218 notes to chapter 2
only. It is clear the Latin writers thought of arsis as effort, thesis as the fall to rest
after effort. (Abbott, LII, 185)- Saville, A Queer Chivalry, 83.
- In Dublin in 1885, a series of three meditation points—titled “Lance and Nails,”
“The Transfiguration,” and “The Five Wounds”—elaborates this early metaphor of the
stigmata to attaching your will completely to God’s will: “Seeing Christ’s body nailed
consider the attachment of his will to God’s will. Wish to be as bound to God’s will in
all things, in the attachment of your mind and attention to prayer and the duty in
hand; the attachment of your affections to Christ our Lord and his wounds instead of
any earthly object” (Devlin, Sermons, 255). - Cf. MacKenzie, “Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves,” Poetical Works.
- MacKenzie notices the pattern of 5s: 5x2 stanzas in part one and 5x5 stanzas in
part two. He also refers to Hopkins’s early notebooks, “On the Origin of Beauty,” in
which a character asks the professor: “Out of five dots arranged in a particular way you
make a cross, may you not?” (House, JP, 103; Higgins, The Collected Works of Gerard
Manley Hopkins, 155). - An earlier version of this line reads, “O rose but thy crimson, the gashes in thee /
They came at thy nailing against the cross-tree” (ll. 33–24). - “Rosa Mystica” was first published in The Irish Monthly, 26. 299 (May 1898):
234–35 and it was reprinted in Shipley’s Carmina Mariana. - Hopkins, considering Christ’s passion in early 1870, describes the wellspring of
his emotion as a pressure like that of a knife:
But neither the weight nor the stress of sorrow, by themselves move us or bring
the tears as a sharp knife does not cut for being pressed as long as it is pressed
without any shaking of the hand but there is always one touch, something strik-
ing sideways and unlooked for, which in both cases undoes resistance and
pierces, and this may be so delicate that the pathos seems to have gone directly
to the body and cleared the understanding of its passage. On the other hand the
pathetic touch by itself, as in dramatic pathos, will only draw slight tears if its
matter is not important or not of import to us, the strong emotion coming from
a force which was gathered before it was discharged: in this way a knife may
pierce the flesh which it had happened only to graze and the grazing will go no
deeper. (House, JP, 195)- Ibid., 11.
- From Devlin, The Sermons: “the touch which only god can apply” (158).
- Hartman, The Unmediated Vision, 49–67.
- Miller, The Linguistic Moment, 260.
- Hopkins’s journal entry from August 29, 1867 recounts a meeting with a Miss
Warren (whose nephew was a Fellow at St. John’s Oxford); they took a walk (this epi-
sode is recounted in MacKenzie, Poetical Works, 149). Hopkins records:
Miss Warren told me that she had heard the following vision of an old woman.
She saw, she said, white doves flying about her room and drops of blood falling
from their “nibs” — that is their beaks. The story comes in Henderson’s book of
Folklore. The woman was a good old woman. . . . The room was full of bright
light, the “nibs” bathed in blood, and the drops fell on her. Then the light be-