Victorian Poetry

Victorian poetry and religious diversity

This shift allows her to conclude her poem not as a direct polemic against
men who "take no heed" but rather as an inclusive statement about the
universality of divine Christian love. Rossetti's concern with speakers who
might remain unheeded on earth certainly echoes a deeply significant
concept in Christian theology: namely, that Christ was rejected by many
people, only to be crucified. Taking Christ's example, therefore, the
experience of communal rejection becomes a potential sign of divine
authority. In this sense, Rossetti forges an implicit link between the status
of existing as an unheeded woman in the Anglican world and the place of
Jesus as a rejected prophet in his earthly suffering. (This is a connection
that she makes repeatedly in one of her later prose works, Seek and Find
[1879].) Finally, in her poetic appropriation of Jesus's words, Rossetti
claims a canonized Christian text as her own. "Consider the Lilies of the
Field" enables Rossetti to articulate her own particular theology as a
Christian woman who "considers]" Christian gospel both intellectually
and spiritually. That said, since this poem has rarely been interpreted for its
female perspective on a biblical parable, it is clear that it proved remark-
ably unthreatening to a patriarchal religious and literary community that
would sanction a woman's acts of religious poetry long before they would
sanction her theological authority.

IV

Where Rossetti calls on an unheeded existence as a marker for Anglican

women's poetic and religious endeavors, Gerard Manley Hopkins turns to

this same figure of feeling "unheard" in his powerful sonnet "To Seem the

Stranger": a poem that represents the stressful condition of his Roman

Catholic identity in the Anglican culture that he chose to reject. Hopkins

was raised in a well-to-do High Anglican family. He studied at Balliol

College, Oxford, where he came under the influence of many religious

controversies still raging in response to the legacy of the Oxford Move-

ment. Eventually, Hopkins himself entertained doubts about the various

Anglican schisms from Roman Catholicism, and in 1866 converted to

Rome. Although Roman Catholic political disability had recently been

removed in England, affiliation with Rome still carried minority status. For

a prizewinning Oxford graduate like Hopkins, conversion meant that all

university posts and positions in the clergy were closed to him. It also

meant that even his family had certain suspicions about his contact with

them. Writing to his father in October 1866, Hopkins mentions these

concerns: "You are so kind as not to forbid me your house, to which I have

no claim, on the condition, if I understand, that I promise not to try and

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