Chiastic Strands in Stanza 1 of "The Wreck of the Deutschland"

But the important part played by parallelism of expression in our poetry is not so well known: I think it will surprise anyone when first pointed out. (Gerard Manley Hopkins, "On the Origin of Beauty")¹

The passage beyond language requires language or rather a text as a place for the trace of a step that is not (present) elsewhere. (Jacques Derrida, "At This Very Moment In This Work Here I am")²

"Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades, or loose the cords of Orion?" (Job 38.31)³

In this paper I make the following claims. First, the first stanza of Hopkins'
"The Wreck of the Deutschland" employs chiasmus thoroughly. Second, the chiasmus functions as a crucifix in the stanza signifying Christ the fisher of souls. Third, the stanza, which closes with a paraphrase of verses from Job 10, is concerned, like Job, with the relationship of self to God, and, like Job, employs a self-as-whale metaphor--Christ is the whaler:

Your hands fashioned and made me; and now you turn and destroy me. Remember that you fashioned me like clay; and will you turn me to dust again? Did you not pour me out like milk and curdle me like cheese? You clothed me with skin and flesh, and knit me together with bones and sinews. (Job 10.8-11)

Finally, Hopkins uses chiasmus, as does Derrida, as a site of deconstruction--the deconstruction of the self in Christ.

The chiasmus of the stanza seems to be Hopkins' answer to the whale in Job. Its argument is that there can be no good self without Christ. Like Job, Hopkins' stanza is also about the relation of the self to God, though after Christ that relationship is changed completely. It thus seems reasonable to see the chiasmus of the stanza as symbolic of the union of the hu man and the divine in Christ, the stanza's tacit third person--it symbolizes, perhaps, to use Walter J. Ong's chiastic expression, "The ideal of realizing oneself in Christ and Christ in oneself." ⁴ The stanza is about the self and God, but its form, which one may and may not be sensitive to, signifies Christ, so it is thus really about the relationship of the self to God with and without Christ.

I read the poem as a fabric of two interwoven linguistic realities, iteration and polysemy. In his famous essay "Linguistics and Poetics" Roman Jakobson argues that "[the poetic] function, by promoting the palpability of signs, deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects"⁵--poetry, therefore, is enhanced semiotic materiality. The poetic function promotes this palpability of signs by "project[ing] the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection onto the axis of combination. Equivalence is promoted to the constitutive device of the sequence" (p. 71). Jakobson's observation does not imply that the principle of equivalence ceases to operate on the axis of selection, although it may; it simply notes that the distinguishing characteristic of poetry is that the principle of equivalence operates along the axis of combination. Rhyme, of course, is the most obvious manifestation of the operation of this projected principle of equivalence in poetry, but as Jakobson points out, rhyme, in which repetition separates sounds from sense, "is only a particular, condensed case of a much more general, we may even say the fundamental, problem of poetry, namely parallelism" (p. 82). The "palpability of signs," the materiality of poetry, is parallelism. One of Jakobson's primary sources of these ideas is an undergraduate essay written at Oxford in 1865 by Gerard Manley Hopkins, which Jakobson cites (p. 72). "The structure of poetry is that of continuous parallelism," Hopkins writes in "Poetic Diction" (Journals and Papers, p. 84), and it is in the first stanza of a poem by Hopkins that I will...