just for the s k "ecstasyt' of animal activity. mnoghuc 97)

But I see no pmblem with the po«n's cornparison of God to a bud of prey ifwe read "The

32 Waiter Ong's gloss is helpful hem: "The creation of the universe and of humankind foiiowed as a consequence of îhe design to have the Son take on human nature. Adam's sin, caiiing for redempion as it did, gave the incarnation a speciai urgency but not its d raison d'êüen (108).

Windhoverf' in the context of the destructive God in The W& of the Deutschland. and

the lion-limbed predator G d of " C e Comfoh" 1 think, however, that as the falcon

buclcles into a dive it metamorphoses into a very different type of bird, a dove.

My reason for seeing a dove where Hopkins mentions only a fdcon, is that the

bud catches on fire as it dives ("the fk that breaks h m thee then" (10)). Geofiy

Hartmaa argues that this fire must k a literal one: "whereas a lesser poet than Hopkins

might have used "hn in a punly figurative sense, in Hopkins the figurative sense is

dways derived h m physical phenornena" (62). Hartman suggests that the fire is "light

flashhg h m an uneven breastplate" (62), but 1 argue that the flash of flarne is that of a

meteor which ignites as it euters the earth's at~nosphen?~ The Holy Spint enters the

earth's atmosphere in two f o m , according to t&e Gospels. The first is that of a bird:

"And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway [sic] out of the water: and, Io, the

heavens were opened mto him, and he saw the Spirit of G d descendhg like a dove, and

lighting upoa him" (Man 3:16). The second form is the fïre which descendeci on the

apostles at Pentecost: "And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fh, and

it sat upon each of them" (Acts 2:3). Like the meteor, the Holy Spirit bmts into flarne as

33 in Fire in the Sky (1998) R o h J. M. Olson and Jay M. Pasachoff convincingly demonstrate the nimteenth-cenhuy féscination with meteors: The scientific investigation of wmets and metcon, which arst occimed in earnest during the period in question [the eighteenth and nineteenth centtlries], dovetaileâ with the inherrnt British intezest in nature and a strong literary tradition of cornetmeteor symbolism" (1). They go on to point out that "a kmwledge of science and astrommy became one of the Mimarks ofa British gentlemann (3). As bath a litemy figure and a gentleman, Hopkias rnight well have used the image of the meteor in "The Wiver , * as indad ht used the image of the cornet in "I am üke a slip ofcornet," a pocm Olson rad Pasachoff include in theV book

he descends to earth. The dove in flames is an image Hopkins employs elsewhere. In

The Wreck of the DeuischZand he describes his own heart as a dove flying into the fin of

My heart, but you were dovewinged, 1 cm tell, Carriet-witted, 1 am bold to boast,

To flash from the fiame to the flame then, tower nom the grace to the m e . (m 6-8)

And in "God's Grandeur," written only two or thtoe months before "The Windhover,"

Hopkins also picnirrs God in tnms of fire ("The world is charged with the grandeur of

God. I It will flame out" (1-2)) and a dove ("Because the Holy Ghost over the buit /

World broods with wann brrast iuui with ah! bright wings" (1 3-14)). As Paul Mariani

says, we have to see this dove as litcrally "on rire" with the sun: "It is only when we see

that the Paraclete is the dawnhg suri-its breast the wamllng sun, its wings the spreading

rays-that the immediacy and force of the image strike the d e r " (92). The bud of "The

Windhover" is anothei bird literally on fin. In fding, in the act of buckling and

sacrificing itself, the fdcon metamorphoses into a dove which erupts in flame, thus

moving h m the f h t person of the Tcinity to the third. while simultaneously re-enacting

Christ's surrender of his falcon-lke transcendenice for a dove-iike immanence (the dove in

"God's Grandeur" is immanent in the world), in the Incamati~n.~

The last tercet celebrates the mysterious beauty of everyâay sacrifice, such as uiat

" The image is similar to T. S. Eliot's vision of the Holy Spirit appearing during the London air-raids of the 19409, dedbed in the "Little Giddingn section of Four Quartets:

The dove descendhg breaks the air With flarne of incandescent terni Of which the tangues declare The one discharge h m sin and mot. (IV, 14)

of Hopkins himself, Hihich expresses itseîf in the "sheer plod" (12) and "blue-blealc" (13)

dndgery of human existence. Whiie these actions an not as spectacdar es the bùd

catchhg on fïre as it plunges through the sky, they can stili partalre o f b t lovely and

dangernus flame, sti î i "shine" (1 3), still "gash gold-vedon" (1 4). Sacrifice, which

appears to secular theory to be the submission of serniotic desire to the symbolic, reveais

itself to be, in Hopkias's Christian vision, a mystery beyond the power of either huma.

desire or human reason to M y comprehend. David Anthony Downes argues that the

difficuity of The Wiidhover" lies in its insistence on the mystery and paradox of the

sacrificial Incarnation: "What is so difficult in this poem for many readers, and justly so,

is the grounding of the 'fakonf Christ in the dust and ashes of the 'sheer plod' C h n a Of

course, there is no answer for this paradox except the mystery of the incarnation (and by

extension al1 hcarnationalism)" ( H o p h ' Sanctiïj,ing Imagination 66). Mystery

characterizes both Chnstianity and psychoanaiysis, in the end. As Robert Rehder says:

"Aithough we do not completely understand the poem, we accept its greatness. That we

are strongiy moved by what we camot explain suggests that what occurs is unconscious

communication" (174)?' Hopkins might argue that the communication is only

'' On a somewhat facetous note, 1 was interestecl to discover that in transcribing Rebdds words, 1 hed at first typed "greatwss" Uistead of "greatness!' Couid this be the presence of the semiotic, mealing itself through the materiality of the tex., suggesting to my conscious seifthat I find the poem much more difficdt, more of a "mess" t&an my Iogicai, symboiic, side rrslips? Or am 1 just an inaccurate typist? The danger of a psychdyt ic appmh, of course, is that it is a detemunisti

9 C view of the psyche, where notbiog happens by chance and everything is overdetetmined. But then that is also the view of a Christianity which believes that Gad pays as much attention to my typing as he does to the fhil of a sparrowC A psychoanaiytic nading of a Christian poem, tberefon, is likely to be guiity of, while at the sem time b«ng justifid in, rrading signincmce into anything and everything*

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"unwnscious" because the human mind canaot consciously grasp the greatness of God.

Both in fonn and content, then, religious poetry simultaneously invites and resists

a Kristevan anaiysis. In the end, it is the paradoxes so beloved by both Cbnstianity and

poetry, and especidy, thmfon, by Christian poeûy, which t h w into confusion any

attempt at a schematic analysis. While Christianity stnictures itself to a large degree

around oppositions ( g d and evil, body and soul, sin and gmce, etc), the poetry inspired

by it ofka works to demolish those oppositions, as it does the opposition between the

symbolic and the semiotic. A Kristevan approach, therefore, can help to iilumim, but

cannot hope to exhaust, the mysteries of Christian poetry.

Chapter Three

Love and Hate: Ambivalence in Religious Poetry

I love and love not: Lord, it breaks my haut To love and not to love.

(Rossetfi, "bst Thou Not Care?" 1-2)

Christian poets hate the God they love. Because they can never escape h m

ambivalence, they also love the God they hate. Take God out of the poetry and we are

left with unconscious expressions of self-love and self-hate. 1 approach each poet's work

in terms of his or her lovehate relationship with God, before attempting, in the

conclusion to the chapter, to suggest interpretations of the poems which assume that God

is a projection of the poet's self. This is not to say that I take the pets entirely at their

word for the body of the chapter; on the contrary, in lookhg for signs of repressed hatred

or resentment towards God 1 often read the pets againsi theu intentions. On the other

hanci, Dom, Herbert, Rossetti, and H o p h do not shy away from writing about the dark

side of their stniggles with God; they al1 have too much integrity, both as pe ts and

klievers, to pretend that the coune of tme love always nins smoothly*

Any discussion of Christian love benefits enormously h m incorporating the

distinction between agape and eros fomulated by Anders N y p n in his classic 1932

book Ag- unàErar. Nygren dethes agape as a disinteresteâ, unmotivated love which

is givcn h l y to the beloveci, however unworthy that kloved is; while eros is a desire,

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which is amused by the attractive qualities of beloved.' Nypn argues that Platonic eros

was the dominant motif in the Hellenistic world, while agape was formulated by St Paul,

and dominated the vision of the early Chnstians. The history of the idea of Christian love

is, accordhg to Nygren, the history of the interaction of agape and eros: "Almost

everywhere in the history of the Christian idea of love we find Eros and Agape most

intimately comected with one another, and it is therefore difficult to escape the

impression that Uiis comection is naturd and necessary" (32). Certainly the poetry 1

discuss in this chapta expresses a love in which these two modes are inextncably

combineci.

Agape is a theocentnc love, the love of God for his creanires. He does not love us

because we are lovable, or worthy; ratber we becorne worthy because he loves us. The

human response to king loved in this way by God is meant to k one of gratitude and

faith, of sumnder to the force of God's love. Humanity cannot love God through agape:

since he is completely worthy of love it cannot be an unmotivated gift; and since he is our

creator aad our judge it can hady be disuiterested. It is, however, possible and indeed

necessary to love others with agape.

Eros is an anthrocentnc love: the love of humans for God. Eros is motivated by

the desirability of the object, which in the case of God is overwhelming since he is the

Nygren's definition of eros is not solely that of semai love. W e eros subsumes semai desire, it is not totally defieci by i t Aii sexual love is eros, but not al1 eros is semai. As Nygrai says of oros: "Deep as the sensual mots of Platonic love may k, its whole tendeucy is to seek deliveraace h m the merely sensual" (51).

"Anthracentric" is Ktistcva's tam, which I prefa to Nygicn's term, "egocentric."

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supreme good, the locus of ultimate tmth and beauty. The huiillm subject attempts to

purify itseifand rise up in orda to merge with and possess the beloved object, Gd. Can

G d also love us through eros? The early Christians, believers in agcrpe, would say no,

that we are completely undesirable in oursches. But dient is a place in Christianity for

beiieving God does Love us through eros, a point of view whiçh 1 shall discuss below.

Nygren associates agupe and eros with certain strands of Christian doctrine and

practice. Eros is associated with mysticism, the striving of the soul to becorne one with

God, whik agape puts its faith in revealed religion, the okdient following o f a God who

always remains above and separate. Eros fostcrs a klief in the efficacy of works; agape

d i e s on faith done. Eros inspires both the aesthetic and ascetic strands of Christianity:

the aesthetic eros is attracteci by the beauty of God, while agrrpe responds ody to God's

love; the ascetic eros believes that sin belongs to the body, whüe agape attributes it to

"perversion of the will" (223). Eros tends to be found in Catholicism, and agape in

Protestantism?

The most important ciifference between agclpe and eros for my exploration of love

and hate in tbis chapter is the difference in the attitude to the self. Nygnn states: "Eros

starts with the 4ssumption of the Divine origin and worth of the soul. . . . Agape, on the

other hand, stmts with the cowiction of one5 own lack of worth" (222; Nygren's

' It is not a simple matter, however, of characterizhg the htestantism of Dome and Herbert as focusscd wlely upon agape at the expense oferos, since, accorduig the Nygnri, "the Remiscece tubs up the Dos monx the Refrmation the Agape mohy (669; Nygren's emphasis). Since Donne and Herbert wese poets of both the Refomtion and the Remissauce, they were influenceci by both ideas of Christian love, both ugqe and eros,

144

empbssis). He provides an historical context for this difference, citing Paul's argument

that God loves us in spite of our unwoithiness. Paul's view is in "opposition to al1 t h t

cm be cafled 'serf-lovem ( 1 30; Nygnn's emphasis). Early Christiadty, however, soon

came under the influence of Heîienistic Gnosticism which viewed God's love not as a gifi

but as "downward-ditected desire-that is, vuigar Ems" (303). G d could desire the sod

because of the soul's divine origin, another of ûnosticism's kliefs. St. Augustine,

comiiig under these influences, attempted to synthesize agape and eros into caritus. in

doing so, he pmvided a positive answer to the question 1 asked above: cm God love us

with eros? Accordhg to Nygcen, Augustine argues that God loves us with desire because

we reflect him: "When God loves us men., it is in the last resort nothhg but Himself in us

that He loves: Ems has compelled Augustine to provide this motive for God's

unmotivated love" (556). Such a love malces God into a narcissist, loving us for the

reflection he sees in us of his own goodlless and beauty.

Like Nygren, Kristeva also distinguishes between two modes of loving, which she

caiis narcissism and idealizatioa In narcissism, "Its Highness the Ego projects and

glorifies itself," while in idealkation it "shatters hto pieces and is engulfed, wben it

admires itseif in the mirror of an idealized Other-sublime, incomparable, as worthy (of

me?) as I c m be unworthy of him, and yet made for out indissoluble union" (Tdes 4

Love 6-7). Ideaüzation, the oppsite of aarcissism, o h lads to self-hatreâ. Most love-

nlationships are a complicated mixture of naicissism and ideaiization, just as Nygren

wouid argue that they are a complicatad mixture of agqe and e w . Narcissism results

fiom king the object of agupe, d e ideslizaaion resuits h m king the abject who

loves with eros, although, as I shall argue, the poetry complicates this neat equation.

Knsteva, following Fnud who argued that objet-love is male and narcissism

fernale,' genders the M m n t ways of loving, arguing that women cm, love thug& eros,

but ody by becoming, to some extent, m8sculiae: "That the libido, hence Eros, be male

does not absolutely prevent the woman h m placing her loves in it. T h u g h a more or

less painhi identification with man" (Tales 8O).' I f men are drawn to eros, then women

are more inclimd to achieve natcissism through king the object of love, whether that

love is eros or agape.

A large part of Tales of Love is given over to the history of Christian love, in

which Kristeva concentrates on narcissism, ignoring ideaüzation for the most part. In this

she departs somewhat fiam Feuerbach who argues that Christianity causes both

narcissism and seif-hate in the human subject. God, according to Feuerbach, enables the

subject to achieve narcissism: "It is . . . pleasanter to know one& beloved by God than

merely to have that simple, natuial self-love which is inaste in aîi beings; pleasanter to

see oneseff h g e d in the Love-beaming eyes of another petsonal king, than to lodr into

the concave mirrot of self. or into the cold depths of the ocean of Nature" (140). And yet

God is also a burden, an impossible mode1 to live up to: "The conception of the m o d y

' "Compkete object-love of the attachment type is, pperly speakhg, characteristic of the male. . . . Strictiy speairing, it is only themselves that . . . women love with an inteasity comparable to that of the man's love for them" ("On Narcissism" 88-89).

Immediately aAer this paragraph, she does speculate on the possibilities of a "fende libido" and "an -tics of the partiy ferninine" (Taies 80). which she says only occur in situations of aadmgyny and lesbian love. Compare Fnudls "1 am reaây to admit that there are quite a number of women who love according to the masculine type md who also âevelop the s e d ove~~aiuation pmper to that typen ("On Nmissismn 89).

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perfect M g is rio merely theoreticai, inat conception, but a practicai one, calling me to

action, to imitation, thwing me into Me, into d i d o n with myself; foc while it

pmlaims to me what I ought to be, it also tells me to my f e without any flattery, what 1

am not" (47). According to Feuerbach, then, loviag God can r e d t in both self-love and

seif-hate on the part of the kliever.

Kristeva, however, concentrates on the Christian God as a source of self-love

rather than of self-hatred. She posits God as the f h t Narcissus:

Consider this mim,rlike motion: my desire will be fulfilled through Him, for He has Mfilled bis own by creating me in his image. . . . We meet again with a h d of ''prhwy twcissism,'' surmountable ody tbugh the positing of an ûther who is supposed to have existeâ before us and who is not unaware, on his part, of that longhg for self-gratification and total gratification. ( T h 160)

The Christian God loves himself ihrough the Otbn (the human soui). To Gd, then, we

are al1 minors, nfl&g his love and goodness back to him. The converse of this

Augustinian viewpoint is that God is our mirror, reflectiag our potentid love and

goodness back to us.

As 1 argued above, God can love the soui with either agape or eros; the soui can

only love God with eros* in religious poetry these three actions, God loving with eros,

God loving with agape, the sou1 loving with eros, each have a combination of possible

Men the poet loves with eros, for example, one of four things can happen, one of

which involves love, the otha three of which involve hate. First, the poet can achieve

tuippiness and love for himseifand G d simply by eXUIting in the pleasun that his own

adoration gives him. Second, if the poet senses no response fbm God he can end up

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hating both God, for his coldness, and himseIf, for his own weskness in peffisting with an

unrequited desire. Third, the poet can continue to adore ûod but despise himself as king

so far beaeath divine perfection, the process Knsteva d s idealkation. And fourth, the

poet caa angrily reject an uaresponsive Gd while mgarding himselfwith self-pity or self-

righteous approvai.

Similady, if G d loves with agape, the poct's responses can also take one of four

forms, one of love and three of hate. First, she cm achieve a narcissistic self-love based

on her status as the object of God's love. Second she can hate herseif for not king

worthy of this love. T M , she can hate Gd for demanding a sumnda which she fcels

unable to d e , for placing upon her obligations and guilt Mder which she feels

oppressed. And fourth, she cm angrily ment Ood for not loving her with eros, with the

desire that would suggest she is actually worthy of love in berself, resenting the agupe

that makes no comment on her own desirability!

But ifGod does love the p e t with eros, then the poet is always happy, often

picturing the love between himself and his God in terms of an ecstatic and satisfied

It is not my intention to apply these distinctions rigorously to the poetry, since 1

believe that on the whole the poets were not fonnulating to themselves the differences

between eros and agape, but were rather trying to work tbrough the mbtleties of love and

As C. S. Lewis puis it: "No soonet do we believe that G d loves us then there is an impulse to believe that He dots so, not because He is Love, but because we are intrinsicaiiy lovable" (me Four Loves 180). Lewis's ruefiil insight iil umbîestbereason why the poets o f b try to tum ûod's feeüng for them h m ogclpe4ove into eros-love.

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ambivalence in a deeply emotional and personal way. While 1 refer to eros and agape.

ideaiization and narcissism, 1 try to treat each poem on its omi merits. as a cry h m the

Donne

Dome's primary reaction to God seems to be one of fw, rather than of love, as 1

atgued ia chapter one. Donne's central problem in treating the love between himself and

God is diat he desires God to love him with eros rather than agape, a problem which may

k related to his conversion h m Catholicism to the Calvinist Anglicanism of the

Elizabeth church. When he fels that he is loved with eros, he is able to achieve

aercissism. Men he feeis that God's love for him is based on agape, on the other hand,

he responds with resentment and hostility towards God and hatred of bimself.

Holy S o ~ e t 9, "What if this present," illustrates the process of God's love

resulting in the poet's narcissism. The poem has corne under much critical attack for the

speciousness of its argument, in comparing Christ to the poet's "profme mistresses" (IO)?

I would add to these cnticisms the observation that the faultuess of the analogy s p ~ g s

h m a confusion on the poa's part (whether deliberate or aot) between agape and eros.

Christ's love for bis enemies, his pcaying for "forgivenesse of his focs fierce spight" (8), is

P. M. Oliver, for exampk, points out that "if the speaker knows he was lying to his 'profme mistresses' when he used this argument to get them into bed, he must teaüse that it is even more fdacious as an argument for king saved" (1 14). But whereas Oliver concludes that the fBuity argument means "we are not in the presence of high seiiousaess" (1 15). 1 nad the poem as a very setlCous effort on Donne's part to understand the nattue of the love he should have for M.

149

clearly agape, a love unmotivated by the worthiness of its object. Dome then proceeds

to üLen Christs love for him to that of his hurnan lovers who take "pitty" (1 1) on him.

Agape is certainly a love that involves pity, d e r than admiration. But it is clear that the

human love Donne describes is not based on agupe at all. h asLing his mistresses to take

pity on him, he is clearly wockiag within the Petratchan tradition whereby the woman

does not desire, but r a k takes pity on, the man. But that pity is a response to the mm's

desire, his erar-love. Goci's agape is not a nsponse to mm's desire, but d e r a love

which itself demands a response. It is not anthrocentric, in other words, but theocentric.

The Protestant Donne sbould know that he c m t equate the cnicified Cbrist's pity for

him with that of his mistresses whose pity is mainly a response to his own flattery. His

relationship with his misûesses was based on eros-love, and, while many of Donne's

poems show him clearly desiring that God also love him with eros, theologicdiy he

knows he must k happy with Gd's agqe .

Donne's attribution of an eros-love to Cbrist aiiows him to achieve a levei of

namissistic self-love in this sonnet. His equation of Christ with his mistresses allows

Donne to p i c m Christ as physically beautifid and attractive. This beautifhl Cbrist

dwelis in Donne's own soui, thus implyhg that the poet is suffiised with Christ's beauty

h m within, and becornes beautiful himself. The lhes thst describe Christ's own

transformation from divine stermness, fiightening to look upon, to human beauty, thus

also imply the poet's tradormation: "Teares in his eyes quench the m i n g tight, /

Blood as his hwnes, which h m his pierc'd head feU" (56). Christ's tears weli up in

Dome's own eyes, his blood weh up in Donne's own b, m h g him fag to look upon.

And if DOM^ is beautifid, then, by the iogic of his own argument, he must also be good:

"To wicked spirits are horrid shapes assign'd, / This beauteou forme assures a pitious

minde" (1 3-14). If he is beautifid and good, then he can take pity upon himseIf, just as

Chnst and his mistresses do, and achieve narcissistic seglove. Donne's attribution of

eros-love to Chnst is the meam whereby he can love himself.

In "Since she whom 1 lovd,"Do~e makes the difficult move fkom wishing to love

God with eros, to becoming the object of God's eros-love, a change he is not entirely

successful in perfoming. The octave describes how the speaker's love for his wife leads

him to a love for God:

Since she whome 1 lovd, hath payd her last debt To Nature, and to hem, and my goad is dead, h d ha soule early'into heaven ravished, Wholly in heavenly thîngs my mind is sett. Here the admyring her my mind did whett To seeke thee God; so streames do shew the head, But though I b v e found thee:and thou my t h h t hast fed, A holy thinty dropsy melts mee yett. (1-8)

Both his love for his wife and bis love for God are based on eros. As bis S e ' s soui is

taken up into heaven, his mind follows in the upward movernent which characterizes

erar. He seeks God, and hâs him, iike a desiring lover taking the active d e . And yet

his desire remains unsatisfied. The turn of the sonnet fiom octave to sestet is based on

the pet's rdization that he must surrendet the role of lover to God, and take on the mie

of beloved himself: "But why shouid 1 begg more love, when as thou / Dost w o a my

soule, for hem o f i g aü thinen (9-10). Only by aüowing hiinseif to be wooed, instead of

tryhg to woo, will Donne be able to escape the unlpritisfied nature of his own desire for

both his wifé and his ûod. Y& the last four lines show the pet unable to hold onto this

reaiization, as he attri'butes the qualities of eros-love to Gd:

And dost not only fearr least I aiiow My love to saints and Angels, things divine, But in thy tender jealosy dost doubt Least the Worlà, fleshe, yea DenU putt thee out. (1 1-14).

It is eros which is proae to jedousy and exclusivencss, whüe agape does not know

jealousy and is totally inclusive. Donne projects ont0 God his own feelings of jeaiousy

that his wife has given her love to saints and angels, and things divine, now that she has

ôeen "ravished" into heaven. He çan only imagine God lovhg him in the same way that

he loved her, tbrough eros. Thensa Di Pasquale is right to notice the gender implications

in these lines: "The idea of a jealous God is of course an Old Testament cornmonplace;

but insofu as God's fears reflect the poet's own jealousy over Anne's ravisiment, they

te- to a persistent masculinity of perspective which is-in the spiritual order of thlligs-

DOM~'S most serious probkm" (53). Eros-love, as Kristeva argues, is a masculine love,

active, ambitious, based on desire. Dome must leam to play the role of the fexninine

beloved to God's masculine lover, if he imagines God loving him with eros. Ody in the

glimpse of a possiily female and matemaI God who feeds his thirst as a mother breast-

feeds her child, does he achieve, for a moment, an alternative vision in which he can be

the object of a divine love based on agape, not eros. But as Carey argues of Dom's

love-poetry: "bis ego naches too eagerly &er objects beyoad itselfto be narcissistic: it is

goaded by iîs incompleteness" (99). Donne's need is to love, m k than be loved. It is

&ficuit eaough for him to accept king loved with ûod's eros, rather thaa loving his wife

with eros, let alone to also make th change h m a vision of love based on eros to one of

love based on agape?

"Good Friday 16 1 3. Riding Westwardt' enacts Donne's difficult pmgress in

achieving self-love through God's agap. He begh the poem by nmning away h m

God's love, f d g burdened by the obligations it places upon him: "Yet âare I'almost be

gld, I do not see / That spectacle of tw much weight for mee" (15-16). It is the action of

lwking on which al1 the pet's anxieties focus, for in looking at God, he becomes Gd's

reflection. The spectacle is o f too much weight for hîm not only because he feels

inadequate to respond to such great love on God's part, but also because God's look

defines him as God's reflection. As he says in the next lines: "Who sees Gods face, that is

seffe Me, must dye; 1 What a death were it then to see God dye?" (1 7-1 8). The

implication in the first of these lims, is that seeing God's fare cesults in a death which is

merely a prelude to a ~~uttection, to a renewed and more beautifid self, reflecting back to

God the glory of his own gaze. But seeing God die is a diffant matter. It is glorious to

be the reflected face of a gîorious God, but temiQing to becorne the reflection of a dying

Christ? Donne's description of nature's d o n to the Crucifixion is a projection of his

The psychodyst might interpret this poem as the description of a successful substitution of natcissism for the lost love object. Dome uses his belief in God to allow him to reâirect the eros investeci in his wife onto himseK Because of his faith, he is able to moum without melanchoiia.

Donne's ductance to look into the fecc of a wounded Chnst is echoed by the speaker of Rossetti's "Dcspised and Rejectedt' (I 178-80) who refuses to look upon the Christ who calls to her with these woids:

"My Feet bleed, see My Face, See My Hands bled that bring thee grace, My Hart doth bleed for thee, Open to Me." (45-48)

TO gaze into thiswsfirewwldrta~thtspcrlrctasequrillybroLai, injud,aid

own desirr not to look: "It made hU owne Licutmpnt Nature sbrinlrt, / It ma& his

footstoole crack, eod the Sunae winlrt" (19-20). It is Dwnc who "shrinksw away h m

mslres out of himscir; as hc rcflccts God, which "cracks" unda the shain. lnstead of

looking, then, Dome inteliechraüzes his approach to the Crucifixion: "Tbough these

things, as 1 ride, be h m mine eye, / They'are prrsent yet unto my memry" (33-34).

Such a distancing of the expaience is aot -le, D o m e s , b u s e while he

refbses to look at Chnst, Christ penists in looking at him: "For that laoks towaràs them;

and thou look'st towards mec, I O Saviour, as tbw hanglst upon the tree" (35-36). Cbnst

transfoms the distancing third prion pronouns of "thatn and "thcmn into the immediate

second and fint pason pronouns "thou" and "mce." In asking God to beat him in the

following four lines,

1 turne my backe to the, but ta ceceive C o d o n s , tül thy mercies bid the lave. O thinke mce worth t h e angcr, p d s h mec, Bume off my nists, and my deformity, (37-40)

Donne seems to recognizc that focing the gaze of Chnst in his Passion requins him to k

a rcflecfion of Christ. Uaülte the voyeur, he is i m p l i d in his own lodong.

&y, ratha than as eqdly giorious, dorable, and lovablc as the victorious Gad in Heaven. Clirist's o f f i of love is rejectcd because the speaker uniiot ôear to look upon hnelf in a nueinristic mlationship with tbU wounded, bledhg deity, jwt as Donne cannot look pi CbnSt on th Cross. hnicaiiy, her ~~ lcaves hm etmaily blccding: "and on my door I The mark of blood for evennott" (5748). W. David Shaw says of Rossetti's "Twicc" (I 124-26) thiit "Whm the dcvotiond poet stops loolting at ha h~iiadl00Itsinst#dstthcwhoI~l~t~~ofcbBst.shhualrrrdyscttht conditions for hr rreovey" ("Pm of Mystay" 56). But in "DcspW rad R c j d n Chiist is not wholt but broka, rnd lookingat him would wt hdp the poet maver, unfess she unbracer the paradoxes of Chbistianity.

154

The poem ends with the pet about to turn to look into the face of his God:

"Restore t h e Image, so much, by thy grace, / That thou maykt h o w mee, and I'U twne

my face" (41-42). As he does so, he ceases to speak and the poem ends. It is indeed me,

then, that "Who sees Gods face, that is selfe life, must dye" (17) for the poem dies as

Donne turns his face, but it is a death to the old deformed and sinfiil seif, a death to

desire, a de& to the s e p t i o n h m God that d e s it necessary to address him in words

in the first place. Dome becornes the mVror "image" (41) of Christ; they gaze at each

other in the classic image of narcissism. There is no need for the poem to continue when

the p e t has ceached such completion, such satisfaction of the desire to love and be loved.

Love, however, is not the ceneal note struck by Donne in the description of his

relationship with God, as most readem have noticed. instead, Dome tends to respond to

God's agape with either mentment of the obligations it places upon hh, anger that God

does not love hlln with eros, or despair at his own unworthiness to be the object of any

love at ail. In other words, Dome often rrsponds to God's love with both haûd of God

and self-hatred.

Holy Sonnet 1, "As due by many titles," depicts an angry rejection of God's agape.

The nRt iine shows the poet making the correct ~sponse of totai sumnder to W s love,

although the hint of reluctance in the word "resigne" betrays Donne's resentrnent at being

placed under the obligation of many clallas and titles. In the second quatrain, however,

Donne tums h m bis focus on God's actions of mation and redemption to listing his own

guaiities in relationship to W. When he tells G d tbat he is his son, servant, sheep,

image, and temple, he appears to k advettising his desirable qualities. He wants God to

155

love him with eros, rather than agupe, because if he is loved with eros, it meeas he is

deshble, w h e m king the object of an agupe love does not mflect at ali on his own

quahties. The sonlsun pun in line 5, "1 am thy sonne, made with thy selfe to shine,"

locates this eroslagupe conflict in one word. As Gad's son, Dome is the object of his

ogope, the love that descemis frwi the father to his smaü chiid. But as God's Sun, Donne

receives the upwardly directed desire which ascends h m the man who tums his face up

to the source of light and heat. DOM€? justifies his claim to be God's an, the object of

Gd's desire rather than his agape, by admitting that his light is just a reflection of God's:

"made with thyselfto shim," and goes on to cal1 himself God's image and the temple in

which Goci's spirit dweils. This list is desigmd to appeal to God's narcissism. D o ~ e

hopes that G d will love him because he shms in God's divinity, because he d e c t s God

back to himself. Donne seems here to reject the Calvinistic emphasis upon the

worthlessness of the hhuman soul, in favour of the Augustinian view that God loves us

because he sees himself in us.

nie poem &ers the "many titles" of the h t line h m God's claims to Donne's

love, to DOM& claims upon God. Once this swhch takes place, Donne's tone becomes

much more agitated and hostile towards W. "Why doth the deviii then usurpe in

mee?"(9) he demaads, as if accusing God of betraying him to the enemy, when in fact he

has just admitted that he betrayed himself. "Why doth he steale, nay ravish thatts thy

right?" (10) he asks, slyly up$rsdiiig himself fiom an object that cm be stolen to a bride

who can k raped (and who should be the subject of h a husband's ems).

Donne's hungy ego then c a w s him to distiogtish hùiiself h m the rest of

156

humanity. He cornplains that Gad "lov'st mankind weli, yet wiitfnot chuse me" (13).

Refbsing to be loved as part of humanity, Dome rejects bis status as one of the many

objects of Gd's generous and unâisctimiaating agrrpe, demanding instead that he be

chosen, singled out as special and desirable in himseif. Dome both hates and desires

Goâ in this poem: he hates God for the obligations, the "xnany tities" God's a g p places

upon bim, while at the same tirne he desires G d to desire him. It is an ambivalence

which he displaces onto Satan in the p d o x which ends the poem: "And Satan hates

mee, yet is loth to lose mee"(l4)). In tnith, it is Donne who hates God, and yet is loth to

lose him. Donne's ambivalence in his religious poeûy reflects his ambivalence about al1

love, inciuding the love of self.

God's agape in Holy Sonnet 7, "Spit in my face yee Jews," also resdts in hatred

and hostiiity on the part of the poet, but this time it is directeci inward, at himself casher

than at G d The poem is an example of a departure h m the equation of agtp leading

to narcissism. Instead of feeling lovable and secure because God loved him so much that

he died for him, Dome instead falls into what Knsteva would cal1 ideaiization: he keenly

feels his inability to live up to the standard God sets, and consequently hates himself for

i t As A. L. French puts it: "God is . . . by dennition, perfect; so that in writing about

Him, you cm oniy celebrate His p e i f i o n s or your own shortcomings. . . . If the

problem is that of a certain one-sidedness, isn't there a chance that a man might f d some

nsentment (however unconscious), some hostility?" (123-24). This sonnet m e r s

French's question in the aiErmative).

The first two Iines neatly combine the effort to compete with God &the seK

hatnd and masochistic desire for punishment that m d t s h m the poet's faiiure in this

cornpetition. It is not the Jews who are beating the pet, but himseKI0 Donne forces

both his own seWute, and his hatred of God for outperforming him, onto the Jews who

beat him and Christ and &us satisfy by proxy his aggressive instincts against both himself

and God. As in "As due by many titles," the volta signais a change, this tirne k m hatred

to love. Havhg exhaustecl himself with violence and pdshment, and hatred of God,

himself, and the Jews, Donne tums to the positive side of the idealizing equaton, the

glorifîcation of God, rather than selfdeniption. "Oh let mee then, his strange love still

alimite" (9). he says. The attitude is idealinng rather than narcissistic here, the poet

placing himself at a distance from God's love, which rernains "strange" to him, which he

admires mther then partakes of. Dome does aot achieve seblove in this sonnet.

Holy Sonmt 10, "Batter my Heart," teeters perilously close to expressing hatreâ

for both the speaker and 006 The conflict in the poem is bom fkom Donne's confiation

of eros with agape. He loves God with eros, describing his desire in terms of a pining

woman, employing semû puns in "batter my heart" ((1 and "labour to'admit you" (6)"

and desiring ravisbment. "Yet dearely'i love you, and would be lov'd faine' (9) he cries.

full of his desire to possess God and God's love.

Possessing Gd's love, however, is no easy mener. Donne wants both God's eros

Io Of course. in chapter two 1 argue that it is not the Jews, but God who is beating DOM^. There is no contradiction hem since 1 argue that Ood is ody a projection of DOM^ himiEPlf,

l l W i m Knrigm points out that "heart" is seventeenth-cemtury slang for the vagina (The F d Accommodations of John D o ~ e " 43). The OED cites childbirth as a meanhg of the verb "labourn since 1454.

158

and his agape. Th two modes of love converge in the word "ravisht' (14). On the one

hand ravishment impiies a man fiiied with desire to possess a women. On the other hand

it also implies rape, the overcoming of another person's wül. The former meaning

belongs to eros; the latter to agape. DOM^ wants Gad to want him as a man wants a

woxnan. But he is not able to give himself fk1y to his lover. In consequence, he ais0

wants God to take him over completely, sweep away his will, and "imprison" (12) him in

agape. N y p n describes agupe as a force which demands the sumader of the beloved:

"The unconditional nature of the love he has experienced &es the demand for his

sumnder to it also unconditional" (91-92). The problem is that God does not appear to

be forthcouhg with either agupe or eros: "for, you / As yet but knocke, bteathe, shine,

and seeke to mend" (1-2), cornplallis Donue, characterizing G d as an ineffectual

craftsmari, fiddlhg almost Wüfferently with one of his possessions. As a result of God's

unresponsiveness, Dome imagines the relationship between them as one of violence. He

expresses his aggression towards God in the many irnperatives he uses. These

imperatives are verbs of violence to be dllrcted at the speaker, but some of them,

breakhg fke from their surroundhg syntax, codd a c W y have God as dieu object. For

example, if we taLe the lines "That 1 may rise, and stand, o'erthrow mee'and bend 1 Your

force, to breake, blowe, brni and make me new," and remove the suboidinete clause,

"That 1 may rise, and stand,"and all references to the object of the violence, the "me" of

the speaker, we have the line "&nd your force to break, blow, and b m " Donne desires

&xi to bend his force beçL on himselfso that he, Gd, breaks and bums. Dome's self-

heirrd whicfi arises, in this poem, fiwi the absence of a narcissîstic love with God, enipts

159

in a violence which shatters the boudaries of its intended direction (egainst Donne), to

include the unresponsive end unloMng Gd.

The sonnet describes a fierce love-hate celationship. Donae hates himseif for not

loving God enough, but he also hates God for not loving him enough. In the final image

of rape Donne conrlates the love of the sexuai act with the hatred involveci in physical

violation to project upon G d the ambivalence of his own soul. While he loves and

desires God enough to imagine their union as a mvishment in the sense of being nIled

with ecstasy or delight, he hates and resents him enough to cast bim in the role of violent

rapist

Donne, who desires both to love and be loved with eros, has difficulty in

accepting the Pmtestaat view of the nature of Gd's love as a g i p . It is hard for him to

rralize that he m o t simply substitute God for his M e or mistress and love him in the

way that he loved hem, that his love for God must be a respoase, d e r than an active

courtship. But it is even more diflïcult for him to accept, once he bas taken on the

traditionaily ferninine d e of the kloved, that God's love is not motivated by his own

merit or desirability, as a man's love for a woman is. Dome's difficulties in nlating to

Godk agape result in most of the Holy Sonnets expressing fear d e r than love.

Herbert

Herbert is much more engaged in the process of loving than Donne is. Cntical

attention has nfiecteû this f e tespondhg in àetaii to the trratment of love in The

Temple, partIy as a d t of Rosamonci Twers inauentiai 1959 -y, "George Hakrt

and Cmita," in which she states: "Herbert, Iike ourselves but certainly more delibemtely,

faced a whole set of questions concerneci with love of God in relation to love of self - amore Dei and anmr Jui" (169). Whiie Elizabeth Stambler argues that The Temple

"resembles a volume of cowtly love poetry" (329) with Herbert as the lover who woos

God, Helen Gardner sees Herbert as the one who is wooed:

But, as Pmfcssor Tuve pointed out in a briiliant paper on "George Herbert and Caritas,," if we are going to speak of the religious poems of the seventeenth century as love poems addressed to Gd, they must be tecognized to be love poems of a very curious kind. For, whereas in most love poetry it is the wooer who speaks and pleads with his mistress to ceward his loving service and love him in nturn, here the speaker is not pleading to k loved and protesthg bis own loyaity and service. He is, and hss ken, and knows that he is, and has ken, loved. . . . The seventeenth- cenhiry p e t rmly attempts to foîlow the medieval poas in presenting the love of God dirrctly in the wooing of man's soul. He prefers to present the wooed rather than the wooer; and the wooed is o h celuctant and unwilling and ungracious. (Religion and Literature 183)

Whereas Gardner assumes that most seventeenth-cenbiry religious poems describe a

theocentric agap relationship, 1 argue that many of the most powerful poems by Donne

and Herbert, as well as those by Rossetti and Hopkins, express an anthrocentric eros quite

similar to that found in secuiar love poetry. Richard Strier also draws on Tuve, arguing

that her emphasis on George Herbert's celebration of agape proves the extent of Herbert's

Pmtestantism, and glancing at ambivalence in his commentaty on Herbert's "Confession"

when he e t e s : "Man. . . consîantiy uses his ingeauity to create a place where he can be

happily 'curved in upon himseIf,' fne h m the demmding attentiveaess of God's love"

(33). My approach to Herbert and love is perhaps closest to that of Arnold Stein who

argues that Herbert's poctry illustrates both "a movement away h m love, an effort to

escape" and "a movement toward, aiming to force love" (120). Like Stein, 1 conceaûate

16 1

on Herbert's ambivalence, demomtrating how he expresses both happiness and despair as

the lover of God tbrough eros, both @tude and nscnûnent as the beloved object of

G d s agape.

The love of "The Starre" is pure eros; God does not make any move of love

towards the pet, but exists at a height, at a distance, surrounded by stars, as the supreme

object of desin and admiration. lbat Herbert is writing in the tradition of eros-love is

also signaiîed here by the simdtaneous moves on the part of the speaker towards

aestheticisrn and asceticism. Nygren describes eros as having "a markedly aesthetic

character. It is the beauty of the Divine that attracts the eye of the soul and sets its love in

motion. Hence 'kholding,' 'contemplation,' 'vision,' are important words in the sphere of

Ems" (223). it is ceaainly the beauty of the vision of God's face smounded by stars

which Herbert dwells upon at the beginning of the poem:

Bright spark, shot f'roxn a brighter place, Where beams sunound my Saviours face,

Canst thou k any where So well as there? (1-4)

Herbert's appreciation of the star is decidedly aesthetic in character.

Paradoxically, perhaps, ems is ascetic, as well as aesthetic, in nature. Nygren

declares that "the ethics of Ems tend to be o f an ascetic ciiaracter. Evii lies in the

domiward direction, looking towards the thulgs of sense, while good lies in the upward

direction, towards tbings spuinial," whle for agape, "Sin has nothing essentially to do

with the M y or sensuai nature. Sin is the perversion of the will, ungodliness,

disobedience to ûod; it is man's sekentred nbeliion agahst &xi" (223). Hcrkrt

meais the d c name ofhis love when he asks the star to purge him of sin:

Fkst wïth thy fbwork bum to dust Foîiy, and worse than folly, lust:

Then wiîh thy light refh, And maùe it shine:

So disengag'd from sinne d sicknesse, Touch it with thy celestial quichesse,

That it may hange d move After thy love. (9-1 6)

Whereas agape considers evil to be a matter of the will, Herbert's immersion in the eros-

motif in this poem allows him to cal1 lust (a sin of the body) worse than folly (a sin of the

intellect or spirit). His asceticism is also behind his equation of sin with sickxms, and his

desire to become bodiless in imitation of the star's celestial quickness. He loob upward,

towards the spintual stars with their "triaitie[s] of light, 1 Motion, and kat" (17-1 8),

njecting the matend heaviness of his sinful body.

Yet the f k s of asceticism do not burn away the poet's aesthetic appreciation. He

imagines his adoration of God as a rather serisual dance:

That so among the rra 1 may Glitter, and curk, and winde as they:

That winding is th& f d o n Of adoration. (25-28)

And the poem en& on an image of satiety, satisfition, and sweetness:

S u n thou wilt joy, by gaining me To fly home liice a laden bee

Unto that hive of beams And garland-saeam~. (29-32)

Herbert hes not baaished s e d t y , but translateci it to a higher plane, the usud nsult of

the tension ktween aestheticism and asceticism in eros. Induiging in eros-love is its own

reward in "The Starrr." Hakrt acbieves narcissism simply by revelling in the pleesurr

of his own desire.

"The Glancel' ais0 celebrates Christian missism, but in this poem Herbert plays

the role of the beloved rathet than the lover. He responds to Godls love with delight and

pleasure partly because he has skilhlly incorporated in that love aspects of both eros and

agap. The f h t stanza contains some of the most emtic lin= Herbert ever m t e :

When first thy sweet and gracious eye Vouchsafd ev'n in the midst of youth and night To look upon me, who before did lie

W e b g in sinne; I felt a sugred strange delight,

Passing ail cordials maàe by any art, Bedew, embalme, and ovemanne my heart,

And take it in. (1-8)

Although Herbert's response to God is entirely one of sumnder to God's love, he

describes thet sumnder not as an act of faith and obedience, but as a reaction to erotic

seductioa 1 do not mean to argue that the poem slips over into the eros-motif entirely by

endowhg G d with what Nygren would term downwarâ directed desùe. It is clear that

God "vouchsafes" his glance of his own t h e will, and that Herbert, "weltring in sinne," is

k d l y the object to pmvoke desire in anyone. As Richard Strier says of "The Glance":

"Ibis is agope, unmotivated by its object, and transfonning it" (1 34). But Herkrt's

response is to feel as ifhe has ban looked at with desire. in a way, God tricks hirn into

love.

His enchanted nsponse to Gd's agape allows Herbert to fa1 strong and cenüeâ

in a OatCjssistic love. in the second stanza he describes how "many a bitter storm* (9) and

"mghg griefs"(l15) attack his sense of self. but are vanquished by bis lcnowledge that

W loves bim=

But still thy sweet original1 joy Spmg h m t h e eye, did wodc witbin my soui, And surging griefs, when they gm bold, controll,

And got the day. (13-16)

Because God loves him, he need not shatter under the pressure of his own seLf-destructive

passions. This missism is W y sustahed by the loving look between God and poet,

that wiii blossom from glance to gaze a k r death: "When thou duit look us out of pain"

(21). Looking. like Narcissus, at his divine nflection, or rather having that nflection

look at him, allows Herbert to love himself and feel immune to the Storm and surgiiig

passions which threaten to shatter his psychic unity.

The speaker of "The Dawning" moves, or attempts to move, fiom self'-hate to self-

love by means of God's love for him. The "sad hem" (1) whom Herbert addresses,

&ers h m a nligious melancholy that cm only accept Christ's death, not his

resurrection, like the Knstevan viewer of Holbein's The Dead Christ" (Black Sun 10%

38): "But thou dost still lament, and pine, and crie; / And feel his death, but not his

victone" (7-8). The depressed speaker can only move to joy and hence self-love by

means of a narcissistic relationship with Christ. He must $ive up the security of bis

soiipsistic depressive state, opening himself up to Goci's love: "Unfold thy forehead

gathetd into fiowns" (3), and must look up to gaze upoa Chtist: "Take up t h e eyes,

which feed on earth" (2). rejecting the non-teflective suffie of the earth for the reflecting

fae of ûod (wbt else wouîd he see when he looLs "up" but the risen Christ?). The love

the risen Christ is o f f d g here is cleady agupe; no one would k d such a depressive

person, such a "wet blanlret," desirable in his own right. The nnal image, that of drying

tearfui eyes on Christ's burial cloth, indica~cs the claustrophobia of the narcissistic

relationship the depressed heart seeks with Cbnst:

Anse, luise; And with his buriall-linen chie thw eyes:

Christ left his gravecloths, that we might, when grief Draws tears, ot bloud, not want a haxuikerchief. (13-16)

One "buries" one's face in a handkerchief, an image of docation which is iikely to be

increased if that handkerchief is the size of a shroud. Herbert transforms Jesus into the

narcissistic mother, enveloping her crying child in swaddliag clothes and holding it close

to her breast. Herbert's vision of narcissism in this poem is inextricably entwined with

death.

"Unkindnesse," "Mawm," "Even-song," "Deniall, " and " Longing" are five

examples of poems where Hetbert expresses hostiîity towards God. in the first Herbert

mefully recogdzes his hostility, while in the following two his anger is disguised, even

unconscious, since it arises h m a resentment towards God's love. In "Denid" and

"Longing" Herbert openly repmaches God for not showing him enough love.

"Unkùrdnesse" aclriowîedges the perversity of human nature which makes the

beloved scorn and rrject the lover. Herbert recogiiizes that he treats those fkienâs who

mistxeat him much better than he treats the God who loves him. The final stanza alerts us

to the reason khind Herbert's rejection of Gd:

Yet c m a fiiend what thou hast done W? O write in brasse, M y God p n a tree

His bloud did spill me& to pchase my gd-wi l l .

Yet use 1 not my foes, as 1 use Thee. (21-25)

It is ûecause of, not in spite of, W s sacrifice on his behalf, that Herbert mats God as his

worst enemy. The ogope ofthe cross puts too gmt a burden on him, and his guih and

sense of obiigation result in the opposite of gratitude.

In "Mattens" the hostility towards God's agope lies beneath the surface of the text,

easiiy missed on a nrst reading, and yet undeniably present in the ambiguity of the

language. The first stanza is a prime example of such ambiguity. It appears as if Herbert

is praising the solicitousness of God's love:

I cannot ope mine eyes, But thou art ready then to catch My moming-soui and sacrince:

Then we m u t needs for that day d e a match. (1-4)

And indeed he is thanlâul for this love, but it is a gratitude that co-exists with

exasperation and re~entment.'~ The first two lines could easily be nphrased as "1 can't

even tum amund without falling over you!" while the verb "catch" suggests that God is

the hmter and Herbert his pny. The use of verbs of necessity in "must needs" aiso

suggests that Herbert is compelled, not willing, to have God love him. The tow of the

third stanza is sixnilady ambigwus:

My God, what is a heart, Thst Uiou shouldst it so eye, and wooe, Powring upon it ai i thy art,

As if that thou hadst nothing els to do? (9- 12)

Herbert seems to be running dom b l f here, but impiied in the low valuation of the

human heart is scom for the G d who wants it so much. "Don't you have anything better

l2 Tuve comments upon the pervasiveness of gratitude in The Temple: "gratitude is in these poems the primary constituent of man's love for Gd. It is f8t more ubiquitous than an emphasis upon desire for . . . rest or peace in God, or upon hope of ultimate fidi happiness, or upn mysticai union" ("Herbert and Caritas" 184; Tuve's emphasis). The obligation of being coLIS&Iltly gra!efiil, an obligation laid upon those Protestants who sîressed Goâ's agape, is kely to resuit, in my opinion, in d o n a l moments of weatiness and tesentment.

to do?" Herbert asks, raishg the suspicion that he might be denigmting himselfin an

effort to get God to leave him alme, the way Som people break up with their lovers by

announcing, "YOU are fm too good for me anyway!' Herbert cannot accept Gd's agape,

the disinterested love unmotivated by any worth in its object. And it is clear to him that

Goâ cannot love with eros, since the human heart is so undesirable. in the last stanza

Herbert betrays his desire to love God in a more active, eros-centred way than by

surrendering quietly to Gd's agape:

Teach me thy love to know; That this new light, which now 1 see, May both the work and worlanan show:

Then by a sunne-beam I wili climb to thee. (1 7-20)

Herbert desires to ascend to Godls height and Light just as he does in "The Starre." But as

a good Protestant, aud the author of "The Holdf'" he hows that such climbing is not

for him. He is faced with a love that demands his full sumader, and yet does not allow

him to act on his own initiative, nor flatter his vanity and invest in his narcissism. No

wonder he cannot help a note of ambivalence creeping into his hymn of praise for Gd.

"Even-song" reacts to God's agupe by nuniag the pet's hostility upon himseif.

The h t eight h e s praise God for his gooàness, his agape. The speaker then pmceeds to

ask what return he has made to God, and concludes that his response was wholly

1 rame; but al1 1 brought, was fome. Thy diet, care, and cost

Do end in bubbles, baiis of winde; Of winde to thee whorn I bave crost,

But balls of wiîâe-fk to my troubled d e . (12-16)

Guiit and seKhate cause Herbert to think of himseif as wind and foam, without centre or

solidity. This sense of the self faliing apart and losing al1 coherence briags to mind

Ktisteva's description of ideaibation: "Its Higimess the Ego . . . shatters into pieces and is

engulfed" (Tales 6-7). Herbert's solution to his own inadequacy is to suirrender himself to

Gd's agcpe, as a child sunenders itseif to its mothefs love:

Yet still thou goest on. And now with darknesse closest wearie eyes,

Saying to man, It ddh sifice: Hencejbth repose; your work is done.

Thus in thy ebony box Thou dost inclose us, till the day Put our amendment in our way,

And give new wheels to our disordefd clocks.

1 muse, which shows mon love, The &y or night: that is the gaie, this th'harbow,

That is the waik, and this the arbour; Or that the garden, this the grove.

My God, thou art al1 love Not one poore minute scapes thy breast, But brings a favour h m above;

And in this love, more then in bed, I rest. (1 7-32)

Herbert successfuliy makes the move h m ideaiization to narcissism. He leams to "rest"

in God's love. But for once 1 disagcee with Helen Vendler who argues, "Like al1 the

greatest of Herbert's late poems, rEven-song'l is a poem of final selfacceptance" (161).

The imagery associated with this narcissistic self-ecceptance suggests that all may not be

weli. When ûod aims mothaly he (or she, rather) "closest wearie eyes," and "incloses"

the poet and 0th- in his "ebony box" of night, gathering the poet's fragmented self and

pulling him in tight and d e into an enclosed space. That "box" is Like both the womb, or

breast, of the motha, and like a ~offin.'~ This ünlMg of the mothds embrace with death

ncal ls h m ' s "Hymne to Christ at the author's last going into Germa~ly," a poem 1

discussed in chapter two.

God's love therefore incites the poet first to idealization and self-hate and then to

narcissism and seElove. But tltl~:issism, associateci with the ferninine in both Freud and

Kristeva, takes its name h m the young maa who dieâ from loving himseîf too much.

The missistic mother and child relationship cm be srnothering and annihilating,

accorâing to Kristeva: "The jubilatory vaiiishing of identity at the hemt of a nostaigic love

for a matemal embrace is nevertheless felt by the adult as a loss, even as a mortai danger"

(Tales 223). Herbert's imagery unconsciously suggests that givhg into God's agape cm

resuit in the death of the self.

Herbert writes many pocms in which his fiustrated eros-love results in hostility

towards God, himself. or both. Rosamond Tuve is s d y wrong when she says that

"Herbert is so entirely convinced and aware of a bwndless love received nom the one he

loves that this is a datuna in the most unhappy, the most tormented of poems" (178).

Unhappy and tormented poems in which Herbert does not seem convinced of W s love

include: "Deniall," "Lmging," "Aflfliction O,'' "The Search," "Sighs and Grones," and

l3 Gene Veith places "Even-song" in its Reformation context by stressing the Luthem concept of d g in God that lies behind it: "Luther distinguishes between 'active righteomess,' that of the Iaw, ad 'passive righteousness,' in wbich the kliever simply aiiows Christ to work in h i . . 'Resting in Cbnst' is difficult, since the seifperversely insists upon law, d e h g to k justifieci thugh its own efforts, bearing its own gdt" (Refomtion SpirituaIiîy 77). The difEcullty of achieving such a passivity, when activity is so much more amactive, muid k liLened to a spintual death, a derith to the old sinful selt

"Affliction (IV)." 1 shall only look at the first two of these.

"Deniall" moives around eros-love and its firustrations. Herbert desperately tries

to reach a God who is either indifferent, absent, or both. Herbert does al1 the work and al1

the suffering. nie first stanza, for example, shows him huniog to the imagery of miiitary

aggression in an effort to take God by stonn:

When my devotions couid not pierce Thy silent m a ;

Then was my heart broken, as was my verse: My breast was full of fears

And disorder. (1 -5)

The result of God's silence kfon Herbert's desire is an idealizing love on Herbert's part.

He falls completely to pieces:

My bent thoughts, like a brittie bow, Did flie asunder:

Each took his way; some would to pleasures go, Some to the warres a d thunder

Of alamis. (6-1 0)

And Herbert pointa out that it is not just his ego that is shattereâ, but his language, his

poetry: "Then was my heart broken, as was my verse" (3). He caanot make his lines

rhyme. In Black Sun, Kristeva considers the difficulty depceased people have in using

language, describing depression in ternis that exactiy appmximate the sentiments

The iinguistic signifier, which was a seeming, is then swept away by the dishirbances Iike a sea waii by ocean breakers. . . . My &es affect is the dtimate yet mute witness to my having, in spite of ali, lost the archiac Thing of omnipotent ascendancy. Tbat sadness is the finai nIta of aggressiveness, the llivcisaistic tesimint of a haîmi t h is unacknow1edged. . . . (64; fisteva's emphasis)

Herbert's hatred of Ood is ~~~~~~!knowledged, resdting in his sadness and the coilapae of

his verse (ünpuistic sigdiers). Herbert anis his hatred towards God into self-pity, a

fonn of narcissistic sadness:

As good go any where, îhey say, As to benumme

Both knees and heart, in cryiag ni@ and day, Corne, corne, my Go4 O corne,

But no hearing. (1 1 - 15)

This assertion of his own righteousness is followed by an indignant attack on Gd's

O that thou shouidst give dust a tongue To crie to thee,

And then not heam it crying! (16-1 8)

We begin to get the sense that maybe this perverse God is not worth al1 this love and

Herbert's sense that he is not loved with eros results in the imagery of semial

impotence in the fifth stariza:

Therefon my sou1 lay out of sight, Untuntd, uiismuig:

My feeble spirit, unable to look right, Like a nipt blossome, hung

Discoateoted. (2 1 -25)

Like the Petrarchan lady, God withholds his favours, ref'ushg to grant Herbextts requests.

Like the Petrarchan lover, Herbert seems much more lovhg, and more worthy of king

loveâ, tban the object of his desire.

Eros faüs Herbert again in "Longing," which begins with the image of the

despcratc poet looking up to God for help that never arrives:

With sick and Wsht eyes, With doubling knees ead bones,

To thee my cries, To thee my grones,

To thee my sighs, my tears ascend: No end? (1-6)

Herkrt's tears ascend in the way of eros* but he is unable to ascend with them, to reach

his goal. And no love descends h m God in the way of agape. Herbert tries to force

God hto engaghg in a narcissistic nlationship with the pet by playhg the rnother and

child card again:

From thee aii pitie flows, Mothers are kinde, because thou art,

And dost dispose To hem a part:

Their infants, îhem; and they suck thee More fne. (13-18)

God refuses to induige Herbert in this way, provoking a reai outburst of undisguised hate

on the pet's part:

Thou taniest, while 1 die, And ni11 to nothing, thou dost reigne,

And d e on hi@, While 1 remah

in bitter grief: yet am 1 stil'd Thy childe. (55-60)

God's negiect of his child is certainly met with bittemess. This hate results in part h m

the idealiPng love of the poet whicb is signalleci by his description of himself as

fragmented and abject:

Behold, thy dust doth stirre* It moves, it creeps, it aims at thce:

Wiit thou defm To succour me,

Thy piie of dust, wherein each c m m e Sayes, Come? (37-42)

Lod JESU, hem my heart, Which hath been brdren now so long,

That ev'ry part Hath got a tongue!

Thy beggars gmw; rid them away TO day. (73-78)

Herbert's reliance on eros leads him into idealization, bitter anger at God (note the

slightly threatening tone of "Behold, thy dust doth stirre, / It moves, it creeps, it aims at

thee" (37.38)). and total scom for himseLf. Diana Benet points out how the poet's

unrequited love results in a "sense of incoherence," a fragmentation that recalls Kristeva's

description of idealization: "Literally, his center does not hold: eyes, knees, bones, h e m

soui, and other members break their silence to pmclaim their individual agony" (55). The

poem ends on a more psimistic note than "Denidi" which seems to corne to some sort

of peace with the final hopefbl vision that God will respond:

That so thy favours granting my request, They and my minde may chime,

And mend my ryme. (28-30).

The nnal plea of "Longing," by conhast, tevolves around a much less optimistic rhyme:

Pluck out thy dari, And heal my troublecl bceast which cryes,

Which d y ~ . (82-84)

If "Deaiail" ends on a rhyme, "Longing" ends with a death. Herbert's bitter cornplaint

agairist God bas to wait d the first Line of the followhg poem, "Away despair! my

gracious Lord doth hem" ("The Bq"), for any mponse. "Longhg," considered es an

autonomous text, is one of the darkest indictments against G d in The Temple.

While Herbert is catainy more cornfortable than Donne in king the object of

God's agape, his ûeatment of the love between God anâ the sou1 is not nstricted to this

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one position, as it perhaps shouid have been were he the strict Luthem-Calvinist

Protestant that some mitics have d e d bim.14 Maci, Herbert explores his experiences

of both lowig and behg loved, of both agup and eros, of both love and hate.

Rossetti

Rossetti is decidedly happier when she figures the relationsbip between herself

and God as one of eros. The petvasive presence of The Song of Solomon in her religious

l*cs test@ to her desire to figure her relationship with God in the ternis not only of

eros, but of the erotic. Ifshe f'ls God fails her in his relationship as lover, a repressed

hatred is the cesuit. While the poems which express Gd's eros also express blissful

happuiess, her reactions to Gd's agape are more ambivaient, resulting in both love and

hate.

Rossetti's short lyric, "Lord, what have 1 that 1 may offer Thee?" (II 192-93), and

her "Advent Sundayt' (II 21 1-21) both dramatize the Christian's reahtion that she can

love heiself because G d loves ber. In the fïrst poem, Gd's love is clearly agap, since

Rossetti stresses her inadquacies as an object of desire:

Lord, what have 1 that 1 may offer Thee? Look, Lord, I pray The, and seel-

What is it thou hast got? Nay, child, what is it thou hast not?

l4 A. D. NuW is one of those who stress Herbert's Calvinism, but his hypothesis that "The great suppression ofmoral hostility to Ood u&r Caivinism may have been far mon violent psychidy, than the nineteenth-centwy suppression of s e d t y charted by Freud" (91) pmvides one way of rewncilhg the Ptotestantism ofboth Donne and Herbert with their ambivalence t o d ûod's agape.

Thou hast di g i h that 1 have given to thee: off i them al1 to Me, The great ones md the small, 1 di accept them one and all.-

1 have a will, good Lord, but it is m d ; A heart both crushed and hard: Not such as these the gift Cleaa-banded lovely saints uplik-

Nay, chiid, but wih thou judge for Me? 1 crave not thine, but the.-

Ah, Lod, Who lovest me! Such as 1 have now give 1 Thee.

The poem is very similar to Herbert's "Dialogue," but with a more positive, less

ambiguous ending. Rossetti is ûuly accepting and happy, not broken hearted üke

Herbert, at Gd's insistent love for hedS Throughout the poem she protests that she has

nothing to offer God except "a heart both crushed and hard" (10). She can only conceive

of being the object of an eros-love, one based on the desirability of the object. And since

she hows she has nothing that could attract Gd's desire, she biows she cannot be

Iovable. But God tells Rossetti that his love mukes her lovable: "Thou hast aiI the gifts

that 1 have given to thee" (5). By accepting her statu as a wotthiess object made worthy

of God's love by God's love, Rossetti simuitaneously tums her back on vanity and pride,

and d o w s herself to k lovecl, thus entering into aercissism. "Such as 1 have now give 1

the" (16), she declmes, accepting her low value in the objective scaie of tbings ("such as

lS Herbert's "Dialogue" ends with the lines: Iluir as 1 didfieeijpwt With my glorie rad desert Lefi an joyes to@el al1 smmt-

Ah! no more: thou breaks't my heart. (29-32)

I haven), aad yet knowing that the gift of herselfwüi be welcorne to God.

Where "Lod, what have I that 1 may offer thee?" dwells on divine agupe, "Advent

Sunday" (II 2 1 1-1 2) celebrates Gd's eros:

Behold, the Bridegroom cometh: go ye out With lighted lamps and garlands round about To meet Him in a rapture with a shout.

It may be at the midnight, black as pitch, Earth shall cast up her poor, cast up her rich.

It may be at the crowing of the cock Earth shall upheave her depth, uproot her rock.

For 10, the Bridegroom fetcheth home the Bride: His Han& are Haads she hiows, she hiows His Side.

Like pure Rebekah at the appointed place, Veiled, she unveils her face to meet His Face.

Like great Queen Esther in her triumphiag, She triumphs in the Rtsence of her King.

His Eyes are as a Dovers, and she's Dove-eyed; He kwws His lovely murOr, sister, Bride.

He speaks with Dove-voice of exceeding love, And she with love-voice of an m e r i n g Dove.

Behold, the Bridegroom cometh: go we out With lamps ablaze and garlands round about To meet HUn in a raphin with a shout.

The poem is inspimi, Iike so much of Rossetti's religious poaiy, by the Song of

Solomon, a text which Knsteva posits as profoundly namissistic: "The hymn of love at

once confesses its source, its object, and its addressee-Solomon the king, at the same

t h e author and loved one, is also the one to whom the text is addrrsscd" (Taies 88). The

narcissism of "Advent Suiday" maLes its appe8f811ce at ünes 8-9: "For 10, the

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Bridegtoom faheth home the Bride: 1 His Hamis are Han& she knows, she hows His

Side." Tbc bride-soul knows the Christ-bridegroom's han& and si& not only in the sew

of suvoir, knowing them as a fact revealed in scripture, but also in the sense of connaître,

recognizing them as objects she has always k e n aware of? This f d a r i t y resuits fiom

the mimring reiationsbip between Chnst anci soul. The bride m i l s slowly, as in a

"recognition scene" h m drama:

Like pure Rebekah at the appointed place, Veiled, she unveils her face to meet His Face.

Like great Queen Esther in her ûiumphing, She trîumphs in the Presence of her King. (10-13)

The recognition ktween the two is the recognition of one's own dection: "His Eyes are

as a Dove's, and she's Dove-eyed; I He knows His lovely m h r , sister, Bride" (14-1 5).

To emphasize the rnirror celationship, Rossetti uses the rbrical device of chiasmus in

lines 14-17. Christ is unmistakeably Narcissus hm: not ody does he gaze lovingly at a

b r i d e - h r (mirrot-bride), he also speaks to an Echo, the "love-voice of an answering

Dove." Rossetti takes Christ's nercissism as a justification for the soul's self-love. The

poem celebrates the soul's eros-love for God, Gd's eros-love for t&e soul, and the

narcissism of both. God cleady functions in this poem as the subject's idcal nflection.

Being the subject of God's eros allows for a self-love of an ecstatic, auto-erotic nahue.

Rossetti gazes at haself @g at herself with delight. There are more mirrocs in

"Advent Sunday" thaa she coiisciously intended to mate.

I6 Rossetti might also have intended the sense of camai knowledge. The bride "laiows" the bndegrwrn in the Biblicai sense.

From three poems celebrating love, 1 now hini to three poems which express hate.

"Out of the Decpn (III 285) shows Rossetti responding to God's agape with self-hatred.

The octave of this sonnet is given over to blaming God for king absent, for making the

speaker feel alone and doved:

Have me- Thou my Gd; mercy, my Gd: For I can hardly bear life day by day: Be 1 here or the= 1 fret myself away:

Lo for Thy staff1 have but felt Thy rod Along this tedious desert path long trod.

When will Thy judgement judge me, Yea or Nay? 1 pray for grace; but then my sins unpmy

My prayer: on holy ground 1 fool stand shod. (1-8)

But the sestet reveals that it is not Gd's love that is wanting a f i all, but the poet's:

While still Thou hauntstt me, faint upon the cross, A sorrow beyond sorrow in Thy look,

Unutterable mving for my soul. Al1 f a i m Thou, Lord: 1, not Thou, forsook

Myself; 1 traitor slmk back h m the goal: Lord, 1 repent; help Thou my helpless loss. (9-14)

The movement of the sonnet is the exact opposite of Donne's "As due by many titles." He

b e g b with a loving and &maadhg God, admits he beûayed himself, then suddenfy

accuses God of leaving bim at the mercy of the enemy. Rossetti begias by accushg God

of haWig no mercy upon her, kfore admitting that it mis she who "forsook I Myself."

aad shrinking ôefore the agape God offers her. This agupe is a burden of guüt upon her.

The words "haunts'tt' and " m . g " are m l y weightecî somewhat negatively in the

stanza, suggestiag the reluctsulce of the poet to surrenda herselfto this demanding love.

She canwt expiate her guilt by matching Ood's love for her. Not ody a n she not love

him as much as he loves hr; she cannot even love herser as much as he loves her: "1, not

179

Thou, f o m k / Myseif; I traitor slmk back h m the goal." Her love for G d is clearly

iâeaiization: she measuns her love against his, finds her own wanting, and experiences a

shanaing of ber ego, expresseci in the lines "1 k t myself away" and "1 pray for grace; but

then my sins unpray I My prayer."

If Rossetti tesponds to Gd's ems with love and his agapre with self-hatred, she

nsponâs to his apparent lack of love for her with hatred of him. But since she cannot

express her hostility to God openiy, the most powerfid instances of ber resentment appear

disguised in the form of ber apparently secuiar narrative poems, Goblin Market and The

Prince's Progress, mther than in her devotionai lyrics. In both these poems Rossetti

constnicts an seemingly clear Christian allegory, which is underlaid by a subversion of

the Christian story.

Goblin Mike t has, since its publication, been nad as an allegory of the fa11 and

redemption of humanity. Several critics have seen Lizzie as a female Christ, and have

often gone on to interpret her gender as part of a feminist agenda on Rosseni's part.

Marian Shalkhauser, writing in 1956, identifies Lizpe as Christ and Laura as "Adam-Eve

and consequentiy al1 of sinful mankind" (19), concluding her brief study with the

statement that Rossetti created "a Christian fairy taie in which a femhine Christ redeems

a ferninine mankind h m a masculine Satan" (20). Sbalkhauser does not explicitly draw

a femlliist moral here, but Sylvia Bailey Shurbutt, who d e s reference to Shaikhauser's

reaâing, does: "there appeers within the wodr a conscious effort to tum bibücal and

Miltonic myth with its misoeynistic intent, into hmic afnnnation of the female, Christ-

Iüû principk of lovhg sekacrifice and mative sehsiertion through rebirth or

180

resucfection" (41). Otha critics who see LWe as a fernale Christ include Angela

Leighton, who nads the poem as a "nligious allegory, of a tempted Eve who becomes a

saintly Christ" (138), and Lirda H. Peterson wbo nads the poem in tems of typology:

"Although Rossetti's tale may not teproduce typology strictly, ber poem does o p t e

within-and extend-a mgaiZable typologid mode in that an individuel woman

niterates, through a selfkss act of sacrince, Christ's life. Lizzie becomes a correlative

type, in Barbata Lewalski's tenninology, as she repeats Christ's sacrifice. . . . Rossetti

does not introduce a male figure to save Laura" (2 19-20). In their concentration upon

Lizziers femaieness, these critics join others who see the poem as a feminist celebration of

sisterhood.

I klieve that the focus on Lizzie as female obscures the fact that she is, fht and

foremost, humaa. It is not the fut that she is a female Christ-figure that is audacious, but

the fact that she is a human one. I suggest that Lizzie represents Adam rather than Christ,

and that Goblin Market is a blasphemous rewriting of the Genesis myth, one which

presents humenity saving itseif, without need of Goâ. To mat Shalkhauser's formula,

then, 1 nad Goblin Mwkt as an atheist faUy-tale in which a humen Adam (Lizzie)

redeems a human Eve (Laura), without the aid of God, and 1 believe that Rossetti wrote it

as a submerged, perhaps uncoascious, act of hostility and anger towards a God that she

felt did not love hm.

The key to my reading is a focus on Goblin kfmket as a retelling of Paradise Lost

rather thaa of Genesis. Most critics, in focussing on the Bible, have neglected to see how

closely Rossetti folows Milton and how radidy she dcpeits h m him. Gilbert and

Gubar refer to only one scene of Pmadise Losf, that of Eve's eating of the apple in Book

iX (56748). Shurbutt d a s draw some parailels, but aot in any depth. D. M. R Bentley

is far more intensive in malang wmections between the two tats, and in f a identifies

the key aspect of Pmdise Lost which Rossetti tewrites: "As Lizzie watches Laura's

spirituai and physicai deciine, her sympathy for her sister prompts her to consider sharing

ber sony plight (U. 299-301), a road that, if taken, would have seen her following in

Adam's fwtsteps d e r the fall of Eve, and, in effect, letting dl go by placing human love

above spiritual duty" (73). Lizzie's refusal to fall with her sister, in the way that Adam

fdls in more ways than one, for Eve, is t&e most important moment in Rossetti's

rewriting of Puradise LON. In effect, Rossetti leaves G d no role in the redemption of

hummity; k celebration of human love hides a rejection of divine love.

That Rossetti had ponded on the possibility of A h refwing to accompiuiy Eve

into sin is shown in her poem "Eve" (1 156-58), in which the forlorn rnother of mankind

bernoans her husband's fate:

Hadst thou but said me nay, Adam, my brodier, I might have pined away; 1, but none other: G d might have let thee stay Safe in our garden, By putting rne away Beyond all pardon. (1 8-25)

This poem, composed some five and a half years a f k Goblin M i k t , transforms Adam

and Eve iato siblings, just as the earlicr poem does, with the difference that Lipie and

Lam are sisters, Adam and Eve brother aad sister. L e e cepresents Adam nonetheies,

departing h m him only in saying %yn ta Laura, as can k seen fiom a reading of the

poem that tefers in depth to Pmodise L o d 7

The poem begins with the sistem facing temptation together, but separates them

almost immediately. buta's fdwe to accompany Lizzie out of the glen at twiiight

echoes Eve's dl-fated decision to wander away fiom Adam in Book IX of Pmadise Lost.

As Adam says (and as any twentieth-century viewer of h o m films knows), bad things

happe11 when people split up: "But other doubt possesses me, least hami / Befall thee

sever'd from me" (25 1-52), Or as Sean Grass put. it, the separation of the sisters is "a

situation that we feel inevitably leads to Laura's fdl" (364), just as, 1 would argue, we feel

the inevitability of Eve's fall in her separation h m Adam.

At this point in the poem the goblins are described:

One had a cat's face, One whisked a tail, One tramped at a rat's pace, One crawled Like a mail, One Lüce a wombat pmwled obtuse and furry, One like a ratel twnbled hurry slnrrry. (7 1-76)

Shurbutt compara the goblins to "Milton's serpent before king cursed by [Gd] to

slither forever legkss," (41), but to me they bring to mind both the animals who appear

"frisking" (340) before Adam and Eve in Book lV, (also, incidentally, in the evening, and

beside a stnam):

Sporting the Lion mpd, and in his paw . Dand'd the Kid; Bean, Tygers, Ounces, Pards

ûambold before them, th'unweildy Elephant To make them mirth us'd all his might, and wmthd Hh Lithe Roboscis; (34347)

" Bentley aiso points to "Eve," commenthg thet "it is tempting to see in both Eve' and Goblin M i k t a residue of the Romantic penchant for writing Milton" (73, n. 35).

183

an& much more sigxiflcantly, the muitifarious society of devils in Hell, as they appear in

Book X a collection of ciiffiment sariles and serpents, writhing and tumbling in what

drieadfiil was the din Of hissing through the Hall, thick swarmiag now With complicateâ monsters, head and taile, Scorpion and Asp, and Amphisbana din, Cerastes homd, Hy&, and EIIops char, And Dipsm. . . . (521-26)

The g o b h , then, d the Edeaic animals in their comic, endearing qudity, and in theu

variety, while resembling the devils in the way their physicd gmtesqueness minors their

evil natures.

Lizzie eats the fniit offerrd by the goblins as Eve eats the f i t offered by Satan,

and falls into despair. Jerome J. McGann, and Sean Grass after him, attempt to nject the

d g of the poem as a Christian aüegory by arguing that after eating the fiuit Lizzie

does not immediately suffi any evil coasequences. McGaan asks us to 'Notice how

tenderly Lam and Lizzie are presented together after Lam's 'fall'" ("Christina Rossetti's

Poems" 249); while Grass states that: "The experience of eeting the goblin fniit and the

results of tbet expdnce mark the poem's most significant depamire h m the Genesis

story, for Laina does not Unmediately Suna any coasequences for her transgtession.

Unlike Adam and Eve, Laura is not overburdened with either a feehg of guilt . . . or a

howledge that she has done eMI" (369). The poem may depart hm Genesis at this

point, but it most catainly does not depart from Milton Adam and Eve, afkr eathg the

f i t in Book K, d e r no immediate guilt, but instead maire love, after which tbey f d

Ha hand he seis'd, and to a shadie bank, Thick overhead with verdant roof imbowtd He I d her nothing loath; F l o u were the Couch, Pansies, and Violets, and Asphodel, And Hyacinth, Earths hshest softest lap. There they thir fil1 of Love and Loves disport Took largely, of thir mutual guilt the Seale, The solece of thir sin, till dewie sleep Oppress'd hem, wearïed with thir amornus play. (1 03 7-45)

Milton, in spi& of stnssing the sin involved in this lovemaking, nevertheiess empbasizes

the pleasure of it, among al1 the lovely flowers. It is only after they wake, as it is only

atter Lam awakes h m her innocent sleep with her sister, that they feel oppressed by the

sense of sin:

Soon as the force of that fdlacioy Fdt , That with exhiierating vapour bland About thir spirits had plaid, and inmost powen Made erre, was now exhaltd, and grosser slaep Breû of unkindly fumes, with consious cirems Encumberd, now had left them, up they rose As h m uncest. . . . (1046-52)

Whni Laura d e s , she too is encumbered with "conscious dreams":

Early in the momhg When the fht cock mwed his waming, Neat like bees, as sweet ami busy, Laura rose with Lizzie: Fetched in honey, milkeâ the cows, Aïmi aad set to rights the house, Kneaded d e s of whitest wheat, Cakes for dainty mouths to eat, Next chmed butter, whipped up cmm, Fed kir poulûy, sat and se&, Talked as modtst maidens shodd: Lizzie with an open heart, Lam in an absent Qeam, One content, one sick in part; One warbling for the mere bright day's delight,

One Longhg for the night. (1 99-2 14)"

Both Adam and Lizzie have to face the fdl of their beloveds, but Rossetti departs

fiom Milton's epic, by maLing Lizzie refuse the f i t and try to redeem Laura, a quest in

which she triumphantly succeeds. On rehuning h m the goblins, Lizzie calls to het sister

in the notorious passage:

She cried "Lam," up the garden, "Did you miss me? Corne and kiss me. Never mhd my bruises, Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices Squeezed h m goblh Mts for you, Goblin puip and goblin dew. Eat me, drinL me, love me; Laura, make rnuch of me: For your sake 1 have braved the glen And had to do with goblin merchant men." (464-74)

The eroticism of these lines has been much commented upon, of course, but no one has

compared îhem to the passage in Paradise Lost where Adam invites Eve to make love

aAer eating the f i t :

Eve, now 1 see thou art exact of taste, And elegant, of Sapience no d l part, Since to each meanhg savour we apply, And Palate cali judicious; I the praise Yeild thce, so well this day thou has putvey'd. Much pleasure we have 10% while we abstain'd From this delightfki Fruit, nor known tili now True relish, tasting; if such pleasure be In things to us forbidden, it might be wish'd, For this one Tree had bin forbidâen ten. But corne, so well refksht, aow let us play, As meet is, a f k such delicious F m ;

IL This passage dso echoes Eve's dfeam in Book V, in which Satan tells her ail about the glories of the ni@, the "pleasant h e m (38-47).

For never did thy Beautie since the day 1 saw thee fitst and wedded the, adomld With al1 perfoctons, so enfiame my sense With d o t to enjoy thee, f h r now Than ever, bountie of this vertuous Tree. (IX 1017-1033)

Both couples embraee and lass with lips still moist h m the juice of forbidden f i t . The

wo passages are therefoce linked by the equation of fhit with physical embraces, but

differ in that Rossetti's etoticism is in the service of redemption, Milton's of the Fall.

The clear echoes of Milton in Rossetti's poem strongîy suggest that she meant

LiPie to represent Adam rather than Christ. Why, then, did she make ber Adam femaie?

She codd have had a bmther-sister pair enacting the h a of Goblin Mmket, but

decided against it, for, 1 klieve, two important reasons. The first is that by having a

brother save a sister, she wodd be making her Godless retelling of Milton and ûenesis

too obvious. The second is that she wished to avoid the complications of sexual love

between male and femaie that Milton so vividly brought into play, choosing instead to

symboüzc humanity's redemption of itself through a non-sexd and universal love. Thus

she rewrites the failen sexuai Liaison between Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost as a

physical, but non-sexual, embrace between sisters at the moment of redemption. Where

Adam falls through eros, Lizzie redeems through agape.

It is Uoaic ihat Rossetti, writing within a culnnal milieu which did not consciously

recognize lesbien s e d t y , is now read as expressing lesbian eroticism in this scene. To

her, it must have seemed that the k t that she has two sistcis embcacing automaticaiiy

precluded any hint of eroticism h m the physical expression of love. Jerome McGann

senses Rossetti's intentions when he writes that "the scene introduces a negative

1 87

fulfilment into the work: L a m is ieleased h m the speli of erotic illusions . . . For

passion and eiotics are substituted feeling aiad sympathy, and for men are substituted

women and children, the 'Me' ones of the eaah" (249-250). Whiie Milton makes

Adam's sexuel love for his wife humanity's d o d i , Rossetti tums Lizzie's non-semal

love for her sister into hiimruiity's redemption.

McGann argues against a Christian meanhg for Goblin Murkt by pointing out

that Rossetti never pl& it among her "Devotional Poems" ("Christina Rossetti's Poems"

25 l), but i f 1 am right in my ceacüng, she obviously wished to disguise het radiai

rewriting of Milton in which the first Adam makes the second Adam obsolete and

uonecessery. Dorothy Mermin, like McGann, reads the poem as a feminist celebration:

"it is not a poem of bitter npression but rather a fmtasy of feminine &dom, heroism,

and self-sufficiency and a celebration of sistetly and maternai love" (108), an assesment

with which 1 would have to disagree. Goblin Market is indeed a poem of bitter

npression, but what is repressed is not sexual desire but anger and doubt towards a God

who is not responsive to Rossetti's spintual deside Goblin M ù r k is a fmtasy, but of

human, d e r than feminine, fmdom, heroism, and self-sufiiciency.

Rossetti's resentment towards the God who neglects her is even more marked in

Tiie Prince's Progress. Critics have had a good deal more trouble relating this poem to

Christian degory diaa they have had wîth Goblin Market. As Dawa Henwood says in

l9 Mennin herseif notes îhat "As in much of Rossetti's poetry and that of others in the Re-Rephaelite chle, desire here has no end or final object" (108). Desire without an object, Rossetti would argue as a Christian, is dtsirr that bas not yet reaüzed its a e n t is in the divine. The fke-floating, objectless desin of Goblin M i k e t is Rossetti's own desire fot God*

188

h a ment anaiysis of the poem, it is "a text in which it is surprisingly difljcult to gain a

critical fmtholdt' (87). As Henwood argues, the poem taLes a f d a t Christian degory,

that of Christ as the bridegroom to the soul, and distorts it out of dl recognition. The

poem does not allow us to nad either the Prince as Christ and the RUicess as the soul, or

the Prince as the soui joumeying to the Princess es Christ, while at the same t h e

irresistibly suggesting both of these interpretations. My reading of the poem is that

Rossetti employs a slippery and inconsistent allegory in order to disguise a suppressed,

p e r h q repnssed, anger at the divine bridegroom, Christ, who has not corne for her.

The Prince's Progress rewrites nie Song of Sol~rnon:~ a source that Rossetti

rem to often in her devotional Lyrics, casting Christ as the Bridegroom and herself as

the Bride, in an ecstatic vision of the love she hobs to experience with God a f k death. 1

have already examined two ofthese poems, "Thou, Goâ, seest me" in chapter two, and

"Advent Sunday" above.

"Advent Sundayn (date of composition unknown), contains many sirnilarities, in

f a to The Prince's Progress. The almost identical nrst and last starizas of the poem

describe the Bride's attendants (who, with their "lighted lamps" recall the ten wise

virgins), going out to greet the Bridegroom with a shout of joy:

Behold, the Bridegroom cometh: go ye out With Lighted lamps aad gatlands roumi about To meet Him in a rapture with a &out. (1-3)

These attendants are mirrored negatively by the Bride's women in The P r i m ' s Progress

2o Mary Arsarau identifies in some detail these Biblicai echoes, stresshg the irony in Rossetti's use of the dusions in her article, "Pilgrimage and Postponement: Cbristina Rossetti's The Prince's Ptogress" (1994).

who go out to meet the Bridegroom with nproaches rather t b rapture. The Bride of

"Advent Sunday" is ôoth veiied and royal, like the Priacess:

Like pure Rebakah at the appointed piace, Veil& she unveits her face to meet His Face.

Like Great Queen Esther in her triurnphiq, She ûiumphs in the presence of her King. (10-13)

These lines echo the stama in me Prince's Progress in which the union of the two

Fling the golden portals wide, The Bridegroom comes to his promiseci Bride, Draw the gold-stiff curtains aside,

Let them look on each OMS fwe, She in her meekness, he in his pride-

Day wears apace. (463-68)

The difference in the poaas is that one marriage is co~l~ummateà, the other is not. One is

a poem of joy, the other of despair. They are both, however, very personal poems, in that

Rossetti identifies her soul with the Bride in each case. Whereas "Advent Sunday"

celebrates God's eros-love for her, The Prince's Progress castigates bis failure to desire

Critics have of course noticed that the Prince is identified with the tradition of

Christ as bridegroom, but few of them have known what to do with this discomforting

f-. Linda PetCrson comrnents thet "At the beginning of the poem, Rossetti surrounds

the Prince with so many bibiid types and dusions that he seems-though only sams-to

k a Christ figure" (220). Peterson does not adanpt to explain why Rossetti shouid set

the Prince up as a Christ fi- ami then maùe him so waeMy inadeqyate to fiii that role,

except to say that Rossetti's use of negative typology saves to undercut "petriarcha1

8ssumptions that male fi- are the heroes" (220). but Rossetti is M y Uely to lump

Christ in with the genetic figure of the male hem. Nor is she Mcely to k absentminded in

identifjhg the Prince with Christ and then somehow forgetthg that she ha9 done so. She

is more likely to be blesphemous than careless. Henwood argues that both the Prince and

the Riacess shade in and out of representing Christ: "the poemts basic plot

simultaneously invokes and distorts the Biblicai myth of Chnds apocalyptic remion with

his cherished Bride, the Church" (87); "The Princess appears to embody, on one level, a

female representation of Christ, the patient, grieving lover of the pilgrim soul" (88). At

the same tirne, however, both figures dso cepment the Christian souk "Thus it seems

that both the Rince and the Prllicess are misguideci seekers who represent two different

attitudes towards the Chnstiau CNX of worldiy experieacel' (91):' Jorn Rees also sees

the two characters as representing different aspects of the human sod: " What the poem

gives us . . . is a picture of two kinàs of spiritual testing side by side: one test consists of a

call to effort and the test is faüed; one is a call to suppress normal human yearning and to

*' Henwood's reading of the Princess as morally compromised by the text sptings pady h m her assumption that the Bride represents the Church. Natgaret Johnson also identifies the Bride as the Chutch:

the hem is Christ, cornin$ to daim his bride the church. Fmm this latter peffpective, what would otheIWise be littie more than a moral tale becomes instead a critique of the apocaiyptic myths concerning the second comhg, and a criticism of Christ's dilato~ess in human time . . . the implications of such a reading appear to p against the tenor ofRossettils belief. (1 09-1 0)

But the Song of Solomon has k e n traditiody ceaâ two diffèrent ways: in one, the Bride symbolizes the Chuch, but in the otha she represents the individuai soul, and it is cleariy the second tradition that Rossetti mites h m in hm devotiond lyrics. Thr Priicee's hogress is not a criticism of a ldcewann Angiicaa Church which neglects its duty to actively seelt God, but a h d e l t description of Rossetti's omi feelings of spirituai bartenness and heIp1essness as she patiently awaits Goâ's grace.

iive and die in hd-won patience'' (69). While 1 agree with Henwood that both figures

move k m divine to human des , 1 cannot find in her account a convincing expianation

of why Rossetti would be so impiow, or careless, as to allow the Rince to suggest C M n

so strongiy, and yet fd so miserably to measun up to him. My explanation of the

Rince's disturbuig failwe to fulfil bis d e as Christ is that Rossetti was angry at God,

seeing herselfas the patient, Mering Ruicess, whom he does not arrive to m u e , and

that her anger and resentment led her into disguised bla~phemy.~

One perallel between the Prince and Christ which has not been noticed, probably

because it is so blasphemous, is the way in which the Prince's quest mirrom Christ's

temptation in the wildemess. Both Christ and the Prince tmdergo three ternptations.

Christ resists al three, whiie his distorthg mirror, the Rince, succumbs each tirne. For

each, the f'ht temptation involves sustenance. Jesus fasts "forty days and forty nights"

(Matt 4:2) before the devil tempts him with bmd, a temptation he refuses. The Prince,

on the other hand, has "journeyed at least a mile" (59) kfore he accepts a drink of mik

h m tbe milimaid, who is clearly the devil in disguise, as intirnateci by both the apple

tree she 1011s beneath, and the "shining serpent-coils" of het hair in which she ensnares the

Prince.

* Here 1 depart very fat h m Henwood who reads Rossetti's description of the Prince as indulgent and gentle: 'The nartator's tendmcy to treat the Riace's character 6th playfiil irony does not in any way excuse bis failings, but it dœs invite the d e r to indulge in identification with this very human hem" (85). Henwood makes a good point h m , but 1 feel that the fnghteningîy uncompdsing and UIlforgivhg greethg that the Rince is given at the Princess's fimerai pmcession, overwheb any of the earlier humour on the marmot's put. Perhaps Rossetti, scared at her own anger, was morr able ta express it tbtough the words of the Princess's woxnen, tban those of the namîtor.

After failing his test with the milbnaid, the Rince joumeys through a nightmarish

desert which suggests the wildemess of Christ's foriy days and nights. The second

temptation thst Jesu faces in his desert involves d e m g death:

Then the devü taketh him up into die boiy city, and setteth him on a pianacle of the temple, And saith unto him, If thou be the Son of Goâ, cast thyselfdown: for it is mitten, He shall give his angels charge concemiog t k : and in their han& they shall ker thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a Stone. Jesus said unto him, It is written agah, Thou shelt not tempt the Lord thy God. (Man 4: 5-7)

Unlike Jesus, the Prince does not have the wisâom to accept death as an inevitable part of

me: he joins the Alchemist in his quest to concoct the Elixir of Life, who promises him

that "1 will give you life if you crave" (212). Like the millanaid, the Alchernist is a

sornewhat diabolical figure:

The veriest atomy he hoked, With grimy fingers clutching and crooked, Tight skh, a nose al1 bony and hooked,

And a sbeking, sharp, suspiciou way; Blinking, his eyes had scarcely brooked

The light of day. (1 8 1-86)

But the Alchemist is more complex than the milbnaid. Rossetti describes him as "fool or

knave I Or honest seeker who had not found" (26162). If he is not a "knave" (the devil)

he might, as a "fool," or an "honest d e r , " npcesent the Christian who has mjected

worldly happhess for a chance at etemal life which may not exist; that is, he might

npresent Rossetti hemK

The finai temptation of Christ in the desert is the temptation of power, lwcury, and

Again, the devii taketh bim up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him aU the kingdoms of the world, and the giory of them; And

saith unto him, AN these things wül 1 give thee, ifthou wilt fd d o m and worsbip me. Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is witten, Thou s u t worship the Lord thy God,and him only shait thou serve. (Ma# 4:8-10)

The Prince is also o f f d a littie kingdom of his own, tended and loved by the women

who save him h m drowning:

While overhead bird whistles to bird, And round about plays a gsmcsome herd: "Safe with us"-some take up the word-

"Safie with us, dear lord and fncnd: Al1 the sweeter if long deferred

1s rest in îhe end." (349-54)

Jesus is o f f i d the pleasant position of d e r over al1 the rich and luxurious cities of the

world, an offer he tejects. The Rince is offereà his own Little community of adoring

women, and succumbs.

The Prince then, while he certainly does represent the Christian who must save his

immortai soul, also represents, on a deeper and perhaps less conscious Ievel, the God who

cornes too late to make the long-suffering Rossetti his Bride. As Henwwd points out:

"Given the poem's inescapable mythicai context, its closing fimeral lament gives voice,

we realize, to the deepest, West spirituai despif (92). Henwood is nght in identifyiag

the poemrs underlying tone as one of spirituai despair, but I would go m e t than she

does, in arguing that the despeir is due to Rossetti's perception that Ood has failed to love

her with the eros a Briâegmom owes to his Bride. The woids of the hcess's women to

the Prince are the words which Rossetti desires God to ovdear: "Her heart was starving

all this W e I You made it wait' (489-90).a

Hopkins

Hopkins, mon than my of the others, and perhaps p d y as a resuit of his

Catholicism, describes his love for G d as an active erw, rather than a passive response

to Gd's agape. Exceptions to this de, such as The Wreck of the Deutschland and

"Carrion Cornfort," p i c m God's agqe as the destructive actions of a temfying predator,

suggesting just how difficult it is for Hopkins to submit to be the beloved rather than the

lover. Alison Sdloway suggests that "From his schoolboy days, Hopkins was in love

with love" ("Hopkins, Male and Female, and the Tender, Mothering Earth"' 53), and he

certainiy seems happiest when revelling in his own desire and enthusiasm for God, when

trying to rise above the earth, aad out of himself, to achieve a mystical union with Christ.

When he doubts that Christ is willing to receive him however, as he does in the temble

sonnets, his love turns to hate, for ôoth himselfand his Gd.

In "Gd's Grandeur" Hopkins celebrates the gceatmss of Goâ, asking nothing of

Of coume, it might be possible, therefore, to read The Prince's Progress as Rossetti's cejection of a human bridegroom in favour of the divine husband. Read this way, the Rince's failures on the quest wouid serve merely to conmist with Christ's successes in the desert, he would -nt Christ's foi1 rather than Christ himself, and the motivation behind the poem wouid be the same as that behind "The Heart knowah its own bittemess" (II 265-66) in which the speaker decides that Christ makes a better lover thiin any human male. But a refetence by Rossetti to the poem in a letter goes agaiost this pious reaâing: "1 am glad you like my merse of the Sleeping Bemcry: except in fillry land such reverses must o f h occur; yet I dont thirik it argues a s o d or gratefLul spirit to dweli on them as predominantly as 1 have done. Bessie Raynei Parkes' last volume, with its hedthy cheerfhiness, has nbulwl me" (ûctober 1863, Letters 184). Rossetti recognizes that h a poem expresses ingraiinide and an unsound spirit, which she wouid M y have fe1t if h a poem hPd kai an exaltation ofcbrist over human lovcrs.

195

G d on his own behalf, but merely content to worship him. His love for Gd is

awakened by his aesthetic appmiation of natute; it is Gd's beauty, seen in nature, that

inspks him With eros. H o p b achieves self-love in this poem by identifying himseif

e t h that nature. He moves fiom an understanding of the potential divinity of nature:

"The world is charged with the grandeur of God" (l), to an accusation that humanity has

spoilt natw: "And ali is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil" (6), to a realization

that God's forgiving, numiring love, Gd's agupe, redeems soiled nature and d e s it

lovable again, as expmssed in the sestet. Just like nature, the pet too is charged mth the

potential to be Godlilce, becomes d e p i e d because of fallen human nature, and then

becornes lovable again through king clasped in the warm embrace of the Holy Spint.

To a mater extent thm maay other poems, "God's Grandeur" invites us to d

God as a projection of the pet. Just as God stands apart fiom humanity, watching it

spi1 the beauty he has created, so too does Hopkins, the p e t who celebmtes and glorifies

nature, stand apart and above h m the mass of humanity which desecrates i t And just as

God's love redeems both nature and humanity, making the one beautifhl again and

forgiviag the other, so too does Hopkins's vision of "the dearest fnshness deep down

things" (10) keep nature beautiful for him and d1ow him to end the poem not on a note of

bittemess humanity, but with an image of all-embracing love for both the world

and the people in it. The world is charged with the grandeur not just of W s love and

creation, but of H o p b r s love and perception.

The eros-love of "Hurrahing in Wes t ' ' shows itself immediately in the poet's

raptuilous gaze u p d at the sky. H o p b strains up towads God as he identifies with

1%

the soaring birds: "batbarou in beauty, the stooks rise / Aromd" (1-2). The two iines

thet open the second quatrain describe the pmccss of eros perfectly, in their stress on

ascent and des* "1 Wall<, 1 lifi up, 1 Liff up heart, eyes I Down al1 that glory in the

heavens to glm o u Saviow" (4-5). And God cesponds to this love, allows himselfto be

"gleaned," through nature: "And tyes, heirt, what looks, what tips yet gave you a f

Rapturous love's greeting of d e r , of rouader replies?" (7-8). God's response to

Hopkins's eros-love sen& the poet into ecstasy: "The hem rem wings bold and bolder I

And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet" (1 3-14), The Vnagery

here is erotic in both the spiritual and sexuaf senses of the word: the bold rearing of the

heart suggests the male's physical response to desire, while the falling of the poet implied

by the hurling of earth "off under his feet" evokes the ferninine swoon of sumader to

desire. "Hunahiog in Harvest," like Herbert's "The Starre," glories in the aesthetic and

exnotional cewards of the poet's eros-love. Both poems fit Feuerbach's thesis: "The divine

nature wbich is discerneci by feeling is in trutb nothuig else than feeling emphired, in

ecstasy with itself-feeling intoxicated with joy, büssfui in its own plenitude" (9).

There could hardly k found a religious poem more explicit on the nature of God's

own narcissism t h "As kingfishers catch fin, dmgonflies draw flame." Hopkins

celebrates the selfhood of al1 meanires in his octave, claiming that everything was created

precisely so that it could express itself and its own essential nature:

Each mortal thing d o a one thing and the same: ka l s out that king indoors each one dweNs; Selves--goes itseif; nryserit speaks and spells,

Ctyiag Khat l do is me: for thwt I came. (5-8)

If Gcui cteated us to k our selves, then we can m l y love ou~selves umesemedly. But in

the volta of tbe somet, Hopkins g a s M e r than this in claimiag thaî God also created

us in order to be himseifthugh us:

f say more: the just man justices; Keeps g&e: tbat keeps dl his goings greces; Acts in G d s eye what in God's eye he is- Christ. For Cbrist plays in ten thousand places, Loveiy in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men's feces. (9-14)

God the Fathet and God the Son appear to be using the human sou1 as a way of gazing at

each other as if in a mirrot. Hopkins e t e s here in the tradition of St A u m e ,

believing that G d caa love us with eros because he sees himseif in us, and tbat this e r w

love of God's allows us to love ourselves for who end what we are. Hopkins's

undetstanding that God uses us as a way to love himself, corresponds inversely to

Kristeva's argument that the human abject uses God as a way to love itself. Kristeva

argues that Christianity imagines God using people as his mirror, as a way to love

himself, a view she nnds scriptural support for in the Gospel of John. "Johannine love

sketches o u the space of a nlationship between I and You, Son and Father, an exclusive,

absolute one in which They-ihird parties-are ody intermectiarie~'~ (Tales 148). But if

there is no God, the exact inverse ofthis process takes place: we love ourselves h u g h

the "intemediiary" of Goâ. An atheist d e r shply tums Hopkins's pomi on its head.

Hopkins probes the darker side of his relationship with God in his terrible sonnets.

' At times, as in "Carrion Cornfort," Hoplrias fin& Gd's love too much for him, seeming

to imply that he might k ktter off; or at least der, without it. But in "No worst, there is

none" and "1 wake and fd the feii of darlr, not day," it is the absence of love on God's

psrt tbat se& Hopkins to the edge of haîe and atheism.

In "Camion Cornfort" Hopkins cowers before a tcirifying prrdator who tums out

to k the God of love in disguise. in the k t quatraia Hopkins addresses Despair who

represents the worat sin a Christian can commit:

Not, PU not, canion comfort, Despair, not feast on the; Not untwist-slack they may k-these last strands ofmm In me &r, most weary, cry I cm no more. 1 can; Can something, hope, wish day corne, not choose not to be. (1-4)

But the inverteci Euchmistic imagery of the fint line suggests that Despair is actually God

in disguise, a reading supported by the ambiguity of Hopkins's adàressee in the second

quatrain:

But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouidst thou nide on me Thy wring-world right fmt rock? lay a lionlimb against me?

Scan With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan, O in tums o f tempe* me heaped there; me h t i c to avoid

thee and flee? (5-8)24

These Liaes Iink the first address to Despair to the sestet which describes the actions of

God, thus suggesting that the tioaümbed "temble" is both Despair aud God:

Why? That m y chaffrnight fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear. Nay in al1 that toil, that c d , since (seems) 1 kisseâ the r d , Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would

laugh, chéer. Cheer whom thou? The hem whose heaven-handling tlung

me, f&t thî Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one?

That night, that year ûfnow dom datkness I w t c h lay wrestling with (my God!)

my M. (9-1 4)

24 As Alan M. Rose says "That difnculty, which kgins the quatrain, has concemeci almost ewry commentatot on the poem: 1s the antecedent of 'O thou temaet whst at fht encounter it seems to be-Despair?" Rose goes on to suggest that the "apparent vagueness of the pronom . . . was eX8Cfly HopLias' intention" (213).

199

Just as Hopkins's chûîflies, leaving his grain clear, so too does God shed the "chatr' of

his false skin to reveal the "pin'' of his divinity within.

Hopkins's confiation of God with suicida1 Despair te!etem on the edge of

blasphemy. Certauily the first quatrain coastnicts the speaker as a man of integrity and

courage, refiising to sumender his will to De@. But if Despair is a disguiseci God, the

speaker's stand changes into one of pewersity and disobedience. He asserts his selfhood,

indeed his manhood, in the face of Gd. in asserthg that he can do "something" Hopkins

denies that before the power of God he c m do nothing.

If. by that last point, 1 am mabg Hopkins sound like the Herbert of "The

Holdfast" that is because 1 believe this sonnet to k Hopkins's reaction to the Protestant

ideal of agape. Eros is Catholic and agape is Protestant, according to Nygren, and

Hopkins seems to pmve his point by embracing eros and cejecting agape. The correct

response to divine agape is cornplete surrender, an act the speaker is incapable of, as

shown in his declaration that he can hold himselftogether, and his revelation that he bas

ken wrrstling with his Goâ. Hoplans presents himself in his other poems, such as

"Hurrahirig in Harvest," as a Christian who wishes to actively offer up bis love for God;

he has great diBC?culty in king asked to pasively amender to that love. He would mther

consume Ood in the Eucheiist than be consumeci by the "darbme devouring eyes" of

that same Gd. Meteas the Protestant Hetkrt of 'The Holdfast" accepts his

powerlessness before Gd's agcipe, Hopkins insists on his power to resist the annihilation

of himselfkfore this same agupe which Mls upn him like a lion, like despair.

Because he bas such difficuity accepting the mle of kloved rather than lover (a

200

difficuity which relates to bis habitua1 reluctance to take on the passive ferniaine role

before Ood, a characteristic 1 examined in chapter two), HopLins reacts by questionhg

Gd's very existence. His gradual revelation that Despair is G d in- the opposite

reading that Despair is in fat just despair, and it is God who is Dcspall in disguise, not

Despair who is Gd. The fiaal four lines question the very existence of God as an entity

separate h m the speaker: Theet whom though?" Hopkins muses, "O which one? is it

each one?" (13). If it is "each one" that he is cheeniig, then he supports God to exactly

the same degree that he supports himself, in the struggfe between them. ifhis feeling for

both is identical, then perhaps they are identicai. Hopkins struggles not with Gd, but

with himself, as Geofney Hariman suggests: "the concem [in "Camion Cornfort"] is

merely thet of al1 his poems in its extremity: in my actions, in my perceptions, is it God 1

fcel and c d t , or mysekf?'' (54). Just as the octave might l e 4 us ta believe that Despair

is the devil, before the sestet teus us that he is Gd, the poem in its entirety collapses

devil, Gd, and pet into one king. Hopkins is unable to "avoid thee and flee" (8)

because it is impossible to flee h m oneseK G d s love is so effdvely disguised in this

poem that it ceases to exist as love, laving Hopkins alone under the threat of an angry

atheism. Hopkins's cevenge against God for depnving him of his eros-love and forcing

agape upon him, is to reject his love by denying his existence.

1 do aot mean to argue that anger, hate, and atbcism an the dominant emotions in

this sonnet wbich cleariy ends on a moment of wonda and reconciliation: "(my Gd!) my

Goci" (14). Rather, the prirpose of my teading is to point to the repressed feeling hidden

in the text, thUp paying û i i to Hopkins's honesty in expressing the submerged tensions

that underlie his attempts to love his diflicult and mysterious Gad?

Hopkins wntes a sunilar atheism into "No worst, the= is none," this t h e in

menp for Gd's apparent r e W to teward his love or rrspond to him at dl. The

openhg statement, "No worst, thue is none," fiinctions, in one sense, as a derual of

absolute value. If there is a G d there must be a best and a worst; in a Godless,

nlativistic universe the= is neither. Hopkins's greatest explicit accusation against God,

"Cornforter, where, whm is your comforting?" (3), also serves to cast doubt on Goci's

existence. If he is a cornforter, then comforting is his essential nature, so if he does not

cornfort, then he camot exist. H o p b might have said "Father, where is your

fathering?" or "Lover, where is your love?" instead. They al1 equate to "God, where is

your God-ness?" (which in tum irnplies "God, when is your goodness?") and evoke the

Scnpturai passage where Jesus accuses sinnets of king iike sait which has lost its

saitiness: "Salt is good: but ifthe sait have lost his savour, wherewith sball it be

seasoned? It is neither fit for the land, nor yet of the dunghill; but men cast it outt' (Luke

15: 34-35).

Having cast doubt on Gds very existence in the octave, H o p b tums in the

sestet to the only thing Ieft, himself. And he is temily afirud of himself. if he is not

loved by God, then he is hek

Paul Mariani also points to the ambivaknt nature of Hopkins's faiings in this sonnet: The questions et once show the anga of someone deeply fnghtened, something of the -tic admiration for a champion. . . and a pavnding tone of respectful awe. . . . The ambivalence of the spccila's fceüng, oscilleting bctween t e ~ ~ r and fiiwning, is sdmirahLy caught in the nervous, stacccito aitemathg exclamations and questionings'' (23 1 -32).

O the min& mird has mountains; CWS of fa11 Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap May who ne'er hung thac. (9-1 1)

Hopkins's h o m of sobpsism is gmphically represented by the opposition he creates

between a gigantic self big enough to contain mountains and the tiny, puy, hsignijicant

self who hangs off one of those mou11tains. He stretches himself out to encompass the

universe, since there is no G d to circumScnbe this monsûous, fonnless swelling, and

cnishes himself to a tiny figure within that space. If he look outside himself for God he

sees only the universe of Self; if he looks within himself for God he sees only the Iitîle

humen figure of Self hanging there. His only solutions to his sufliering, death or sleep,

fiuthm ktray his hidden atheism. It is only ourselves that we can escape in death or

sleep; neither can shelter us fiom G o d o Hopkins's resentment at G d might lead him into

atheism, but that atheism resuits in a hatred and homr of himself. Hatred of G d and

hatred of self are one and the same thing.

The repred atheism of "No worst" d a c e s again in "1 wake and feel," but

significant differences exist W e e n the two darkest of the dark sonnets. in both, an

mequitcd eros leads H o p h to self hate, but in ''1 wake and fcel" he never turns his

haîreâ t o w d Gd, to whom he refers as "dearest him thst lives alas! awaf'(8). in fact

the domiirent m e of the octave is one of pity md tendemess. He addresses himself with

tendemess and soiidarity: "What hours, O whet black hoth we have spent / This night!

wbat sights you, saw; ways you went!" (2-3). There is no seWconflict here;

Hopkins and bis heart are in this together.

It is the sesta that reaîiy makes this poem worthy of the title "terrible sonnet!' As

in "No worst," but fat more explicitly, Hopkins declares that hell resides in the self:

I am gaü, I am heartbum. Gd's most deep decm Bitter would have me taste: my taste wrrr me; Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.

Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough som. 1 see The lost are like this, and their scourge to k As 1 am mine, theu sweathg selves; but worse. (9-14)

The worst thing G d c m do, his "most deep decree" (9), is simply to leave HopLias to

1 have tried to show how God's love or lack of it leads the pets into seElove or

self-hate. But if the p e t loves a God who does not exist, who or what loves him back?

Feuerbach would suggest that it is the poet himself. Freud and Kristeva would go M e r

in positing a split-subject and identifying God as one part of the poetts self. A Fnudian

approach might identify God with the superego and the poet with the ego. Freud

theorizes that the ego is always tiying to obtain the love and appmval of the super-ego,

anci tbat when this love is withheld, depression is the nsult: "during a melancholic attack

[the] super-ego becornes over-severe, abuses the poor ego, humiliates it and ill-treats it"

(New Innodtrctory L e c m on Psychoanaiysis 61). Thus a poem such as Hopkins's '+No

worst, there is none" dramatizes the depnssive pet 's ego beaten on the and by the

vicious super-ego. Freud identifies the super-ego as the subject's htedization of his

parents, especially bis f&er,% which seems to k how Kristeva sees the split-selves of

2L "But now that we have embsrkcd upon the anaiysis ofthe ego we can give an enswrr to ai i those wbse morai sense has been shocked and who have wmp1ained that there must smLy k a higher nshin in man: 'Vey t& we can say, 'and here we have

ber patients: "The d y t i c subject, or malysand, in substance says the foliowing: 'I am

suffishg âom a primitive trauma_ ofbn sexual in nature, a deep narcissistic injury, which

I relieve by displacing it onto the anaiyst. Here and now the omnipotent author of my

king or malady (my fa* or mother) is the arialyst'" (In the Beginning War Love 2).

(Whereas Freud emphasips the importance of the father in the subject's psyche, I think

Kristeva would rather emphasize the mother.) From the point of view of psychoanaiysis,

then, God, "the omnipotent author of my being," is nothing else than the subject's parents,

who never, of course, gave her enough love. (Ibisteva's statement, which posits the

analyst as Gd, suggests an interesting possibility for an approach to religious poetry

which imagines the poet as the analysand and God as the d y s t . )

I fwe do read God as part of the pet's own psyche, then we can read the poems as

attempts by the pets to adiieve self-love or to express and confiont self-bate. On some

unconscious level, the poet hiows that he should love himself in spite of al1 his unlovable

quaiities. But sometimes his vanity rrjects this seKagape. He wants to love himself

because he is desirable, hstes himself for king undesirable, and resents the fact that he

shouid love himself anyway, with agape. The subject wants to love himseif with eros,

does not succeed, and succumbs instead to seKbatred. At other thes , however,

that highet nature, in this ego ideal or super-ego, the representative of our relation to our parents. When we were littie childrm we I m w these higher natures, we admireci them and ferned km; aad lata we took them into ourselves"' (me Ego and the Id 36). "The psychoanaiysis of individuai human beings . . . teaches us with quite speciai insistence that the god of each of hem is f o d in the likeness of his father, that his pasonai relation to Gad depends on his relationship to his fethn in the flesh and oscillates and changes dong with that relation, and tbat at bottom God is nothhg other than an exalteci father" (Totem a d Tuboo 147)

205

Christianity's stress on agupe aiiows the subject to accept that whiie she may not be

objectively desirable to herseif', a decision to love herself makes ber worthy of love.

Believing in a loving God dows the subject to move fkom an involuntary primary

narcissism to a secondary, volmtary missism. As Knsteva says of Chtistianity:

"Henceforib, love of self is an emr oniy to the extent that one forgets one is a reflection

o f the ûther (the Lord)" (Tales 122).

The atheist readet can tuin al1 of these poems upside dom by removing an

external God from the love or hate nlationship, and viewing the poet as loving or bating

himself. But even if we leave God in the poems, we can appreciate the complexity of the

poetq better if we acknowledge the extent of the ambivalence, the inescapable co-

existence of attraction and repulsion, that the poets experience towards God. Without

hating him, they cannot t d y love him. By expressing, sometimes comiously,

somethes unconsciously, the messy ambivalence of their feelings for God (or

themselves), they guatantee the validity of religious poetry as art.

Chapter Four

The Validity of Religious Poetry

Whcn wee an mov'd to saaie rcligious ûnly to vent wit, Lord delivcr us.

(John Donne, "A Litany" 188-89)

The religious poet faces different issues nom the secular poet. Chnstianity can

both discourage and irispbe the writing of poetry about God. First and foremost in the List

of encouraghg fators is the existence and example of the Bible, especially the "poetic"

books like the Song of Solomon and the Psalms, which b a r witmss to the divine

inspiration of the poet whose worâs are thni sanctioned as sacred. Secondly, and

comected to the Bible, is the possibility tbat religious poetry may teach, inspire, cornfort,

md even convert its readers. Thirdly, the Gospel of John tells us that God created the

world through the Word, the Divine Logos: "In the beginning was the Word, and the

Word was with Gd, and the Word was Gd" (John I : 1). If G d is the Word, then what

beaer way to praise him than with words? The nature of Christ as Wod or Logos is

reIated to one of the most central justifications for religious poetry, the Incamation. As

Charles Lock writes:

If Christianity provides the potential for the world's demption, for the undoing of the consequences of the Fall, then the Christian poet is specifically priviieged with the tssL of redeeming language, uiadoing the coIISequences of Babel. Sacramenntalism-word made flesb-is not the given condition oflanguage after the Incamation, but a potential absolute for which the Christian poet can aim. (140)

207

A number of critics have concentrated on the significance of the Incarnation for the poetic

theory and pmctice of individual pets. Raman Selden argues tbat Donne is able to

combine the spiritual and the c d so effectively in his poetry because the "poems oRen

tum upon one transformation or another of what 1 wish to c d his incamtional

conviction" (59; Selden's emphasis). Richard E. Hughes says of Herbert that he "did not

merely write about the Incarnation: he saw poetry itself as a microcosm of the

Incarnation. The doctrine provided Herbert, not ody with subject, but with fom,

technique and meaning" (54; Hughes's emphasis). J. Hillis Miller argues that H o p h

was inspired as a p e t by the Incarnation because "[Christ] is the ultimate guarantee for

the validity of metaphor. It i s proper to say one thing is Iike another only because ail

things are Like Christ" (The Dtrappearance of God 3 13).

Finaily, the existence of so much secular poetry adcûessed to aspects of Gods

creation (a beloved man or woman, nature) inspires the Christian to use his or her poetic

talent towards the glorification of God. While Donne and Rossetti both seem

comfortable writing secular and sacred poetry, Herbert and Hopkins exalt kir religious

poetry by denigrating the profane output of their poetic contemporaries, a strategy that 1

shail retwn to below, when discussing each pet in tum.

Powerful justifications exist, then, for the writing of Christian literature. But the

reasons against the writing of reiigious poetry are also powenul. The two centrai issues

are inspiration and self-assertion. If the pet's words are divinely inspirecl* then the

question soon arises of whether the poem is obsolete-whether the poem addnssed to

God is not in fact written by Gd, thus d t i n g in God EslLing to himseIf. A. D. Nuttaîi

208

asks this question about Herbert's poetry: "Ifthe poem cornes h m Gd, are we to

suppose t&at G d prays to Gd?" (57). The poet can counter this problem by addressing

himself, or the d e r , or no one in particular, rather than addressing Gd. Or the poet

can conceive of his or her poem as a lrind of mirror for God's self~ommuning, as

Hopkins conceives of humanity in "As KUigfishers Catch Fire":

For Christ plays in ten thoustand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of mm's f-S. (12-14)

Ifthe poet believes that his or her peûy is noi divinely inspired, then she is faced with

the problem of self-assertion. The Christian should k silent, self-negating, and listening,

not noisy and loud, involveâ in the seKassertion and ego-gratification of speaking his or

her mind.' The Christian is caught between the two poles of poetic practice described by

John Keats in his distinction between the "wordsworthien or egotistical sublime" (1 57)

and "Negative Cupubilily' (43; Keats's emphasis). Should the Christian poet concentrate

on exploring the fascinations of ber own personality (even the examination of one's own

conscience can becorne a type of selfabsorption, or spiritual pride, as Te~yson

iilustrates in "St Simon Stylites"), or ûy to negate hersclf in the mamer of Keats'

"@cal Cixuacter" (W), which Keats describes in terms reminiscent of negative

theology: "it is not itself-it has no seff'it is every thing and nothing-It bas no character"

(157)? But then we can bardly expect the religious poet to take "as much delight in

Cieady, these quilities have implications for the issue of gender and religious poetry, a con- 1 wül taclde when 1 dWcw Chtistina Rossetti.

209

conceiving an Iago as an Imoged' (157)~~

Moreover, poeûy involves the use of the creative facuity; in imitahg the creation

of God, the poet may inadvertently set himselfup as God's rival. As W. David Shaw

asks, in relation to Hopkins: "But how cm the poet divide the Word into words without

also annihilahg the Word?" (Incompnhensibie Certaintiesft 72). J. Hiliis Milier, also

writing about Hopkins, argues that the reiigious poet is tempted to denigrate his or her

work because of "a fear that his poetry might reaily be performatively efficacious. . . . His poetry rnight perhaps even be sacrilegious or blasphemous" ("Naming and Doing"

177). Considend from the viewpoint of Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Infience, we can see

the poet vay afrad indeed to stniggie with and reject the God who is both his divine and

poetical father (God is the poet who writes the Bible, and the ariist who creates the

worid). This is one ûedipai conflict which cannot end in the son's (or daughter's) victory.

One way to counter these dangers is for the p e t to concentrate on her prophetic or

priestiy d e , regarciing the poetry primarily as a tool placed in the service of God for the

means of reaching a human audience. Herbert, who wo& so much in his poetry about

t& validity of that very poetry, arrives at this solution on his deathbed, delivering his

poems to Nicholas Farar witb the following famous speech:

Sir, 1 pray deliver this Little book to my dear brother F m , and tell bim he SM find in it a p i c m of the many spiritual conflicts that have pas& betwixt Ood and my soul, before 1 couid subject mine to the d l of Jesus my Master, in whose service 1 have now found perféct fieedorn; desire him to read it: and then, if he cm think it may tum to the advantage of any

* The notable exception to diis statement is Milton's vivid m t a t i o n of Satan in Puradike Lest. None of my poets, however, give much attention to the devil, or o t k figures ofevil, in k i r niigious lyrics.

dejected poor wul, let it k made public; ifnot, let him b m it; for I and it are less than the least of G d ' s mercies. (Izaak Walton 3 10-1 1)

Whether or not Herbert ever achislly said anythllig liLe this, the speech still smes well to

illustrate one tactic the reiigiws pet might use to escape the charges of useless self-

aggrandizement and self-indulgence. He offers the poerns up as a possible help to "any

dejected poor soul," who might need more tbaa the Bible and the Church by which to

negotiate his or her own "spiritual conflicts."

Dr Johnson and Julia Knsteva seem an unlikely pair of names to couple together

in one sentence, but their respective comments illumine the cenaal issues involved in

religious poetry. Dt Johnson claims that religion is too powerful a truth to be expressed

in poetry:

Contemplative piety, or the intercourse between God and the human soul, cannot be poetical. Man admitted to implore the mercy of his Creator and plead the merits of his Redeemet is alrrady in a higher state than poetry can confèr. . . . P~oary loses its lustre aad its power, because it is applied to the decoration of sornething more excellent îhan itself. AU that pious verse can do is to help the memory, and delight the ear, and for these purposes it may k vny useful; but it supplies nothing to the mind. The ideas of Christian Theology are too simple for eloquence, tao a n d for fiction, and too majestick for omament. (291-92)

Kristeva argues more or less the opposite, that poetry is such a powerfbl force for

nbellion that it destroys dogma as soon as it tries to express it:

Mimesis and the poetic language inseparable h m it tend . . . to prevent the thetic3 h m becoming theological; in otber worâs, thcy prevent the

The "thetic" is Kristeva1s for the position ofjudgment h m which the subject says anything: "AU enunciation, whetha of a word or a sentence, is thetic. 1t requins an iàentification; in other words, the subject must xpuate h m and through his image, h m and thugh his objcctp" (Rewlution 43). The semiotic threatens the thetic by destroyiiig its sense of qamtmess and position.

imposition of the thetic h m hiding the semiotic proces that produces it, and thy bar it h m inducing the subject, d i e d as a transcendental ego, to fiinction solely with the systems of science and monotheistic religion. (Revolution 58)

poetic language and mimesis may appear as an argument cornplicitous with dogma-wt are familiar with religion's use of them-but they may also set in motion wbat dogma npresses. In so doing, they no longer act as instinctuai fîoodgates within the enclosure of the sacred and become insteaû protesters agahst its posturing. (Rovolution 61)

Thus for khason religion is too great for poetry, while for Knsteva poetry is too good for

religion?

What Knsteva and Johnson have in common is theu shared cissumption that

religion and poeûy are antagoaistic towards each other. It is, however, just as possible to

hold the opposite view, that they bave more in common than otheTwise. Laurence Lemer

argues that fisteva's view of religion does not take h o account its potential for

Kristeva's attitude to Christianity is more complex than can be seen h m thex two quotations h m ber work. She distinguishes between theology and dopa, the symbolic aspects of religion, and holiness and mysticism, its semiotic dimension. Elizabeth Grosz cites Kristeva 's attribution of subversive pomr to "madness, holiness and poetry" (52) and goes on to say:

These are the thm pnnleged domah in process or where the semiotic gains a position of dominance over mity or the symboüc. The semiotic explodes in an excessive, uncontroIIed jouissrnice of madness (the madness of the psychotic or the fetishist, who refuse the father's law and =tain their semiotic, prr-ocdipal maternai attachments); of the "hoüness" of transgressive ecstasy (of wbich Lacan malces St 'Ibmsa of Avüa the most striking example); and of poetry, which is at its most subversive in the mitings of the avant-gatâe. (52)

Yet Kristeva only considers religion aad poetry compatible when the religion is "subversive" in the first place. The orthodox Wntings of the gentle Herbert exdthg the via media, for example, w d d pmbably strike her as d o p a attempting to maice use of poehy, and e i t k (in which case the poctry is good), or succading (thus d t i n g in bad pOetcy). It is üiis aspect of asteva's writing on religion and literatute t b t 1 wish to tackle.

expressing the instiod and declam, "By asdating religion with ambigu& rather than

with rational contml, I propose that Kristeva's theory can be stood on its head" (144).

David Jasper d e s the case that, far h m king fùndmentaily opposed to each other,

religion and poetry are drawn together by deep similarities: "For the ambiguities and

padoxes of thaologicai expression should mt be battend into slogan and aôstmctions,

but should be mogaized as aliied to literary conceits, as devices of expression and

sources of inexhaustible meanings" (34). Frank Burch Brown argues that the human

mind noeds both theology and poetq (or, rather, theological and poeticai ways of

thinking), to corne to a good understanding of the world:

Paraphhg Kant, we might say that, as a mode of conceptual understanding, theology tends to be empty in its clarity of vision and in its genetality, and thus to need metaphoric and experiential interpretation. As a mode of metaphoric undetstanding, poetry (in the broadest sense) tends to be bünd in its experiential îùliness, and so to need conceptual clarification, criticism, and generalization. In dialogue, however, poetry ad theology play a vital role in the unendhg process of understanding faith and ûansforming life. (1 8 1)

Translateci into Ktistevaa terms, Brown is saying that theology is symbolic and poetry is

semiotic, but that they complement rather than oppose each other in the human mind

(and, by extension, in nligious poeüy). And, fhî iy , Miclml Edwarâs makes a

sophisticateâ case for the scriptural anticipation of the psychoanalytic view of the

d e s t a b W subject and an empty or "failen" Ianguage:

me Bible] m y imply that the subject, beyond out experience of it, is a unity in the si@ of W, yet its teacbing is quite concordant with the notion ht, h m wbae m tue and in our men state, the subject is indefinitely displami, unknowable apart h m the signifîers in which we refa to i t in fsçt, it goes much further: the subject is not only in a state of perpeaial othancss: it is Lot& The vocabuliuy of Lacan in pesticuiar, in which the subject is N&cenüeâ," or "extraneous to itseIfT and eXpenences

"lack," "gap," "division," couid be seen as the translation into a contemporary psychoanaiysis of th temu by which Christian Wnters have named the seif as involved in original sin (1 30)

la EdWBTdS's view, the theological concept of the F d itself works agaiast the view of

language and litemtwe that Kristeva wouid label "theologicaî."

Debates about the nature of religious poetry made up part of the context in which

both seventeenth and nineteenth-century po#s were HRithg. Both Louis Martz and

Joseph Sumaiers point to the Jesuit poet Robert Southweii as an infiuence on the

seventeenth-century desire to exalt sacnd over profane poetry: while Elizabeth Clarke

suggests Giles Fletcher as another, more important, example for Herbert. Barbara

Lewalski complements Martz's examination of the Counter-Reformation influences that

Southweli represents by revealing the degree to which the Protestant writers of the

seventeenth century were able to Nni to the Bible as theu example and guide in the

writing of rdigious poetry: "Looking to the Bible itself for theoretical principles, many

Protestants found in two Pauline verses the starting point both for a biblicaliy sanctioned

poetics of the religious lyric, and for the theory of biblid genres1' (37). William Stuii

See M a The Poetry of Meditation (184-85), for a detailed description of Southwell's works, including Sàint Peters Cornplaint and M m e MaghIens Funerai Teare, the finit of which was printeâ in London eleven times between 1595 and 1636, the latter printed in London eight times between 1 591 and 1636, aad both containing strong attacks on profime literatm and encouragement to pets to turn their han& to religious verse.

LeWaldci identifies the two Pauline verses as: Speaking ta yoursetves in psslms and hymas and spirinial sangs,

singing and malting melody in yow heart to the Lord (Ephesians 5:19) Let the word of Cbnst dwell in you richly in aii wisdom; teacbing

and aâmonishing one another in p 4 . m ~ and hymns and spirituai songs, singing with grace in yow hearts to the Lod. (Colossiaas 3:16)

traces the history of the nligious soanet in the sixteenth centwy, concliiliing that "By the

tum of the seventeenth century, divine 'Sonnets made of thee' were legion in Engiand, as

they had long been in Italy and France " (135). (Stuil is quoting h m Herbert's sonnets to

his mother, which 1 discuss below.) Robert L. Entzminger argues that seventeenth-

century Protestantism worked both to encourage and discourage writing upon religious

Luther's doctrine of justification by faith calls into question the value of al1 human work h m a divine perspective, but the dilemma is especiaîiy pointed with respect to preachers: given the incte~tsed emphasis on hurnan depravity, how couid they pnsume to give voice to divine tmths? . . .If LutMs concept of justification seems on the one hand to disqualiQ human speech as an agency of divine truth, his emphasis on the Wod on the other hand empowers the preacher, making the pulpit much mon centrai in Rotestaatism than it had been in the mediaeval chusch. (37)

Most signifiant, perhaps, is Clarke's claim that "There is no discourse of literary tbeory

sepamte h m that of thcology in the &y seventeenth century" (24):

For the Victorians, the statw of religious poetry was somewhat different, mainiy

because they were not able to assume, as DoMe and Herbert could, that their audience

wouid share theù faith and love of M. On the other band, Raoul Granquist argues in

his book on the reputation of Donne that the Victorians moved away fiom Johnson's

d i s a p p h g attitude to religious poetry. When they did attack it, it was for different

fessons than his, as iliusüated in the words of an anonymous miewer of George

Herbert's poetry in Tlie Christian Remembruncer in 1862: "Rcligious poetry is seldom of

' Intemthgiy, David Jasper claims that contemporary literary theory is ais0 pmaded by theology, aithough by the absence, rather than the piesence, of ûod: "much twentieth- ceatury literary theoly seems to t a k its ongins h m a theoIogical BIUUety" (2).

215

the highest order. The subject transcends hurnan capacity: and the nligious puet is liable

to the danger of having his sensuous perceptions dimmed by the superior brighreess of

the ixnmatetial worid" (Patrides 253). The miewet is concerned about the poet's

"sensuous perceptions"; he clearly thialrs a sensory rather than othenworldiy approach to

the world is what good poetry is made of. Whm Dr Johnson disapproves of nligious

p t r y because he fears it does not do justice to ceiigion, the Victorian reviewer

disapproves of it because he fean it wiîl not do justice to poetry. In fact, this miewer is

closer to Kristeva than ta Johnson.

Monover, the Oxford Movement, which exerted a huge influence on both

Rossetti and Hopkins, was deeply concemed with the relationship of poetry and

Christianity. Both Keble and Newman were poets themselves, and they both believed in

the religious nature of poetq and the poetical nature of religion. Hilary Fraser, wbo

declares that the "traditionai disposition to relate reügious aad aesthetic experience was

u n d y pronounced in the nineteenth cenhuy" (2), atgues that both men

felt that petry gives imaginative life to religion as religion transports the imagination to spiritual spheres. Poetry is the best vehicle ofreligious utterance because it ceveals itself through a symbolical structure: it re- enacts, as it were, the processes of religious expcrience, of Revelation, and understanding through faith by analogy. (27)

Rossetti and H o p h had wt only the example of the Bible and of poetic predecessors

such as Dome and Herbert themselves before them, but could also look to thek own

immediate predecessors and contemporaries, Keble aud Newman, who were their

spiritmi, as weii as poeticai, leaders anci mle-models, to j e fot them the writhg of

their religious poetry.

216

On the other band, Mson Sdioway argues for a negative attitude on the part of

many Victorians towards art itsek "[Hopkins] was as ambivalent about art, nature, and

the aesthetic We as many of bis contempotaTies, and he sharod with the giwrnier

Victorien prophets a sense of impending dom, so that art seemed fnvolous at times, if

not actuaUy immoral, and nature no longer a comfort"(Gerard Manley Hopkins and the

Viciorian Temper 2). Like Ruskin, Sulloway argues, Hopkins "saw the role of the artist

as divinely saoctioned, and at the same tirne, a threat to salvation: sometimes the artist

appears as the interpreter of God's wîll, sometimes as the man most lücely to flout it" (77).

Considered in the context of such an ambivalent attitude towards art itself, Victorian

religious art, specifically nligious poetry, is Iilcely to reveal exûeme anxieties about its

own legitimacy.

The question of audience must also be considered histoncally. Rosemond Tuve

argues that Renaissance poems always thought of their poems as d h t e d towards a

human d e r : "no one seems to bit on the solution of thinking of poems independently of

readers" (Elizabethan and Metaphysical fmagery MO), a fact also pointed out by Joseph

Summers: "the p h a r y purpose of [Herbert's] poems was not what we understand as self-

expression. . . . the self to Herbert was not the valuable thing which it became to a later

age" (George Herbert: His Religion d A r t 84); while the Victotians were writing in a

pst-Romantic age, in which a poem could be written as an expression of the poet's

feeling or vision. M. H. Abrams Ui The Mirror and the Lump atgues that Renaissance

pats tended to believe in th pfagmatic theory of poetry, t h theù prnpose as poets was

"to teach and ta please" (M), M e the Romantics believed tbet poeûy was "the overflow,

217

utterance, or projection of the thought and feelings of the poet'? (21-22). The Victoriaas

had to deaI with both these traditions of p ~ e t ~ ~ r , the Metaphysicais only the first.

D o ~ e and Herbert had a v e y different idea of audience h m Hopkins and

Rossetti. Seventeenth-century gentleman circuiated their poetry in manuscript arnoag

members of their own courtly class. Donne, indeed, published the two Anniversaries, but

mt entirely wüiingly, accorcüng to Bald, who reports that pressure wm put on hirn to

publish and he consenteci with "some nluctance" (243). The issue of audience does,

however, cross the boundaries of t h e in some respects. Marion Meileender stresses that

religious poets find their main di&cdty in "the devotional pet's need to mediate

simultamously W e e n God and his sou1 and between himself and his teaders" (3 1). a

dificulty that faces pets in every era.

in this chapter 1 deal with each poet separately, looking at the evidence h m their

poetry and, in the case of Rossetti and Hopkins, their extra-poetic statements to ascertain

their beliefs and pcactices about nligious poetry, and examining the poems to see where

belief and practice conflict. Two key differences ktween the poets serve to complicate

the cornparison between them. First, the idea of vocation as a poet takes on a different

colouring for the three male poets who also had vocations as priests, than for the

laywoman Rossetti. Second, and closely related to the first point, is the issue of gender.

Did king a womm d e the miting ofreligious poetry different in any way for

Rossetti? 1 take these questions into consideration in my attempt to discuss the thme

issues of validity (is religious poetry valid? and if so, how important is it, cornparrd to

other ways of scrving M?), inspiration, and audience.

Donne

John Donne's pronouncements on nligious poetry me to be found d y in the

poetry itself. La Corona foregrounds itselfas poetq from the very fht ihe, "Deigne ut

my han& fhis crown ofprayeer mdproise," wbich is also die last üne. Stsaza one w o h

to pcrsuede G d that he shouid acapt this poem, by stresshg the poem's validity. In the

second h e , "Weav'd in my low devout melancholie" (2), Donne emphasizes that the

poem is composed in humility and senousness, and does mt involve the egoistic

motivatious of pleasun, pride, or self-fulfilment. God shodd not refuse what is given

with such pure motives. In the next two iines, Donne implies that Gd is in any case the

source of the poem, which would maice rehing it absud: "Thou which of good, hast, yea i

art treaswy, / Ail cbging unchang'd Antient of dayes" (3-4). Since a low, devout

melancholy is unquestionably a good thing for a Christian to possess, it must therefore

corne h m Ood, the source of aii good. And if the poem springs from this devout

meiancholy, then the p m too is directly inspired by M. In the next quatrain, Donne

indicates what he wants in return for the gifi of the poem:

But doe not, with a vile mwne of fraile bayes, Re- my muses white sincerity, But whst thy thomy crovme gain'd, that give mec, A crowne of Glory, which doth flower dwayes. (47)

DOM^ States that he does not want a poetic reward (the cmwn of bayes), but a religious

reward (the crown of saivation), indicating that he sees La Corona as primarily a religious

tather than literary object, a pmyer before it is a poem. The asking for any rewarci at di

suggests diat Donne sees his writing of nligious poctry as part of a bargain he wants to

2 19

maLc with Gd: if he uses his Gd-given talent for poetry towcvds the glory of God, God

WU reward him as in the Scripturai story of the PambIe of the Talents. Such an attitude

indicaîes a total belief on DOM& part in the validity of nligious poetry. In line 9,

however, Donne stresses that the poeûy is only acceptable ifthe motivations behind it are

tnily pue: "The ends cniwne our workes, but thou crowns't our ends.' if the "endw of

Dome's poetry haâ acnially k e n poetic fme on this world, in the fom of the "vile

c m e of bayes," then he could not have expected God to reward him with salvation

afbr dl. The sonnet concludes with one M e r tactic by Donae to d e his poetry seem

acceptable. In the lim, "Tis thne that hem and voice be lifted high" (1 3), Donne makes

his poetry seem both impersonal (and therefore lacking in any egotistic motivation), and

an obügetion. God cannot tum dom a poem written out of a sense of religious duty.

Stanza one is the ody stanza to foregound the poem in this way. But parts of

staazas two, six, and seven also seem to glance obiiquely at poetry, even while ostensibly

concentrathg on the life of Christ. The second stanza focuses on the ~nnunciation, and

the Incarnation of Christ. As 1 have pointed out, the Incarnation was a trope by which

Christians couid justify religious poeûy. ifchrist, the Logos, became human in order to

raise humans to his level, then human language could also incarnate the divine. The last

quatrain in particular seems to relate the Incarnation to the p a m celebrating it:

Whom thou conceiv'st, conceiv'& yea thou art now Thy Makers maker* and thy Fathers mothct; Thouliest light in daillÇe.¶ and shutst in little morne, Immensicy cioysterd in thy &are womb. (1 1-14)

Just as God nrSt conceiveci the woman who now conceives him, so too did God mate

and inspire the poet who now becornes his "Maicers maker" by crrating God within the

220

m m . And just as Christ Les in the Virgin's womb, so too does he lie within th small

enclosed space of Dome's sonnet: "Immemity cloysterd in thy deme wornbe."

Lu Corona ends with the "Ascentionl' statua, in which Donne imagines not only

Chnst, but also his poem rising up to heaven: "And if thy holy Spirit, my Muse did raise, I

Deigne ut my h d this crowne of prayer and praise" (1 3- 14).' if God was in fact the

inspiration behind the poem, if the Holy Spint did &se the Muse, then he should accept

the poem. D o ~ e firmly believes Lu Corow is inspimi by God, and therefore a valid

devotional act. As a whole, the poem is a prime example of what Louis Martz has

identified as a poem of meditation: DOM^ focuses on scenes h m Christ's life in an effort

to feel tme devotion. The poem truly is a crown of prayer, therefore, and as such Donne

bas no reaî doubt that God will deign to accept it.

"A Litany" introduces some doubt hto DOM& faith in bis poetry as acceptable to

God. The relevant stanzas here are: Vm "The Pmphets," IX "The Apodes," WI "The

Doctors," m, X m , and XXW. In the first of these, "The Prophets," Dome reveals

b l f a practitioner of the "Protestant poetics" identifieci by Barbara Lewalski, in that

he clearly regards the Bibiical miters as models and justifications for his own writhg of

religious poetry:

Those heavenly Potts which did see Thy mU, and it expresse

h rhythmique fict, in common pray for mee, That 1 by them excuse not m y excesse In seebg secrets, or Poëtiquenesse. (68-72)

Dome's juxtaposition of the Muse and the Holy Spirit seems to anticipate Milton's mrrging of the two in tht Urania of Purudise Clost.

22 1

Yet on a closer look, it becornes clear that Dome dœs not wish to use the prophets as his

own justification: "That 1 by them excuse not my excesse." He feels that his poetry hardly

lives up to the standad of the divinely inspired "heavenly Pd%" of the Bible, and

therefore asks them to pray that he does not corne to thïnk too highly of his own poetry.

Donne does not necessariiy doubt the validity of religious poetry as a pmctice, hm, but

ratber his own efforts in that ptactice. His fear that his poetry is not divinely inspire& but

instead seeks for secret knowledge and poetic effects, leah him directly to doubt whether

bis poetry is in fat legitimate.

Another staaza in which Dome seems to run countet to Lewalski's argument that

the Bible justified religious poetry for Protestants such as himseif is T h e Apostles."

Dome atnmis that the Biblical writings of the Apostles "an divine" (78). (that is,

divinely Uispired), but asks for help in reading these books:

May they pray still, and be heard, that 1 goe "h'old broad way in applying; O decline Mee, when my comment would make thy worà mine. (79-81)

Donne here reveals his distnist of both bis originality of interpretation, and the

assimilation of another text hto his own poetic voice (although he may well be ostensibly

thinking of bis role as pceacher rather t h p e t in these lines), activities which Harold

Bloom argues are essentiai for poets. in favour of a humble orthodoxy. in king afrad to

make W s word his he seems to mject the idea of the Bible as inspiration for religious

In "The Doctors" Donne reveals a strong sense of the respoiisibility that the &ter

on refigious matters has to his audience:

pray for us there That what they have misdone

Or mis-&, wee ta tbat may not adhere; Theu zeale may be our sinne. Lord let us nume Meane waies, and cail them stars, but not the Suane. (1 13-17)

The Doctors of the church attempt to interpret God's word, just as Donne hllnself does in

his retigious poetry. His fear that they might distract their audience h m the true word of

God in the Scripture, and might even cause h m by misreadings or misinterpretations,

suggests that he might ais0 wony about the possible hami his own poetic interpretations,

inspired at least to some degree by the Bible. might have on his audience. This stanza

clearly shows a Protestant sensibility in its distnist of the thedopical traditions of

Christianity and its tum to the Scriptures. It might well k easier for a Catholic priest

than an Anglican one to feel he has the right to compose religious poetry, since he wodd

also have a gceater right to mediate ôetween bis congregation and the word of Gd.

Stanza X X [ I I glances at the issues of inspiration and audience. Donne asserts, in

these lines, that God is both:

Heare us, for till thou heare us, Lord We know not what to say.

Thim eare to'our sighes, teares. thoughts gives voice and word. O Thou who Satan heard'st in Jobs sicke day. Heare thy selfe now, for thou in us dost pray. (203-07)

Donne seems to be saying here that Ood speaks to himselftbrough the sinner's prayers,

irnplying thai his own religious poems are also a record of God tallring to himself. These

very Iines, iadead, would k spoken by God, addressing himselfas "Lord" and "Thou."

Donne wurites himself out of his poetry quite as cadidy as Stanley Fish, in Self-

Col~~illlling Arnicts, cclaims Herbert does. But in dohg so, he claims the bigksi

possible legitimacy for his poetry, since it is Gd, and not he, who Wntes i t The other

audience, the maciers, the "us" that Donne (or rather God) is prayùig for, had better give

the poem their fidl attention and whole-hearted assent.

The fiaal staaui in "A Litany" which glances at religious poetry is XXW:

That lemming, thine Ambassador, From thine ailegeance wee never tempt,

That beauty, paradises flower For physicke made, from poyson be exempt,

That wit, borne apt, high good to doe, By dwelling lazily

On Natures nothing, be not nothing too, That our affections kill us not, nor dye, Heare us, weake ecchoes, O thou eare, and cry. (235-43)

Leaming, beauty, wit, and the affections are al1 f~culties which create and inspire poetry.

Donne reveals his anxiety that they will al1 lead him away from Gd, that the leamhg

involved in his poetic allusions, the beauty of his words and images, the wit of his

conceits, and the affections which cause him to write in the fïrst place, will become ends

in themselves, rather than meam by which to love God. Perhaps Donne is here thinkllig

more of his secuiar love poetry than his religious poetry. But in the writing of both, the

concentration upon the poem itself might weli distract the p e t fiom the object of that

poem, whethet that object be his mistress, or God.

Out of the Holy Sonnets, only "If f a i W soules be aiike glorified" can be read as

glancing obliquely at the anxieties involved in religious poetry. The sonnet is concemed

with the gap between appearance and d t y , or, in linguistic terms, between the signifier

and the sigained. Donne uses the word "signes" in contrasting the two:

But if our mudes to these soules be descry'd By circumstances, and by signes that be

Appannt in us, not immediately, How shali my mindes white truth to them k try'd? (5-8)

How, also, can the readers of his poetry ascertain the poet's sincerity? Might they mt

accuse him of the sins which Donne Lists in the next lines:

They see idolatrous lovers weepe and moume, And vile biasphemous Conjurers to d l On Jesus name, and Pharisaicall Dissemblers feigne devotion. (9-1 2)

These sins comspond to particular pitfdls of poetry: the miting of idolatrous secular

love poetry, of which Donne is certainly guiity; the wandering into blasphemy in the

effort to understand God through poetry rather than orthodox doctrine; the conjuring up

of Jesus's name as a way of making a pomi effective; and the Pbansaid, or iasincere,

use of ceiigion to make good poetry (which last is perfectly expresseci in the epigram to

this chapter).

if the history of Donne criticism is anythllig to go by, Donne was quite right to

fear such accusations. Mario Raz points to Dome's exaltation of wit over sincerity: "He

was like a lawyer choosing the fittest arguments for a case in band; not like a searcher

afkr a universally valid tnith" (68). Stanley Fish says of this very sonnet that 'Uot oniy is

he tryiiig to convince &ers of his uitimate sincerity-of his mind's white e~th--he is

trying to convince himseîf" ("Masculine Persuasive Force" 245). The most thundmus

accusations against Donne are those made by John Carey, who seems at times to k in

agreement with Donne's contemporaries when he describes them as regardhg DOM^ as

"a blatant d s t , who had no right to k in holy orders at ali" (89); and accuses hirn of

vaiuing wit over sincerity: *Donne was the least consistent ofmortais, and k never felt

that an idea had been properly exploited until he had tned it out backwards as weii as

forwards" (164). The most ment expositor of Donne's insincerity is P. M. Oliver who

sees in his poetry an "absence of any indication that Donne was concemed, other than

aesthetically, with the image of God which he was portraying" (9).

Of course, di reiigious p e t s are open to charges such as these. T. S. Eliot,

writing about Herbert rather than Donne, introduced the fascinating issue of sincerity and

the religious pe t :

AU poetry is ciifficuit, almost impossible, to write: and one of the gnat pemanent causes of error in writing poetry is the difficulty of distinguishing between what one really feels and what one would like to feel, and between the moments of genuine feeling aud the moments of falsity. There is a danger in all poetry: but it is a peculiarly grave danger in the writing of devotional verse. (Patrides 334)

But Donne's religious sincerity is questioned fiu more than that of Herbert, Rossetti, or

Hopkins. No one accuses them of menly playing around with theological concepts, or

separating themselves fiom the deeply religious speakers of their poems. Donne's

solution to the problem of readers questionhg his motives is, in this sonnet, to reject his

human &ers and h t e his poems for an audience of one, God:

Then ninie O pensive soule, to God, for he knowes best Thy tme griefe, for he put it in my b ~ a s t . (1 2-1 4)

in these iines Dome intimates, once again, that G d will understand and accept the poem,

because it was he who put it into the poet's mind in the nrst place, it was he who mote it.

The Holy Sonnet sequence as a whole reveals Donne's attitude towards the issue

of audience? The sonnets vary as to whether they are a d d r e d to God, to Donae

himseLf, to various 0th- audiences, or to a mixture of these thm. This variation in the

audience makes some of the sonnets seem a good deal more personai than others. "Oh

my blacke Soule!" is one of the most personal anâ sewabsotbed. The poun is entirely

addnssed to the poet's own soui. He is his one and only audience here. But whereas the

octave is both osteasibly, and t d y , sewaddressed, the sestet, while d l ostensibly

addressed to the soul. actuaily tums towards a second audience, Gd. "Yet grace, if thou

repent, thou canst not lacke" (9), begins Donne, still addressing his own soui, before

suâdenly posing a question that the sou1 cannot supply an m w e r for: "But who shall give

thee that grace to begime?" (10). The sou1 is not supposed to answer here, God is. The

m e r , which is not given in the poem, is of course God, who is supposed to corne

nishing dong, wavhg his hand and cailing out, "Me, me! I will!" Ood is the asumed

audience of this po«n.I0

Donne certainly did think of his audience while composing these paems, accordhg to Ted-Larry Pebworth, who points out that "three distinct version of his 'Hymn to God the FatM circulated duhg his lifetime and shortiy thereafter; and he prepared and released t k distinct sequences each of his epigrams and bis holy sonnets, dong the way discarding some of the original poems, adding new ones, and malring textual changes in the pocms that were retained" ("Early Audiences" 135). The human audience, then, was clearly never absent h m Donne's mhd.

'O Louis Mertz, however, nads these Iines diffemntly: [Dome] attempts to codon his "blacke Soule" with the traditionai thought: "Yet pce, if thou repent, thou mut not lacke!' So the Old Church beiieveà, but now, in the New Church, Donne must ask the stmge and overwhelming question: "But who wiii give thee that gtace to kginne?" No one is the= to administer the sacrament of Conféssion: it is no longer a sacrament. How then does one repent? It is as though this speaker otaads in an immense empty m e . ("Vehement Grief and Silent Tean" 23)

227

Holy Sonnet 4, "At the round earths imagined corners" does not, at h t , seem a

personal poem in any way. Dorme addrrsses the angels and the "nmbeilesse infinities"

(3) of the dead, fwussing on the end of the world h m wbat seems, at first, like an

impersonal distance. But once again, the tum h m octave to sestet tums the poet to

another audience, and once again, that audience is Gd. Donne tums h m the friture to

the present in his panicked cry: "But let them sleepe, Lord, and mee moume a space" (9).

The rest of the sestet is then addressed solely to God, with the one significant exception

of ünes 11 and 12: "Tis late to aske abundance of thy grace, / When wee are there." The

change h m "1" to "wee" draws in the reader, who reakes that the pet is ptaying for

him or her, as well as himself. and that the poet intends the reader to follow his lead in

begging for God's mercy. The sonnet therefon addresses three s e p t e audiences.

In Holy Sonnet 5, "Ifpoysonous rnineralls," Donne seems to address his questions

in the octave to no one in particular. Perhaps these questions lack a specific audience

because he knows, even while he asLs them, that they are unanswerable. Of course, the

switch to adhsing God in the sestet implies that he was the audience for the octave al1

dong. Donne acts as if he is yanked back h m his blasphnnous questions by realizing

that G d has bcen "ovcrhearhg" his thoughts, which makes him instantiy grovel for

mercy: "But who am 1, that d m dispute with thee / O Ciod" (9-10). But whereas Dome

the speaker humes to "take back" the impulsive questions that burst h m him in the

octave, Donne the poet leaves them in there fomer. The repudiation of the quesfioning

1 beiieve that Dome fiils this space immediately with G d He is not afiaid of no one hesring him.

in the sestet is only half sincere. DOM^ had nally repented of his blasphemous

questions, he wouid have destroyed the poem." Donne intended God as the audience for

the whole p m , mt just the octave. He would, indeed, We the answers to those

questions, and he knows that the answer to the question "But who am 1, that dare dispute

with thee" is "a poet."

Holy Somet 1 1, " Wilt thou love Go& as he thee!" is another example of a poem

which seems to address one audience, but in fact addresses another. But whereas in "Oh

my blacke Soule!" Dome ostensibly addresses himself while clearly meanhg God to

overhear him, in this sonnet he uses himself as a substitute for his intended audience, his

readers. The first iine nuis, "Wilt thou love God as he thee! then digest," and we would

expect the next üne to kgin "My sermon" or something similar. The pet seems to k

dso the preacher, giving his d e r , the "thou" that he actdresses, some help in his

spiritual joumey. But the second Iine begins with the surprishg words, "My Soule," thus

turning the poern inwards, by addressing the pet's own self. However this sonnet aever

tums as personai as "Oh my blacke Soule!," which also begins by addressing the poetrs

soul. lnstead, the poem develops a "wholsow meditation" (2) on the Incamation,

" The objection to my reacüng here is to argue for a distinction ôetween the pet and the speaker. Donne may have deviseù the questions as means to show the sllifulness of the speaker, not as issues which were bothering his own mind But even P. M. Oliver, who nnds evidence of Donnets h n i c distance h m his speakers eveqwhere, concludes that in this sonnet they are one and the same:

This is one of the ram moments in the Ho& Sonnets when one fcels that Donne's "In and "me" are representative pronouas: his speaker stands for a generation of souis priiifiilly conscious of kir s in fbess and yet unwiilîng to accept thaî a Iovhg God can be so cruel as to have cirbitcariiy dama#i them kfom they even p o d tht option of sinning. (124-25)

229

wholesome precisely because it is unsullied by personal emotion or egotistic desires. The

ûue audience, the human readet for whom DOM^ is a priest as well as a pet, is aîluded

to towatds the end of the sonnet: "The Sonne of glory came downe, and was slaine, I Us

whome he'had made, and Satan stolne, to unbinde" (1 1-12). The sonnet is a poem about

"US," not "me."

Donne, then, is reasonably confident in the legifimscy and importance of bis own

religious paetry as an instrument for the greater glory of God, and is so largely because he

tuds his poaic vocation analogous to his priestly one. Even in his most personal somets

he has one eye out for his audience, hoping to scare them into conversion the same way

he tries to do in his sermons. Roger B. Rollin writes that "the Holy Sonnets, iike so many

of Donne's secular poems, seem to be written mainly for their shock effect (or, in this

case, as shock treatment). . . . they are sick poems in the senice of preventative

medicine" (1 3 1). George Parfin also stresses Donne's orientation towards his human

audience:

it is seldom if ever accurate to think of an audience of one in connectioa with Donne's work. We may be tempted to do this with bis religious lyrics, d e m g their audience as the poet himself or God, but this is misleaciing. This so partiy because . . . Donne's most private scnitinies have s social dimension. (69-70)

At the same tirne, however, Donne is well aware of the dangers of religious poetry, of his

own tendencies towards blasphemy and bincerity as he tries to appmach the God who

Herbert

PossiMy the greatest and most thomugh poetical treatmait of niigious poeûy in

English can ôe found in The Temple. Not only dots George Herbert mite gnat poems

which specificaiiy comment on îhemselves and his artisticlreügious dilemma ("Love" i

and II, "Jordan" 1 and II, "The Quidditie." "A tme Hymne," and "The Forentonen"), he

dso, in many other poems not specincally about poetry at alî. glances obliquely at the

rewards and problems the genre brings.

Walton's Life tells us that Herbert was preoccupied with the writing of nligious

poetry by "the seventeenth year of bis age" (275). Walton quotes a letter that Herbert

wrote to his mother which hcludod two sonnets, in both of which Herbert defines himseif

as a nligious pet by cejecting the main altemative of the day, the Petrarchan love sonnet

and other m t i c poetry. But it is the object of erotic love, not the love itself, that he

rejects, substituthg an immortal God for a mortai woman:

My God, where is that ancient heat towards thee, Wherewith whole shoals of Martyrs once did b m , Besides theV other flames? Doth Patry

Wear V e m Livery? only serve ber turn? Why are not Sonnets made of thee? and layes

Upon thine Altar bumt? Cannot thy love Heightea a spirit to sound out thy praise

As weii as any she? C a ~ o t thy Dow Oin-strip their Czpid easily in fiight?

Or, since îhy ways are deep. and still the seme, Wiî1 not a verse nui smooth th& been thy name?

Why doth tbat fim, which by thy power and might Each breast doth feel. no braver fùel choose nian that, which one day Worms may chance refuse?

Sure, Lord, thae is ewugh in thee to dry Oceans of InL; for, as the Deluge did

Cover the eaith, so doth thy Majesty: Each Cloud distiis thy praise, and doth forbid Poefs to tum it to another use.

Roses and Liilies speak tbee; and to make A pair of Cheeks of them, is thy abuse.

Why should 1 Womens eyes for Chrystai take? Such p r invention bums in their low mi.&

Whose fire is wild, and doth not upward go To praise, and on t k e Lod, some Ink bestow.

OpCa the bones, and you shaü nothing fkd In the kst face butfilth, when, lord, in thee The beauty Lies in the discovery.

Herbert's linking of sex, the feminine, and death at the end of each sonnet, while a

traditionai trope, seems to cry out for a psychoanalytic nadiag a la Kristeva. Such a

reading might argue that Herbert's rejection of the sexual in favour of the divine, is &y

a rejection of poetry in favour of religion. But, as 1 have just argued, Herbert does not

reject erotic love, but rather dincts it towards a different object. (These sonnets,

incidentally, posit Gd as the object of eros. rather than the subject who loves with

agape.) What Herbert do49 reject is the feminine. The firat sonnet relies heavüy on fùe

imagery, fk king a masculine element, while the second ôegins by stating that God can

dry up liquids, the "oceans" that ûaditiodly represent the feminine. Herbert's manifesto

in these early sonnets is that religious poetry is superior to love poetry because its

superior object, God, allows it to escape the comptions of femiaiae sexualiîy and death,

remaining pmly masculine and spintual. The poary of The Temple proves him m g .

The earliest poems in Tho Temple to ûeat the subject of religiws poetry are

"Love" (i) and 0, sonnets vay similar to the two in the Iettet to Magdalen Herbeit.

Herbert once again asserts the vaüdity of reiigious pociry by deriding love poeûy. Thc

Temple's fht word on religious paetry, then, is a wholehearted, uncomplicated,

endorsement of its validity, importance, and merit in the eyes of Gd.

"Jordan" 0, which follows "Love" 0 at a remove of only two poems, also

as- the validity of the nligîous poem, but this time it does so by running down the

style, rather than the content, of contemporary secuiar poetry. Herbert equates "fictions"

with "false hairt' in the nrst ihe, again W g deviation h m tnith and punty with

femininity. He then suggests that ovet-elaborate verse is fomd in the gems of pastoral

and love poetry:

1s it no verse, except enchanted groves And sudden arbours shadow course-spuaae l k s ? Mut purling streams refkesh a lovm loves? (6-8)

He goes on, in the last two lines of the po«n, to eqwte simplicity with the genre of

religious poetry: "Nor let them punish me with losse of rime, / Who plainiy say, M y God,

King" (14-15). As many critics have pointecl out, there is, in fact, no "loss of rhyme"

in this stanza since "king" rhymes with "spring" in line 13. Herbert is suggesting, 1 think,

that because nligious poeûy takes the expression of tnath, rather than the creation of a

good poem, as its end and object, the poetry will then take care of itself, the rhyme (and

other aspects of a poem) will f d into place because the k s t poetry is, in fact, a gift h m

Gad, not the nsdt of long work and craft h m a humen mind. Herkrt asseits the

validity of religious poetry by pointing to its divine inspiration.

In "The Quidditie" Herûert asserts that his poetry has no value at al l if it

concenttates on subjects other than ûcxi. Men he writes

My Goû, a verse is not a crown, No point of honow, or gay suit, No hawk, or banquet, or renown, Nor a good sword, nor yet a lute (1-4),

233

he is saying, in part, that his poetry cannot treat kings, courtiers, banquets, sword fights,

and the like. It can only write about ûod and when it does, it becomes the most valuable

gift he has: "But it is that which whiie 1 w / 1 am with thee, and most take alll' (1 1-12).

ûnce again, Herbert's strategy for claiming the validity of religious poetry is to reject as

useless and unworthy all otha possible poetic subjects and themes.

"Jordan" (II) tums upon the puet's previous arrogance and complacency and

pounds them into humility. Where "Jordan" (I) claimed that only non-sacred poeûy nui

the risk of blotting its tmth t h u g h too-daborate language, "Jordan" @) admits that the

problem iies in the nature of poeûy itself, and that nligious poetry is not immune after

dl. Anticipating Kristeva, the poem seems to suggest that poetry about God ends up

celebrating itself rather than Gd, thrit the poet, ngardless of his desire to serve, becomes

an unwitting rebel against the bonds of religion. The fint stanza concentrates on the

poetts arrogance and seKassertion, using the language of both aggressive male sedi ty ,

"My thoughts began to buniish, spiout, and swell" (4), and aggressive economic activity,

"Decking the seme, as if it were to sell" (6). The second stanza shows the poet trying to

rectify tbis self-assertion in its stress on the word "service": "Thousanàs of notions in rny

brain did m e , / Off ring theù service, if 1 were not sped" (7-8), but soon the pet's

desire to serve God well, rather than just to sme him, cancels out the momentary attempt

IoIiaibloaedwhaîIhadkgume; This was not quick enough, and that was dead. Nothiiig codd seem t w rich to clothe the sunne, Much lesse those joyes which trample on bis head. (9-12)

Hetkrt fhds himself unable to bnalr fiee of the traps of religious poetry by himself. As

in many other poems he leaves the last word to God:

As flames do work and winde, when they ascend, So did 1 weave my self into the sense. But while I bustled, 1 might hear a friend Whisper, How wide is al1 this longpretence! There is in love a sweetnesse readie pennti: Copie out onely that, and save expense. (1 3- 1 8)

As Staniey Fish says:

n ie question, quite simply, is, how does a pet (or anyone else) weave himself out of the sense?

Herbert's answer is to make the experience of his poems the discovery of their true authorship. That is, the insight to which a particular poem brings us is often inseparable from the realization that its source is not Herbert, but God. . . . Rather than afnrming (and therefore denying) that God's word is ail, the poem becomes, quite literaily, God's word. ("Letting Go" 478-79; Fish's emphasis)

But Jooa Daalder reads these ünes differently, asserting that Herbert is not condemning

his own self-assertion at ail, but rather making his poetry hto a sacrifice: "But 1 am not

sure that his reaction to his former self is ody one of condemnation. After ail, it is

possible to s e the self in these lines as a sacrifice on God's altar, buniing away as a

victim; and Herbert is refehg to an upward movement, not one towards Hell" (27).12 1

'* Daalder's reading of these lines certainly corresponds to Rossetti's use of winding flames, as in "An 'Immuratar Sister" (Il 130-21):

Sparks fly upward toward their fout of fin, Kindhg, flashing, hove~g:--

Kuidle, flash, my soul; mount higher and h i e r , Thou whole bumt-offig! (25-28)

And in Sonnet I l of Luter Life (II 143), she speaks of God Luruig us upward h m this world of mire,

Urging to press on and mount above Outselves and al1 we have &ad experience of,

Mount@ to Him in love's papetuai h. (1 1-14) Thst amther reiigious pet uses the image of flames as a -ce to God serves to strengthen Daaldeis reading, although Herbert secms to be ushg the sacrifice image

235

am more inclined to foîlow Fish's reading here, that Herbert cannot find a way to write

poetry t h does not involve a reliaace on his own talent and personality, and that does not

nsult in pride over the nnished result. He manages to cimmivent the sllifulness k n n t

in nligious poetry by claimiag that God is his inspiration. Goà writes the poems; Herbert

ody copies them down,13 lke the divinely inspird authors of the Bible.

Yet Herbert is mbk to rest in his own solution, renuniag again to the question of

nligious poetry later in The Temple." "Duinesse," for example, is a poem in which

divine inspiration is both absent and very sorely missed. Herbert conrrasts the difliculty

against itself, to emphasize the la& of his owa self-sacdce in writing his poeûy. See notes 2 1 and 27.

l3 Bloch argues with Fish's neding: But is the fnend really whispering "Sit back in silence and let God write your lines"? "Onely" refers not to "copie" ("You neeâ on& copy, a mechanical ta& quivalent in effect to siience"), but rather to "love" ("Copy out only sweet love, nothhg else, certainly not the foolishness you have been wasting your t h e on"). The poet is Uistnicted to change not the task but the object. (Sjdling the Word 154; Bloch's emphasis)

Bloch's d g might be convincing if apptied to Dome or Rossetti, both of whom mite poans celebrsthg secular love as well as the love of Gd, but Herbert ha9 only Wntten sacred poems. Why should he fcel tbst he has to change the object of his poetry? It is not "onely" which is the key wod here, but "copie." Even if the lhes say "Copy out only sweet love," they still say COD it, not think up new ideas about it. in the contact of The Temple it seems clear that Herbert is concemed about the temptations and pitfalls of poetrypo* se, not about pmfane poetry which he seems to have never wasteâ tirne on. His sonnets to his motha dalaring his rejection of profme in favour of sacreâ poetry were Witten when he was only seventeen.

l4 1 agrce with Daalder's argument agaiast the existence ofany coiisistent the- about poetry in The Temple: 1 feel imcomfortable with any attempt to impute to [Herbert] some supposed 'poetic thcory' as something which he com'stently adheted to. . . . 1 do not kiieve îhat we can locate more than momenearily held positions in any of the poems. No poem is any more nnsl and defite, as a statement ofHerbertts 'poctic theory' thaa aay other" (18; Daalciet's emphrisis).

236

of wxiting reiigious poetry with the seeming facility lovers have in writing secular love

poetry. The nfth and sixth stanzas of the poem concentrate on the difference between the

two genres:

Where are my lines then? rny approaches? views? Where are my window-songs?

Lovers are still pretending, & ev'n a n g s Sharpen their Muse:

But 1 am lost in flesh, whose s u p i lies Still mock me, and grow bold:

S m thou di& put a minde îhere, if 1 c d d Fhde where it lies. (1 7-24)

The "But" be$ianing stanza six seems curiously illogicai. Surety it is precisely because

they are "lost in flesh" that the lovers find it so eusy to write poetry. It is not that

Herburs body ovewhelms his mind so that he aumot write love poetry to God, but

because his mind hies to deny this body, seing it only as a source of "lies." That Herbert

seems to be unconscious of the logical contradictions in this poem, plays right into the

han& of the twentieth-century critic steeped in psychoanaiysis. Yes, we might say,

Kristeva is correct: poetry m u t spring h m the semiotic realm of s e d t y , and Herbert

unconsciously dizes this when he contrasts his poetic bammess with the

pductiveness of secular pets. But it is equally possible to imagine an eighteenth-

centwy critic following Dr Johnson in claiming that Herbert's unwitting attraction

towards the sugareâ lies of the flesh shows that he, or any other SM human, is

incapable of keeping human weakness and sin out of sacred poetry.

"A P d e " is Herkts answer to the problem of religious poeûy's seeming l e s

f d e than sec* poctry. He simply takes ova the love poem by substituting God for

237

the woman as the object of the poem. This bold stroke means that al1 the puzzling issues

sumunding religious poetry simply melt away since the only difference h m standard

love poeûy is the identity of the ad-, not the nature of the love expresseci, or the

attitude of the lover. And by addresshg God in the same way that love poas adàress a

womaa, Herbert does not simply take over the iderior genre of love poeûy, but pays it

the tribute of embracing sexual de* as a legitirnate inspiration fot poetry. Of course the

expiicit "A Parodie" occurs towards the end of The Temple aAer many poems in which

Herbert implicitly casts himself and God in the role of lovers. Examples hclude

"Whitsunday," "The Stam," "Prayer" (II), "The Search," (where a " d e , " or aggressive

Herôert woos a "fende," or passive, God); and "Affliction" O, "The H. Communion,"

"Mattens," and "The Glance" (in which a "fernalet' or passive Herbert responds to a

"male" or active God). The Temple suggests, therefore, that sacred poetiy is an imitator

of, rather tban mode1 for, secular poetry. "Jordan" (II) and "A Parodie" are poems about

inspiration.

"The Posie" and "A true Hymne" are both poems which deny the importance of

the digious poem to either the p e t or God. Both work by repeating a simple refhin:

"My joy, my @Gee, my crown" in "A true Hymne," and "Lesse then the ieast / of clil thy

merciest' in "The Posie." These r e h b take on the nature of a formula and thus point to

liturgy, with its set prayers repeated every Suaday. Heïbeit simuitaneously claims for his

poeûy the same stanis and validity as the lituigy, and rejects the sewassertion involveci in

poetic d o n in favour of the h d t y of the Christian pcaying within the set fonns. In

"The Posie" he dismisses al i the qdt i e s a poet can k proucl oE "Invention mst, I

Cornparisons go play, wit use thy wiiî" (9-1 0). In "A mie Hymne" he explicitly

compares his p t r y to components of the iiturgy: "The finenesse which a hymne or

p d n e affords, f Is, when the soul unto the line accords" (9-1 O), and &ives his point

home by invoking, in the last two stanzas, the many Biblical passages in which God is

said to crave an offeriag of the heart rather chan a blood-sac~ifïce:'~

He who craves al1 the minde, And ali the soui, and süength, and the,

If the words onely ryme, Justly cornplains, that somewhat is behinde To make his verse, or write a hymne in kinde.

Whereas if thlieart k moved, Although the verse k somewhat scant,

God doth supplie the want. As when thkart sayes (sighing to be appmved) O, could I love! and stops: Gd writeth, Loved. (1 1 -20)

Just as G d , by his agape, talces away the human inadequacy to love, so too does he, by

writing the last word of the poem, absolve the pet h m the anxieties of writing.

AM of the themes e x p d in these poems can k found in "The ForeruMers."

Like the sonnets addressed to his mother, "Love" 0 and (II), and like "Jordan" O, "The

" These passages include: And Samuel said, Hath the Lord as gmt delight in bumt o f f e ~ g s

and sacrifices, as in obeyhg the voice of the Lord? Beholà, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat ohms. ( 1 Samuel 1522)

To do justice and judgrnent is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice. (Provetbs 21 :3)

And to love him with al1 the heart, and with al l the undetstanding, and with aii the soul, and with al1 the süength, and to love his neighbour as himself, is more than al1 whole bumt offerings and sacrifices. (Mark f2:33)

The cornmon theme âere is tbat G d requires love before SaMifice, an iàea thet Herbert modifies to suggest that Gad prefas love over poetry, that poetic d c e must be o f f i with love, or the lims are empty and useless kfore 006

Forerunners" claims legitimacy for religious poetry by attacking secuiar love poetry:

tovely enchanthg languege, sugat-cane, Hony of roses, w i k wilt thou fi? Hath some fond lover tic'd thee to thy bane? And mit thou lave the Church, and love a stie?

Fie, thou wilt soi1 thy broider'd coat, And hmt thy self, and him that sings the note. (19-24)

However, just like in "Ddhess" and "A Parody," Herbert unintentiody reveafs the

origin of the poetic impulse in human sexual drives, by admitting that he took poetry

h m brothels in the fbt place.

FtueweU sweet phrases, lovely metaphors. But wiii ye leave me thus? when ye before Of stews and bmthels onely kaew the doores, Then did 1 wash you with my tears, and more,

Bmugbt you to Church weU &est and clad: My God must have my best, ev'n d l I W. (13-18)

Poetry's desire to "leave the Ch&, and love a stie" (22) is reaily ody the need to retum

to its natural home. As in "A tme Hymne" and "The Posie" Herbert tums h m defending

the legitimacy of religious poetry by using a refrain, in this case "Thou art still my God,"

to play d o m its importance, leading, in the end, to a resolve to sacrifice his poetic gift

should such a sacrifice lead hirn closer to God:

Yet ifyou go, I passe not; take your way: For, Thmc art still my Gd, is d l îhat ye Perheps wiîh mote embeliishment can say. Go birds of swg: let winter have his fee;

Let a bleak paieness ch& the doore, So aii withui k livelier then kfore. (3 1-36)

"The Forerunners" is filleci with ambivalence and contradictions. It is, as Louis Martz

argues, with the "Jordan" poems, "The Quidditie," and "A tnie Hymne," a poem which

attempts "to exorcize that constantly bescttiiig tmptation-to show off bis W a n t power

as an artist. It is a temptation as u d y as Donne's sexual appetite-and as serious a h t

to the sod" ('Vehement Grief and Silent Tears" 30). Herbert is tom, as Michael

Schoeafeldt argues, "between the desire to devote to G d the best of bis abilities and the

neeâ to npuâiate the selfsisplay hkrent in such an othenivise pious desire" (17 1).

Most of the crïticism concemhg Herbertis audience ha9 erpued stmngly for his

sense of a human d e r . Vincent Buckley is rather a lone voice in dedaring that,

compareci to Donne, Herbert "solves his own problems, he makes no demands on us" (36;

Buckley's emphasis). Almost every critic of Herbert has followed Joseph Summers's lead

in arguing that Herbert's poems were written for an audience, rather than for self-

expression. Stanley Fish bas probably been the most infîuential advocate of Herbert's

reader-centeredness in his d i n g of Herbert as a catechist:

how is it possible to say, without contradiction, that The Temple is firm, secure, and compiete, and yet is also precarious, shiffiag and dinished? . . . One need oniy replace the catechist and his pupil with the poet and his ceadet: to one belongs the stability of prior and controllhg intention, and to the other belongs the cealkation of that intention, a dization which will be preceded by uncertainty and arrive in the form o f a surprise. ("Dohg Scholarship" 1-2)

George Parfin concentrates on Hcrkrt's d e as priest as well as pet, t a h g his cue for

this interpretation h m the title of Tho Temple:

The Temple thus offers interplay between the poet-figure and the architecture and fumishing of the church building, and this involves a congngational element which is rare in Donne. Such interplay is clear in poems LiLe "Reâemption" and the Iast of the lyrics calleci simpiy "Love," where the parabolic use of the pet-figure generates a sense of poet as fepresentative Christia~, so that the pocm becornes both an act of woRhip and an objcct which can k used by othas in contemplation of their deity. (Engiish P w h y of the &venteenth Century 53)

Cbristopher Hodgkins, discussjng the "diâactic strstegyn of the poetry, echoes Parfitt's

point about the poet standllig in for the d e r :

mhese lyrics are unified by a didactic strate=* This strategy generally works, not by stating explicit precepts, but by dramatizing crucial scenes dong the protestant spirituai pilgrimage. scenes in which the reader c m find bis experience miirored and thereby gain cornfort or leam viarious lessom. The individual speaker of the paems, wbile not the protestant everymao, nevertheless is typical of the "church" as a wholethat is, the invisible church, the entire body of the eiect struggiing to twt G d in the f a e of a hostile world. (467; Hodglrins's emphasis)

Some critics have concentrated more particularly on the rype of audience Herbert

had in mind. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Lmy Pebworth, for example, cead "The

Familie'' as a public, as well as a private, poem, directeci specifically at the elements in

English Pmtestantism that would fiachire the Church and bring about Civil War in the

near fiiture:

But as a public poem, the house of God is not the speaker's heart but Beth- el (Genesis 28: 17-22). the visible Chwh, which is hm kset by loud dissidents who respect neither d e s nor ears. The speaker petitions God to expel the m g i e r s who defile His seat, to conml ecclesiastical disputes by imposing peace and silence, to uphold the traditional order of set forms and hours, and to inculcate humble obedience. ("The Politics of The Temple" 6-7)

Of course, in petitioning God, Herbert is also petitionkg, or warning, his human teaders.

Summm and Pebworth are carefbl to stress that because "The Familie" bas this public

dimension, it does not therefore lack the pasonal element; rather the two work together:

Precisely because he mgnized in himselfthe temptation to noisy dissidence does he pay for Gd's harsh judgement on the m g i e r s . The extemai threat posed by the Puritam comsponds to an equally dangerous i n t d potential for disordetiiness. in this sense, the public and pnvate dimensions of "the Familien are t d y imparable. (12)

The criticai consensus, then, is tbat Herbert was vay aware of his human audie~e.'~

What seems clear to me is that Herbert ususlly has two audiences in mind for any

individuai poem. When he addresses God, he has one eye out for his feliow sinners who

might read the poem and knefit fiom it, while in the pams ostemibly addressed to his

&ers, he cleady means his words of exhortation to be overheard by Gd.'' The

pmminent example of the first of these is "Obedience," the last staaza of which was so

famously answered by Hemy Vaughan:

How happie were my part If some kinde man wouid thrust his heart

Into these lines; tilî in heav'ns Court of Rolls They were by wingeâ souk

Entred for ôoth, farre above their desert! " (4 1 -45)

I6 A notable exception to this focus on Herbert's audience is Helen Vendler, who writes that "To appmach such private poeûy as an exercise in public communimtion with an audience is to miscoiutnie its emphasis" (5).

l7 As C h Bloch puts it: l'Herkrtls 'thou' is often directed not only to himself but also to his feliow sinnet. . . . Nor is it possible to sepamte poems to God h m poems to himself and others. . . . indeed, in that very conjunction-the expressive inseparable k m the didactic, the expressive in thk savice of the didactic-we recognize the spirit of Scripturr " (S'pelling the Word 17 1-74).

l8 Vaughan's reply is contained in the first staaza of bis poem "The Match": Dear fncad! whose holy, ever-üvhg lines

Have done much good To many, and have check my blood,

My fierce, wiid blood that stiiî haves, and inclines, But is stiil tam'd

By those bright fins which thee infîam'd; Here 1 joyn han&, and thrust my stubbom k a r t

Into thy &et& lhae fiom no Duries to be W,

And if herraftcr youth, or@& thwart And clah theV dure,

H a I renomce tûe pois'110~ m. (1-12)

243

The two "Antiphon" poems invite the readet to join in the exhortations written down for

them aud are clearly meant to rise to God's ears as the inceme of praise. The parable or

nanative poems Iike "Humilitie," and "Love ualwwn," are obviously addtessed to the

reader, inviting him or her to try to malce sense of the story, in the same way that

Pmtestaatism asked every Christian to interpret the stories of the Bible for himself. I

want to look at four poems which to some de- problematuc the issue of audience in

Herbert,

"Miserie" begins by telling Ood just how badiy he is treated by humanity, but the

question at the start of staiua two, "How canst thou brook his foolishnesse?" (7). is

sîrictly rhetorical. Herbert does not wish God to follow his advice when he says: "Man

cannot serve tke; let him go, I And m e the swine" (43-44). On the contmy, he wants

God to go on king tolerant; it is the behaviour of his human audience that he is trying to

change. In no other poem dots Herbert corne amss so strongiy as a w r a W OId

Testament prophet-misanthopic and Mous at his own errant Israel. But Herbert

changes direction severai times in the poern. in stama six he suddeniy switches pronouns

h m "he" and "theyn to "WC" in "The sunae holds d o m his head for shame, I Dead with

eclipses, when we speak of thee" (33-34), including hllaseif rhetorically for the first time

in his d c denunciations, an exception that Stanley Fish misses when he says dist

"nowhere in the body of the poem does the speaker acknowledge his complicity in the

sins he is indicating" (&rf-Collstlming Arrifacrs 180). But this touch of humi1ity lasts

only two stanzas and by stanza eight he is back to exwriating "Man" (43), making him

into the encmy of a righteousaws symb0b-d by both his own &-Me profession of

244

pmchet, and his role of preacher within the poem: "These bachers make 1 His head to

shoot and ake" (47-48). Then, irnmediately a f k opposhg "man" (his readers) to the

"prracha" 0, he switches his address h m Goci to maa. addressinp his d m

M y : "0 foolish man! where are thine eyes?" (49). The last five stanzas altemate

between desaibing "man" to no one in particular, and addtessing "man" directly. The

end of stanza eleven opposes the speaker-as-poet to the rest of humanity: "Ah mach!

w b t verse 1 Can thy strange myes rehearse?" (6566). This opposition between the

preacher-poet and the stupid metch that neither sermons nor poetry c m reacb makes the

sudden reversal et the end of the pam dl the more wonderhilly shocking:

But sinne hath fool'd him- Now he is A lump of flesh, without a foot or wing

To raise him to a glimpse of blisse: A sick toss'd vessel. dashing on each thing;

Nay, his own shelf: My Gd, 1 mean my self. (73-78)

(Note how the 'My God" could be an adhss or an exclamation, as Fish points out in

Se&Comming Arrifacts (1 8 1 -82), anticipating the Iast line of Hopkins's "Carrion

Cornfort"). Suddenly we tealize that, with the exception of the very last "My Gd,"

Herbert bas ken addressing himself aii dong. nie poem is so menrellously satirid,

sarcastic, and vitriolic b u s e it is fueUed by self-loathing. The human teader may feel

released by the thunde~g Herbert's sudden îuming away into himself, but only for a

moment- Herbert lcnows that the readet is more Lürcly to have sherrd the speaker's

disdainfll heights duiing the denunciations tban f k d huaseif the target of them. Thus

when the speaker pulls the mg out h m uada his own feet, he d e s the d e r rigbt

along with him. It is not just the sin of Phariseeism that bas fooled the reader, but the

skiîl of the poet.

Where "Miserie" addrrsses its audience in uncharacteristically barsh terms, "The

invitation" reprrscnts a more usuaî attitude on Herkrt's piirt to his readers. In both

poems the speaker is clearly a pmacher figure, addressing his words to a congregation at

the same time that he addresses his poem to a neda. But whereas in "Miserie" the Old

Testament prophet denounces his h e m , his d e n , and himself, in "The Invitation" a

priest of the Eucharist welcomes a multitude of sinnets to a fesst of love, forgiveness, and

grace. He names four types of human weakness and instead of denouncing hem, argues

that God can fiilfil a sinnets desires far better than the world can. Gluttons are assured

that they will feast on "God, in whom al1 dainties are" (6). Dnuikanis are offered blood

instead of wine (7-12). The debauched and worldly ("Ail, whom joy I Doth destroyt' (19-

20)) an promised a grrater joy in God, while lovers are bcibed away fiom their human

loves with a love which "Mer death can never die" (30). Only the people addtessed in

the third stanza, those "whom pain I Doth anaigne" (1 3-14) are offmd a destruction,

rather than an intensification, of their Herbert throws dl his power of

I9 My rrading of "The Invitation" is in agreement with Richard Strier's: It would seem, then, that Herôert does not participate at ail in the Counter- Reformation cuitivation of ecstasy, in the campaiga to "change the object, not the passion." T h m is, howevct, one important exception to this generalization. in "The Invitation," Herbert seems to present sinners, especidy those hduigiag in sensual excess "as people with aii the right instincts" who are simply seeking satisfaction in the wrong places-"yet sucking natures teate!' The poem presents the Eucharist as the i d d hilnlment of the passions involved in sinning. The objects, not the passions, n d to k changd ("Changing the Object" 28)

It is surpiising that S t n a reads The Invitationn in this way, but Qes mt mention "A Parodie: which, as I argue above, seems to -est e x d y that the object of love, rather thsn the passion of love, should k changeâ. Herbert perhaps participates in "the

seduction and bnbery, of appealing to his audience's self-interest (a tactic he usuaiiy

employs on Gad himseif), into persuading his î isicae~ and readers to corne ta Christ.

The last staaza is addressed to Goâ, and shows Herbert revershg his direction. Whereas

in the previous stanzas he uses God as a bribe to Qaw in his human audience, he now

uses that audience, that wngregation, to bribe God into appearing:

Lord I have invited ail, And 1 shall

Still invite, stiil d l to thee: For it seems but just and right

in my sight, Where is All, then Ali shouid k. (3 1-36)

Just as the priest invites G d to the EucMst to nourish the congregatiori, so does the

poet invite God into the poem to bestow grace on the d e r . For his poetry to work,

Herbert needs al1 present: himself and his poem blissfully situated between his human

d e r s and his divine audience. A poem that appeais to both God and maa is indeed both

"just and right," a very good poem indeed.

Herbert clearly thought long and hard about the issues involveci in the writing of

reiigious poetry, pmbably more than any of the other three pets in this study. His

solution to the pmblws of~e~assection and sin inherent in the writing of poetry was to

foregrouad those pmblems in paems which c d d then be o f f d up to God. It is poetry

in general, rather than specifically niigious poetry, that Herbert found hard to reconcile

with his Christianity; he seems to have decided that it was better, h the words of St Paul,

to many than to hum, that is, to write sacreci r a k than ponine patry if he had to wcite

Counter-Refodon cultivation of ecstasyn to a greatet extent than Strier gives him credit for*

247

poetry at d. Once the poems were written, he seems to have left it up to God whether or

not they should do Gd's work by king published and attaining a human audience?O

Rossetti

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar taclde the issue of Christina Rossetti's attitude to

her own poetry in their landmark study of nineteenth-century women writers, The

Madwontan in the Aftic. in Rossetti's case, they concenttate on her gender at the expense

of her religion. The ody tirne they explicitly consider the influence of Christianity on her

poetzy is to dismiss it as a hannful influence, claiming that Rossetti "elected an art that

giorified the religious constrictions of the 'convent threshold"' (83). Where Gilbert and

Gubar argue that Rossetti hesitated to write because of her sex, I contend that she felt

emboldened to Wfite because of her religion. Whereas Donne, Herbert, and H o p h felt

that the masculine values of boldness, se~assetzion, and pride involved with publishing

poetry came into conflict with the more ferninine virtues of quietness, modesty, and

resignation to fate that characterize Chnstianity, Rossetti was able to do the opposite, to

counter the constraints of h a gender with the hperatives of ber religion.

Gilbert and Gubar look fht st M d e , ar&g that "the moral of this story is that

the Maude in Christina Rossetti-the ambitious, cornpetitive, ~e~absorbed and self-

'' niis attitude is identical ta Hopkins w b wrote diat "a very spirituai man once told me that with things Iike composition the best s d f l c e was not to -y one's work but to leave it entirely to k &posecl of by oùedience" (29 ûctober 188 1, &Zected Letfers 162). Whik the "very spintual man" was probably a felow Jesuit, Hoplriris couid also have ken inauenad by the spintual man describeci in Wdton's Life of M- George Herbert; ccrtainly his action in leavhg his poems to Robert Bridges a f k bis death is remarkably similar to Hcrkrt's sumnder of his pems to Nicholas Fenar.

assertive poa-must die, and k replaceâ by e i k the H e , the nun, or, most ükely, the

kindiy usehi spinster" (552). What this statement does not Sam to recognize is that in

Rossetti's actual Me she remaineci an ambitious, competitive, and s e w ~ r t i v e (if not

seKabsorbed) poet." Unlike Donne, Herbert, or Hopkins, she made consistent efforts to

get her work published She cheerhily anci openly admitted her pieasun upon

succeeding: "you may think whether 1 am not happy to attain fame (!) and guineas by

meam of the Magazine" (8 Apd 1861, Letters 146). Far h m welcoming any lack of

success as a comctive to Utlfeminine ambition and vanity, she bewailed disappointhg

sales: " T d to tell 1 was disappointcd at drawing no more b d s or fame h m the

Magazine" (7th January 1863, Letters 172). In addition to her ambition, she also openly

admitted competitiveness:

Miss Rodor 1 am not ah id of: but Miss ingelow . . . muid be a formidable rival to most men, and to any woman. (1 December 1863, Letters 189)

1 have just received a pcesent of Jean ingelow's 8th edition: imagine my feciings of envy and humiliation! (21 Decemkr 1864, Letters 208)

(It is notable, however, that she oniy mentions rivairy in conjuaction with 0 t h women,

not with any male poets.) #en she does beliale her stahis as a woman poet, she sounds

disingenuous. In a letter to Dante Gabriel Rossetti she vurites:

2' S h n Srnuiders d s M i e diffierentiy h m Gilbert and Gubar, arguing that "the 'bumt-offe~g' at the end of Maide provideci hm with a metaphor to c o d a t e h a spirituai cornmitment The imagery of conflagration useà to symbolize the soul's devotion to Christ she used not only in 'An "Immuratam Sister,' but in 'SOM Lwise de la Miséricorde' and The Convent Thrrshold'" ("'A Fom that Diffetences'"i64). Srnuiders linlts the image ofthe b m t - o f f i g to H o p h , but it ai= works weii for the contested üncs about winding flamcs in Hcrkit's "Jordan" o. See notes 12 and 27.

It is impossible to go on singing outloud [sic] to one's one-stringed lyre. It is not in me, and therefore it will nevei corne out of me, to tum to politics or philanthropy with Mis Browning: such many-sidedness 1 leave to a grrater t h 1, and having said my say may weîi sit sileat. . . . Here is a great discovery: "Women are not Men"-and you must not expect me to possess a tithe ofyour capacities, though 1 humbiy-or proudly-iay clah to a family likeness. (Apd 1870, Letters 348)

Her exaltation of her bmther over herself appears to be a tactic to distract him fiom

attempting to dictate &et poetic subject matter to her, in other words an assertion of the

superiority of her poetic judgment over bis? Moreover, when she declares herseif mb le

to match his abilities, she is merely bmcketing him in with Elizabeth Bamtt Browning,

who was of course a woman poet just üke Rossetti herself.

Rossetti did believe that, theologically, women were hiembically subordhate to

men. She argues this position in "A Helpmeet for Him" (II 169). and S o ~ e t 15 of Luter

Llfe (11 144-45) which begins, "Let women fear to teach and bear to leam." But she

herself was not at al1 anaid to teach. On the contrary, she seemed to fcel that God haâ

called her to that very task, through ber gifi for poeûy. As she grew older, and more

estdished as a poet, she became more confident in the belief that God sanctioned ber

role as a public voice. She mites of her devotional book Seek and Find "It is of course,

but a simple work adapted to people who know less (!) than 1 do: but 1 took a keen

interest in mithg it, and 1 &ope some may feel an interest in reading it" (25 July 1879,

Cbiistina Rossetti di4 h o w m , nly stmngiy on her b m k as the chef critic and editor of her poems. As Jan Msish points out, "there was no one else whose juâgement she trusted moret* (323), and "Christine welcomed and used his interventions because they were founded on a nmi klief in h a talent, which in many nspects he mted above his own; she had, &e told their mother later, more nanusl talent than himseif' (326). Rossetti's knowldge ofher brother's respect for ha work maices k avowai ofhis superiority over her bccausc of his sex s o d somewhat disingenuous.

Fmily Lems 80). The exclamation mark reveals her ambivalence about proclallniag

her superiority, but neveitheless she does not seek to deny that superiority or its likely

saîutary effect on her audiaice. Rossetti valued ber role as a religious teacher higher than

that of her position as a major poet: "1 dont thinlc hami will accrue b m rny S.P.CX.

[Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge] books, even to my standing: if it did,

1 should still be glad to throw my grain o f dust into the religious ~ c a l e " ~ ~ (1 Jmwy 188 1,

Fami& Letters 92). in her wiiihgness to sacrifice her poetry to the grrater religious good,

she resembles Hopkins: the differeace between them king that she felt that it was

possible to combine her poetry with her religion in a way that Hopkins did not.

Rossetti was able to reconcile her identities as a wornan and a poet by subsuming

both d e r her identity as a Christian. Perhaps because the codict between gender and

poetry was present for her as it was not for Donne, Herbert, or Hopkins, it totally

ovemhelmed for her any conflict between religion and poetry. Religion, for her, was a

justification for writing, rather than a M e r . A passage from Time Hies reveals how

Rossetti justifiai her poetry to herself by classifying it unda thai supreme ferninine and

Christian virtue of her the , duty:

Suppose our duty of the moment is to write: why do we not write?- Because we canot summon up anything original, or sûiking, or picturesque, ot cloquent, or bciiiiant. But is a subject set kfore us?-It is.

* That Rossetti incurred no ham h m her religious activities is proven by the excelient sales of her religious poctry during her lifetime and a h her death, as detailed by Diane D'Amico: "Rossetti's status as a devotional poet during h a lifetime and for appmrrimately Wty ycers sAa ha deeth in 1894 was exceedingiy hi&. 'ïhe first edition of her devotionai volume, Verses (1893), was SOM out appxinrately tai days aiter publication" (269).

1s it üue?-It is. Do we understand it?-Up to a certain point we do. 1s it worthy of meditation?-Yes, and prayerfiilly. 1s it worthy of exposition?-Yes, indeeâ. Why not then kgin?- "Fmm pride end vain gloy, G d Lord, deliver us!' (22)

It is, therefore, the remal to write poetry that involves unwomdy and un-Christian

vanity. &tty S. Flowers points out how the "Victodan ideal woman exactly matched the

Victorian ideal of the obedient Cbnstian-dutiful, self-sacrificing, al~iiys attuned to the

needs and wishes of othm" (163). By ngarding her nligious patry as a duty, Rossetti

was able to retain her sense of herself as both a g d woman and a good Christian. The

presence of this attitude seriously throws into doubt Gilbert and Gubar's reading of

Goblin M i k t in which they argue:

what Lizzie is telling Lam (and what Rossetti is telling herself) is that the risks and gratifications of art are "not g d for maidens," . . . Young ladies Iike Lam, Maude, and Christina Rossetti should not loiter in the glen of imagination, which is the haut of goblin men like Keats and Temyson- or iike Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his compatriots of the Pre-Raphaelite Bmtherhood. (573)

ui fsct, as a Christian pet, Rossetti may well have felt she had even more right, in spite

of her sac, to "loiter in the glen of imagination" than did the agnostic male pets of her

Poetic evidence for Rossetti's belief in the validity of h a religious poetry is to k

found in "The Lowest Rmm" (1 200-07). In this poem the speaiter, a not-so-young

Rossetti saw in her own f d y a gender division betwcen Christian and Ereethinkec h a mother, sister Maria, d herseIfwere dl devout, while her bcothers Dante Gabriel and W i Michael rejccted Cbristianity. With such a M y pattern More her, she may weli have felt tbt, judgd by the stendards of Chnstianity, women were superior, ratber than infior, to men.

womm, ergues with her younget sister over the comparative merits of Homer and the

Gospls. The sisters have very diffbrent charactem. The older says of h l f t h a t she

A silent envy n d widiia, A seUish, souring discontent

Priâe-bom, the devil's sin. (1 70-72)

Gilbert d Gubar wodd ncognize this self-portrait as that of a fhstrated womari pet,

ûying to renounce iiterature because it involves "the devil's sinn of unferninine pride.

This is the voice of the p e t who, according to them, wcote Goblin Market as a

nnunçiation of poetry. The second sister is the ideal Victorian wornan, docile, tender,

and gentle:

For mild she was, of few soft words, Most gentle, easy to be I d ,

Content to listen when I spoke And reverence what 1 said. (161 64)

nie speaker exalts the Homeric hemes as the uitimate in human excellence,

cornparhg them favourably with the people of h a own time: "They hated with intellset

hate / And loved with fU11er love" (59-60). Her sister replies:

Homer, tho' greatet than his gods, With tough-hewn virtues was sufEced

And mu&-hem men: but what arr such To us who l e m of Christ? (153-56)

She asserts that the literature of the ûospels and New Testament is superîor to that of

Homer. The speaker makw an attempt to counta this argument, by notichg similatities

between Homer and the Old Testament:

Beneath the sun berers notbing new: Men flow, men ebb. maaLiad flows on:

i f 1 am weafied of my Me, Why so was Solomon.

Vanity of vaaities he preached Of di he found, of al1 he sought:

Vanity of vadies, the gist Of ali the words he taught.

This in the Wisdom of the world, In Homer's page, in dl, we fkd:

As the sea is not Wed, so yeams Man's universai mind. (1 77- 188)

Her sister once again replies by udavourably cornparhg the voice of Ecclesiastes with

that of the Gospels:

She scarc+ly answered when 1 paused, But rather to berself said: "One

1s hm," low-voiced and loving, "Yea, Greater than Solomon." (1 96-200)

Rossetti contrasts the wo women in this poem, one restless and discontent, the other

idedy gentle and docile, and makes the less threatenhg, more praiseworthy one the

upholder of the superiority of Christian over secular literature. While she writes that

"The Lowest Room is" one of her least personal poems (14 December 1875, Family

Leners 55). it is personai insofar as it affimis both tbat Christ is the greatest subject

literature can tackle, and that a woman can comment on (and by extension add to)

Christian literature without losing one ounce of her fernininity or compmmising her

desirable fate as a hapjy mfc and mother (even ifthat wes not to be her own fate).

Rossetti employs a wide range of voice and audience in her religious poetry.

Many of h a best and most famous reiigious poems correspond to the classic fonn of

religîous lyric in which the speaker dresses C d ditectly, focussing on the pain, joy, or

254

desire felt by the "Y of the po«a. Wood Friday" (1 18687) and "A Bacrr Resurrection"

(1 68) are outstanding examples of Rossetti focussing on G d as her only audience.

Another substantiai portion of Rossetti's poetry addresses God directiy, but uses "we"

instead of 7," as in, for exsmple, Sonnets 3 anà 8 in Luter Lre (II 139,141-42). By

using "we" instead of "1" as in the nist three lines of sonnet 3,

Thou Who didst make a d knowest whereof we are made, Oh bear in mhd our dust and nothingness, Our wordess tearless dumbness of distress, (1-3)

Rossetti achieves two thlligs: she makes herself, through her patry, into the

intercessionary priest standing between God and humanity that both her gender and her

Protestantism prevented her h m being; and she pulls her reader into her prayer, making

him duire in the petitions or praise she makes to Gd.

Rosseni, far more than the other poets, eddnsses her readers dirrctly, as the

pPimary audience of her patry. Whereas DOM^ and Hopkins, for the most part, present

theV personal experience and let the reader learn fiom that, and Herbert addresses the

r e a k directly in only a few of his poems,= Rossetti's addresses to the reader make up a

very large proportion of her celigious poems. David A. Kent points out that "while we

value ber personal lyrics ofjoy and despair, Rossettik voice generaily spealrs in

imperatives or exhortations more often than it is overheard in colloquy with God. Her

awateness of the reader as fellow pügrim might k attributed to a consciousness of the

sizable Victorian audience she was addrrssing" ("By thought, word, and deed" 272). in

almost all of these exhortatory poems, Rossetti uses the pronoun "we" rather than

addressing her teaders as "you," thus constructing a compmionate and humble, rather

Uiaa didactic, voice. In "Advent" (1 68-70) she goes so far as to introduce direct speech

by "we," that is, herseifand, presumably, her reaâers:

This Advent moon shines cold and clear, These Advent nights an long;

Our lamps have bumed year &et year And stül theV flame is strong.

" Watchmen, what of the night?" we cry Heart-sick with hop defnnd:

''No spcalring signs are in the sky," 1s s t i l l the watcbmads word. (1 -8)

The poems in which she does use "you" also leave open the possibility that she is

addressing herself d e r than, or in addition to, her reader. In the following untitied lyric

@ 334), for example, she employs the intimate and singular "thee" rather than the public

and plural "you," and the tone of exasperation and harshness scems to belong more to

Rossetti's self-loathing and sense of sin than to an Old Testament misanthropy:

O foolish Soul! to make thy count For languid fds and much forgiven,

When lîke a flame thou mightest mount To storm and carry heaven.

A life so fa*-is this to live? A goai so mean,-is this a goal?

Chnst love thee, mnedy, forgive, Save thee, O f d s h Soui.

The d e r , however, is catallily at likrty to küeve herself the footish sou1 and job in

the prayer for forgiveness as she ceads the poem. The next poem but one (Ii 334-39,

however, is unambiguou in its addrrss to a multiple audience, employing the pronom

"you," speaking of in the plural, a d adopting an e a c o ~ tone in its

exhortation:

The god in sight! Look up and sing, Set fiices full agahuit the light,

Welcome with raptutous welcoming The goal in sight.

Let be the le& let be the right: Seaight fonivard make your fwtsteps ring

A loud alarum t h ' the night.

Death hunts you, yea, but nft of sting; Your kd is green, your shtoud is white:

Hail! Life and k a t h and al1 that biing The goal in sight.

Rossetti sounds here like the priest kfore his congregation that she could never be.

Out of the four poas Rossetti is also the most confident user of God's voice. She

writes many poems in which either God and poet are in dialogue, oc God himselfspeaks

the entire poem, although, ironicaily, her poetcy seems the least conversationai in tone,

the least close to the naturai rhythm of speech. Neithet Donne nor Hopkins ever make

Ood spcek dinctl~:~ while Herbert has only "The Sacrifice" in which God speaks the

whole poem, only "Dialogue" in which God and pet get equal time, and only a few

poems, such as "Jordan" (II), "The Collar," end "The Pulley," in which God's speech is

reporteci. That a f e d e poet should be so much more codonable appmpriating Gd's

voice than these thnt gnat male p e t s is another f ~ t that sits untidily with Gilbert and

GuWs theories about Rossetti-as-Maude.

The complexity of audience in the dialogue p m s is emphasized by those

dialogues in whicb the identity of the speakers is ambiguoui, as in "Uphill" (ï 65-66),

26 Christ does speak in 'The Soldier," but in reporte& nthr than dkct rpcech.

which is strucnued dong question and answet lines:

Does the d wind up-hiil dl the way? Yes to the very end.

WiU the day's joumey take the whole long day? From morn to night, my fnead. (1-4)

Who is speaking hm? 1s the pet aslirig the question, and God responding? Or is it the

d e r , or a faceless figure that represents the reader who asks and the pet who

responds? Both seem to be happening spontaneously, which meam that neither the

reader, the poet, or G d has to be excluded h m king directly addressed by the poem.

"Amen" (1 90-91). "The Master is Corne, and Calleth for Thee" (1 226), and

"When my Heart is Vexed I will Cornplain'' (II 303-04) are aii similady ambiguous

dialogues. Unlike 'Uphill" it is certain that God does not speak in these poems shce he

is r e f e d to in the third person, but it is just as dificult to tell whether Rossetti sees

herself as the questioner or the answerer in the dialogue. The last of these poems begins

with the folfowing exchange:

"The fields are white to harvest, look and see, Are white abundantiy. The Ml-orbed W e s t moon shines clear, The &est-tirne draws ne=, Be of good cheer."

"Ah, woe is me! 1 have no heart for harvest the, Gown sick with hope defemd h m chime to chime." (1-8)

Does Rossetti see herseif here as giving codort to ber d e r s 9 or as receiving cornfort

h m someone else, pahaps an ange& or a Habatiaa "fncad?" As in "Uphill" the

arnbiguity sunoundhg the speakers allows Rossetti to k botù the teacher and advisor of

258

her resdet. and the humble seeker before Gd.

Rossetti writes poems that fit none of the abovesientioneâ categories: poems

addnssed to no one in particular but simply expressing the feeiings of the speaker, the ''1''

of t&e classic lyric poem, as in "A Birthday" (1 3637); the aamtive or parabolic poems

(e.g. "From House to Home" (X 82-88)); poems addnssed to a specific addressee who is

not God, suçh as the wotld, flesh, and devil in "The Thrae Enexnies" (1 70-72); and

dramatic lyrics, such as "By the waters of Babylontt (III 282-83) and "A Prodigai Son" (iI

1 18) where the speaker is clearly not Rossetti herself.

Christh Rosseai. then, is the least wonied, and the rnost confident, of the four

poets on the issue of writhg religious poetry. Her küef in the legitimacy of the genre,

and her own ability to *te it, spring directly h m her gender and fiom her lack of

priestly vocation. Because she was already practising the Christian virnies of silence end

~e~negation as a womw she did not fa1 the need to also practice them as a Christian

poet. And b u s e she could never stand in the pdpit and preach, she found in poetry a

replacement for. r a t k than a distraction hm. or a cause of confiict to, a vocation as

priest. (Whüe DOM^ and Herbert both wrote many of their religious poems before they

took oidcn, they did have the vocation before them as a possibility, even a probability,

from an d y age.) Whm the male pcicsts womed that their nlifiious poetry was

excessive and self-indulgent, the femaie laywoman felt that her poetry was the best thing

she could give by way of seNice to Ood and ber fellow Christians.

Most of Hopkins's attitudes to nligious poetry can k gathered h m his l e m to

feUow poets Robert Bridges and Richard Watson Dixon. His explicit comments in these

lettas nnd implicit echoes here and there in his poetry, but he did not take poetry itself as

a poetic subject in the same way that Herûert did. Of aii in the pets in this study,

Hopkins tends to be the most dismissiw about the importance of nligious poetry and the

most genuinely confused (as opposed to ambivalent, like Herbert) about whether he

should be Wnting it.

Hopkins does not make nmny statements about the rights and mngs of writing

religious poeûy; he is far more concemed about the rights and mongs of publishing it.

W y thm passages h m his letters deai directly with his attitude to writing. The fht is

a fmous and much citod passage h m a letter to Richard Dixon:

You ask, do 1 write verse myseLf, What 1 haâ miacn I bumt before I became a ~esuit? and resolved ta write no more, as not belonging to my profession, uniess it were by the wish of my superiors; so for sevea yem 1 m t e nothing but two or three littie presentation pieces which occasion called for. But when in the winter of '75 the Deutschland was wrecked in the mouth of the Thames and five Franciscaa nuns, exiles h m Germany by the Falck Laws, aboard of her were drowned I was affécted by the account and happening to say so to my rector he said that he wished someone would write a poem on the subject. On t&is hint I set to work and, ibough my hand was out at first, produced one. . . . A h writing this I held myself fke to compose, but cannot find it in my conscience to spend time upon it; so 1 have done litîle and shall do les. (5 October 1878, Seiected Letters lO7-û8)

S h n Srnuiders WIites ofthis episode that: "Unîike Rossetti at the end of Mrnde, [Hopkins] did not find symbol and metaphor expcdiat to ncoacile poetic and religious a h . Converthg figure to f& H o p b felt comstraiii6d b msLc of his poetry a kmt- offeting! He thereby unwitthgiy litcnliacd the metaphor Rossetti nrst employed at the end of M d e " ("'A Fonn That DWemces"" 170). See notes 12 and 21.

260

Hopkins's fear of writing relipMus poetty stems not from any doubt about the validity of

reiigious poetry in itself, but h m concem tbat he p e m d y , as a Jesuit, should not

waste his t h e and energy upon it, that he would k unprofessional to do so. (He does not

seem to have felt that Canon Dixon was m g to d t e nligious poetry.) His

resewations and reStTictions an extend, r a k than internai as in the case of Dome and

Herbert, aithough it o h n seems as if Hopkins uses the Society of Jesus as an excuse, an

extemaiization of some inner nluctance to write. Nomian MacKenzie argues

convincingly that H o p h ' s non-production stemmed h m himself, not h m the Jesuits:

"An attitude which began in a desire to 'seek fkst the Kingdom of Gd' . . . bccame

entangied in his human frailty, his lack of selfîonfidence" (32). Janet Denford provides

some examples of this human f%lty, arguing that Hopkins "was always rnistnistful of the

public" and that "he experienced the perfectionist's nluctance to let the finished work

Ieave his ameading hand" (6). Alison Sulloway looks beyond Hopkins's pasodity to

his culture, suggesting that it was the Victorian in HopkinsT as much as the lesuit, that

held hUn back h m writing: "Hopkins's ambivaience in the metter of fame and art was as

much a part of Hopkins, the ex-Tractarian, Hopkins, the scholar of lowett, Bailiol and

Oxford, Hopàins, the Ruskinian aesthetician, and Hopkins, the paradigm of the new

Victorian gentleman, as it was of H o p h , the convert to Catholicism and Jesuit priest"

(Gctmd Muniey Hopkins ond the Vktorian Temper 102).

There is caiainly no evidence thst his feiiow priests would have wished him to

abstain h m verse, as he himscif inciicates in a letter to Bridges: "ûur society cannot k

blamed for not valuhg what it never I m w of. . . . It always seems to me that poetry is

unprofessiod, but that is what 1 have said to myseif, not others to me. No doubt if 1 kept

pmducing 1 shouid have to ask rnyself what 1 meant to do with it dl; but 1 have long been

at a -11, and so the things Lie!' in this same letter Hopkins aâmits that a fellow

Jesuit, admittedly of his own ranlr, appnciated his poetry: "Fr. Francis Bacon, a

fellomovice [sic] of mine, and an edmirrr of my semions saw al1 and expressed a strong

admiration for tbem which was certainly sincere" (21 August 1884, Selected Letters 200-

01). Moreover it seems clear that Deufschlmd and Eurydice were njected by the editors

of nte Month because of questions of p t i c ment, not religious appropriateness.

The second major statement Hopkins makes reveals more about his opinions on

the validity of religious poetry:

1 cannot in conscience spent [sic] tirne on poetry, neither have 1 the inducements and inspirations diat make othets compose. Feeling, love in particular, is the great moving power and spring of verse and the only person that I am in love with seldom, especially now, stirs my hem sensibly and when he does I cannot always "make capital" of it, it would be a sacrilege to do so. (1 5 Febniary 1879, Selected Letters 1 17)

Hopkins reveals an objection to "using" his reIationship with Christ for the purpose of

creating art. He would agree with Dr Johnson here: theology is too great for poetry.

In HopLinsis third important statement on the subject, however, he reverts to the

validity of his writing of religious poetry:

This 1 say: my vocaîion puts befom me a standard so high that a higher can be found nowhere else. The question then for me is not whetber 1 am wiliing . . . to make a d c e of hopes of fame . . . but whether 1 am not to undergo a sevar judgment h m Ood for the lothncss I have shewn in making it, for the remes I may have in my heart made, for the bacbard piances I have given with my hand upon the plough, for the waste of tune the very compositions you admire may bave causeâ and th& pnorciipriion of the mind which belonged to more sacreâ or more binding dutks, for the diquNt and the thoughts of vahglory they have given nse

to. . . . 1 desttoyed the verse I had written wfm 1 en- the Society, and meant to write no more; the Deurschfad I began aAet a long interval at the chance suggestion of my supenor, but that king done it is a question w h e k 1 did weil to wrik anything else. (29 October 188 1, Selected Letters 16 1-65)

It is always the pracess of writing that Hoplrias criticizes, never the finisheâ product

itself. He feus the distraction nom his priestiy duties. not tbet his poems, once written,

will do any damage to the cause of his religion by king too idequate to express the full

glory of God. Indeed, I can only find very few expressions of doubt in thepwtic (as

opposed to religious and ethicai) validity of his wodc, and they occur in the poetry:

Beyond sayhg sweet, pst telling of tongue, Thou art ügbtiiiag and love, 1 found it, a winter and warm.

Father and fonder of heart thou hast wmg: Hast thy dark descending and most art merciful hm. (st. 9)

The pet admits that the rnystery of this "past al1 I Grasp God" (st. 32) is too much

for even the sweet saying of poetry to express, but he goes on to try myway, by the

expedient of piling magnificent paradoxes on top of each other.

Hopkins may not treat the issue of vaiiâîty directîy in his poetry, but he does write

about inspiration in such a way as to directly imply the legitimacy of his work. In his

letters he has this to say on the subject of inspiration:

1 shail shortly have some sonnets to send you, five or more. Four of these came like inspirations unbidden and against my will. . . . So with me, if 1 couid but get on, if I couid but produce work 1 shouid not mind its king buried, silenced, and gohg no mert but it Lills me to be tirne's eunuch and never to kget. (1 Scpternber 1885, Sclected Leners 214-1 5 )

It is now years that 1 have had no inspiration of longer jet t&an makes a sonnet, except oniy in that fortnight in Waies: it is what, fac more than direct want of the, 1 find most against poctry and production in the life 1 lead. . . . Nothing cornes 1 am a eunuch-but it is for the bgdom of heavenls d e . (12 January 1888, SkIected Letters 268)

The fùst of these passages makes the traditional c l a h that the poet is merely the

instrument foi an e x t e d inspiration which m o t be denied. It seems signifiant,

maybe even ominous in sight of the despair of 1&se sonnets, that Hopkins d m s not

specifically claim that this inspUation cornes h m Gd. In the second passage he claims

that his lack of inspiration is part of Gd's plan for him, thus revealing his belief that

poetic inspiration does corne h m God and is his to give and take away.

Hopkins is more forthcoming about inspiration in his poetry. Michael Spcinker,

who reads al1 of Hopkins's works as poems about poetry, concentrates upon The Wreck of

the Deutschland as "an autobiograpâ.icai poem about the birth of the p e t [as] can be

shown h m evidence withh and outside the poem" (100). As the first major poem

H o p b m t e in seven years, The Wreck of the Deutschland invites a readîng which sees

it as, in part, a celebration of its own inspiration. Since the subject matter was not solely

of Hopkins's choosing, but suggested to hùn by a superior, it is possible that some of the

emotions he invests in the shipwreck are ecnially displaced fetlings about the fact that he

is miting a poem once again, and with the approvd of his order. In stanza five Hopkins

suggests that his poetry is a manSestation of his love for God:

1 kiss my hand To the stsrs, lovely-asunder

Starlight, waffing him out of it; and Glow, glory in thunda;

Kiss my hand to the dappled-withdamson West: Since, tho' he is under the worid's splendoiir and wonder,

His mystery must be instrrssed, sûessed; For 1 gmet him the days 1 meet him, and bless when 1 undentand.

The poem itseif is an iastnssing of G d s mysûxy, and is Iitcrally "sûessed" within

cornes to me he inspires me and 1 respond with a gceeting in the fonn of a poem.

Hopkins describes the hsistible quaüty of his poetic inspiration in stanza 18:

Ah, touched in your bower of bone, Are you! tumed for an exquisite smart,

Have you! make words break k m me hem al1 alone, Do you!-mother of behg in me, hem.

O unteachably afkr evii, but u t t e ~ g tnith, Why, tears! is it? team; such a melting, a madrigai

In these six Lines he manages to make three large claims: that he is not really respoasible

for his poetry, in t b t his heart, the irrationai part of him, makes the words break h m

him (note how describing himself as "al1 alone" suggests diat he is the victim of an

assadt); that his poetry has the same emotionai authonty as heart-mg tears, sp~g ing

h m the sou1 d e r than the brain, and W l y that his poetry has prophetic and revelatory

power since the heart that inspires his words is "uttering truth."

In staaza 28 Hopkins telescopes his own searchg &et poetic inspiration with

the scramble of the Deutschland passengers to find something to m u e hem:

But how shall1. . . maice me m m there: Reach me a. . . Fancy, come fasteru

Strike you the sight of it? look at it loom there, Thing that she . . . There then! the Master

@se, the only one, Christ, King, Head.

Both the nun and the poet are rewaJded with the same vision, Christ the Mastet, who wiii

inspire the nun to her pmpbetic cry of faith and the petto his pphetic poem of fhith.

The Wieck of the Deutschland, in the words of Lon-Ana Burnstead, "clearly voices

Hopkins's poetic ambitions and ideais" (82)?

26 J. H.Ws Miller, however, argues that the poem is about the failwe of patry, in tbat it "ncognizcs that there is no wod for the Word, that dl wods are metaphors. . . .'The

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"Pied Beauty," a poem about the glories of the natural world, also glaces at

Hopkins's own artistic practice. Afta the tïrst five Linw, concentrating on mature,

Hopkins switches his focus to the productive activities of humanity: "And hii Mes, their

gear and tackle and trim" (6). The miting of poetry could be considered a trade,

especidiy in the eyes of sucb a craftsman as Hopkins, and the following üne could

certainly be interpreted as describing Hopltins's particular b m d of that traâe: "AU things

counter, original, span, strange" (7). Behind the praise of Gd's natural creation lies a

defence of Hopkins's own "sümge" and "original" poetry which is insplled by God: "He

fathers-forth whose beauty is past c&angev (10). In this reading of the poem the very last

line, "Plaise him," is not only an imperative but a justification of the aim of Hopkins's

poetry, which continuaîiy praises Gd.

Two of the dark sonnets, "To seem the stranger" and "Thou art indeed just" mat

the subject of the lack of inspiration. In doing so, they both angrily accuse God of not

providing that inspiration. By locating the source of bis poaic inspiration in Gd, and

then expressing anger when it is not forthcoming, Hopkins indirectly asserts the validity

of his religious poetry in a way that he is not prepared to do in his letters. "To seem the

stmgeri'en& with the lines:

Oniy what wod

Wisest my heart breeds dark heaven's M i n g ban Bars or hcli's speli thwarts. This to hoard unheard,

Wreck of the Deutschiand,' like ail the great poems of Hopkins' matwity, hnas on a recogoition of the uitimste Mitme of poetic languagen (Ilic Linguistic Moment 264-65). Miller holds thai this recognition is iargeIy unconscious on Hopkins's pcirt; 1 am more concemed in this cbapter with the conscious intentions of the m.

266

Head unheeded, leaves me a lonely begm. (1 1-14)

Heaven is bot. dark and baffling bere-, the poet gives no indication that Haven's ban

migbt be j ~ t i f i e d , ~ ~ or that his lack of inspinition is "for the kingdom of heaven's d e . "

Anci if it is heu that thwarts his inspiration, then not writing rtligious poetry is clearly

antagonistic to God. in "Thou art indeed just" Hopkins ren~ms to his favourite image of

king a spintual eunuch, but this t h e he uoambiguously puts all the blame for his

uifertiîity on God:

birds build-but not 1 build; no, but saain, Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes. (12-13)

He ends with a plea that G d WU cectify his poetic dryness with the inspiration that only

he cm provide: "Mine, O thou lord of life, send my mots min" (14). Since the poem is

revded to be about poetry and the lack of inspiration at its end, new light is shed, on a

second readhg, upon the earlier lines that compare the poet's situation with that of

sinnem. "Why do sinaers' ways prosper? and why mut / Disappointment al1 1 endeavour

end?" (3-4) may well cefer to Hopkins's poetic contemporaries who were not writing

religious poetry but d l manageci ta p d u c e more good work than he did. The lines

Oh, the sots and tbratls of lust Do in spare hours more thrive than 1 that spead,

Sir, Life upon thy cause (7-9)

attack those poets that Wfite about semai love (Hopkins may well have had Swinburne in

Indeed, Daaiel A. Hams reads these bes as an angry accusation on Hopkins's part: Thus, when Hopkins changeci 'some ban' to 'da& heavenCs m g ban,' and thereby ascriil the failure of coiioquy to ûd, he made the most cadidy heterodox gesture of his poetryn (1 17).

267

mhd) and who have the "spere hours" in which to write that the Jesuit priest lacks.

Finally, "To R. B." likens poetic inspiration to the Incamation itself. The first

quatrain evokes the image of the Holy Spirit coming dom upon Mary and impregnating

her :

The fine deiight that fadias thought; the strong Spur, üve and lanciag iike the blowpipe flame, Bmthes once and, quench&d fastet than it came, Ltaves yet the mind a mother of immortal song. (1-4)

Hopkins ends by saying that the Holy Spirit, the "Sweet fire the sire of muse" (9) does

not alight upon him, and that therefore his poetry lacks the true mative inspiration that

mirrors God's creation: "Ibe roll, the rise, the cml, the mation" (12). This sonnet then,

stands as a final testament to Hopkins's belief that poetic inspiration cornes fiom God and

minr,rs Go& own creative power.

The aspect of his poeûy that Hoplcias seems most conflictecl over is his audience,

or lack thereof, While he continued to write poetry h m 1875 mtil his death in 1889, he

attempted to publish very little of it. One of his earliest statements on the question of

audience reveals both his cejection of, and desire for, a readetship. He tells Robert

Bridges: "1 c m o t think of altering anythllig. Wby shd. I? 1 do not write for the public.

You are my public and 1 hop to convert you" (21 August 1877, Selefred Letters 91).

Surely, if by his poems he hopl ta convert Bridges, it must have ctossed his mind that a

busand converted readers would be Mer than one. He admits as much eight years

By the bye, I say it delibeilately and before Go& 1 wouîd have you and Canon Dixon and ali mie poas remmber that fme, the king Lnown, though in itseifone of the most dangeroui things to man, is nevertheless

the tme and appointcd ais, element, and setting of gCI1ius and its woiks. What are w o b of art for? to educate, to be standards. Education is meant for the many, standatds are for public use. To proâuce then is of littie use uniess what we p d u c e is known, if known widely known, the wider known the better, for it is by being hiown it w o h , it influences, it does its duty, it does good We must then try to be known, aim at it, take means to do it. (1 3 October 1 886, Selected Letters 23 7 )

if ''to p d u c e is of little use Wess what we produce is known," why then did Hopkins so

nsoiutely refuse to publish his own work? Part of the m e r can be found in this extract

itself when he calls fame "one of the most dangerous thhgs to man." This phrase echoes

a longer meàitation on the periis of fame wcitten in a letter to Dkon in 1878:

When 1 spdre of fame 1 was not thinking of the harm it does to men as artists: it may do them hum, as you say, but so, 1 think, may the wmt of it . . . But 1 meant that it is a great danger in itself, as dangerous as wealth every bit, 1 should think, and as hard to enter the kingdom of heaven with. And even if it does not lead men to break the divine law, yet it gives them "itching ears" and maices them live on public breath. (1 3 June 1 878, Selected letters 102-04)

In his fear of king compted by personal glory, he echoes Cbristina Rossetti, but ualike

her, he actively avoided the temptation.

Hopkins presents himself as satisfied with an auciience of two, Bridges and Dixon,

because "a poet is a pubIic in himseif" (19 Jan- 1879, Selected Letters 109). But he

also nveals a very stmng sense of Christ as his main audience. To Dixon he describes

Christ as a literary critic: "The ody just judge, the only just literary critic, is Christ, who

prizes, is proud of, and admires, more than any man, mon than the receiver himself can,

the gifts of his own making" (1 3 June 1 878, Sélected Lems 104). He writes to Bridges:

"As 1 am criticising you, so d a s Christ, only more comctly and more affedonately, both

as a p e t and as a man" (22 Febniaiy 1879, Bridges 73). Since Christ is both critic and

audience (which, incidentally, serves to validete the genre of nligious poetry most

emphaticalty), he can also take on the mle of publisher:

Now if you value whet 1 write, i f 1 do myself. much more does our Lod. And ifhe chooses to avail himseîfof what 1 leave at his disposal he can do so with a feiicity and with a success which 1 could nevet colllllland. And if he does not, then two diings foiiow; one that the n d 1 shall nevertheless receive fiwi him wiil k al1 the greater; the other that then I shdi hiow how much a thing contrary to his will and even to my own best interests 1 shouid have done if 1 had taken things into my own hands and forced on publication. (1 December 188 1, Selected Letters 163)

H o p b almost totaily rejects the idea of having a large audience while he Lins:

1 shall, in my present minci, continue to compose, as occasion shall fairiy dow, which 1 am ahid wiîi k seldom and indeed for some years past has ken scarcely ever, and let what 1 produce wait and take its chance; for a very spiritual man once told me that with things like composition the best d c e was not to destroy one's work but to leaw it enthly to be disposcd of by obedience. But I cm scarcely fmcy myself asking a superior to publish a volume of my verses aad 1 own that humanly there is very Little 1ikeLibOOd of that ever coming to pass. And to k sure if 1 chose to look at things on one side and not the other 1 could of course regret this bitterly. But there is more peace and it is the holier lot to be uahiown than to k known. (29 October 1 88 1, Selected Letters 162)

Lüre Herkrt, he was happy to have his poems read after bis deah, if they might do any

good. When he does Wnte with an audience other than Chnst or his fellow poets

specifically in muid, it has, he claims, an adverse effect on his poeûy: "Both [May

Magnificat' and 'Silver Jubileel of course are 'popular' pieces in which 1 fetl myself to

corne short'' (9 Aprii 1879, Bridges 78).

Hopicins's actions in this matter of publishing, however, do not always echo his

words. He des id a Jesuit audience, at least at h t , as evidenced by bis submitting the

Dourschlandand the Ewydice to The Month. Most surprising, however, is his action in

188 1 of sending t h sonnets to Hali Caine for c o n s i ~ o n , on the suggestion of Dixon

(Norman White 324), whose pmious encouragements to Hopkins to publish he had

continuaiiy rejected, sometimes with rebuke.

Hopkins's attitudes to his poetry walesce in the figure of the chief nun brn me

Wieck of the Deutschland. She emerges magnificentiy as a voice which drowns out al1

the others:

Night roared, with the heart-bd hearing a heart-bmke rabble,

The woman's waüing, the crying of child without check- Till a lioness amse bnastiag the babble,

A prophetess towed in the tumuit, a wginal tongue told. (st. 17)

By calling the nun a prophet, Hopkins links her with the tradition of religious poetry as

prophecy. Paul Mariani points out a M e r way in which the two an linked: "Hopkins

too is a virginal tongue tellhg the signiscance of the shipwrrck" (60). in staiiza 29

Hopkins presents the nun not so much as the prophet who speaks, but the visionary who

sees, the tnith:

Ah! there wa9 a hart right! There was singie eye!

Read the unshapeable shock night And knew the who and the why;

Wording it how but by hlln that present and past, Heaven and earth are word of. wordcd by?-

The Simon Peter of a soul! to the blast Tarpehn-fa but a blown beacon of light.

Just as the nun sees h a vision and "words it" by the Wod of Go& the Logos who is

Christ, so too &es the religious pet speak the woid of truth. The next stanza, as does his

much later poem "To R B.," cornpans the nun's vision (and hence the poet's inspiration)

to Maryls conception of Christ:

Jesu, heertts light, Jesu, maid's son,

What was the feast that foliowed the night Thou ha& glory of this nu?-

Feast of the one woman without &. For so conceivèà, so to conceive thee is done;

But here was ha-thme, birih of a brain, Woid, tbat h e d and kept thee and uttered thee outright. (st. 30)

The nun is a figure for Hopkins himselfand in her vision, her prophetic words, her

elevation to the status of Mary, and the effkct of her words upon her audience (in this case

Hopkins himself), she tnumphantly ensuns the legitimacy and importance of Hopkins's

own religious poetry.

Hopkins rnay have despairrd of an audience in the real world, but many of his

poems seem motivated by the possibility of teaders other than G d and himself. J. Hillis

Miller provides a good breakdomi of the ciifference types of audience Hopkins's poetry

calls for. As he says, some poems "are addresd boldly and k t l y to God," some to

pemaincatious such as "Peace," &ers to particular people such as "Margaret" and

Robert Bridges, some to himself, and some to the reader, for example "As Kingfishers

catch W and "To what serves Mortai Bcauty" ("Naming and Doing" 183).

Certain poems present more complicated issues of audience. One of these is "The

Los of the Eurydice." Hopkins is almost belligerent in the first line, calling God to

attention in no uncertain temur: "The Eurydice-it concerned thee, O Lord." God, then, it

seems, is the audience for the F m . But the pet aimost immediately veers off into the

impersonal narrative style, which suggests God is not his primary audience since G d can

be persuadecl, curscd, praiseù, and spologized to, but does not mod to k iaformed of

events. The readef, then, is Hopkins's primary audience. But in thne of the last four

272

stanzas, Hopkins turns his attention to a very specific group of readers, the motbers,

wives, and sweethearts of the drowned sailon. Since Hopkins offered to poem to The

Monrh it seems that he hoped these specific people wodd read and take cornfort h m his

poem. He even instirrcts these women in how to pray to God, givhg them the very words

they shouid use:

But to Christ lord of thunder Crouch; lay knee by earth low under:

'Holiest, loveliest, bravest, Save my hero, O Hero savest.

And the prayer thou hearst me making Have, at the awfd overtaking,

Heard; have heard and granted Grace that day grace was wanted! (109-16)

At the end of the poem, then, Hopkins makes eue his opening statement that the poem

concems God, by addressing God through the readers that the poem addresses. Hopkins

makes part of the poem into an acnial prayer, uttered by both himself and al1 his readers.

Among the six temble sonnets, the most temble have usually been taken to be

"Carrion Cornfort," 'Wo worst, there is none," and "1 wake and feel." It is one of these

three, according to cntics, that Hopkins must have "written in blood." The precise

chronology of these poems is uncertain, but t h together, dong with "To seem the

stranger," thcy show a clear progression h m addressing God to ignoring b. In

"Camion Cornfort" Hopkins spends the octave in an address to Despair, who hims out to

be God in disguise. The direct address to Gd, retumed to very briefly in the parenthesis

in the lest line, "1 wretch lay mstiing with (my God!) my God" (14), thus constitutes

over haifthe poem. By conttast, in "No worst" only one üne is spoken to God and one to

273

Mary: "Cornforter, wàere, where ia your comfortbg? 1 Mary, mother of us, where is your

relief?" (3-4). Unanswered, the poet tums at the end to addressiag himseif, as a grim

version of the "cornforter" he invoked in vain:

Hen! cmp, Wretch, under a cornfort serves in a whirlwind: al1 Life de& does end aad each &y dies with sleep. (12-14)

"To seem the straagert' and "1 wake and feel" do not bother to ddress God at dl, knowing

such an invocation would only be another "dead letter" ("1 wake and foel" 7). Instead,

Hopkins begins "1 wake and feei" by addressing his own hart, only to end it by despising

and lamenting his solipsism:

Isee The lost are like this, and their scourge to k As 1 am mine, their sweating selves; but worse. (12-14)

The thtee sonnets chart a progression h m rnost to least hopeful. "Carrion Cornfort''

offers good reasons for the speaker's der ing and ends on a note of wonder, 'Wo worst"

slumps into confusion and can offer only sleep or death as a h g e h m suffering; "1

wake and feel," in involring iasomnia and damnation, negates those cornforts, and is the

most bleak and despairhg of the three. Cornsponding to the dwindling of hope and faith

in this small sequence, is the progression h m addtessing God as the primary audience in

"Carrion Comfo&" to the Iack of any atterapt to do so in "1 wake and fcel." As Daniel

Harris argues, "the vocative mode nearly vanishesn (77) in the terrible sonnets, and

"Trms1ated into the tems of Ignaîian meditation, the elimination of the vocative amounts

to an omission of colloquy with Gd, the central and climactic occasion towards which

274

the entire meditative exercise should move" (80). The absence of God as an addressee

suggests a gmwing, ifurroascious or unwilling, atheism on Hopkins's part.

Like a tnie post-Romantic, Hopkins believcs in the holiness of poetry, and he

seems to have believed that sacd poetry was the best and holiest poetic genre. His

conflicts over poetry stem almost enh ly h m his vocation as a Jesuit priest. While it

may be true that, as Donald Waihout arguesgM he could not have written his poetry

without the inspiration and discipline of his calling, that calling caused Km to devaiue the

importance of his poetry, doubt whether he should k Wnting it at ail, and shun a human

readership for it during his Metirne.

Feuerbach argued that "Temples in honour of Agion are in mith temples in

honour of architecture" (20). and that "the power of nligious music is not the power of

miigion, but the power of music" (142). The existence of many non-Christian readers

who enjoy religious poetry without feeling the neeà to convert seems to prove him right.

But it appears to have ken only George Herbert who was gravely worried by this issue;

Donne's concem about his own personal saivation outweighed any anxiety about the

effect of his poeûy, Rossetti clearly believed that God wouid woik h u g h her poetry to

b ~ g reaâers to himself, and Hopkins klieved the road to converting his fellow men lay

in his wodr as a Jesuit, not as a poet. The tension that exists between Christian and p e t

in ali theV work, however, bears witaess to the way in which the conflict between religion

30 "Remove this Christian expeiience and its concrete Catholic and Jesuit embodiments which Hoplans felt it entailed for his own He, and the content of the poeûy, let aioae its very occunence, would seem to be impossibie" (20).

275

and art results not in Med poeûy, nor distorted Chtistianity, but in gmt literature a d a

fascinating and compeihg portraya1 of the relationship W e e n the sou1 and God.

Conclusion

Litenuy criticism should be compkted by criticism fiom a definite ethical and theological standpoint. In so fat as in any age there is common agreement on ethicai and theologid matte=, so fm can litemy criticism be substantive. In aga like our own, in which here is no such common agreement, it is the more necessary for Chnstian mders to scnitinue

. . their ileading, especidy of worlrs of Meginstion, with explicit ethicai and theologicai standards. The "greatness" of literatwe cannot be deterniined solely by literary s&ndaids; though we must member that whether it is literature or not c m k detennïned oniy by literary standards. (T. S. Eliot, "Religion and Literature" 97)

My approach in this thesis has been "literary criticism . . . completed by criticism

fiom a definite . . . theological standpoint," but unlike Eliot, my standpoint has been

agnostic rather thm Christian. I have arguai thughout for a reading of the poeûy which

sees the poet relating to himself, rather than to Gd. In doing so, I have üied ta provide

one m e r to the question posed by Jerome McGann with reference to Rossetti: "But

suppose for a moment you w t e d to convince a non-Christian Japanese fnend of the

power of Chcistina Rossetti's poetry or-perhaps better--a hurnanist scholar h m the

Soviet Union-or simply any non-kliever. What line would you take? What would you

say?" ("The Religious Poetry of Christina Rossetti" 128). M c G m seems to me to avoid

mswering his own question, since he cornes to the conclusion that "to read Rossetti's

reiigious poetry with understadng (and tkefore with profit and appreciation) requires a

more or less coascious investment in thepeculian'h'es of its Chnstian orientation, in the

sociai and hùtorical particulam which f d and shape the distinctive fcaturrs of her work"

277

(132; McGann's emphasis). It seems to me that the Japanese and Soviet readers wouid

sirnply &mg their shouîdas anâ wallr away ifoffered this answer. My thesis has come

up with two diffierent atmvers-

The first is one that al1 secular critics of niigious poetry have to some degree

offereâ, that the power of religious poetry lies simply in its power as poetry, in its forma1

literery merit and beauty. In chapters two and four 1 argue that the forma1 qualities of

poetry c m be enhanced, not desttoyed or neutralizod, by a Christian theme or investment.

These two chapters both argue against Knstevak belief that poetry only works when it

destmys dogrna: chapter two by engaging fisteva on het own terms, chapter four by

constnlcting possible anmuers to her objections by the poets themselves. Religious poetry

can delight the secular reader.

The second anmer is that religious poetry powerfiily and beautifully expresses

self-confiict- While non-believing naders might be tempted to dismiss religious poetry

as a record of an inauthentic and delusionary expience, they are likely to find it a

convincing accouat of the subject's attempts to come to grips with itself, if they are show

ways in which they can nad "ûcxi" as part of the psyche. Chapters one and three

concentrate upon the poetry as a document of selfhowledge and self-co~l~t~ction:

chapter one by lwîâng at the ways in which the abject consûucts itselfas fiuniliar or

mange, chapter thrre by examining sttategies of seKlove and seWute. Religious poetry

can teach, as weil as delight, the secuiar reader, by pcsenting to her different ways in

which she can relate to her own self,

278

The thesis, then, attempts to pmve mong "the greet majority of people" for

whom, in Eliotts words, "'rellgioup poetty' is a variety of minor poetry: the religious pet

is not a pet who is treating the whole subject matta of poetry in a nligious spirit, but a

p e t who is dealing with a coafiraed part of this subject matter; who is leaving out wbat

men consider their major passions, and thereby confessing his ignorance of them"

("Religion and Litemtwe" 99; Eliot's emphasis). By reading religious poeûy in some

sense independently of God, 1 hope 1 have shown how the nligious poet indeed treats the

"major passions" of love, hate, feu, sexuaiity, resentment, desire, depression, and joy;

that the religious poet indeed ûeats "the whole subject matter of poetry in a religious

spirit," rather than relegating himself to the ststus of a minor pe t of "limited awareness"

("Religion and Literan~e" 99). Religious poetry is inevitably about the self and about

poetry, two of the most major, most central, subjects of ail poary.

And yet, in spite of my agnostic appmach to religious poetry in this thesis, I would

offer McGannrs nonChristian readers a third m e r , that the power of the p û y of

Donne, Herbert, Rossetti, and Hoplans, springs h m the God that they mate in theu

poetry. Anthony Low mites that the particular challenge that cnticism of religious

literature f~ces is that "To begin with God is to violate the normal d e s of modem titetary

discourse; not to begin with him on such a topic, however, is at least to violate the

suppositions of such wiitas as DOM~, Herbert, and Vaugben" ("The Pmblem of

Mysticism" 183). Ifto kgin with God is to violate the niles of criticism, then to end with

him must be even more tnasgressive, but that is what I fecl cornpelleci ta do. In the end,

good reiigious poeûy m*s& as well as invites a secular reading. The four poas in this

279

study beiieved in Gd. They loved him and hated bim. They mote poetry to, about, and

because of him. Whether or not he ûuly exists in d t y , he most dennitely exists within

the lines of their poetry.

1 wondet what the pets themselves, should they reside in the heaven they

bclieveâ in, would think of the ways in wbich theu poeûy was read today. Wodd they be

dismayed by the amount of non-Ctnistians reading their poeûy solely for aesthetic

p l e m ? Wodd they be upset at those who read it in order to learn about humanity

cathet than about divinity? Or would they be gratefbl for the power of their poetry to

seduce the unbeliever into at least a temporary and fictive kl ief in God? 1s a purely

literary attraction to God ktter than no attraction at all?

The power of great nligious poetry does iie, in the end, in its religion as much as

in its poetry. Just as the Cbriscian mader will get more out of a work such as Samuel

Beckett's Wdting for Godot if he surrenders himself to the atheistic vision expressed

there, so too will the agnostic or atheist reader h d himseifrewarâed if he cm suspend

his own disbelief. He will obtain a great degree of satidBCtion if he nids the poetry for

what it can tell him about humanity, as 1 have tried to show, but, whatever his own

beliefs, he wili obtain even gnater deligbt h m the poetry ifhe reads it for what it cm

tell him about humanity's relationship with Gd.

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