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DOI 10.1007/s12138-010-0172-9

SHORT NOTE “To R. B.”: Hopkins’ Ovidian Letter from the Black Sea*

© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

The fine delight that fathers thought; the strong Spur, live and lancing like the blowpipe flame, Breathes once and, quenchèd faster than it came, Leaves yet the mind a mother of immortal song. Nine months she then, nay years, nine years she long Within her wears, bears, cares and combs the same: The widow of an insight lost she lives, with aim Now known and hand at work now never wrong. Sweet fire the sire of muse, my soul needs this; I want the one rapture of an inspiration. O then if in my lagging lines you miss The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation, My winter world, that scarcely breathes that bliss Now, yields you, with some sighs, our explanation. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “To R. B.” As the final poem of one of the nineteenth century’s greatest Christian poets, “To R. B.” is for many readers a disappointing footnote.1 Its muted melancholy seems somehow not quite Hopkins; there is nothing specifically Christian in it, nothing even Biblical, no trace of that “wrestling with (my God!) my God” that characterizes the Terrible Sonnets. I shall argue that this dissonance * 1.

I am extremely grateful to David Jeffrey, Joshua King, Peter Knox, Gareth Williams, Ralph Wood, and the anonymous readers for their comments and encouragement. Hollahan 1995: 3 is typical: Hopkins is “pathetically offering not a bang but a whimper, a lame apology, an explanation, ‘the poorest substitute for a poetic text’ (Said [1975], Beginnings 274).”

International Journal of the Classical Tradition, Vol. 17, No. 1, March 2010, pp. 53-59.

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International Journal of the Classical Tradition / March 2010

is deliberate—that Hopkins has adopted a voice not entirely his own, a pagan voice aligned most closely with the exile poetry of Ovid.2 This imaginative identification with a non-Christian contemporary of Christ would accord with Hopkins’ profession as a classicist,3 with the variations in voice of his other late works, and with the alienation he experienced most acutely in Ireland. That Hopkins admired Ovid’s elegiac poetry is beyond doubt. As he raves in a letter to R. W. Dixon (27 Feb. 1879; Abbott 1955a: 25), Ovid carried the elegiac couplet to a perfection beyond which it could not go and his work remains the standard of excellence. Hopkins’ own Latin elegiac compositions, in their wordplay and imagery, have a distinctly Ovidian flavor. It is also probable that Hopkins was studying Ovid shortly before his death. The last academic paper he mentions writing—in his penultimate letter to Robert Bridges (20 Mar. 1889; Abbott 1955b: 303)—concerns the Argei, for which Ovid’s Fasti (3.791, 5.621-62) is the most important ancient source.4 The Argei were straw dummies thrown into the Tiber, a strange rite that Ovid associates with the homesickness of Hercules’ followers from Argos (Fast. 5.651-56); it is easy to imagine why such a phenomenon, combining sacrificial substitution with longing for one’s native land, would pique Hopkins’ interest during his last days in Ireland. It would in fact be surprising if Hopkins had not taken special interest in the author whose “exilic poetry is without parallel in classical Roman literature as a meditation on the state of exile itself” (Williams 2002: 338).5 Whether or not one sees “To R. B.” as specifically Ovidian, its classical themes are readily observable. The multivalent “combs” (6), which has garnered most critical attention, has several affinities with ancient meditations on poetry.6 Hopkins combines the canonical length of pregnancy (nine 2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

The “real” reason for Ovid’s exile in AD 8 until his death in 17 remains a mystery, but Ovid’s story is this: because of a “poem and an error,” the emperor Augustus, a Jupiter figure, hurled the lightning bolt banishing him from Rome to the Black Sea region. That the poem was the Ars Amatoria (“Art of Love”)—often called simply “Art(s)”—allows Ovid to universalize his experience as the Suffering Artist punished for his Art. The Tristia (“Sad Things”), Epistulae ex Ponto (“Letters from the Black Sea”), and Ibis (an elaborate curse poem) are considered the “exile poetry” proper, but the Fasti was also revised from exile. Though not so dramatically banished, Hopkins, a Jesuit priest, was nevertheless subject to the absolute authority of his superiors. The last years of his life, spent as a professor of Greek literature at University College Dublin (1884-1889), felt like an exile to him (see especially “To seem the stranger”). His isolation from family and friends, both religiously and geographically—his Anglican family never accepted his conversion to Catholicism—caused him great pain; not until he lay dying of typhoid fever did his parents come to visit him. On Hopkins as classicist, see especially West 2006/07 (with bibliography). The other, far less colorful, is Varro L. 5.45-54, 7.44. Hollahan 1995: 66 observes that Hopkins, a “poet of exilic consciousness,” could have followed Ovid’s example in the Epistulae ex Ponto, but did not. This (to my knowledge) is the closest any critic comes to connecting Hopkins with Ovid’s exile poetry. The difficulty arises from assuming that lines 5-6 refer to pregnancy alone (see Gardner and MacKenzie 1967: liii, 297; Bremer 1970: 148), but MacKenzie later

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months) with the time famously recommended by Horace (nine years) for holding onto a work before publishing it (AP 388: see West 2006/07: 31),7 and combing aptly represents the final grooming of both children and literature. Yet “combs” is also the mot juste for another reason: it can mean “to dress (wool, flax, etc.) with a comb, so as to separate the fibres” (OED s.v. “comb” v.1. 2.a). When in line 8 Hopkins switches metaphors from “poem as child” to “poem as work,” that work is most likely a textile; “text” (Latin textum) means “thing woven” (“textile”), and women in ancient poetry (such as Helen in the Iliad or Arachne in the Metamorphoses) often weave narrative webs that resemble the framing poems (see, e.g., Rosati 2006; Johnson 2008: 74-95). As Hopkins with his linguistic acumen undoubtedly knew, Latin pecten, primarily “A comb (for the hair)” (OLD 1.a), can mean both “A reed or comb used in weaving” (2.a) and “the plectrum or quill of a lyre; (also meton., for the instrument itself)” (2.b). The verb “combs,” then, reactivates the clothing metaphor latent in “wears” in a beautiful conflation of imagery: combing a child’s hair, weaving, and perhaps playing the lyre (i.e., writing poetry).8 Some of the other classical gestures are even more obvious. Striving for “immortal song” is ubiquitous in the ancient poets, who could not hope for actual immortality. For a Christian poet, however, who believes that he himself will become “immortal diamond,” “immortal song” seems a pallid substitute, and Hopkins’ concern with it here suggests that he has adopted a non-Christian perspective. The proem of Paradise Lost provides an interesting contrast: for all Milton’s classical allusions and aspirations to greatness for his “advent’rous song” (1.13), his goal is to “assert Eternal Providence” (25), not to produce an “immortal song” as such. The inspiring agent’s sphere of influence is also strikingly classical rather than Christian. Here again, the contrast with Milton is illuminating: he associates the Muse with the Holy Spirit, who brings cosmos to birth out of chaos (1.21-22). Hopkins invokes a similar image at the end of “God’s Grandeur”

7.

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proposes a simple solution (1981: 209): “The mother/poet carries the embryonic poem within his mind (wears); then he gives birth to the first lines on paper (bears); these he nourishes into growth (cares); finally, he polishes the poem into perfection (combs).” My one modification would be to read “cares and combs” as the third member of an asyndetic tricolon like “burgers, chips, pork and beans,” not the third and fourth members of a journalistic series like “apples, pears, oranges and bananas.” For all Hopkins’ delight in series variously presented—“fold, fallow, and plough”; “gear and tackle and trim”; “counter, original, spare, strange”—not once in his poetry does this nineteenth-century gentleman omit a serial comma. Boswell refers to Johnson’s tragedy Irene, for instance, as a work he “had been obliged to keep more than the nine years of Horace.” Horace himself probably has in mind the nine years’ labor on the Smyrna of Catullus’ friend Cinna (Cat. 95). (There is a certain historical irony in the fact that nine years was also the length of Ovid’s exile.) Much of my argument about Hopkins’ allusions to Ovid could also apply to Horace, another poet much admired by Hopkins (and Ovid); the protestations of mediocrity and creative “winter” in the sestet, however, are Ovidian rather than Horatian. Those who have experienced the frustrations of writing and/or combing children’s hair may also find resonances of OED s.v. “comb” v.1. 3, “To beat, thrash, give a ‘dressing’ to.”

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(13-14); in “Pied Beauty,” God “fathers-forth” the entire visible world (10). But in “To R. B.,” the spirit of inspiration, like the Greco-Roman Muse, acts upon the mind: what it “fathers” is “thought.” The one other appearance of the “muse” in Hopkins’ poetry denigrates her as an attainment, like physical beauty, less important than the titular “Handsome Heart” (9-10). It is therefore all the more remarkable that the poet’s expressed desire in his final poem should be for “Sweet fire the sire of muse,” not for God.9 The ambiguous sexuality of poetic inspiration also recalls a pervasive tension in classical texts. Don Fowler (2002: 159) discusses how inspiration, paradoxically, increases both masculine and feminine traits, as “the same empowering flow of force places [poets] in the female subject position, penetrated and overborne.” The first quatrain of “To R. B.,” with its imagery of penetration and impregnation, underscores this “feminization.” Yet the “fine delight” is the “sweet sire,” not of poetry, but of muse—that is, the quintessentially feminine personification of poetic inspiration, a “wife / To my creating thought,” as Hopkins calls his beloved homeland England (“To seem the stranger,” 5-6). To press the metaphor further, if the “one rapture of an inspiration” can be compared to the sexual act, would the offspring be a child (“immortal song”), figuring the poet as wife/mother, or a wife (“muse”), figuring the poet as husband/father? I would not presume to answer this unanswerable question, but I would suggest that the paradoxical sexuality of Hopkins’ sonnet is thoroughly classical. Though Ovid is certainly not the only ancient poet to have both masculinity and femininity increased by inspiration, he does offer some of the most beautiful examples of this phenomenon. The Bacchic thyrsus brings him “rapture” not unlike that of Hopkins’ “strong Spur,” leaving him as ecstatic and oblivious to evil as a Bacchant (Tr. 4.1.41-44).10 Like Hopkins, Ovid combines religious and sexual imagery for poetic inspiration, the Muse’s “hand at work,” and the (lost) pleasure in “weaving” a text (Pont. 4.2.25-30). The “poem as child” metaphor pervades the Tristia, as when Ovid, addressing his first poem on its way to Rome, warns it to avoid its “brothers” (the scrolls of the Ars Amatoria) as murderers of its “father” (Tr. 1.1.107-116; see Hinds 2006: 42227). More than any other Roman poet, Ovid reflects consciously on the process of making poetry, weaving an autobiography in which issues of genre and creativity assume epic significance. The presentation and addressee of Hopkins’ sonnet also link it to Ovid’s exile poetry. Though nominally “To R. B.,” it treats R. B. only as an imagined audience for G. M. H.—and yet it does presuppose a sort of literary conversation between friends, an explanation (implicitly) requested and given. Other poems dedicated to individuals, such as “Spring and Fall” (“to a young child”) and “The Windhover” (“To Christ our Lord”), lack both the appearance of conversational intimacy and the theme of poetic creation. “To R. B.” would 9.

Though some critics see God as the inspiring agent (MacKenzie 1981: 207) or even the poem’s addressee (Mariani 1986: 76), nothing in the text necessarily points to the Christian Holy Spirit rather than to a classical spirit of inspiration. Mariani 1970: 313 correctly observes the octet’s “classical account of the nature of inspiration.” 10. Fowler 2002: 147-51 discusses such Bacchic imagery in Horace, Virgil, and Lucretius, all of whose works, of course, Ovid knew well.

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thus appear to be the only example in Hopkins’ work of the self-referent, literary, epistolary style that characterizes Ovid’s poetic letters from exile. Even the use of initials rather than the full name, another thing Hopkins never does elsewhere, recalls Ovid’s suppression of his friends’ names in the Tristia (see Oliensis 1998). The most characteristically Ovidian gesture in Hopkins’ poem, however, is the “winter world” and consequent loss of creativity. Ovid delights in describing the preternatural cold of his place of exile: wine in frozen shards, fish trapped in ice, men walking dry-shod on the sea, etc. (Tr. 3.10). The inhabitants’ barbarity, the wild beasts’ howls, and the constant fear of enemy attack have made him unlearn his Latin (Tr. 5.12.55-57). Yet he laments his lagging poetic powers with great power and wit: as just one example, his hymn to Pontus with its perpetual winter (Pont. 3.1) reverses, with mischievous cleverness, Lucretius’ hymn to Venus and springtime (DRN 1.1-20). Hopkins, similarly, in his last three poems bemoans his poetic sterility in ways that underscore his fertility.11 The gently humorous personification of “my winter world,” that member of the infertile couple designated to render “our explanation,” along with the understated incongruity of “with some sighs,” reveal a spark of Ovidian playfulness even on his deathbed. The poem’s close may also contain a private joke: in a late letter to Bridges (25 May 1888; Abbott 1955b: 275), Hopkins writes, with deliberately cumbersome redundancy, And there it is, I understand these things so much better than you: we should explain things, plainly state them, clear them up, explain them; explanation—except personal—is always pure good; without explanation people go on misunderstanding; being once explained they thenceforward understand things; therefore always explain: but I have the passion for explanation and you have not. The metaphors of poem as child and as textile, the preoccupation with “immortal song” rather than with personal immortality, the sexually ambiguous relationship with the “fine delight that fathers thought” rather than with God, the focus on the process of poetic creation, the epistolary format without specific reference to the recipient, and the “winter” responsible for (putative but self-refuting) poetic failure: these features are all but unique in Hopkins’ work. It seems unlikely to be accidental that all of them are characteristic of Ovid’s exile poetry. This assumption of a classical voice, I suggest, accords with the shifts in voice in the poems that precede “To R. B.” “Thou art indeed just, Lord,” as the epigraph makes clear, draws upon the language and tone of Jeremiah, the Old Testament representative of complaint to God. “The shepherd’s brow,” on the other hand, shows many affinities with the embittered outbursts of tragic drama.12 Hopkins the classicist was immersed in poetry where the narrative ego could be different from, even opposite to, the “real” personality of the man who held the pen, but without the obvious assumption of a different persona (as in, say, Browning’s “My Last Duchess”). It is not surprising that near the end of his life he should be drawn toward 11. See Feeney 2008: 141; McChesney 1968: 184. 12. See Beyette 1973: 213; Giles 1985: 173-78; Gardner 1949: 156; MacKenzie 1968: 18081 notes.

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others’ expressions of protest and despair, adapting their words and thoughts to his own situation. Part of the purpose of art is to bring solace through community with fellow-sufferers distant in place and time. Recognizing parallels between oneself and others in literature and history marks the mature artist—especially one trained in the Spiritual Exercises. Hopkins’ last years in Ireland, a “life among strangers,” must have led him to long for fellowship with others “banned from the land of their birth.” As his poetic career opens with a Pindaric ode for five exiles in winter, so it closes with a song harking back to the most prominent poetic exile of the ancient world, banished by lightning to a winter he never found warm.13 Julia Hejduk Department of Classics Baylor University

Works Cited Abbott, Claude Colleer. 1955a. The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon. Edited with Notes and an Introduction. London, New York, and Toronto: Oxford University Press. _____. 1955b. The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges. Edited with Notes and an Introduction. London, New York, and Toronto: Oxford University Press. Beyette, Thomas K. 1973. “Hopkins’ Phenomenology of Art in ‘The Shepherd’s Brow.’” Victorian Poetry 11: 207-213. Bremer, R. 1970. “Hopkins’ Use of the Word ‘Combs’ in ‘To R. B.’ ” English Studies 51: 144-48. Feeney, Joseph J. 2008. The Playfulness of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Aldershot, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Fowler, Don. 2002. “Masculinity under Threat? The Poetics and Politics of Inspiration in Latin Poetry.” In Cultivating the Muse: Struggles for Power and Inspiration in Classical Literature, eds. D. Fowler and E. Spentzou (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 139-59. Gardner, W. H. 1949. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889): A Study of Poetic Idiosyncrasy in Relation to Poetic Tradition. London and New York: Oxford University Press. _____ and N. H. MacKenzie. 1967. The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Fourth Edition. London and New York: Oxford University Press. Giles, Richard F. 1985. “ ‘The Shepherd’s Brow’: Hopkins ‘Disparadised.’ ” Victorian Poetry 23: 169-87. Hansen, Ron. 2008. Exiles. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Hinds, Stephen. 2006. “Booking the Return Trip: Ovid and Tristia 1.” In Knox (2006),

13. Hansen 2008 beautifully explores the theme of exile on many levels in Hopkins’ life, his story interwoven with that of the five nuns who died on the Deutschland. Said 2000: 186: “Exile, in the words of Wallace Stevens, is ‘a mind of winter.’”

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415-40 (= Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 31 [1985]: 13-32). Hollahan, Eugene. 1995. Hopkins Against History. Omaha, NE: Creighton University Press. Johnson, Patricia J. 2008. Ovid before Exile: Art and Punishment in the Metamorphoses. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Knox, Peter E. 2006. Oxford Readings in Ovid. Oxford: Oxford University Press. MacKenzie, Norman H. 1981. A Reader’s Guide to Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mariani, Paul L. 1970. A Commentary on the Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. _____. 1986. “The Dark Night of the Soul.” In Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. H. Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986), 51-76. _____. 1990. “The Sound of Oneself Breathing.” In Critical Essays on Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. A. G. Sulloway (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990), 53-59. McChesney, Donald. 1968. A Hopkins Commentary. New York: New York University Press. Oliensis, Ellen. 1998. “Return to Sender: The Rhetoric of Nomina in Ovid’s Tristia.” Ramus 26: 172-93. Rosati, Gianpiero. 2006. “Form in Motion: Weaving the Text in the Metamorphoses.” In Knox (2006), 334-50 (= P. Hardie, A. Barchiesi, and S. Hinds, eds., Ovidian Transformations: Essays on the Metamorphoses and its Receptions, Cambridge Philological Society, Supplement 23 [Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 1999], 240-53). Said, Edward W. 1975. Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Columbia University Press. _____. 2000. “Reflections on Exile.” In Said, Reflections on Exile (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 171-86. West, Stephanie R. 2006/07. “Classical Notes on Gerard Manley Hopkins.” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 13: 21-32. Williams, Gareth. 2002. “Ovid’s Exilic Poetry: Worlds Apart.” In Brill’s Companion to Ovid, ed. B. Boyd (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2002), 337-81.