Victorian poetry and science(112-13). The poem describes the air as a "fine flood": a physical medium
like water. The sky, the body of air which surrounds the earth, shares
Mary's color: it is a "bath of blue" able to "slake / His fire" (95-96).
Gillian Beer has traced the scientific explanation that informs Hopkins's
understanding of "How air is azured" (74), thereby softening the harshness
of the sun's rays, to Tyndall. 20 In 1870, Tyndall established that minute
particles in the atmosphere cause the refraction of solar rays, especially of
those that have a small wavelength, which our eyesight registers as the
color blue. That the air of the sky is not, as was previously supposed,
stained blue is clear from the fact that
this blue heaven
The seven or seven times seven
Hued sunbeam will transmit
Perfect, not alter it. (86-89)In these lines, the sunbeam splits not only into the seven hues of the
Newtonian spectrum but also into the much finer gradations disclosed by
the new science of spectroscopy. During the 1850s Robert Bunsen and
Gustave Kirchhoff proved that each chemical element, when added to a
clean gas flame, produced a definitive wavelength of light. When such light
is passed through a prism, it discloses a "bright line" of color at a particular
point of the spectrum. As an undergraduate at Oxford during the 1860s,
Hopkins was aware of "the spectral analysis by wh[ich] the chemical
composition of non-terrestrial masses is made out." 21 His "seven times
seven / Hued sunbeam" is an aptly approximate reference to the growing
but often contested tallies of solar chemical elements that scientists were
making in the latter part of the century. The astronomer Norman Lockyer,
for example, writing in 1878, counted "more than thirty" of the fifty-one
known terrestrial metals from solar light. 22
Spectroscopy provides Hopkins with an apt analogy to describe his
ontology, which values individual difference as an expression of God's
nature. It is for Hopkins the very specificity - the tightly focused distinctive-
ness - of the "bright line" that makes an instance of being integral to the
ultimate Being of God. The inclusive yet transcendent white light of the
Sun is, scientifically speaking, the source of all energy and life in the
universe. Each creature is necessary as the means to disclose, by absorption
and reflection, aspects of the vast spectrum of Being that, as pure
transparent white light, would otherwise be imperceptible. This is a feature
evident in the untitled poem, dating from 1877, that begins:
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells153