Part I showed how the post-Kantian hermeneutic of Spirit developed in Hölderlin and Hegel, and how, in the nineteenth century, difficulties emerged in the work of a series of thinkers who tried to move beyond the sacramental understanding of the self and of history, but in so doing involved themselves in far-reaching paradoxes. We have seen how the moral underpinning of the Spiritual hermeneutic, first indicated by Kant in his account of good and evil, comes to the fore in Strauss and Nietzsche, but for essentially negative reasons: Strauss initiated a move away from the community of Spirit, which Nietzsche took to its logical conclusion in the figure of Zarathustra, attempting to live beyond good and evil. The abandonment of community is seen in a different form in the anti-dialectical metaphysics of F. H. Bradley, where the Straussian and Nietzschean problem of redemption expresses itself in finite centres which point to a reality that can never be achieved. Furthermore, the moral dimension is bound up with speaking and writing — with communication: Strauss and Zarathustra speak with a voice that negates itself in the act of utterance.
We can now listen to two other voices, contemporary with Strauss, Nietzsche, and the birth of British Idealism. There has never been an extensive comparison of Eduard Mörike and Gerard Manley Hopkins: such links as have been made are occasional and extremely fleeting.1 Yet Mörike and Hopkins have much in common, even aside from the generally held critical judgement that they are important modern figures in their respective literary traditions.2 They differ in a crucial respect from all of the figures we have looked at so far. Their creative lives took place in the context of an allegiance, sometimes ambivalent, to an official church: Mörike's in the Lutheran Church of Württemberg, in which he was ordained in 1826, Hopkins's in the Jesuit Order, in which he was ordained in 1877. Unlike Hegel and Hölderlin, they did not abandon an ecclesial vocation, and unlike Strauss, Nietzsche, and Bradley, all of whose lives overlapped with those of Mörike and Hopkins, they certainly did not feel the need to turn their back on Christianity altogether. Mörike and Hopkins also share a number of recurring poetic themes, which are familiar to us from the story we have seen unfold so far: vision, moments of revelation, and the nature of objects. They are therefore obvious candidates for a discussion of how the post-Kantian hermeneutic of Spirit is felt poetically in the nineteenth century.
Like Hegel, Hölderlin, and Strauss, Mörike was a product of the Tübingen Stift, which he attended from 1822 until 1826. He first met Strauss in 1827, and they maintained an irregular correspondence for several decades.3 Although Strauss often remarks on Mörike's poetry in the letters, Mörike does not address Strauss's work.4 However, he was aware of certain undercurrents in Strauss's thinking, and was troubled by their implications, as can be seen from some telling comments in a letter to Friedrich Theodor Vischer of 1837 (two years after the publication of Das Leben Jesu):
Du schreibst auch von den Straußischen Bewegungen. Ich sehe ihnen mit dem größten Anteil zu. Dasjenige, was er gemeiner Christenheit durch die Kritik der Evangelien nimmt, war freilich ihm und Dir und mir und Tausenden auf einem andern, primitivem Weg im voraus weggenommen und es könnte sich nur fragen, wie denn bei einem so landkundig werdenden theologischen Bankerott zuletzt der unvernünftige Haufe sich befinden und beruhigen werde? In meiner öffentlichen Stellung als Geistlicher habe ich jederzeit geglaubt, gewisse Dinge hergebrachtermaßen als ausgemacht und faktisch voraussetzen zu dürfen, ja zu müssen, und zwar teils nach dem Grundsatz von der Unmündigkeit des Volks, teils weil doch selbst auch der Gebildete und Wissende gern seine Andacht an die von Kindheit auf gewohnten Vorstellungen und Formen knüpfen mag; obwohl ich Dir gestehe, daß mir bei dieser Auskunft niemals ganz wohl und frei zumute war.5
[You write too of the movements surrounding Strauss. I view them with the greatest interest. What he takes away from common Christian belief through his criticism of the Gospels was of course already taken away from him and from you and from me and from thousands of others in a different, more primitive way, and we can only ask what this theological bankruptcy, spreading further and further afield, will finally mean for the uneducated masses, and what means of reassurance they will have in the face of it. In my public office as pastor, I have always felt permitted, indeed obliged, to assume certain things as agreed and given, in accordance with tradition: partly because of people's lack of intellectual independence, partly because even the educated and knowledgeable person likes to have his devotion tied to the ideas and forms of thought and expression that he has been used to since childhood; though I grant you that I have never felt entirely comfortable doing so.]
Here Mörike addresses the themes that occupied our discussion in Chapter 2: tradition, community and the status of the pastor within it, representation. Unlike Strauss, for whom the public role of the cleric consists in the gradual deconstruction of scriptural representation (LJ, II, 742), Mörike insists on the necessity of tradition ('hergebrachtermaßen'), and is reluctant to separate himself, the clerical man of learning, from the community of the Church. He too is part of that community, and he too only has access to truth through the representations ('Vorstellungen') of the biblical text that he is called to expound. Mörike's public role is that of the Kantian 'Schriftgelehrter', not of the Straussian, and later Nietzschean, apostate cleric, cutting himself off from his flock in order to assume an all-seeing perspective above them. However, despite his clear difference from Strauss, Mörike is made uneasy by the demands of his vocation: he has never felt comfortable addressing his community in this way.
Mörike's most frequently discussed poems date from around his retirement from pastoral work in 1843, after a decade of inwardly turbulent public ministry.6 In these poems, the move from public to private is felt in the pervasive concentration on things, on meticulously observed objects presenting themselves to the subjective awareness of the speaker, and they have been regarded as enigmatic because of Mörike's elusive presence within them. He seems to draw the reader in towards him while at the same time constantly distancing himself, hiding behind the paraphernalia of the Biedermeier age: the playful archaism of verse forms and motifs drawn from the 'Märchen' tradition, the miniaturist detail of the collectable object, the shining expanse of the aesthetic surface.7 Yet there has been no attempt to understand Mörike's enigmatic poetic presence in terms of the post-Kantian hermeneutic of community, despite the fact that Mörike belonged to the theological context in which that hermeneutic was formulated, commented indirectly on it in his remarks about Strauss, and clearly felt the dual claims of public, communal vocation and private, inner life. And ignoring the significance of community in Mörike means ignoring the significance of history. This omission seems inextricable from a further failing: to treat seriously Mörike's relation to Hölderlin.8 In 'Patmos', the post-Kantian historical hermeneutic reaches its poetic culmination: as such that poem remains a central point of reference for a discussion of history and Spirit in Mörike. In what follows here, we will examine three of Mörike's best-known poems from the 1840s, all of them focused on objects, and ask what relation they have to the hermeneutic of Spirit. This will involve asking how they relate to Strauss's attempt to deconstruct that hermeneutic, and in asking those questions we can address Hölderlin's real importance for Mörike.
'Auf eine Christblume' ('On a Christmas Rose', 1841) clearly combines Mörike's religious emphasis with his interest in things.9 It consists of two parts, one of seven strophes and one of two, which Mörike composed in close succession but separately: he originally regarded the end of the seventh strophe as the end of the poem.10 'Auf eine Christblume' relates Mörike's discovery of a flower in a churchyard on a visit to Neustadt, and this incident takes on the character of an epiphany. The power of this moment is apparent from the letter Mörike wrote to his friend Wilhelm Hartlaub on 29 October 1841, the day after the discovery. The significance of the flower for Mörike is reflected in the meticulous description he offers of it, and the sense that finding it is a defining moment for him. His account combines the themes of life and death:
Auf einem andern, mir gleichfalls bekannten, Grabe aber fand ich mit großer Überraschung etwas Lebendiges, Frischblühendes, wonach ich viele Jahre vergeblich getrachtet hatte. Eine mir völlig neue Blume, mit fünf ganz aufgeschlagenen ziemlich breiten Blättern, an Weiße und Derbheit wie die der Lilie; von den Enden herein lichtgrün angehaucht u. fast ebenso, nur etwas satter grün, im Kelche unten. In dessen Mitte bildeten die blaßgelben Befruchtungstheile einen ziemlich dicken Kegel, oben mit 4—5 kurzen Purpurfáden büschelartig geziert. Der runde, schmutzig-grüne, rothgesprenkelte Stengel, nicht gar kurz, jedoch gekrümmt, so daß die Blume niedrig saß. Die Blätter gleichfalls schmutzig grün. Die Pflanze hat einige Ähnlichkeit mit der Wasserrose. Ihr Dürft [sic] ist äußerst fein, kaum bemerklich, aber angenehm. So reizend fremd sah sie mich an, sehnsuchterregend!11
[But on another grave, also known to me, I found to my great surprise something living, and in fresh bloom, which I had been striving in vain to find for many years. A flower that was completely new to me, with five quite wide petals, fully opened out, strong and white like those of the lily, with a hint of light green at the tips. Almost the same effect, only with a somewhat lighter green, could be seen below in the calyx, in the middle of which the pale yellow reproductive parts formed quite a thick cone, decorated on top with 4—5 short purple threads coming together in bunches. The round, dirty-green, red-speckled stalk, not really short, but curved, so that the flower sat low. The leaves also dirty green. The plant is similar to the water-lily. Its scent is extremely fine, scarcely noticeable, but pleasant. It looked at me with such lovely strangeness, and aroused such longing in me!]
Having described this meeting between the poet's subjective self and the natural object, the letter emphasises how this object exists between seasons, blossoming in winter: 'liebet sehr den Schatten und wintrichte Stelle, kommt deßwegen an warm u. sonnichten Orten gar nicht fort' [very much loves the shade and wintry places, and for that reason does not get on at all well in sunny ones].12 In serving as a reminder of summer in the depth of winter, and so transgressing the rhythms of the year, the flower seems to transgress time: it exists within the alternating pace of the seasons, and yet bridges them, forming a point in between them and so not defined by them. That in-betweenness is captured in the first strophe of the poem. Yet it is now given a further dimension, linked through a process of relation to other created things:
Tochter des Walds, du Lilienverwandte,
So lang von mir gesuchte, unbekannte,
Im fremden Kirchhof, öd' und winterlich,
Zum erstenmal, o schöne, find' ich dich! (ll. 1—4)
[Daughter of the forest, relative of the lily, sought by me for so long, unknown, in the strange churchyard, bleak and wintry, I first find you, beautiful flower!]
It carries its own beginning, the moment of its conception, within itself, and points to the network of creation in which it came to be: it is 'Tochter des Walds', and is related to the genus of the lily. It therefore refers back to an entire history of generation and development: its sexual identity (given emphasis in the letter, in the description of 'Befruchtungstheile') leads it beyond itself. Furthermore, the poetic persona who discovers the flower has his own history, which has been determined by the search for this object: 'So lang von mir gesuchte, unbekannte". Subjective and objective trajectories come together in the bleak churchyard, as the flower reveals itself to the speaker, and that moment when the subject meets its object is a moment outside the opposition of summer and winter, a moment in which both exist together — alienation turns into reciprocity: 'Im fremden Kirchhof [. . .] o schöne, find' ich dich!' The speaker's experience of epiphany is compelled by the sense of the flower's history, the meaning it has as the result of its relation to other things and people — these are all bound up in the power it radiates:
Von welcher Hand gepflegt du hier erblühtest,
Ich weiß es nicht, noch wessen Grab du hütest;
Ist es ein Jüngling, so geschah ihm Heil,
Ist's eine Jungfrau, lieblich fiel ihr Teil. (ll. 5—8)
[I do not know by whose tending hand you bloom here, nor whose grave you guard; if it is a youthful boy then he met with good fortune, if it is a maiden her fate was loving.]
Mörike's flower is embedded in a history that is not accessible to the speaker of the poem, but nonetheless the speaker recognizes that history as the source of the flower's significance.13 Indeed its history — the way it reaches out beyond itself in a network of relation — is what gives the flower its in-between status. All of its past associations (its genetic descent from the lily, its relation to the hand that planted it and to the life it commemorates) are present in the moment it reveals itself to the speaker: they make it shine forth, blossom in winter, beyond the confines of seasonal rhythm, and so beyond the confines of time.
Auf eine Christblume is then a poem about time and history. The moment when Mörike encounters this flower in a churchyard is a moment when time is exceeded and made meaningful — time reveals history, in the moment when two histories (of the poetic persona and the flower he describes) meet. In this moment the histories of the speaker and the flower expand to include each other, and a new relation is established. Underlying this is a dynamic process which, in the terms of Hölderlin in 'Patmos', can be understood as 'Dämmerung'. Though the word does not appear in 'Auf eine Christblume', the concept is important for Mörike too, and like Hölderlin he attaches to it a commemorative dimension, as seen from an early poem, 'Im Frühling' ('In Spring', 1828): 'Was webst du für Erinnerung | In golden grüner Zweige Dämmerung?' [What memories do you weave in the half-light of gold-green branches?] (ll. 23—24). As in 'Patmos' light and dark reflect into one another to produce a transformation — the flower is located 'Im nächtigen Hain, von Schneelicht überbreitet' [In the nocturnal grove, covered over with snowlight] (l. 9), and though it is 'Kind des Mondes, nicht der Sonne' [Child of the moon, not of the sun] (l. 13), this coldness is held in balance with inner warmth, and the whole glides from one sensory reflex to another:
Dich nährt, den keuschen Leib voll Reif und Duft,
Himmlischer Kälte balsamsüße Luft.
In deines Busens goldner Fülle gründet
Ein Wohlgerüch, der sich nur kaum verkündet. (ll. 15—18)
[Balsam-sweet air with its heavenly chill nourishes you, your chaste body ripe and scented. From within the golden fullness of your breast comes a lovely smell, only scarcely heralding itself.]
As an intersection where time gains meaning and history is felt, the flower is redemptive. Discovering it is a redemptive moment in the life of the speaker of the poem — indeed the flower has become the condition of meaning in that life, the point at which that life is properly realized, through the intersection of the speaker's history with that of the object. And because it has such a central place in the speaker's life, it has a similar relation to the words of the poem in which that life is glimpsed. Now the poem creates an analogue to point beyond the flower, and beyond the words of the poem: 'So duftete, berührt von Engelshand, | Dér benedeiten Mutter Brautgewand' [This was the scent of the blessed mother's bridal gown, touched by an angel's hand] (ll. 19—20). This is the full significance of 'Christblume': the flower is redemptive, and revelatory, because Christ flashes off it. For Mörike, the juncture of subject and object, the resonance produced when two histories come together and include one another, is a reflection, on the personal level, of an eschatological truth — the truth of history itself. There is an awareness that subject and object are linked in their historicity, the relation each has to another life; that principle of relation can be extended outward from this modest scene to encompass the whole created world. And every time that awareness is achieved, the highest conceptual necessity identified by Hegel in the Phänomenologie is fulfilled: Spirit is made manifest to consciousness. Or as Mörike puts it here, every time that manifestation takes place, Christ is born — the scent of the flower is the scent of the Blessed Virgin's robe. Accordingly, the poem begins to comprehend itself, and the flower it addresses, as both referring to (moving towards), and participating in, the consummation of history. In this fundamental respect, Auf eine Christblume' is a Hölderlinian poem. The sense of transition is conveyed by the quiet shift into a figurative register ('So duftete'): in order to realize fully the truth that it has articulated, the poem must approximate its words to the Word, as it catches in the Christmas rose the presence of the incarnate God.
As Hölderlin demonstrates in Über die Verfahrungsweise, meaning is memory. The revelation of Spirit is Spirit's own self-recollection, through the self-consciousness that is achieved in its passage through human history. With characteristic lightness of touch, and without ever rupturing the lilting simplicity of his poetic form, Mörike both states that vast truth and makes it problematic:
Dich würden, mahnend an das heil'ge Leiden,
Fünf Purpurtropfen schön und einzig kleiden. (ll. 21—22)
[Five purple droplets, each lovely and unique, would be your vestment, a reminder of the holy passion.]
Mörike's flower must become a metaphor in Hölderlin's historical and eschatological Sense, referring back to the Passion and thereby also forward to the eclipse of history at the return of Spirit to itself. Yet through a simple shift of grammatical mood, with the only subjunctive in the poem, Mörike designates that reference as only potential, unrealized. The flower only 'would' recall the wounds of Christ, only 'would' achieve redemption and therefore meaning.14 It cannot be identified with the meaning of the Crucifixion — that association eludes the speaker with the result that he can express it only negatively, before trying to conceal the failure behind a conciliatory reflex: 'Doch kindlich zierst du, um die Weihnachtszeit, | Lichtgrün mit einem Hauch dein weißes Kleid' [But at Christmas time you adorn, childlike, your white robe with a breath of light green] (ll. 23—24). But this instinctive effort to gloss over the rupture only makes it more apparent.15 We might say that 'Auf eine Christblume' faces the same difficulty as 'Patmos', though it expresses it with taut understatement: is the poem caught up in an inevitable paradox, since what it must speak about must elude it? Can its words refer to the Word, when the Word has averted itself in death? That is, can Mörike's flower really signify Spirit's coming to self-consciousness, or does it fall into particularity, as a mere thing incapable of pointing beyond itself? Like 'Menons Klagen um Diotima', the poem now tips ineluctably from presence to absence, fulfilment to loss. In contrast to the themes of proximity and resonance at the poem's opening, the final strophe of the first section (originally conceived as the end of the poem) suggests distance and the failure of contact:
Der Elfe, der in mitternächt ger Stunde
Zum Tanze geht im lichterhellen Grunde,
Vor deiner mystischen Glorie steht er scheu
Neugierig still von fern und huscht vorbei.(ll. 25—28)
[And the elf at midnight going to a dance in the brightly lit depths Stops far off, timid and curious before your mystic glory, and scurries by.]
The flower now stands inaccessible and aloof, and does not connect the two spheres established earlier — the sphere of nature and the sphere of divinity. The rose no longer appears as a revelation of the meeting between God and created matter, but rather as a discrete object refusing the gaze of the beholder.16 And in this disjuncture, opening up beneath the apparently undisturbed rhythm of the verse and the fairytale motifs of the final strophe, Spirit meets the same dereliction as it does in the second strophe of 'Hälfte des Lebens'. As in Hölderlin's poem, though, the possibility of redemption, of the affirmation of the fulfilment stated in the poem's opening lines, comes when we read into the space beyond the poem.
The division between the two sections of 'Auf eine Christblume' creates a caesura, a break in the tightly composed ordering of the strophes, and a sense of imbalance on the page. The two-strophe second section is less than a third as long as the seven-strophe section preceding it. Rupture is held in balance with continuity: when the poem resumes it has the same four-line verse form, but a different rhyme scheme (now abba, rather than the earlier aabb). Beneath the meticulously constructed surface of Mörike's poem, there is tension and change. The imbalance created on the page between the two sections means that as we read the brief second part, we have the sense of an ending; these two final strophes will provide an epilogue to what has gone before, by introducing new motifs. Like the first part, they use nature imagery to address absence and proximity — this is Mörike's version of the near and distant God. We are returned to the rhythms of seasonal change:
Im Winterboden schläft, ein Blumenkeim,
Der Schmetterling, der einst um Busch und Hügel
In Frühlingsnächten wiegt den samtnen Flügel;
Nie soll er kosten deinen Honigseim. (ll. 29—33)
[In the winter's soil the butterfly sleeps, a flower's seed. On spring nights it will weave its velvet wing round bush and hill; it will never taste your honey sap.]
This penultimate strophe uses a new image to continue the theme of failed contact with which the first section concluded. The butterfly does not come into contact with Mörike's flower — one belongs to spring, the other to winter. And this lack of contact is a lack of redemption. Rather than transcending time — referring beyond time — the flower, like the butterfly, is here entirely subject to the rule of time. The historical perspective, in which time becomes meaningful through being exceeded, here seems to have been lost altogether. The flower as a dynamic symbol seems to have deconstructed itself into a mere thing, referring only to itself and the endlessly repeated pattern of discrete seasons which never intersect in a moment of transformation.
Yet a redemptive possibility remains, framed by Mörike in the final strophe, which seeks to reinstate significance by throwing itself beyond words in the way described by Hölderlin in Über die Verfahrungsweise. It asks a question, and acknowledges that it cannot provide an answer:
Wer aber weiß, ob nicht sein zarter Geist,
Wenn jede Zier des Sommers hingesunken,
Dereinst, von deinem leisen Dufte trunken,
Mir unsichtbar, dich blühende umkreist? (ll. 33—36)
[But who knows if, one day, when all the beauty of summer has faded, its tender spirit, drunk with your faint scent, will not encircle you in your bloom, quite unseen by me?]
Mörike speculates that the butterfly and the flower, spring and winter, will meet, and that, therefore, the epiphany that is the occasion for the poem can stand as its defining moment after all: that the words of the poem really are reflections of the Word. And this envisaged meeting takes place through Spirit ('Geist', mentioned here for the first and only time, and echoing assonantly throughout the strophe — 'dereinst', 'deinem leisen', 'umkreist'). The working of Spirit, by which the strictures of time are transgressed, is captured here in a restatement of midwinter spring: the scent of the flower will permeate the butterfly, and the two seasons intersect. The reciprocity of the subjective persona and its object is reiterated in the pronouns of the final line, which both opens up the visual field of the poem and eclipses it. The poem cannot describe this meeting taking place — cannot describe time being redeemed — because the meeting can only take place in a transcendent realm beyond the present ('dereinst'), and the poem is itself subject to time. However, it can hold out the possibility that it will take place, and that in Mörike's discovery of the Christmas rose that transcendent space is fleetingly reflected, and Spirit revealed in history. The concealment suggested by the last line ('Mir unsichtbar') would then in fact be part of the revelation evoked in the first strophe. And the poem in which that moment of vision is communicated must project beyond words, into a space it cannot represent except through the break on the page between two sections, and the quality of the silence that follows its final question. It trusts that this is not an empty space, and not silence at all, but rather filled with the eloquence of the Word. That is what Mörike, like Hölderlin, puts in the balance — belief in the revelatory possibility of poetry. In two further poems, we can see clearly how this belief is for him both a hermeneutic and a moral concern.
'Auf eine Lampe' ('On a Lamp', 1846) is a short, enigmatic poem about time, objectivity, and writing.17 The first sentence suspends itself as delicately between stasis and movement as the lamp it evokes, the iambic rhythms flowing to points of sudden arrest: 'Noch unverrückt, o schöne Lampe, schmückest du, | An leichten Ketten zierlich aufgehangen hier, | Die Decke des nun fast vergessnen Lustgemachs' [Still unmoved, O lovely lamp, delicately hung here on slender chains, you adorn the ceiling of the parlour now almost forgotten] (ll. 1—3). The whole poem is caught between the gradations of 'noch unverrückt' and 'nun fast', and the artefact it describes captured, held for a moment, on the cusp between two eras — its surroundings are now an object of nostalgia, and it will soon be removed. And in the movement from one time to another, the lamp's status has changed, from an object of use to an object of art.18 This is then a poem about transition, and transition, as we have seen, is metaphor. Transition alters our awareness: in the moment we 'abstract' the lamp from the world for which it was made (the world of the past), it becomes a self-conscious point of reflection for us — we become aware of its nature as a made object, of the materials from which it is constructed and its constituent parts, in a way that was not possible when its function was one of pure utility. And having established that ambivalent hovering on the border of past and present, the poem is led to those details of construction:
Auf deiner weissen Marmorschale, deren Rand
Der Efeukranz von goldengrünem Erz umflicht,
Schlingt fröhlich eine Kinderschar den Ringelreihn. (ll. 4—6)
[On your white marble bowl, its edges wound about with an ivy wreath of gold-green bronze, happy children play ring-o'-roses.]
The poem traces the contours of the object, following the plane of the lamp's smooth casing. The emphasis on the shell ('Schale') alerts us to the question of what is behind that carefully crafted surface. This is Mörike's version, in the nineteenth-century world of collected artefacts and domestic interiors, of the idyllic surface of the lake evoked by Hölderlin in 'Menons Klagen'. And here too, the question is whether the serene exterior is a signifier, a pointer of a meaning that exceeds the art-object, or whether behind the surface there is only emptiness. Mörike, though, will not put that question in the stark terms of Hölderlin; rather he will articulate it through the subtle way he draws out the serene surface of his own creation, the poem. We can glimpse the smallest suggestion of possible tension amid the evocation of the charming artefact. The lamp is enclosed, by the manufactured ivy which creeps around the casing, and by the central motif it depicts: the circular dance of children. Wherever we look, our gaze is trained on the materiality of the object, and does not escape from it. We follow the fronds of gold-green ore, the repeated pattern of the dance, and concentrate ever more raptly on the texture of the lamp, on its status as a thing. Yet there is a playful joy about our perception of this object. Moreover, its gentle charm is ultimately the source of its gravitas:
Wie reizend alles! lachend, und ein sanfter Geist
Des Ernstes doch ergossen um die ganze Form —
Ein Kunstgebild der echten Art.19 (ll. 7—9)
[How charming it all is! laughing, and yet with a gentle spirit of seriousness cast over the whole shape — an artwork of the genuine kind.]
Two words stand out: 'Geist' and 'Kunstgebild'. The former, the central term of the post-Kantian hermeneutic of Spirit, expresses the gift of God becoming present to human consciousness, an act of creation beyond all material facticity; the latter expresses constructedness, something man-made. Mörike runs them together, and again there is much in the assonance: the first line balances the archetypal Biedermeier virtue of charm ('Reiz', uttered with the thrilled exclamation of the parlour gathering) with Spirit ('Geist'). Being gently suffused with Spirit is what makes the lamp a 'genuine' art-object — what makes us take it seriously. And it has this seriousness because it has been made, constructed, in a certain time and a certain place. That is what it allows us to see in its role as art, by focusing the disjunction of that time and place from our own. Moreover, by bringing that dislocation ever more sharply into relief, it may in fact overcome it. For as art, the object makes us increasingly aware of its historical status. At the point of transition, in the setting that belongs to the past but is not yet quite forgotten, the object on which the poem fixes becomes a representation. It represents — makes present to us now — the processes of construction that fashioned it in the world we see slipping from view. And that act of representation has not only an aesthetic, but also an ethical bearing, referring us to the lives that created, and used, this object.20 By drawing us in, directing our gaze to its surface, the lamp expands our view beyond it: or rather, its material facticity contains the distillation of a historical meaning. Contemplation of this art-object connects us to a network of lives beyond our time and place, and beyond the materiality of the object, yet only through the object can that dimension be glimpsed. Art projects us into a realm of relation or communality — our lives are revealed to have the same meaning as the lives that produced the lamp, and that meaning is common existence in history. Our world and the world of the lamp derive their meaning from their relation to each other, from the fact that each extends beyond its particular horizons and meets the other in the created object. And in that movement between times, time itself is pointed to a universal horizon that encompasses and exceeds all time. Mörike's abandoned lamp has a transcendental significance.
But who pays it any heed now? Is the sense of transition — the sense or metaphor — lost on us? The poem has its own answer:
Wer achtet sein?
Was aber schön ist, selig scheint es in ihm selbst. (ll. 9—10)
[Who notices it? Yet blithely beauty seems to shine in Self-content.21]
These puzzling final lines, which occupy the extensive correspondence between Staiger and Heidegger, are a subtle extension of the relationship between Spirit and representation suggested above.22 Since it concentrates within itself a moral essence and a historical meaning, the lamp is illuminated with an objective beauty — the beauty of Spirit entering into finite matter — that Mörike recognizes to be independent of our subjective responses. However, it cries out for resonance, and is pained by a world that turns away from it: Spirit's realization is self-realization, the acknowledgement that 'göttliches Werk auch gleichet dem unsern'. The last line suggests that the work invested in Mörike's lamp has an ethical validity, a historical relevance that makes it part of the continuing fulfilment of Spirit, even if this is not perceived. But it has been perceived, by the poem that puts the matter in these terms. In taking the lamp as its subject, Mörike's poem becomes the point of reflection for the beauty that radiates from the art-object — Spirit finds a resonance in words that acknowledge it, words written 'auf eine Lampe'. And the final line only makes sense in this light: the question 'Wer achtet sein?' has already been answered in the writing, and the reading, of the poem at whose close it comes.23 That is the truth of Mörike's text, unrecognized in the literature on the 'Dinggedicht': the poem must approximate itself, in its own perfectly balanced, rounded structure, to the form of the thing it describes, because both are surfaces on which Spirit glints. As our attention is focused on the madeness of the object, so too it is focussed on the writtenness of the poem. And as contemplation of the lamp opens up to us the social and historical dimension of the object's being, putting us in relation with the lives that were associated with its manufacture and use, so reading the poem puts us in relation with the life whose energy was devoted to writing it: Mörike's life. 'Auf eine Lampe' reveals to us the social and historical existence of the poet, writing this poem in a particular time and place, and connects it to our social and historical existence, as we read it in our time and place. Again, the horizon that connects those times and places, and so enables our act of reáding, is the Spiritual horizon beyond every particular time and place and yet common to all of them. That is why we cannot separate Mörike the poet from Mörike the pastor. The literary self-consciousness of his poem as it describes an object is the means by which the post-Kantian idea of community expresses itself in his world. Reading and writing are acts of revelation and relation. They reveal Mörike in his community, the 'Gemeinde' that defined his social and intellectual existence, and 'Auf eine Lampe' extends that community to include us, its readers. The implications of this are extensive. For what this apparently modest epigrammatic text about a lamp ultimately reveals is Incarnation, as defined in the Phänomenologie: the becoming present of 'Geist' to human historical consciousness as human historical consciousness, making itself apparent in the body of the community. Mörike's lamp and poem therefore become correlates, or signs, of that consummation: when we look upon the lamp-bowl we see reflected both our face and that of Christ.
Unlike 'Patmos', 'Hälfte des Lebens' or even 'Auf eine Christblume', 'Auf eine Lampe' does not explicitly draw attention to words passing into silence, but it accomplishes the same effect in the way it achieves closure as an object. The final line of Mörike's poem feels very different from 'Dem folgt deutscher Gesang', but it fulfils a similar function. The space into which Mörike's poem projects itself is the space beyond objects, or the space that makes objects substantial rather than mere 'things'. For Mörike objects reveal that space by serenely filling out their contours, perfectly inhabiting their finite materiality, so that at the point where the object is most intensely an object it moves beyond itself— and the poem, which also inhabits that finitude, closes.24
In its reflection on Spirit and history, 'Auf eine Lampe' can be seen as articulating an attitude towards representation that goes against the view of Strauss. While for Strauss historically conditioned 'constructs' are empty of meaning, and have no link to reality, for Mörike meaning is only realized through the historical world, where the moral bearing of life is perceived in particular things, constructed for particular purposes and places and times, taking on universal significance. Mörike's poem therefore makes itself readable in a way that Strauss's analysis cannot. The contempt for constructedness that characterizes the attack on representation in Das Leben Jesu means that Strauss's words must ultimately deconstruct themselves. Mörike, by contrast, expands constructedness into creation — the manufactured lamp and the written poem reflect the times and lives that produced them, and by relating us to those times and lives articulate a dimension beyond all individual lives, and beyond all time.
A poem written the same year, 'Göttliche Reminiszenz' ('Divine Reminiscence'), is prefaced with a quotation from John's Gospel ('Alle Dinge sind durch dasselbige [das Wort] gemacht' [All things are made by the same [Word]] (1: 3)), and addresses transcendence, creation, vision, and memory.25 It begins where 'Auf eine Lampe' finishes, with a conscious reflection on representation:
Vorlängst sah ich ein wundersames Bild gemalt,
Im Kloster der Kartäuser, das ich oft besucht.
Heut, da ich im Gebirge droben einsam ging,
Umstarrt von wild zerstreuter Felsentrümmersaat,
Trat es mit frischen Farben vor die Seele mir. (ll. 1—5)
[Some time ago I saw a strange picture in the Carthusian monastery I often visited. Today, as I walked in solitude up there in the mountains, all around me the hard rubble wilderness of scattered rock, it came before my soul with fresh vividness.]
The picture seen often in the past is recalled, and the poem becomes an unfolding of the landscape it depicts. The poem is therefore itself 'framed', by an act of memory. And we are placed at a double remove from reality, reading a poem about a picture. Reality — the world outside the picture — is apparently pushed out of the frame after the first few lines of the poem, as we are drawn into the scene of the picture. However, that outside world does not disappear altogether. Rather it articulates itself in the play of perspective that runs through the poem. It is a poem about the subjective self perceiving, writing and reading, and the possibility of an objective viewpoint through which perception, writing, and reading achieve meaning. Any meaning, the first lines intimate, involves the point of mediation between the outside world and the world of the picture (and the poem): the soul. The pattern traced by Mörike here is the same as that in 'Menons Klagen': the soul is the site of recollection, where the self and the world beyond it meet and are transformed. Like Hölderlin's poem, 'Göttliche Reminiszenz' is about anamnesis.
The remembered landscape develops, thrown into relief by intimations of the personal narrating presence, which remind us that we are being shown a picture through his recollection. And the figure occupying the central position in this landscape is the reflection we caught in Mörike's lamp, and in the flower found in the churchyard — the figure of Christ:
An jäher Steinkluft, deren dünn begraster Saum,
Von zweien Palmen überschattet, magre Kost
Den Ziegen beut, den Steilauf weidenden am Hang,
Sieht man den Knaben Jesus sitzend auf Gestein;
Ein weißes Vlies als Polster ist ihm unterlegt.
Nicht allzu kindlich deuchte mir das schöne Kind. (ll. 6-11)
[On the rough gorge, which has a verge of thin grass in the shadow of two palms and offers lean sustenance to the goats grazing on the steep slope, is seen the child Jesus sitting on a stone, cushioned by a white fleece beneath him. The lovely child seemed to me none too childlike.]
Although the flowing, rhythmical detail and the 'stately'26 cadence of the verse, achieved through the expansive quality of the participles ('begraster', 'überschattet', 'weidenden'), takes us deeper into the scene that the poem and the picture build up, the description is structured around two points of departure from the landscape, back out of the frame of the picture: 'sieht man' and 'deuchte mir'. By this means the world outside the picture (and outside the poem, since the poem is written about the picture) is registered through the perspective of the observer, and of the reader: as in 'Auf eine Lampe', the suggestion of lives beyond the text is a structuring principle of the poem. And the people beyond the text are the same as in that poem: Mörike, who saw the picture, and us, who read his poem.27 His subjective response — the poem — and ours — the act of reading that poem — become the tokens of a world outside pictures and poems, in which pictures and poems are created and have meaning: a world with objective reality. Yet that outside world is focused inexorably on the figure at the centre of the picture, whose description dominates the poem's mid-section:
Aus schwarzen Augen leuchtet stille Feuerkraft,
Den Mund jedoch unifremdet unnennbarer Reiz. (ll. 16—17)
[From black eyes silent fiery power shines, the mouth though is surrounded by a strange unnameable charm.]
At the centre of the picture, and the centre of the poem, is Christ, strange and inexpressible. Mörike's diction transforms itself here,28 and his image of silent fire shining forth from the child's eyes seems a direct echo of 'Patmos': 'als | Von schwellenden Augenbraunen | Der Welt vergessen | Stillleuchtende Kraft aus heiliger Schrift fallt' (ll. 192—95). With these images both Hölderlin and Mörike address the making present of the Word through words. 'Patmos' refers to the presence of the Word in the body of the community that reads scripture, and the poem finally needs to be seen as itself part of that community; 'Göttliche Reminiszenz' alludes to the Word incarnate in the child Jesus, having made us conscious of its own words by placing them in contrast to the world outside the poem. The figure of Jesus is the point of convergence for the poem's words, and for the gaze directed at the picture, and yet it is beyond words, unnameable. The face of the incarnate divinity flickers beyond language, and Mörike's word for this, as in 'Auf eine Lampe', is 'charm' — 'Reiz'. The charm of the lamp is its imbuement with Spirit, its gentle seriousness. 'Göttliche Reminiszenz' gives that flickering luminosity its full historical and eschatological bearing. Jesus is seen here transfigured, estranged ('umfremdet') from mere physicality, illumined by the glint of something the poem cannot name: he hovers between the words of the poem — the frame of the picture — and what underlies all representation in poems and pictures. This transfiguration is Mörike's expression of the turn that is the central moment in the post-Kantian hermeneutic of Spirit — the turn away from finitude by which finitude is redeemed. The child's mouth flickers as Spirit plays upon it, and like Hölderlin's Christ turning from the disciples in 'Patmos', as it points us to the limit of description it makes a moral pronouncement: that flickering smile reveals the dynamic movement ('Bewegung', W, III, 568) in which Hegel says the unity of Spirit is grasped, and in which good and evil are named.
In a further interpolation from the viewer of the picture, an action is narrated, in the past: 'Ein alter Hirte, freundlich zu dem Kind gebeugt, | Gab ihm soeben ein versteinert Meergewächs, | Seltsam gestaltet, in die Hand zum Zeitvertreib' [An old shepherd, bent kindly over the child, just gave him a fossil shell with which to pass the time] (ll. 18—20). This sequence enigmatically introduces an object, a thing, into the poem, and so is charged with implication. Two other elements have already been introduced as objects: the picture, and the poem itself, for we are conscious throughout of being at a remove from both. This object, though, is within the picture and the poem, and moreover it is a naturally occurring object, a petrifact shaped by the sea.29 It draws attention to its status as non-man-made, suggesting through its naturalism something beyond the artwork — poem and picture — in which it appears: it is a representation that seems to lead us outside of representation. Now, at the climax of the poem, this object becomes the means by which the perspective of the child transgresses the frame of the picture; its gaze strikes the thing it holds in its hand, directing itself first outwards to us, and then past us forever:
Der Knabe hat das Wunderding beschaut, und jetzt,
Gleichsam betroffen, spannet sich der weite Blick,
Entgegen dir, doch wirklich ohne Gegenstand,
Durchdringend ew'ge Zeitfernen, grenzenlos. (ll. 21—24)
[The child has looked at the strange thing, and now, as if surprised, the long gaze is fixed towards you, but really not at any object, penetrating eternal distances of time, limitlessly.]
Having taken in the 'Wunderding', the gaze expands, encompassing us but not limited by us ('Entgegen' is finely matched by 'ohne Gegenstand'). This gaze is real ('doch wirklich'30) without the need for an object — it is instead what makes objects real. It is what links the picture, and the poem, to the world outside them — our world, signalled by Mörike's reference to 'dir'. Mörike addresses us, as co-viewers of the picture (visitors, like him, to the Carthusian monastery), and as readers of his poem. The poem now explicitly acknowledges a network of relations outside it (between Mörike and us), and as in 'Auf eine Lampe' these relations are subject to time: Mörike may view the picture centuries after it was painted, we may view it centuries after Mörike, and we may read Mörike's poem about it centuries after he wrote it. But those relations are all made possible, and given a common meaning, by the gaze that moves through them and transcends them — the gaze of the incarnate God, which surveys all time. The line of perspective emitted by Mörike's Christ-child is the ray of light that illuminates Leibnizian monadic substance, and the Spirit that gives meaning to time and so makes history possible in the post-Kantian universe. The flicker of a smile is then the consummation of all history, the moment of anamnesis when Spirit is revealed in God's act of self-recollection, a movement simultaneously inward to the recesses of the child Jesus's consciousness, and outward to eternity: 'Als wittre durch die überwölkte Stirn ein Blitz | Der Gottheit, ein Erinnern, das im gleichen Nu | Erloschen sein wird' [As if across his clouded brow there passed a flash of divinity, a recollection, that in the same instant will have vanished] (11. 25—27).31 The flash of recollection, the point of absolute identity between the beginning and end of creation, is over as soon as it is felt. It is the zero-point of creation, where vertical and horizontal cross and dimensionality is made possible. Though it is an infinitely tiny moment, then, it is also the condition for all other moments, and as such lasts forever. It is in fact the utterance of the Word referred to in Mörike's Johannine epigraph — the referent for all words, including those of this poem:
und das welterschaffende,
Das Wort von Anfang, als ein spielend Erdenkind,
Mit Lächeln zeigt's unwissend dir sein eigen Werk. (ll. 27—29)
[And the world-creating word of the beginning, as an earthly child at play, shows you its own work, unknowing and with a smile.]
The closing lines bring together eschatology, the idea of relation, and poetic self-consciousness. The Word reveals itself through its 'Werk', which is all creation ('das welterschaffende'), glimpsed through the words of this poem (the other sense of 'Werk' here). As in 'Auf eine Lampe', the poem and the thing it describes (the picture) reveal the world which makes them, a world beyond themselves that consists of related lives, lived across different times, all subject to the consummation of the Word, the incarnatory act of love that is the origin and the completion of history. And as in the earlier poem Mörike steps forward enigmatically, mediating between the particularity of his poem and the universality of the truth that it reveals, which is the truth of community ('Gemeinde') — the community that extends beyond the poem's final line as it does at the end of 'Patmos'. Community, or relation, is signalled as he once more addresses the reader/viewer ('dir'), who stands with Mörike outside the frame of representation, and with him experiences — is shown — the work of God. The child in the picture is unconscious of the enormity of what he reveals — the fact of creation — but what he reveals can be suggested by art (pictures, poems) that is conscious of its own createdness, its own relationship to the act of revelation it describes, and so conscious too of its own limits. Mörike's poem represents something that it acknowledges to be the condition of representation, and which can only fully be felt when representation is transgressed — when we are referred ('zeigt's') beyond the picture, and beyond the poem, into the historical and social world which encompasses both, and in which Spirit moves.
The transgression of representation at the end of 'Göttliche Reminiszenz' clearly demonstrates Mörike's difference from Strauss, and also shows why any discussion of their relationship needs to have a hermeneutic focus.32 This poem develops a tendency apparent in 'Auf eine Lampe'. For Mörike here does what Strauss cannot. By consciously pointing beyond its representational capacities, 'Göttliche Reminiszenz' redeems text into meaning, making it the signifier of something that exceeds it — of Spirit, which is the condition of the historical status the poem has realized for itself. The poem enacts exactly the relation between religious representation and absolute truth described by Hegel in the Phänomenologie: when representation is surpassed (when Christ's gaze looks out beyond the picture and the poem) we become aware that the image of God as love (as incarnate in the child depicted by the picture) is not just a representational image, but the structuring truth of the world beyond representation, the means through which the community hinted at by the poem becomes possible. That community is hinted at in the relation, across time, between the figures outside writing, outside the frame: the unmentioned painter, Mörike as both viewer and writer, and us as viewers and readers. We realize, in Hegel's terms, that revelation provides the totally adequate means of grasping reality. The relation between Mörike's act of writing (his written representation of something that is already a visual representation) and our act of reading is possible because both understand themselves as historical acts, which overcome their particularity — are redeemed — by acknowledging that they are subject to the condition of history: to Spirit's becoming manifest to human consciousness in the form of human consciousness. As such, what is revealed at the end of 'Göttliche Reminiszenz', when we are taken beyond words and images, is what the Phänomenologie sees as the condition and fulfilment of all reference: love. And this is why Mörike's poem points in a different direction from Strauss. In Strauss representation is never transgressed, text is never made to signify anything beyond itself, because Strauss has denigrated Spirit, and so denied love, 'Göttliche Reminiszenz' offers redress to the circularity of Strauss's hermeneutic: it is an alternative Leben Jesu. Here, unlike in Strauss, reality is not infinitely deferred, but rather grasped in the moment the poem, the art-work, eclipses itself. While Strauss deprives writing of any relation to truth, and so commits himself to paradox (since his own writing must then deconstruct itself), Mörike's poem reveals truth as it directs our gaze past itself. And that revelation is enabled poetically by Mörike's enigmatic presence in the poem. Throughout the poem he turns towards us (addressing us directly), and away from us (letting us become absorbed in the detail of the picture), until finally he turns both fully towards us, as the author of this poem that has become so self-conscious about its writtenness, and fully away, as that writtenness moves beyond itself. Mörike's presence is unmistakable, but it is a presence that reveals through its self-effacement: through him we glimpse something beyond mere personality — his presence is vicarious, opening our perspective to the 'Gemeinde', the vehicle of Spirit. In short, Mörike rejects Strauss's apostasy. The basis of Strauss's crisis of redemption is his self-severance from community; Mörike does not follow him in this expression of disdain, but places himself, and his poetry, within the compass of community.
The immense effort of construction in a poem such as 'Auf eine Lampe', or particularly 'Göttliche Reminiszenz', is the token of what is required to achieve that sense of community. Mörike's effort of making builds against the process of un-making, or deconstruction, that ensues once community and Spirit are abandoned. And the meticulous craftsmanship of each poem reflects an attitude that is consonant with Hölderlin's sacramental view of poetry. For it emphasizes the created status of each poem, and the historical status of the poet: every poem is shaped by the poet's awareness of the relations existing between his life and all other lives — by his awareness of living in a created world. The act of creating the poem reflects the primal act of creation that encompasses the poet's existence too. That existence was, we know, ambivalent: moving between the communal lite of pastoral vocation, and the life of inner withdrawal. Yet what we see in these poems is the realization that the same moral principle informs both the spheres Mörike inhabited. Around the time he entered his mature poetic career he ceased to be the public representative of an ecclesial community, but the private world he discovered, of winter flowers and lamps and paintings, is for him a reflection of the same truth, the same self-utterance of Spirit in history through Incarnation, that gave birth to the community of the visible Church, which Mörike never left. And the extremely powerful truth that Spiritual community is the structuring principle of human historical reality (the truth to which Hölderlin devotes 'Patatos', and Hegel Phänomenologie des Geistes) could only be revealed by Mörike through an act of apparent self-concealment: he withdraws from view, submerging himself behind the Biedermeier façade of domestic interiors and genteel excursions into nature, so that we can come and find him, and in so doing find ourselves. To find a nineteenth-century poet addressing the relation between writing and Spirit as powerfully, we must look further afield than is customary when discussing Mörike.
Hopkins encountered Idealist philosophy while an undergraduate at Oxford in the 1860s, where he was taught by, among others, Green.33 Hopkins throughout his adult life produced a large body of philosophical and spiritual writings, beginning in the Oxford period. The extent to which these writings were formed by Hopkins's exposure to the philosophy of British Idealism has only recently begun to be appreciated.34 Here we will not repeat the work of tracing Hopkins's reception of figures in British Idealism, but place his philosophical writings in the larger context we have traced in earlier chapters. For we have seen how British Idealism developed contemporaneously with, and echoed some of the problems of, the response to the post-Kantian hermeneutic of history articulated by Nietzsche (and Nietzsche was an almost exact contemporary of Hopkins35). We can therefore use Hopkins's philosophical and spiritual writings not only to determine the extent to which he addresses the same questions that Nietzsche raises, but also to begin to understand his relation to the figures against whose understanding of Spirit Zarathustra turned: Hegel and Hölderlin.
Like Morike and Hoideriiri, Hopkins is concerned with creation, time, and redemption — with how God 'carries the creature to or towards the end of its being, which is its [. . .] salvation'.36 From his earliest, often rather obscure, philosophical writings, he engaged critically with Kantian ideas, and was generally concerned to break down the divisions imposed by Kant's dualism.37 For example, he insists that Kant's 'pure intuitions' of space and time can be conflated with the categories of the understanding, which Kant himself did not allow, and this takes Hopkins directly to substance, 'things', 'matter':
Space and time may be brought under one genus. They imply sameness and difference, one and more, end and continuance. It is agreed neither form has any meaning except as implying plurality at least in thought, two sensations. The common form then w[ould] be Quantity. But of course any definition of quantity is out of the question, since it has no meaning except f[rom] being illustrated in things, in matter.38
Hopkins's reaction to Kant was a classic reiteration of post-Kantian ideas: he diverged from Kant 'principally by not respecting Kant's prohibition upon knowledge of the noumenal self'.39 Hopkins's starting point, then, was the merging of phenomenal and noumenal identities that emerged in Die Religion as the inevitable development of Kant's critical thought. This emphasis on our ability to know more than mere phenomena — our ability to know ourselves to be consubstantial with the supreme being, in Kant's theological terms — led Hopkins to his primary concern, also anticipated in the original German response to Kant: the mediation of identity and difference. These are the terms he uses to understand the self in his late essay 'First Principle and Foundation' (1880):
We say that any two things however unlike are in something like. This is the one exception: when I compare my self, my being myself, with anything else whatever, all things alike [. . .] rebuff me with blank unlikeness. (SD, 123)
Hopkins's view of the self here expresses the same isolation described by Hegel in Der Geist des Christentums: Hopkins's self, like the disciples in Hegel's account, can find no correlate in its surroundings, in other selves. Comparison ('Vergleich', W, I, 366) is impossible in both cases, and the self falls into alienation. But though Hopkins formulates it logically, rather than historically, he is, like Hegel, concerned to understand the self in relation to a higher, universal principle which would connect selves together and so lead them beyond their isolated particularity. In other words, he wants to find their 'transcendental condition', that which allows 'anything at any given instant to exist and exist as so-and-so' (SD, 124), and exceeds all finite determination:
Now to be determined and distinctive is a perfection [. . .] in anything finite it cannot be self-bestowed; nothing finite can determine its own being [. . .] nothing finite can determine what itself shall, in a world of being, be [. . .] how much less then when the very determination is what the determiner itself is to be and the selving what its self shall be like! (SD, 124—25)
In compressed and gnomic form, Hopkins's language here carries the same implications as Kant's treatment of justification in Die Religion. Hopkins sees determinate selfhood as 'perfect', complete — 'vollkommen', as Kant might say: having reached the end of the unending path towards the highest good. For Hopkins here, as implicitly for Kant by the end of Die Religion, perfection of the determinate self results from its participation in what is infinitely beyond it. And like Hegel in his development of Kant's hermeneutic, Hopkins thinks that this relation can only be explained through gift, Incarnation. Finite being cannot give to itself an identity, rather it receives that identity from a 'determiner' beyond it, which 'selves', 'bestows' itself in finite matter. As for Hegel, so too for Hopkins, the condition of finite substance being meaningful is love.40
This recognition prompts Hopkins to undertake a detailed — and tortuous — logical account of revelation (SD, 127), based on the composition of the 'universal mind' (SD, 127) with human consciousness. In a crucial passage, Hopkins identifies the human body as the site at which this 'selving' or giving of the universal mind is felt most keenly. The body is for Hopkins a guarantee of objectivity, leading beyond the self:
A self [. . .] is not a mere centre or point of reference for consciousness or action attributed to it, everything else, all that it is conscious of or acts on being its object only and outside it. Part of this world of objects, this object-world, is also part of the very self in question, as in man's case his own body, which each man not only feels in and acts with but also feels and acts on. (SD, 127)
The body in its tangible presence links finite determinateness and the 'universal mind'. Hopkins's preoccupation with bodies here might be seen as one of his most important realignments of the Idealist legacy from the point of view of Catholic ontology. It is comparable to Hölderlin's insistence that the Spirit reproduces itself 'im Unreinen', in finite, physical matter. And it is a natural extension of the axiom with which Hopkins begins his notes 'On Princípium sive Fundamentum': that 'Homo creatus est' (SD, 122). Hopkins's emphasis on man as created here is similar to Hölderlin's claim in Über die Verfahrungsweise that humanity progresses from a tage of childhood to full consciousness — to full awareness of Spirit's self-imparting. From that standpoint, the body is the datum par excellence, possessing a givenness in respect of its status as a gift from God through the reproductive capacity of finite human beings. The body is then irreducibly particular, yet it points back through the network of (sexual) identity that produced it to the infinite source of identity which it shares with every other body. This is what 'Patmos' calls 'der Wurf des Säemanns'. Interest in the body as a means of mediating sameness and difference establishes the basis for an idiom emphasizing 'thing-ness':
I look through my eye and the window and the air; the eye is my eye and of me and me, the windowpane is my windowpane but not of me nor me. A self then will consist of a centre and a surrounding area or circumference, of a point of reference and a belonging field. (SD, 127)
The perspective of the self is linked, through its relation to the objects falling within its field of vision, to the fulfilment of all selfhood in the perspective of God — and that connection is what Hegel and Hölderlin understand as Spirit.41
Implicit in Hopkins's (theo-)logical arguments is a theory of language. Even in his early 'Notes on the history of Greek Philosophy', written in 1868, he sees words as an integral part of his 'object-world': 'all words mean either things or relations of things'.42 Hopkins describes words as follows:
A word then has three terms belonging to it, öpoi, or moments — its prepossession of feeling; its definition, abstraction, vocal expression or other utterance; and its application, 'extension', the concrete things coming under it. (JP, 125)
Words are then networks of relation; like bodies they have a field of association or reference. Moreover, a word is always carried beyond itself:
It is plain that of these [terms/moments] only one in propriety is the word; the third is not a word but a thing meant by it, the first is not a word but something connotatively meant by it [. . .] But not even the whole field of the middle term is covered by the word. (JP, 125)
A word is a point of coincidence, the 'middle term', but the moment of intersection refers back infinitely beyond the particular word. Words thereby gain meaning ('definition') by moving into a space outside themselves, projected in the act of 'utterance' and 'abstracted' from their particularity to a universal significance. Hopkins produced this account five years before Nietzsche formulated his genealogy of language in Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge, but its themes are similar. Both address words and meaning, and both do so with reference to 'abstraction'. However, the two views of language are directly opposed. Indeed, Hopkins's hermeneutic might be seen as a target for Nietzsche's polemic. For Hopkins, abstraction beyond particularity is necessary; for Nietzsche it is impossible. The projection of words through 'vocal expression' described by Hopkins forms a converse to Nietzsche's deconstruction of metaphor, and his reduction of speech to physiology ('Das Bild wieder nachgeformt in einem Laut', KSA, I, 879).43 Hopkins argues for the possibility of significance based on relation, which Nietzsche attacks: he thereby maintains the communal dimension of language denied by Nietzsche. For Hopkins words pass beyond themselves in order to achieve meaning; they are 'thrown' in the same way that Hölderlin proposes in Über die Vetfahrungsweise. As such, we might say that Hopkins's understanding of language is informed by an understanding of Spirit.
Hopkins's view here, that finite particularity carries within itself a moment of transformation, finds ultimate expression in his famous formulations of 'instress'. In his notes on 'Parmenides', Hopkins glosses the Greek philosopher as follows: 'all things are upheld by instress and are meaningless without it' (JP, 127). Instress is therefore the moment when significance is achieved — in terms of the discussion in Chapter 2, the moment when redemption becomes apparent. Hopkins defines instress as the coincidence of 'the flush and the foredrawn' (JP, 127), the meeting point of 'the fluid informing principle of Being [and] the bounding definition in which such force draws together as a unity'.44 It is a moment when finite, determinate being is revealed as part of the 'universal mind' — the ethical dimension of which is named by Hölderlin's insight that 'göttliches Werk auch gleichet dem unsern', and developed in Mörike's emphasis on the moral essence of natural and man-made things. It is then a moment of transition, of going beyond or 'metaphor' ('Übergang', in Hölderlin's sense), and Hopkins uses the same image as Hölderlin and Nietzsche: a 'bridge, [a] stem of stress between us and things to bear us out and carry the mind over' (JP, 127). Like Hölderlin, but unlike Nietzsche, Hopkins envisages the bridge as leading the self beyond finitude, and the configuration of the instressed self where it is aligned with its universal destiny, is its 'inscape' (JP, 129). In contrast to the sights presenting themselves to Zarathustra on his journey, this inner landscape of the self is confirmation of the self's existence in history, as understood by Hegel and Hölderlin. It is a vector of Spirit, leading the particular self towards its consummation in the mind of God. It is therefore not a subjectively constructed landscape but an objectively real one. In his theories of language, and of the relation between universal and particular, culminating in the idea of instress, Hopkins formulates the view that creation becomes meaningful through signifying its final fulfilment, and is shot through with moments in which the determinate, finite self is transcended and realizes its destiny. This is a sacramental understanding of the world, and Hopkins's picture of subjectivity and its redemption into significance is his phenomenology of Spirit.
Hopkins entered his poetic maturity in 1875, with a poem about suffering, history, and redemption. 'The Wreck of the Deutschland' treats specific historical events, as its commemoration says: 'to the happy memory of five Franciscan nuns, exiles by the Falck Laws, drowned between midnight and morning of December 7'.45 It is a poem haunted by history — by the history of Hopkins's age, when the divisions begun by the Reformation led nations into aggression against the supranational church to which Hopkins belonged. A culminating example of such aggression, which in Hopkins's poem is presented as the refusal of a universal perspective that only a universal church can confer, and hence as a glorification of contingent, particular ends, was Bismarck's Kulturkampf, which sought to bring Prussia's churches under control of the state, and led to the expulsion of Catholic religious orders.46 As a poem about history, then, 'The Wreck of the Deutschland' is a reflection of, and meditation on, the great distortion that Hopkins feels has afflicted Europe in his time: the subordination of the all-encompassing, saving grace of Christ, present in the Church which he initiated, to the will to power of discrete, fragmentary political units. And as such, it is clearly a poem about community For Hopkins, the historical background addressed in 'The Wreck of the Deutschland' is marked by a turning away from the community in which Spirit is felt. People have turned away, in history, from history — averting their perspective from the point at the limit of time which makes time meaningful, and which is identical with the act of divine love occurring at Incarnation, the self-manifestation of Spirit to human consciousness, continued until the end of history in the community of the Church. Although the terms of reference in Hopkins's poem have far greater historical specificity, there are clear parallels with 'Patmos47: like Hölderlin, Hopkins must struggle to see the face of God reflected in human history, to find meaning in something that threatens to become meaningless. Both have a strongly moral concern, since they must formulate attitudes to life that do justice to the Spirit which both perceive — Hölderlin by discovering how to speak of the Word when it seems absent, Hopkins by learning to hear the Word speak through the ravages of a time that rejects it. And though in its epic scope 'The Wreck of the Deutschland' more obviously recalls 'Patmos', as a poem about community and finding God in the historical world, Hopkins's poem clearly shares many concerns with Mörike.
'Part the First' of 'The Wreck of the Deutschland' meditates on God's presence in human history:
Not out of his bliss
Springs the stress felt
Nor first from heaven (and few know this)
Swings the stroke dealt —
Stroke and a stress that stars and storms deliver,
That guilt is hushed by, hearts are flushed by and melt —
But it rides time like riding a river
(And here the faithful waver, the faithless fable and miss). (ll. 41—48)
For Hopkins as for Hölderlin, a radically new perspective opens up when we are aware of the meeting between God and created matter — a perspective that sees each moment of time as 'instressed', pointing beyond itself. All human experience is an 'instressing' of God, an instance of Spirit going out of itself and penetrating finite existence, 'riding time'. Experience in time is experience of history, in the post-Kantian sense — it is experience of time as a constellation of moments in which time is transcended, and so is already part of the consummation of Spirit at the end of time. But we find it difficult to understand our closeness to God, his presence in human time, so we may turn against this view of history. The imagery of these opening strophes is ambivalent, suggesting both epiphany and destruction: the thunder in strophes five and six is a source of delight, a revelatory moment of 'stress felt', but also an anticipation of the devastating storm to which the poem alludes in its title; the river refers as part of a poetic conceit to the redemption of time but also has a more concrete connotation, the foundering of the Deutschland in the mouth of the Thames,48 which is the disaster the poem will try to understand. Through these different associations and anticipations, Hopkins suspends fulfilment and loss.
It may be possible to grasp even loss as fulfilment, however: to grasp our right relation to God, by comprehending the nature of Spirit's self-revelation to humanity, as both 'The Wreck of the Deutschland' and 'Patmos' emphasize:
It dates from day
Of his going in Galilee;
Warm-laid grave of a womb-life grey;
Manger, maiden's knee;
The dense and the driven Passion, and frightful sweat:
Thence the discharge of it, there its swelling to be. (ll. 49—54)
Like the sixth strophe of 'Patmos', this provides a telescopic view of Christ's ministry and Passion, compelled by rhythms of emptying and filling ('discharge', 'swelling': 'den Tod | Aussprach der Herr und die letzte Liebe' (ll. 83—84)). The divine grace that is 'discharged' is the utterance of Spirit at Christ's death as described by Hölderlin, and Hopkins too sees the world as transfigured by that grace — as the vehicle of Spirit, which is near and hard to grasp: 'Though felt before, though in high flood yét — | What none would have known of it' (ll. 55—56). Moments in which we do grasp it — moments of instress — are moments of ecstatic release and revelation, of filling out and projection beyond the self:
How a lush-kept plush-capped sloe
Will, mouthed to flesh-burst,
Gush! — flush the man, the being with it, sour or sweet
Brim, in a flásh, fúll! (ll. 59-62)
This echoes the description of instress in Hopkins's early writings: 'the flush and the foredrawn' (JP, 127). Each instance of instress is an instance of 'flesh-burst', when physical existence is ruptured and taken beyond itself recalling the rupture of Christ's body at the Crucifixion. Instress is anamnesis, the self-recollection of God in the created world, and Hopkins here puts us in mind both of 'Patmos', and of the 'flesh-burst' referred to by Mörike at the crux of 'Auf eine Christblume' — 'das heilge Leiden', of which the specks of purple on a winter-blooming flower might become a sign. Like 'Auf eine Christblume', 'The Wreck of the Deutschland' is a December poem, and in its second part will try to bring forth its own midwinter-spring, discerning the movement of divinity amid dereliction: 'Father and fondler of heart thou hast wrung: | Hast thy dark descending and most art merciful then' (ll. 71-72).
'Part the Second' begins by narrating the moment of shipwreck, the motif used by Hölderlin to introduce the elegiac element in 'Patmos' ('Und wenn vom Schiffbruch oder klagend', l. 64). Hopkins deploys the motif in a more conventional register:49
She drove in the dark to leeward,
She struck — not a reef or a rock
But the combs of a smother of sand, night drew her
Dead to the Kentish Knock. (ll. 105-08)
But the description of the shipwreck itself is a prelude to the central event of the poem, the response to the disaster of the figure Hopkins calls the 'tall nun', who asserts herself against the desolation of the surrounding night: 'Night roared [. . .] Till a líoness aróse bréasting the bábble, | A prophetess towered in the tumult, a vírginal tóngue tóld' (ll. 133—36). The cry of the tall nun, rather than the devastation of the Deutschland, is the pivotal moment in the poem, when loss tips over into fulfilment. Hopkins sees her call as an assertion of good's surpassing power: 'Was calling "O Chríst, Chríst, come quíckly": | The cross to her she calls Christ to her, christens her wild-worst Best' (11. 191—92).50 The conversion of 'wild-worst' to 'best' is the same, characteristically elegiac, movement traced by Hölderlin in 'Menons Klagen' ('Daß unsterblicher doch, denn Sorg' und Zürnen, die Freude', 1. 108). However, while that insight comes as an affirmation at the end of 'Menons Klagen', and is fought for by Hölderlin, in Hopkins it represents a major challenge, and the poem still has much to do: fulfilment may yet tip back into loss. The nun's naming of Christ both reveals and obscures, It is the central event of the poem, but the poem's immediate reflex is to question it: 'The majesty! What did she mean?' (1. 193).51 The poem takes a turn here; it starts to reflect on itself as utterance.52 The nun's cry is a moment of vision — when she names Christ and perceives the wreck of the Deutschland in a redemptive light, as a reflection of the suffering of the incarnate divinity, she encounters the Word, the face of God. But in poetic terms, simply stating this is not enough, and for Hopkins, the problem now is the same as for Hölderlin in 'Patmos': how can he reveal the nun's vision to be the Word? That is, how can the words of this poem be shown to refer to the Word? The horror of the tall nun's death in the Thames on a December night in 1875 can only be redeemed if, in writing about it, Hopkins can show that the content of her utterance (Ό Christ') is something real, and he can only do that by revealing his poem too to be an expression of the Word. 'Vieles wäre | zu sagen davon' ('Patmos', ll. 88—89): this applies both to the death of Christ in 'Patmos', which is synonymous with the revelation that 'alles ist gut' (l. 88), and the dying nun's vision in 'The Wreck of the Deutschland', for these events can only be felt as revelatory through the language of poems which speak about them. Yet as the sixth strophe of 'Patmos' shows, the redemptive Word reveals itself only through the eclipse of language (in death: the death of Christ and its reflection in the death of the tall nun). Hopkins therefore faces the Hölderlinian paradox that his poetic words must refer to the Word which is their condition, yet that Word conceals itself, turns away, as soon as words are used to address it.
In the strophes following the tall nun's vision, Hopkins feels this paradox acutely. The question 'What did she mean?' leads to a series of attempts to reveal meaning, to fix the significance of the nun's utterance. Hopkins begins by asking whether it was a petition to share in the Passion — 'Is it lóve in her of the being as her lóver had béen?' (l. 195), and then suggests that the reader use his or her own conception of ultimate happiness to understand it: 'What bý your méasure is the heaven of désire, | The treasure never eyesight gót, nor was éver guessed whát for the hearing?' (ll. 207—08). But none of these possibilities can be a definitive explanation: 'Nó, but it was not these' (l. 209). The epiphany exceeds the poem's power of description; the moment of death and revelation is alien to Hopkins's language: 'Other, I gather, in measure her mind's | Búrden, in wínd's búrly and béat of endrágonéd séas' (ll. 215—16).
This inability to grasp the meaning of revelation in words, to give an adequate representation of it in the poem, is the subject of the anguished twenty-eighth strophe, which is another climax — the undercurrent of self-reflection bursts through and ruptures the form of the lines:
But how shall I . . . Make me room there;
Reach me a . . . Fancy, come faster —
Strike you the sight of it? Look at it loom there,
Thing that she, . . There then! the Master,
Ípse, the ónly one, Chríst, Kíng, Héad. (ll. 217—21)
Syntax breaks off into empty space, dots on the page, as it struggles to represent what cannot be represented. The tragic quality of this ambivalence is felt as Hopkins names Christ — here the poem can be read as both an ecstatic realization and a desperate search for a point of reference, in which Hopkins darts from one name to the next.53 Revelation conceals. A major reading of 'The Wreck of the Deutschland' sees Hopkins's 'linguistic moment' as identical with a theological paradox:
The tragic limitation of poetic language lies in the fact that the Word itself cannot be said [...] The words of human language, for Hopkins, seem to have been born of some primal division, a fall from the arch and original breath into the articulate. This fall has always already occurred as Soon as there is any human speech. Words have therefore a tendency to proliferate endlessly [. . .] as if they were in search for the magic word that would be the Word.54
The value of this summary is that it points us in two directions. On the one hand, the 'fall' into articulacy may remind us of Über die Verfahrungsweise: Spirit goes out of itself and becomes manifest in the world of human history, a fallen world ('Das Reine kan sich nur darstellen im Unreinen', GStA, VI, 290), but one that is redeemed through Spirit's coming to consciousness within it. On the other hand, we are pointed to the consequences, with which we are familiar from Chapter 2, of being unable to find the breath of God, the movement of Spirit, in broken human speech. The 'endless proliferation' of words deferring reference to anything outside of themselves, and so never making good their claim to meaning, is the hallmark of Das Leben Jesu, and Also sprach Zarathustra. This is the risk of poetry as exemplified by 'The Wreck of the Deutschland': if it cannot speak the Word, the poem may make itself compiicit with voices that deny the Word, and like them deconstruct itself into insignificance. Such complicity on the part of the poem would empty out all the claims Hopkins makes for language in his philosophical and spiritual writings. Words would no longer project themselves through their 'utterance' (JP, 125) towards a transcendent space that is beyond particular words, but rather would simply be refracted into other particular words, which is to say that:
All words are metaphors [. . .] all are differentiated, differed, and deferred. Each leads to something of which it is the displacement in a movement without origin or end [. . .] incapable by whatever series of sideways transformations from ever becoming more than another metaphor.55
'Was ist ein Wort?', asks Nietzsche (KSA, I, 879), and comes to the conclusion that all words are metaphors, links in the chain of constructed meaning, the product of language's unfounded claim to describe reality. 'The Wreck of the Deutschland', written two years after Über Wahrheit und Lüge, expresses the danger of falling into Nietzschean metaphoricity: endless deflection between words, rather than reference beyond words. Words would lose their bodily dimension, their 'field' of reference or association (SD, 127), which points back and forward, through the embodied identity of the determinate voice which speaks them and the field of (sexual) relation by which that voice is generated, to the universal mind of God. This is why 'The Wreck of the Deutschland' is as urgent a poem as 'Patmos': if Hopkins loses that sacramental possibility, and his poem becomes instead an early sounding of the disembodied, radically indeterminate voice of Zarathustra, then the perversions Hopkins sees taking hold in Europe as he writes, manifest in the persecution of the five nuns on board the Deutschland, will have had their victory and redemption will be impossible.
Following the desperation of strophe 28, the poem shifts focus back to the nun's vision, yet now this is framed in strikingly hermeneutic terms — of reading and writing:
Ah! thére was a héart right!
There was single eye!
Réad the unshápeable shóck níght
And knew the who and the why;
Wording it how but by him that present and past,
Heaven and earth are word of, worded by? (ll. 225—30)
We now have a conscious emphasis on words, and a suggestion that not only the nun's vision is a revelation of the Word (which she is able to 'read', penetrating the darkness of night to decipher it), but also the poem which has that vision as its subject, in so far as the poem too must be 'worded' by him that 'heaven and earth are word of'. The emphasis on words is an emphasis on poetic activity — on poetic creation. After the climactic struggle with language, there is a recognition by Hopkins that the poem can indeed be understood as a vehicle for the Word, but that this understanding can only be achieved when the poem points beyond itself in the right way.
'All words mean either things or relations of things' (JP, 125). From 'wording' the poem moves to bodily relation:
Jésu, héart's light,
Jésu, máid's són,
What was the féast followed the night
Thou hadst glóry of this nún?—
Féast of the one woman withóut stáin.
For so conceivèd, so to conceive thee is done;
But here was heart-throe, birth of a brain,
Wórd, that héard and képt thee and úttered thee óutríght. (ll. 233—40)
The Virgin stands both within the process of human generation, and outside it, since she is not marked by the radical evil which Kant sees as characterizing all human life.56 For Hopkins as for Kant, we can turn away from evil, towards God. And like Hölderlin, Hopkins sees this in terms of projection: 'heart-throe'. As the tall nun utters Christ, she casts her own determinate being beyond itself (a creature carries itself 'to or towards the end of its being', SD, 154), and her particular fate is made identical with the universal redemption of humanity ('birth of a brain': the spiritual birth of Christ in her). In that moment the God who is near and hard to grasp is revealed in his 'dark descending': 'Gróund of béing and gránité of it: pást áll | Grásp Gód, thróned behínd | Déath, with a sóvereignty that héeds but hídes, bódes but abides' (ll. 253—55). But the revelatory moment experienced by the tall nun, when she relates herself to God, is not complete until it is experienced as a revelation by Hopkins too. At the end of the poem we move from the historical event of the shipwreck to the historical life of the poet writing about it. The last strophe is a prayer for remembrance, and for the salvation of England:
Dámé, at óur dóor
Drówned, and among óur shóals,
Remémber us in the róads, the heaven-háven of the rewárd:
Our Kíng back, Oh, upon Énglish sóuls!
Let him éaster in us, be a dáyspring to the dimness of us,
be a crímson-cresseted east,
More bríghtening her, ráre-dear Brítain, as his réign rólls
Príde, rose, prínce, hero of us, hígh-priest,
Oür héarts' charity's héarth's fíre, oür thóughts' chivalry's thróng's Lórd.
(ll. 273—80)
The mention of England and Britain brings us back to Hopkins's perspective as he writes the poem: the perspective of an English Jesuit convert, beset by the apostasy of his country, the place where he should feel closest to God, but where God seems most concealed. This final strophe is not elegiac, however, but hopeful — for Britain's return to a communal tradition. And this hope is inclusive: the reiterated word here is 'our'. The poem prays for a return to community, in which the local and the particular are felt as part of the universal, that is, in which finite things are symbols of infinity: the word which expresses that in the German context is 'Gemeinde'. Moreover, the poem holds out the hope that that community can already be felt within the poem which prays for it, in the relation it reveals between real, historical lives, lived outside of the poetic text but registered through it: Hopkins's life, as the writer of the poem, our lives, as readers of the poem, and the life of the tall nun on board the Deutschland. In drawing attention to his own life as the writer of the poem in this way, Hopkins comes close to Mörike's practice. Like Mörike, he positions himself within the poem so that we can see past him, into the world beyond the poem. His presence too is vicarious, the presence of a pastor mediating between the community to which he belongs and the point of final fulfilment to which that community's life is directed.
By revealing a network of relation between different lives, the poem wants to demonstrate that those lives are linked together by something exceeding the particularity of their own time and place — something shared by all individual lives but not defined by any individual life. That is the core of Hopkins's, and Hölderlin's, poetics: in the reality that opens up at the margins of text, Spirit manifests itself to us through our own life. And that is how Hegel defines Incarnation in the Phänomenologie: the manifestation of Spirit to human consciousness, in the form of human consciousness. In other words, the revelation through poetry of a real world beyond poetry is identical with the revelation experienced by the tall nun at the moment of her violent death. The world-creating Word, as Mörike calls it, is felt as real, spoken to us, through the words of the poem struggling with a world from which it appears to have absented itself. For Hopkins as for Hölderlin, the truth of poetry lies in its honesty about the distortion it has to suffer because of its existence in history — the only possible subject for poetry is the painfulness of its time, yet that threatens to make poetry impossible. Poetry makes itself true, however, in its realization that such pain is part of a world that is both fallen and redeemed, and in its recognition of a moral obligation. For if the poem has made us aware of a world infused with Spirit, in which moments of deepest loss are moments of greatest revelation, then that Word can only continue to be recognized beyond the poem through honest engagement with the times. This insistence on reading the signs of the world's redemption in troubled, local circumstances (in 'ráre-dear Britain') is Hopkins's articulation of Hölderlin's defining gesture of hope: 'Dem folgt deutscher Gesang'.
It is, then, inadequate to leave discussion of language in 'The Wreck of the Deutschland' at 'the tragic limitation [. . .] that the Word itself cannot be said', and the consequent fall of words into endless, unredeemable metaphoricity. These are dangers which the poem recognizes, and tries to counter. Moreover, they are dangers to which, for Hopkins, we succumb if we do not accept the responsibility his poem formulates. If we reject community and the possibility that the poem reveals a world beyond itself, of which we are ourselves part, then we commit ourselves to never overcoming the painfulness of time: of our time, and Hopkins's time. Here the poem anticipates a central preoccupation of Hopkins's late poetry, including his 'Terrible Sonnets', where the impossibility of revelation is felt in the danger of dissolution, the break-up of writing much as in 'Mnemosyne'. In the very late sonnet 'To R. B'. (1889), which in its quiet juxtaposition of presence and absence comes close to 'Hälfte des Lebens', Hopkins calls this situation 'my winter world' (l. 13). Yet like Hölderlin, Hopkins holds out the hope that at the point where language seems only to refer to itself, and proliferate endlessly, it in fact shudders into realization, as at the end of 'Carrion Comfort' (probably 1885):57
that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God. (l. 14)
Or of 'That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection' (1888):
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, ' since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ' patch, matchwood, immortal
diamond,
Is immortal diamond. (ll. 31—24)
Both poems finish with the abrupt awareness of possible continuity amidst fragmentation, and that continuity is felt as a jolt, as the limit imposed on the text by what the text, in the moment of ending, tries to show as both beyond, and continuous with, itself. Language therefore echoes and then stops, and we are left to find in the space after writing not blank nothingness, but the light that is reflected through diamond, and through the poem, back to its source, and the God whose presence can only be felt in the eclipse of words.
If we make ourselves blind to such possibilities, the wreck of the Deutschland will not be a revelatory moment, pointing us beyond time, but an event whose horror we are forced to relive ceaselessly, as we try but fail to give it meaning. It will become the defining moment of our experience not because through it we glimpse new possibilities, but because there is nothing else: it will have become a moment of Nietzschean death, endlessly delivering us back into time — where we re-experience an infinite number of times the agony of violent destruction, of shipwreck — rather than revealing to us our existence in history. That is, the poem puts forward the moral imperative of community as a counterforce to the mask of Zarathustra, which claims but can never achieve an ultimate interpretation of the world. Like Mörike at the end of 'Göttliche Reminiszenz', which reaches out beyond textual representation and in so doing counters the Straussian deconstruction of community, Hopkins stakes the moral purchase of poetry on its revelation to the reader of their own participation in Spirit. He is acutely aware of the demand this purchase makes, but like Hölderlin he states even more starkly the consequences of rejecting it.
In 1877, Hopkins wrote a series of nature sonnets, which inhabit a much more compact poetic space than 'The Wreck of the Deutschland'. The main characteristic of these poems is their preoccupation with the intersection between human subjectivity and God. As such they are variations on, and developments of, the tall nun's encounter with Christ: having in the earlier poem found Christ in a moment of utmost adversity, and in that moment glimpsed the redemption of a wounded world, Hopkins is now free to seek him in the seemingly more modest context of landscape and personal experience of nature.58 There is both narrowing and expansion: the world-historical and eschatological perspective of the earlier poem is drawn in, but the self's awareness of its place in a created world opens up a new perspective, fixed on natural objects. These things meet the subjective gaze and become in that moment part of a revelation. This movement is given exemplary expression at the end of 'Hurrahing in Harvest' (September 1877), which shows too the continuing significance for Hopkins of subjectivity 'throwing' itself, in Hölderlin's terms — Hopkins here calls it 'hurling':
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wánting; whích two whén they ónce méet,
The héart réars wíngs bóld and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet. (ll. II—14)
In their themes and their tightly controlled form, these are the poems where Hopkins comes closest to Mörike. And as in 'The Wreck of the Deutschland', Hopkins continues in these sonnets to emphasize the moral dimension of reading and writing.
The moral significance of the interaction between human subjectivity and what Hopkins calls the 'world of objects' (SD, 127) is addressed implicitly by Mörike in 'Auf eine Christblume' and then explicitly in 'Auf eine Lampe', and is stated by Hopkins in his sonnet 'As kingfishers catch fire' (March/April 187759), a poem about resonance and recognition:
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came. (ll. 1—8)
Each thing is captured in its moment of self-revelation: kingfishers and dragonflies light up nature in a flash of reflected sunlight, and stones, held at the moment of their tumbling into wells by the echoing, cavernous spondee at the start of the line ('Stones ring'), which provides a sense of arrest and suspension after the quickening iambs, project their 'ringing' into the sound of bells 'naming' themselves as they chime. The natural world of the first three lines flows seamlessly into the world of human activity: the bells name themselves by sounding forth the name of their maker, the craftsman who brought them into being, and whose name they presumably bear.60 Kingfishers and dragonflies, stones and bells, are sustained in their individual identity by the resonance they achieve not only with other things, but with human consciousness. In hearing the bell name itself, we hear the voice of the person who created it, as when we look at Mörike's lamp we glimpse the life of its manufacturer, at a remove from ours in space and time. And as in Mörike, that relation between us and another, revealed in the sound of the bell, is the evidence of a created order, which includes natural things and man-made things. The bell that speaks the voice of its maker speaks also the voice of its maker's maker, who made the listener too: it flings out a name beyond names, and stones ringing in wells are heard because of the 'concentric circles' of sound emanating from them, through which they are made part of the sensory awareness of all the creatures in their 'belonging field' of reference (SD, 127).
The sonnet's sestet draws the necessary conclusion, finding that our perception of these things is a moral act:
I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Ácts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
Chríst. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces. (ll. 9—14)
Here the face recognized in reflection on Mörike's lamp is fully named. The sounds ringing in the first strophe are expressions of a primal utterance that is heard in the moment when two sets of concentric circles come together, and connects us across space and time to other lives — to the person who made, named, and 'hung' (l. 3) Hopkins's bell, and fashioned Mörike's lamp-bowl. As such we are ourselves expressions of an original creative voice that echoes through us in our relation to others and to the world. When we 'speak and spell' ourselves (l. 7), we utter that voice, and so write the Word. The Word utters itself not just m the fact of our creation and existence in the material world, but in the way we respond to that fact — in the moral choices we embody: the just man is evidence of a just creator, and himself an instance of the justness of creation. He has, in Kant's terms, set himself against evil, and so become a son of God. In his features, says Hopkins, glints the face of Christ, as it does in the features of those who look upon Mörike's artefact in the right spirit, or catch Jesus's smile ('Lächeln', 'Göttliche Reminiszenz', l. 29) radiating from a picture or a poem.
The most famous of Hopkins's 1877 sonnets, 'The Windhover' (May 1877), uses the compactness of the sonnet form to recreate the rhythms of tension and release which characterize the bird's flight.61 The first word tells us that the poem is about not just the windhover, but also the subjective persona who 'caught' it, and now catches it in the poem:
I caught this mórning mórning's minion, kingdom
of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dáwn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level únderneath him steady aír. (ll. 1—3)
The 'stress' of God 'rídes tíme like ríding a ríver' ('The Wreck of the Deutschland', 1. 47), and the windhover suspends itself in a moment of built-up energy in its riding of the wind, moving against the density of air and so achieving motionlessness: the roll of the third line, sprung against its natural emphasis (so that 'underneath' joins up with 'level' to become iambic, rather than attenuating itself into a one-word anapaest) beats against itself as the bird's wings beat against wind.62 The self-suspension reaches a pitch of intensity, and with the flutter of a new wing-beat ('then off, off forth on swing', l. 5), the windhover releases itself into movement, sweeping down through the wind. The movement is described using the poem's only simile:
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. (ll. 6-8)
Here we have not only simile, however, but also metaphor, carrying beyond: comparison ('As a skate's heel') gives way to projection, 'hurling'. Hopkins's language signals first of all insufficiency, the difference between signifier and signified that is a component part of simile (identified, as we saw, by Hegel in his discussion of Eucharistie presence in Der Geist des Christentums, W, I, 366), but then awareness that adequacy of expression is achieved only in the moment when language is thrown beyond itself, becoming 'hyperbolic', as Hölderlin says. 'The hurl' here is the same action described a few months later in 'Hurrahing in Harvest', and recalls Hopkins's suggestion in his spiritual writings that communication in language is possible because of the way the terms of a word are thrown between each other, and ultimately beyond words altogether. The emphasis in 'The Windhover' is thrown back on to the observing persona — as in 'As kingfishers catch fire' and 'Auf eine Christblume', the meaning of the nature scene is only manifest in its relation to human consciousness: 'My heart in hiding | Stirred for a bird, — the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!' (ll. 7—8). This is revelation: the moment when the windhover releases its suspended energy is the moment when the speaker's heart, concealed from us behind the evocation of the nature vision, leaps up in recognition, revealing itself beating with the same rhythm as the bird's wings, and revealing that identity to be the occasion of this poem. Like Mörike in a churchyard in Neustadt, Hopkins in a Welsh field discovers something in nature that casts his self in a new light. Subject and object meet and encompass one another in a moment of reciprocity: the speaker is transformed, or fulfilled, by the sight of the windhover, yet the windhover is only fully itself when the intensity and release of its energy are perceived by, revealed to, the speaker.
The turn (volta) from octet to sestet is a hinge-point, where the poem flinches under the weight of what it has just described:
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plúme, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Tímes told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier! (ll. 9—11)
The force of the experience can only be felt as an immense pressing in on the speaker's world, a strength so great it threatens collapse or distortion: 'buckle!'63 Yet at the moment of buckling, fire 'breaks'. This fire, lovely and dangerous, reminds us not only of the first line of 'As kingfishers catch fire', but also, possibly, of 'Patmos': the radiance of Asia opening up before the speaker, so beautiful that it may blind.64 At this point of utmost pressure, of simultaneous beauty and danger, a name emerges: Ό my chevalier!' Here Hopkins speaks neither to the bird nor to his own heart, but to that which has been revealed in their encounter, and which shines in both of them: to Christ. Here we understand the poem's dedication, appended by Hopkins six years after writing it: 'to Christ our Lord'65 As for Mörike in 'Auf eine Christblume', God is present to human consciousness when human consciousness achieves resonance with another part of the created world — they share in the destiny of Spirit. And like Mörike in that poem, Hopkins sees the moment of resonance as a moment in which the redemptive death of Christ is felt. Mörike's flower is to recall Christ's wounds on the cross, and thus become a sign of Spirit's release into the world. Hopkins's 'buckle!' suggests the buckling of Christ's crucified body,66 sagging under the weight of what Hegel in Der Geist des Christentums would call its 'fate'. The death of that body, and its resurrection throughout all subsequent history (through what Hegel in the Phänomenologie would call the self-consciousness of the community), flashes in the fire that lights the speaker's vision now. Hence 'lovelier' and 'more dangerous': through the release of Spirit the love manifested in Incarnation can be universally felt ('lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his'), but precisely God's nearness may conceal him from us — Spirit's presence to us may become an ordeal of fire.
But the poem does not lose itself in this possibility. Instead it can find the light of that love reflected in modest details of life and nature:
shéér plód makes plough down síllion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gáll themsélves, and gásh góld-vermílion. (ll. 12—14)
The trajectory of the poem has been from high to low — from the windhover's soaring flight to the perspective of the speaker, and now, as in the final strophe of 'Auf eine Christblume', our attention is drawn to the flickering of contact in the earth. Hopkins's ploughed field, in whose mud the ploughshare shines all the more brightly, and smouldering ashes, signs of an almost dead fire that may yet be re-ignited, are this poem's counterparts to the winter soil in which the unborn butterfly sleeps. Like Mörike, Hopkins finally pulls back from the intensity of personal experience, deflecting the radiance achieved in his encounter with an object, and made the occasion of the poem, into other instances in the natural world, not as dramatic as the windhover's flight, but having the same power to reveal. Here too we see Christ's crucified body ('blue-bleak' is the colour of a corpse, 'gall' was offered him on the cross67), and his resurrection. And these instances are further moments of revelation, further potential points of intersection between human subjectivity and the world, stretching beyond the encounter described in the poem. Through that acknowledgement, 'The Windhover' makes itself a moment of revelation in a world full of such moments. It does not buckle fatally, destroying itself through the unbearable power of its insight, because it realizes that that power is borne by the entire created world, of which the poem is part. As such it presents us with the same injunction as 'Auf eine Christblume', 'Göttliche Reminiszenz', and, in a different form, 'The Wreck of the Deutschland' and 'Patmos': to respond to the poem's revelation by seeking further instances of revelation beyond the words of the poem. And in following that injunction to find the face of God 'in ten thousand places', our reading becomes a moral act, making the poem's words, and the whole world to which they belong, into expressions of the primal utterance of love the Word.
Mörike and Hopkins are inheritors, in the nineteenth century, of the post-Kantian hermeneutic of Spirit. As such, both are heirs to Hölderlin. Both are religious poets, who see the danger of apostasy: their poetry sets itself against the dismemberment of community, and the rejection of history, that was the contemporary fate of Idealism in Strauss and Nietzsche. And Mörike and Hopkins can only salvage the thought of redemption by insisting on the moral dimension of poetry — by finding a voice which speaks not from beyond good and evil, but from within what Hegel calls the unity of Spirit. They make the writing and reading of poetry into a 'purchase', an investment in the possibility that poetry reveals to us our place in a historical — created — world, and so our participation in the life of God. The price that investment demands of us seems at times a high one, but the price of not making it, Mörike and Hopkins both suggest, is infinitely more so. The purchase of poetry and the quest for redemption are also the main themes of Mörike's and Hopkins's two major successors in the twentieth century.
1. Such as the undeveloped suggestion of an affinity made by J. C. Middleton, 'Mörike's Moonchild: A Reading of the Poem "Auf eine Christblume" ', Publications of the English Goethe Society, 28 (1958—59), 109—36 (p. 125): Mörike's 'language [. . .] can hardly be described without [. . .] terms which are closely associated with Gerard Manley Hopkins' term "inscape"'.
2. On Mörike, see the standard critical account by Gerhard Storz, Eduard Mörike (Stuttgart: Klett, 1967); Oppert, 'Dinggedicht'; Pierre Labaye, Eduard Mörike: Symbolisme et transparence (Bern: Peter Lang, 1988), and Mörike's Muses: Critical Essays on Eduard Mörike, ed. by Jeffrey Adams (Columbia SC: Camden House, 1990). On Hopkins, see Hartman, Unmediated Vision, pp. 49—67; Brown, Hopkins' Idealism, pp. 278—326; Michael Sprinker, A Counterpoint of Dissonance': The Aesthetics and Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); Emig, Modernism in Poetry, pp. 10—36; Shyamal Bagchee, 'Subtle Souls and Dry Bones: Hopkins and Eliot', Yeats Eliot Review, 11 (1991), 48—55.
3. Though from 1856 the letters came only from Strauss. See Kenzo Miyashita, Mörikes Verhältnis zu seinen Zeitgenossen (Bern: Herbert Lang, 1971), pp. 115—38; also Harry Maync, 'David Friedrich Strauss und Eduard Mörike', Deutsche Rundschau, 115 (1903), 94—117, which reproduces a number of letters. An important contribution on Mörike and Strauss is Ritchie Robertson, 'Mörike and the Higher Criticism', Oxford German Studies, 36 (2007), 47—59.
4. On Strauss's view of Mörike's poetry, see Miyashita, Zeitgenossen, pp. 130—32.
5. Eduard Mörike, Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. by H.-H. Krummacher, H. Meyer, and Β. Zeller, 17 vols (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1967—), XII, 146—47. Cf. Miyashita, Zeitgenossen, pp. 118—19. References to Mörike's poetry also follow the Gesamtausgabe.
6. See Maync, 'David Friedrich Strauss und Eduard Mörike', pp. 95—96.
7. For a summary of critical positions expressing this view of Mörike, see Labaye, Symbolisme, pp. 12—31. On Mörike in the context of Biedermeier, see Friedrich Sengle, Biedermeierzeit: Deutsche Literatur im Spannungsfeld zwischen Restauration und Revolution, 1815—1848, 3 vols (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1980), in, 691—751.
8. The fullest treatment is Ulrich Hötzer, 'Mörike und Hölderlin: Verehrung und Verweigerung', Hölderlin-Jahrbuch, 24 (1984—85), 167—88, but this remains largely a biographical account of their acquaintance; the major book-length accounts of Mörike assume Hölderlin's importance but do not discuss it in any depth.
9. The title, as with Mörike's other poems entitled 'Auf. . .', is an Anacreontic reminiscence. See Bernhard Böschenstein, 'Mörikes Gedicht "Auf eine Christblume'", Euphorion, 56 (1962), 345-64 (p. 347).
10. See Hans-Henrik Krummacher, 'Mitteilungen zur Chronologie und Textgeschichte von Mörikes Gedichten', Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft, 6 (1962), 253—310 (pp. 288—90).
11. Werke und Briefe, XIII, 218. At the end of the letter Mörike expresses the intention 'meine Empfindungen bei guter Zeit in einigen Strophen auszudrücken' [to express my feelings in some verses when the time is right] (XIII, 219). All major readings of the poem refer at length to the letter: see Benno von Wiese, Eduard Mörike (Tübingen and Stuttgart: Wunderlich, 1950), pp. 72—79; Middleton, 'Mörike's Moonchild'; Böschenstein, 'Mörikes Gedicht "Auf eine Christblume"'; Storz, Mörike, pp. 348—57; Gerhart von Graevenitz, Eduard Mörike: Die Kunst der Sünde: Zur Geschichte des literarischen Individuums (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1978), pp. 201—22; Labaye, Symbolisme, pp. 260—77. The present reading takes up Robertson's insistence that the poem 'can and should be associated [. . .] with Mörike's ambivalent response to the Biblical criticism of David Strauss' ('Higher Criticism', p. 59).
12. Werke und Briefe, XIII, 219.
13. In contrast to the poem, the letter to Hartlaub suggests that Mörike did in fact know whose grave the flower adorned: 'Auf einem andern, mir gleichfalls bekannten, Grabe'.
14. For a subtle reading of the poem on this point, which treats the lines as part of Mörike's practice of revelation and concealment, see Böschenstein, 'Mörikes Gedicht "Auf eine Christblume'", p. 358; also Labaye, Symbolisme, p. 272: 'Mais la réalité est toute différente, bien éloignée de toute référence aux souffrances de la crucifixion dont rien ne rappelle la fonction salvatrice'.
15. Cf. Böschenstein, 'Mörikes Gedicht "Auf eine Christblume"', p. 358.
16. Cf. Storz, Mörike, p. 352: 'Zwischen der Ubernatur (der 'benedeiten Mutter', dem 'heiligen Leiden') und dem Naturgrund, der sich im Elf anzeigt, — dazwischen steht die lunare Blume allein und für sich, unzugänglich'.
17. It is Mörike's most discussed poem. For major readings see Storz, Mörike, pp. 322—32; J. P. Stern, Idylls and Realities: Studies in Nineteenth-Century German Literature (London: Methuen, 1971), pp. 91—96, and Emil Staiger, 'Zu einem Vers von Mörike: Ein Briefwechsel mit Martin Heidegger', Trivium, 9 (1951), 1—16, where Staiger and Heidegger debate the poem's final line; also Ilse Appelbaum Graham, 'Zu Mörikes Gedicht "Auf eine Lampe" ', Modern Language Notes, 68 (1953), 328—33. The poem is seen as the archetypal 'Dinggedicht' in Oppert, 'Dinggedicht', p. 752. A more recent account of the poem as 'Dinggedicht' is Brian A. Rowley, 'Brimstone, Beech, and Lamp-Bowl: Eduard Mörike's Things', Publications of the English Goethe Society, 62 (1991—92), 119-38 (pp. 134-35).
18. See Stern, Idylls, p. 92.
19. The description reminds us of Mörike's letter to Hartlaub about the 'Christblume': 'So reizend fremd sah sie mich an'.
20. Cf. Stern, Idylls, p. 94: For Mörike's contemporaries the weightiness and seriousness of a man's persona and of the products of his labour indicate and indeed guarantee a moral quality [. . .] this is an age when gravity is seen as the hallmark of the ethical worth of a man's work.
21. Translation by Christopher Middleton, Friedrich Hölderlin, Eduard Mörike: Selected Poems (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1972), p. 205.
22. The antithesis set up by Staiger and Heidegger, between 'scheint' as 'videtur' and 'lucet' (Staiger, 'Briefwechsel', passim), is false: the moral argument of the poem points to 'scheint' having Schiller's sense of'der schöne Schein', the 'semblance' intrinsic to Art in which the harmony of sensuous nature and moral order is manifested as a symbol. Mörike is dealing with epiphany, which encompasses both appearance and illumination. As Stern intimates (Idylls, p. 93), Staiger and Heidegger both disregard the historical, moral, and ultimately theological dimension of the poem.
23. Heidegger is therefore beside the point, and only partially correct, in stating that 'das Schöne bleibt, was es ist, unabhängig davon, wie die Frage Wer achtet sein? beantwortet wird' ('Briefwechsel', p. 12).
24. Cf. Oppert, 'Dinggedicht', p. 773: "'Auf eine Lampe" sprengt zum Schluß eine Art reifgewordener Deutung aus sich heraus'.
25. Stern sees it as 'the finest of [Mörike's] religious poems' (Idylls, p. 87). See also Storz, Mörike, pp. 320—21, and for an extensive analysis that tries to read it as an anti-religious poem, Lab aye, Symbolisme, pp. 278—89; Labaye's reading is criticized in Carolin Duttlinger, 'Mörike's Fossils: The Poetics of Palaeontology', Oxford German Studies, 36 (2007), 60—75 (p. 71).
26. Stern, Idylls, p. 87.
27. Storz doubts whether Mörike ever saw a picture fitting the description given in the poem, and suggests that the scene might correspond to an imagined piece of Nazarene genre-painting inspired by his journey in the Thurgau in September 1840 (Mörike, p. 320).
28. Cf. Stern, Idylls, p. 88: 'Those two words, "umfremdet unnennbarer", belong to a mode of oblique intimation he hardly ever uses'.
29. It is the focus of much attention in Labaye, Symbolisme, pp. 281—85. Labaye places the image in the broad context of developments in evolutionary theory contemporary with Mörike. These include Strauss:
préoccupé de démontrer l'aspect miraculeux et, partant, irréaliste de la cosmogonie chrétienne face à l'idée que d'immenses périodes sont nécessaires pour parvenir aux formations géologiques et aux formes biologiques actuelles, Strauß ne manquait pas d'opposer au dogme de la création la nouvelle théorie [of evolution], (p. 281)
Labaye points out that in 1844 Mörike executed sketches of fossils, as well as having an extensive collection (p. 283). He goes on to suggest that like Strauss, Mörike is advancing evolutionary ideas in order to attack religious belief: 'on observera que c'est apparemment cette même représentation d'une évolution lente et mille fois séculaire que Mörike intègre à la fin de "Göttliche Reminiszenz" ' (p. 285). The central evolutionary discovery was that life began at the bottom of the sea (p. 281). For detail on Mörike as a collector of fossils, and on fossil collecting as a Biedermeier phenomenon, see Thomas Wolf, Brüder, Geister und Fossilien: Eduard Mörikes Erfahrungen der Umwelt (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001), pp. 115—60.
30. See Stern, Idylls, p. 89.
31. Cf. 'Wie wenn am Feiertage': 'Still endend in der Seele des Dichters, | | Daß schnellbetroffen sie, Unendlichem | Bekannt seit langer Zeit, von Erinnerung | Erbebt' (ll. 45—48).
32. Neglected by Labaye, Symbolisme, in his attempt to argue that the projects of Mörike and Strauss are similar. Labaye's reading of 'Göttliche Reminiszenz', though claiming theological import, makes no mention of representation.
33. See Brown, Hopkins' Idealism, p. 32.
34. Brown, Hopkins' Idealism, has reoriented our understanding of Hopkins's intellectual context. An important study of Hopkins's thought from an explicitly theological perspective is Walter J. Ong, Hopkins, the Self and God (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1986).
35. See Michael Sprinker, 'Poetics and Music: Hopkins and Nietzsche', Comparative Literature, 37 (1985), 334-56 (p. 334).
36. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Sermons and Devotional Writings, ed. by Christopher Devlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 154—55 (SD, henceforth in the text).
37. For detail on Kant's importance for Hopkins, see Brown, Hopkins' Idealism, passim.
38. Quoted from Hopkins's unpublished Oxford notebooks in Brown, Hopkins' Idealism, p. 63.
39. Brown, Hopkins' Idealism, p. 58.
40. Their view is shared with Duns Scotus, who explains 'this-ness' (haeccitas) in the same terms; see the editorial remarks in SD, 342.
41. Hopkins also describes this process in terms of circles emanating from the created self: 'If the centre of reference spoken of has concentric circles round it, one of these, the inmost, say, is its own, is óf it, the rest are tó it only' (SD, 127). This was foreshadowed by Coleridge's use of the image in his reading of Schelling: see G. N. G. Orsini, Coleridge and German Idealism: A Study in the History of Philosophy with Unpublished Materials from Coleridge's Manuscripts (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), pp. 210—11, and Brown, Hopkins' Idealism, p. 58.
42. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Journals and Papers, ed. by Humphry House and Graham Storey, 2nd edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 125 (JP, henceforth in the text). For discussion of the 'All words' text see Brown, Hopkins' Idealism, pp. 75—77.
43. Cf. Ong, Hopkins, the Self and God, p. 26: 'Hopkins' self is not the self Nietzsche constructs in undertaking to deconstruct the self'.
44. Brown, Hopkins' Idealism, p. 174. On the background to instress in Hopkins, see Leonard Cochran, 'Instress and its Place in the Poetics of Gerard Manley Hopkins', Hopkins Quarterly, 6.4 (1980), 143—81, and Thomas A. Zaniello, 'The Sources of Hopkins' Inscape: Epistemology at Oxford, 1864—1868', Victorian Newsletter, 52 (1977), 18—24.
45. References to Hopkins's poetry follow Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poetical Works, ed. by Norman H. Mackenzie (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), though of Hopkins's various diacritical marks, only the accents on letters are reproduced here. 'The Wreck of the Deutschland' has generated much commentary and analysis. Of interest here are Paul L. Mariani, A Commentary on the Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1970), pp. 47—73; the comments in Brown, Hopkins' Idealism, passim., which provide links between the poem and Hopkins's theoretical writings; the line-by-line commentary of L. M. van Noppen, Gerard Manley Hopkins: 'The Wreck of the Deutschland' (Groningen: Krips, 1980), which has become a standard work of reference; the analysis of the poem's hermeneutic tensions by J. Hillis Miller, 'The Linguistic Moment in "The Wreck of the Deutschland'", in The New Criticism and After, ed. by Thomas Daniel Young (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1976), pp. 47—60; Sprinker, Counterpoint, pp. 96—119; Norman White, Hopkins: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), pp. 250—60.
46. See van Noppen, Wreck, pp. 10—14, and White, Hopkins, pp. 250—52.
47. The two are briefly compared as examples of the 'Pindaric mode' in Fitzgerald, Agonistic Poetry, p. 72.
48. See White, Hopkins, p. 250. The Deutschland foundered on a sandbank called Kentish Knock: for a map of the ship's route, see Van Noppen, Wreck, p. 16.
49. Cf. White, Hopkins, p. 252: '"The Wreck of the Deutschland', in so many ways original, is unmistakably a Victorian sea-disaster poem'.
50. On the documentary sources for the tall nun's cry, on which Hopkins drew, see White, Hopkins, pp. 254—55, and van Noppen, Wreck, p. 127.
51. Cf. Sprinker, Counterpoint, p. 110.
52. Cf. Sprinker, Counterpoint, p. 110: 'The central hermeneutical problem of the poem: What does it mean to mean?'.
53. Cf. Sprinker, Counterpoint, pp. 115—16.
54. Miller, 'Linguistic Moment', p. 56.
55. Miller, 'Linguistic Moment', p. 58.
56. The feast that 'followed the night' was 8 December, the feast of the Immaculate Conception.
57. See Mackenzie, ed., Poetical Works, p. 455.
58. On the background to the sonnets, see Mariani, Commentary, pp. 77—93, and White, Hopkins, pp. 277-89. The nature scenes were inspired by the Welsh landscape, with which Hopkins became familiar during his theological studies at St Beuno's College.
59. Mackenzie's dating (Poetical Works, p. 367), followed by White, Hopkins, pp. 275—76. On the difficulties of dating the poem, and the reasons why the much later date previously assumed (1881—82) is improbable, see Mackenzie, ed., Poetical Works, p. lxii.
60. Cf. Hartman, Unmediated Vision, p. 58: 'the craftsman who constructed this bell [. . .] created on the first day resilience, on the second day its infinite thingness or self out of resilience, and on the third day its capacity for self-revelation'. For a more recent reading of the poem, see Brown, Hopkins' Idealism, pp. 253—56.
61. There is much commentary on the poem: see for example Mariani, Commentary, pp. 109—13; Hartman, Unmediated Vision, pp. 49—55, who provides the most detailed analysis of the poem's language; White, Hopkins, pp. 282—83; Brown, Hopkins' Idealism, pp. 287—88; J. G. Ritz, '"The Windhover" de G. M. Hopkins', Etudes Anglaises, 9 (1956), 14—22, stresses Incarnation (or 'kenosis', p. 18). See also Robert Boyle, Metaphor in Hopkins (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), pp. 81—110. On some possible sources for the poem's imagery, see Alfred Thomas, 'G. M. Hopkins: "The Windhover"; Sources, "Underthought", and Significance', Modern Language Review, 70 (1975), 497—507.
62. On the octet's linguistic effects see Hartman, Unmediated Vision, pp. 49—50, and White, Hopkins, p. 282: 'Nearly every line has its characteristic one, two, or three consonants'. Above the earliest surviving autograph of the poem, Hopkins wrote: 'Falling paeonic rhythm, sprung and outriding'. Reproduced in Mackenzie, ed., Poetical Works, p. 145.
63. For a review of the enormous critical response to 'Buckle!', see Boyle, Metaphor in Hopkins, pp. 83—89, and Mackenzie, ed., Poetical Works, pp. 382—83.
64. Cf. the vision of Christ in Rev. 1. 13—17: 'His eyes flamed like fire [. . .] out of his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword; and his face shone like the sun in full strength'.
65. On Christ as 'chevalier', see Mackenzie, ed., Poetical Works, p. 383, and Boyle, Metaphor in Hopkins, p. 86.
66. Cf. Mariani, Commentary, p. 112.
67. Matt. 27. 34.