The Electrical Hopkins
- The Electrical Hopkins
Professor of English Literature, Connecticut College James Joyce's Metamorphoses (1981); Finnegans Wake: A Plot Summary (1986)
Notes
1. Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed Norman Mackenzie (New York: Oxford University Press 1990), 201. All quotations from Hopkins's poetry are from this edition. Subsequent page references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
2. Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed Christopher Devlin, SJ (New York: Oxford University Press 1959), 137.
3. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Including His Correspondence with Coventry Patmore, ed Claude Collier Abbott (London: Oxford University Press 1956), 135.
4. Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, ed Claude Collier Abbott (London: Oxford University Press 1955), 68.
5. Walter J. Ong, SJ, Hopkins, the Self, and God (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1986), 50. See also Robert Boyle, SJ, Metaphor in Hopkins (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1960), 26–31.
6. See Geoffrey H. Hartman, ‘The Dialectic of Sense-Perception,’ in Hopkins: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed Geoffrey H. Hartman (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall 1966), 117–30, especially 122–23.
7. Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed Humphrey House and Graham Storey (London: Oxford University Press 1959), 126.
8. Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Note-books and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed Humphrey House (New York: Oxford University Press 1937), 334.
9. Hopkins, Journals, 204.
10. Hopkins, Journals, 126.
11. Hopkins, Letters, 164.
12. Norman H. Mackenzie, ‘Hopkins and Science,’ Studies in the Literary Imagination 21:1 (Spring 1988), 43.
13. Citations to The Wreck of the Deutschland are by stanza and line number.
14. Among others, Aeschylus; Herodotus, Ovid, and Horace have reflected philosophically that the highest trees or mountaintops are the likeliest to be hit with lightning. Samuel Daniel's version has it that those who ‘are so high above, / Are near to lightning, that are near to Jove.’
15. A series of exchanges in the Hopkins Quarterly concluded that Benjamin Franklin was the first to make this observation on record; Hopkins may well have been the second.
16. Mackenzie, ‘Hopkins and Science,’ 42.
17. See Mackenzie's note to this passage: Hopkins, Poetical Works, 338, and ‘Orion’ entry in OED.
18. Figures here were obtained with the astronomy program ‘Cosmos,’ copyright 1992 by Gene W. Lee.
19. Perhaps combined here with another constellated giant, Hercules, who like the Christ being described in this stanza also descended into hell and returned.
20. ‘... Feast of the one woman without stain. / For so conceivèd, so to conceive thee is done’ (xxx, 6). That is, just as you, Christ, were conceived by an immaculate virgin, so you can be conceived intellectually only by one like her - as here, by this virgin purified in extremis.
21. Mackenzie finds this scene in Hopkins's ‘To R.B.’ See Norman H. Mackenzie, ‘Vision and Obscurity in Hopkins,’ English Studies in Canada 11:4 (1985), 413.
22. See for instance Poetical Works, 21 and Sermons, 254.
23. Hopkins, Journals, 201.
24. Hopkins, Note-books, 178.
25. Ong, 17.
26. As the ‘Dame’ addressed at the conclusion, she is asked in her Marian role of intercessor to forestall any more such ‘líghtning of fíre hard-húrled,’ in a passage recalling that in ‘The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe,’ Mary's skiey ‘bath of blue’ tempers the ‘blinding ball’ of the sun whose ‘glory’ would otherwise be intolerable (175). Hopkins's Mary is, in a way, a lightning rod.
27. Critics discerning a parallel between speaker and falcon include Herbert Marshall McLuhan, who says that the opening lines ‘convey the delicate poise, the hovering emphasis of the falcon's movements’ (Herbert Marshall McLuhan, ‘The Analogical Mirrors,’ in Hartman, 84), and Ann Colley, who remarks of Hopkins's journals that the author ‘writes as if hovering (like the windhover) above the scene’ (Ann C. Colley, ‘Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Idea of Mapping,’ Word and Image 4:2 [April–June 1988], 523–24.) J. Hillis Miller uses the...
