"All By Turn and Turn About": The Indeterminacy of Hopkins' "Epithalamion"

There isn't much written on the "Epithalamion," and what there is tells us--if nothing else--that it's not obvious what kind of poem it is. In spite of the generic implications of that "title," there's little in the text to make it look like a wedding poem. In the first forty-two lines, the "stranger" is drawn toward the boys bathing in the river, watches them for a while, then goes off to a pool of his own to swim. Then the fragments appended to these lines allegorize them into a wedding poem in which the woody valley is "wedlock," the water "spousal love." In which case, it would seem that the stranger is drawn into marriage by the sound and sight of other men enjoying what it has to offer. But this is open to several objections, of which I think the most significant is that boys bathing in the water should stand for, it must be, married men (when one would expect them to stand for those yet to be married). Why should these boys have been kept in the poem when they disrupt the scheme? It's enough to make us wonder if they were first put there when they were only--plainly, nakedly--boys, who were then covered up allegorically as an afterthought. Even if we feel like putting this objection to one side (which I don't), there's the further problem of there being these already married men, and a man entering into marriage, but no women in the poem. That could be because it's unfinished: "I began an Epithalamion on my brother's wedding: it had some bright lines, but I could not get it done," Hopkins writes to Bridges on May 25, 1888. ¹ Or perhaps it's a strange one-sided wedding poem on which women would never have intruded. We could say, then, that the immersion in water images the pleasure of married love, while women--dissolved into the water--don't have to be bodily present. If, that is, we're not troubled by this love being fleet, flinty, and although kind, also cold. But maybe we've decided, well before getting to this point, that there might be other, better, things to do with the text than trying to impose this interpretation on it. This looks not like a nuptial. ²

In effect, this would be to cut the first forty-two lines free of the appended allegorization, and take them on their own. And it would be to prise the "title" from the text; but then, as that title isn't written in the drafts from which editors construct their text, there's an argument for doing that anyway. The title is derived from the letter, where it's less a "title" than a description of the kind of poem it is. Norman White notes that, strictly, "if used it should be enclosed in brackets," a point editors ought to take up, but don't. ³ For instance, the commentary in Norman MacKenzie's 1990 edition tells us the title is taken from the letter, but it isn't bracketed in the text; yet MacKenzie does bracket "[A soliloquy of one of the spies left in the wilderness]," which "title" is likewise taken from a description in a letter. ⁴ So bracketing the title would give the reader a better idea of its status; while White's "if used" nudges us towards referring to the piece otherwise: "Hark, hearer, hear what I do." In spite of this, the tradition is to leave no doubt that this is "Epithalamion." It's a wedding poem, or would have been one if the poet hadn't become leaf-whelmed in description of the woody watery scene. And if it's a wedding poem, critics can justify the presence of those boys by pointing to their inclusion in the cast-list of...