Victorian Poetry

Victorian poetry and religious diversity

Remove" reflects his literal removal to Ireland: the country where he could
belong as a Roman Catholic but not belong as an Englishman. Yet none of
these "removes" offers him the experience of "kind love" to be able to
"both give and get." And, indeed, this re-emphasis on his disaffection
galvanizes another loss of linguistic clarity, significantly marked by the
phrase "only what word," as if he were questioning the very validity of
speech itself because his utterance comes from a position outside of
dominant conventions. In contemplating the value of his own speech, he
returns to a desperate image of familial connection, this time through the
verb "breeds." But the clause "Only what word / Wisest my heart breeds"
depicts a figure of solitary creation, a man seeking to "create" without the
benefit of familial, national, or spousal partnership. And this "word,"
produced out of a solitary heart, remains vulnerable to "dark heaven's
baffling ban" and "hell's spell": two dark forces that "bar" and "thwart"
his ability to create further. This memorable idea of existing as a "lonely
began" - where the active movement of a verb strikingly transforms into an
immobilizing noun - hearkens back to Christ's suffering on the cross,
rejected and despised yet also, through his suffering, offering hope to those
subsequent Christians who would claim his death as the sign of human
salvation: a new beginning that has nonetheless emerged from terminal
isolation.

V

Despite their very different religious perspectives and religious commit-
ments - Aguilar to Judaism; Rossetti to High Anglicanism; and Hopkins to
Roman Catholicism - all three poets take on the challenge of representing
their own particular religious identities and commitments to an audience
that might not otherwise comprehend their beliefs. In doing so, each poet
undoes certain assumptions about national identity, poetic tradition, and
the role of the vates. The echoes between Rossetti's figure of the Christian
woman of whom men "take no heed" and Hopkins's image of the Roman
Catholic struggle to be simultaneously "Heard" and "heeded" in Anglican
society are certainly worthy of note. Correspondingly, while Aguilar
suggests that a "Golden Age" of poetry can occur for specific groups when
they live in relative cultural and political freedom, Hopkins links the
creation of poetry - or in his sonnet, its seeming disintegration - to a
contentious view of how Anglican intolerance makes him "seem a
stranger." These poems endorse the idea that poetry, like prophecy, is
always directed at an audience that has the power to confirm or discredit
the poet's authority. In this sense, they implicitly call up the central paradox

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