notes to chapter 2 219
came dazzling and painful, the doves were gone, and our Lord appeared display-
ing His five wounds. (House, JP, 153–54)
The ability of the beak to “mark” as a pen nib would mark on a page would not have
been lost on Hopkins, here. MacKenzie notes that Hopkins used the word “nibs” four
days later in his description of the Dartmoor furze.
- As Hopkins prepared to revise “The Wreck of the Deutschland” to send to Pat-
more in 1883, he found out that he had been appointed as a Fellow in Classics of the
Royal University of Ireland (Abbott, LI, 263), a post that took him off English soil
and away from the salvation of English souls altogether. This is, perhaps, another rea-
son for his increasing interest in English soil, and the actual border of English and
England. From his isolated vantage point in Dublin, his late poetry configures and
reconfigures the multiple possibilities of connecting to God and to England. - Hopkins is writing about his rejection in The Month to his mother (LII, 138).
- Abbott, LI, 46. Bridges famously despised “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” As
he was preparing the first edition of Hopkins’s poems, in 1918, he wrote to Kate Hop-
kins: “That terrible ‘Deutschland’ looks and reads much better in type — you will be
glad to hear. But I wish those nuns had stayed at home” (Stanford, Selected Letters of
Robert Bridges, 726). - Abbott, LI, 46. By January 1879, Hopkins was explicit about his wish to con-
vert Bridges. He writes: “You understand of course that I desire to see you a Catholic
or, if not that, a Christian or, if not that, at least a believer in the true God (for you told
me something of your views about the deity, which were not as they should be)” (60). - Hopkins’s family called him “the Crow of Maenefa” because of the similarity
between black-gowned priests and crowish birds, and because of the crow’s nests, seats
atop trees near St. Bueno’s College, where Hopkins studied in Wales (White, “Hop-
kins as the Crow of Maenefa,” 113–20). - Abbott, LIII, 27.
- Patmore’s article “English Metrical Critics” appeared in issue 27, 127–61 of the
North British Review as “an article ostensibly reviewing George Vandenhoff ’s The Art
of Elocution, Edwin Guest’s A History of English Rhythms, and William O’Brien’s The
Ancient Rhythmical Art Recovered.” Sister Mary Augustine Roth’s reproduction of Pat-
more’s Essay on English Metrical Law includes an introduction in which she expertly
traces the influences of Patmore’s predecessors Joshua Steele, Hegel (“whose Aesthetics
provided the philosophical basis for an ‘organic’ theory of prosody unifying ‘life’ and
‘law,’ meanings and versification,” ix), Daniel, Foster, Mitford, and Dallas. Patmore
revised the essay and printed it as a “Prefatory Study on English Metrical Law” in the
1878 edition of Amelia, Tamerton Church Tower, Etc., and it was again reprinted in
the 1879 four-volume edition of Patmore’s collected Poems. It is the correspondence
between Hopkins and Patmore following this 1878 edition that is of interest to me
here. - Abbott, LI, 119.
- Though we cannot read the letter to which Hopkins is responding (Bridges de-
stroyed his half of the correspondence), we can read that there was competition be-
tween Bridges and Patmore; Hopkins ends his discussion of Patmore’s theories in the
January 1881 letter with “[b]ut about Patmore you are in the gall of bitterness.” Recall
that, two years later, Bridges approached Patmore about the possibility of mentioning
in print the “new prosody” that Bridges and Hopkins had devised (it was also Bridges