CYNTHIA SCHEINBERGconvert my brothers and sisters." 26 In 1868, not long after finishing his
degree at Oxford, Hopkins entered the order to Jesuits, and two years later
he took the vows of the Society of Jesus, spending the rest of his life as a
Jesuit priest.
Hopkins wrote poetry at many different times in his life as a Jesuit, often
questioning whether poetry was a suitable pursuit, and often wary of
publishing. His close friend Robert Bridges published most of Hopkins's
poems in 1918, almost thirty years after the poet's death. This posthumous
volume drew the attention of many Modernist writers and critics who
highly esteemed Hopkins's works. Ever since, his prosodic and stylistic
experimentalism has been thought to anticipate Modernist transformations
of poetic technique. In this regard, Hopkins is perhaps best known for his
metrical innovations with poetic stress. He developed an ingenious system
of meter (known as sprung rhythm) that would produce what he sometimes
called "inscape": a "pattern" or "design" that emerged, within his distinc-
tive theological poetics, from a system of heavily stressed syllables that
gave more vocal weight to a poetic line than either English grammar or
traditional scansion would usually allow.
"To Seem the Stranger" arguably marks the culmination of a group of
poems written in the mid-18 80s - including "I Wake and Feel the Fell of
Dark, Not Day" and "Carrion Comfort" - that are often referred to as the
"Terrible Sonnets" or (less ambiguously) the "Sonnets of Desolation"
because they explore the confounding complexities, intense difficulties, and
profound terrors of faith. Daniel A. Harris sees this resonant poem as the
summary of the crisis that this group of sonnets articulates; in his view, the
marked emphasis throughout "To Seem the Stranger" on what it means to
be "Heard" (GMH 14) or "unheard" (13) relates to many kinds of
frustration, including the earthly failures of familial, ministerial, and
national recognition, and the ultimate failure of being "heard" by God. 27 In
this remarkable poem, Hopkins extends one tradition of the English sonnet
with his own unique use of enjambment, diction, and rhythm, as the
opening quatrain reveals:
To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life
Among strangers. Father and mother, dear,
Brothers and sisters are in Christ not near
And he my peace/my parting, sword and strife. (1-4)Feeling like a "stranger... / Among strangers," Hopkins alludes here to his
life in Ireland, a country with a majority Roman Catholic population,
where he for the most part worked unhappily as a Professor of Greek and
Latin Literature at University College, Dublin, from 1884 until his death in