Victorian Poetry

CYNTHIA SCHEINBERG

focus on the hegemonic assumption of sexual partnership, pointing to its
difference from his religious and social identity as a celibate Jesuit priest. 28
In addition, this differentiation of his self from both familial and romantic
relationships echoes the conditions of Christ's life, since Christ explicitly
repudiated common ties to family and marriage because of his obedience to
God the Father.
Once he recognizes that even "pleading" to be heard by "England" will
do his religious and poetic case no good, Hopkins continues to dissolve his
formal alliance with English literary tradition, abandoning any semblance
of pentameter in the last line of the octave (which has thirteen syllables).
This line similarly speaks of "wars" both within the speaker's battle to be
heard as a religious other and within England's internal struggle to
maintain Anglican hegemony. But by far the most daring aspect of this
quatrain occurs in the startling line break in "wear- / Y," which suggests a
failed attempt to maintain connections to common conventions of English
grammar as well as poetry. Here, above all, is a representation of the
strangeness of his poetic and religious voice in relation to English poetic
tradition. The three repetitions of "I" in close proximity give way to the
more truly strange version of "I" as "Y," suggesting that the identity of the
speaker has likewise undergone drastic transformation in the "wars" that
eventually determined his Roman Catholic identity.
The sestet opens with a return to seemingly clear language and a varied,
if still expanding, pentameter:

I am in Ireland now; now I am at a third

Remove. Not but in all removes I can

Kind love both give and get. Only what word

Wisest my heart breeds baffling heaven's dark ban

dark heaven's baffling ban

Bars or hell's spell thwarts. This to hoard unheard,

Thought unhoarded unheard

Heard unheeded, leaves me a lonely began.

[leave] (9-14)

Here, too, the poem modulates between conformity and nonconformity to
literary tradition. First of all, the metrical length varies. The opening line
has twelve syllables, while the next two return to ten. At the same time, the
grammatical simplicity of the opening clause yields to increasing com-
plexity of meaning. Whereas the first two alienating "removes" named in
the octave - his distance from his family, and his dissociation from a
spousal love of England - were psychic "removes" that seemed to occur
regardless of his physical location, the idea of existing at a "third /

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