The Columbia History of British Poetry (115 page)

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didactic poem in the manner of Pope, she later "repented of"; but among the "other poems" is "The Prayer," which introduces the theme of suffering as an aid to renunciation of the world that underlies much of her early religious poetry. In "The Dream" the pagan world is swept away by the advent of Christ, who replaces Pan as the source of poetrya theme to which she would later return.
Barrett's mature religious poetry appears mainly in
Poems
(1833),
The Seraphim and Other Poems
(1838), and
Poems
(1844), the two first being marked by conspicuous piety and even preachiness, the last moving towards her later mode, which is more outward-looking and less explicitly religious. She intended
The Seraphim
to transcend "the Titanic 'I can revenge'" of Aeschylus'
Prometheus Unbound
and to attain to "the celestial 'I can forgive'" to which Aeschylus might have turned had he lived in the Christian era. In about a thousand lines, Barrett presents the Crucifixion through the eyes of two seraphim, who struggle to comprehend what they see but whose grasp is limited by the lack of that "humanness" which is the significance of the Incarnation. Yet they acknowledge, before the drama they are witnessing, that "Heaven is dull / . . . to man's earth." The love that human beings will bear for God has no analogue in the purely spiritual realm inhabited by seraphim. The poem, like the volume it heads, received generally favorable treatment by critics, although no second edition was called for. The less ambitious poems in the volume, however, are generally more successful: ''The Virgin Mary to the Child Jesus," "Sleep," "The Sea-Mew," "My Doves," "Consolation," and "Cooper's Grave" are worthier of her later work.
Between this volume of poems and the next came the heavy blow of her brother's death by drowning off Torquay, where she had begged him to join her during a long convalescence. Her father blamed her unjustly for the death and grew estranged from her; she accepted the blame and the estrangement.
Poems, by Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
(1844) reflects these trials, and Fairchild observes that her work becomes increasingly evangelical in spirit as her sorrows multiply.
The most ambitious poem in the volume,
A Drama of Exile
, traces the first steps of Adam and Eve in the wilderness, taking up where
Paradise Lost
left off. A vision of Christ lays before them God's plan of redemption; and to a chorus of invisible angels, Adam and Eve "advance into the desert, hand in hand""
EXILED BUT NOT LOST
!" Here Aeschylean form and Miltonic focus converge to rewrite the
 
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founding plot of the Judeo-Christian world from the perspective of woman. "Eve's allotted grief," she wrote, had been "imperfectly apprehended hitherto" and was "more expressible by a woman than a man." While allowing that "self-sacrifice belonged to [Eve's] womanhood, and the consciousness of originating the fall to her offense," Barrett quietly advances the parallel in loss between Adam and Satan. A less ambitious but perhaps more perfectly achieved poem in the volume, ''The Cry of the Children," suggests a turn away from a theological and towards a political orientation, although still deeply tinged with Christian humanism. The poetry Barrett wrote after her marriage to Browning develops this latter strain.
Coventry Patmore
As a despiser of feminism, democracy, pacifism, the Irish, Jews, andafter his Catholic conversionProtestants, Coventry Patmore is not likely to win many modern admirers. Popularity he also despised. In the intuitionist mystical fusion of the erotic and the spiritual of his later work and his championing of voluntaristic manly bellicosity and dominance, he comes before us at times like a High Victorian Catholic D. H. Lawrence. And like Lawrence's best fiction, Patmore's best poetry is of a high order and repays study. In the four books that form
The Angel in the House
The Betrothal, The Espousals, Faithful Forever
, and
The Victories of Love
he gives somewhat prolix form to his understanding of ideal Christian marriage and domestic love, a marriage and a love that he possessed with his first wife. The first two books trace the growth in courtship and fruition in marriage of a mutually fulfilling love predicated on the husband's acceptance of dominance, duty, and gallantry and the wife's of submission, guardianship of beauty, and the function of limiting and guiding him. This is indeed not far from a traditional Christianor at least Paulineview of marriage, to which Patmore adds a sort of domestic and erotic chivalry: "Her manners, when they call me lord, / Remind me 'tis by courtesy."
Indeed, Patmorean marriage is a continual wooing in which "she's not and never can be mine." Throughout runs an implicit theme that will develop more fully in his later works: "The little germ of nuptial love, / Which springs so simply from the sod, / The root is, as my song shall prove, / Of all our love to man and God." The configuration of marriage as man, woman, and love (sexual and spiritual) will become for Patmore
 
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the expression of a divine ordering: "Female and male God made the man; / His image is the whole, not half; / And in our love we dimly scan / The love which is between Himself."
Faithful Forever
and
The Victories of Love
, made up of verse letters and a closing "Wedding Sermon" that carries much of the burden of meaning, trace first the course of disappointed love and then the trials of unequal marriage that, by the unconditional devotion of the wife and the unflagging duty of the husband, transfigures them both in the presence of death.
Shortly after the death of his first wife, Patmore noted in his diary: "The relation of the soul to Christ
as his betrothed wife
is a mine of undiscovered joy and power." In the second book of
The Unknown Eros, and Other Odes
and in his late prose reflections,
The Rod, the Root and the Flower
, he develops the connections between erotic, spiritual, and divine love only hinted at until then. In the former, sexuality is not a metaphor of spiritual and divine love but an instance of them. The mystery at the heart of married love is the same mystery that inhabits, in a finer tone, spiritual and divine perfection; and, conversely, the spiritual, the religious, and the divine both dwell and are uniquely apprehended in the sexuality and happiness of married life.
"Sponsa Dei," "Legem Tuam Dilexi," ''To the Body," "Deliciae Sapientiae de Amore," "The Child's Purchase," and the Psyche odes advance the idea that marital sex is a sacrament and the matrimonial bed its altar overtly enough to have discomposed many even among Patmore's sympathetic readers. In
The Rod, the Root and the Flower
, finally, Patmore expresses more directly, though in aphoristic form, the central concerns of his poetry and indeed extends them into congruent regions. "Lovers," he here writes, "are nothing else than Priest and Priestess to each other and of the Divine Manhood and Divine Womanhood which are in God."
Christina Rossetti
Christina Rossetti was esteemed in her own time as its greatest woman poet and by some as the greatest of all English women poets. By the end of her life she had, in Antony Harrison's estimate, written some one thousand poems, about half of them devotional; but as her religiosity was integral to her life, it permeates almost all her work. Both her Victorian and her modern admirers point to the great purity and severe simplicity, even austerity, of her poetic manner and to the welcome con-
 
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trast it forms with the sentimentality and diffuseness that vitiates much Victorian poetry. Her stylistic concision owes something, no doubt, to the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics of her brother, just as her restraint reflects her affinities with Tractarianism and the doctrine of Reserve. Concision here means not compression, however, so much as simplicity and directness of utterance, and her weakest poetry has justly been charged with slightness rather than formal shortcomings. On the contrary, Rossetti was notably scrupulous and craftswomanly, submitting poems to Dante Gabriel and others for criticism and perfectly aware when she had achieved the well-made aesthetic object that she insisted on both in her work and in others'.
The fusion of Tractarian and Pre-Raphaelite poetics, Harrison demonstrates, is observable in poems like "'Consider the Lilies of the Field,'" and "'Thou knewest . . . thou oughtest therefore.'" Both poems are marked by a Pre-Raphaelite closeness and intensity of gaze in order to effect an ''Analogical reading" of nature à la Keble; but in Rossetti this process culminates in a small and precisely defined religious illumination or an insight into right conduct as an element of Creation. Much of her religious poetry deals with suffering and release; indeed, a world-weary melancholy pervades the poetry, which appears to be written from the point of view of one who has already renounced the world, as in "The Thread of Life," a melancholy that in "'For Thine Own Sake, O My God'" deepens into self-loathing: "Wearied of sinning, wearied of repentance, / . . . Wearied of self, I turn, my God, to Thee; / . . . Wearied I loathe myself, I loathe my sinning, / My stains, my festering sores, my misery. . . ." Fairchild catches in few words the circular negativity of Rossetti's rigorism: "She loved the world, condemned that love as sinful, renounced the world, was made unhappy by that renunciation, condemned that unhappiness as sinful." There is, however, a single ray of light in this bleak outlook: in "'When my heart is vexed I will complain'" she begins with the beauty of the world ("The fields are white to harvest, look and see"), rejects this beauty ("I have no heart for harvest time, / Grow sick with hope deferred from chime to chime"), yet takes heart from Christ, who "can set [her] in the eternal ecstasy /Of his great jubilee."
But the negation of life in this world, or its reduction to a thoroughfare full of woe, seems to be for Rossetti a necessary step towards affirmation of life in the next. This hereafter she images forth in recognizably Pre-Raphaelite terms as an aesthetic paradise, as in "'The Holy
 
Page 468
City, New Jerusalem,'"built of every precious substance, strewn with every delightful flower and fruit, resplendently watered, and ringing with the harps and songs of saintswhere "citizens who walk in white / Have nought to do with day or night, / And drink the river of delight." God is the ideal architect and each of his materials bears a moral as well as an aesthetic virtue. But such stock idealizations have little poetic force. At her best, however, whichas in
Monna Innominata: A Sonnet of Sonnets
is not always in her explicitly religious poetry, Rossetti clearly merits the place among Victorian poets that she has lately won back.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Alone among Victorian religious poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins may lay claim to greatness. Yet beyond a small circle of readersin the main, poets today little readhis work was completely unknown in his lifetime and indeed virtually so until well into the twentieth century. When his friend Robert Bridges brought out the first edition of his poems in 1918, Hopkins had been dead for twenty-nine years. Public reaction was mixed, if not bewildered. To most reviewers schooled in Victorian and Edwardian literary decorum, this poetry seemed unfamiliar, odd, even rebarbative; some, however, were able to see deeper than its unsettling surface and to recognize that here novelty, and perhaps even difficulty, might be the price of its beauties. But none could fail to see that the author of this small body of poemsbetween
The Wreck of the Deutschland
and "To R. B." are scarcely more than fifty finished poems in English, mostly shorthad introduced startling innovations in poetic language.
The eldest son in a comfortably well-off High Anglican family, Hopkins won two scholarships (called "Exhibitions") that took him to Balliol College, Oxford, where he obtained a First Class in
Literae Humaniores
or "Greats"the final examination in classical languages and literatures for the bachelor of arts degree, requiring detailed preparation in linguistic and formal matters. During these years and for some years after, he kept notebooks and journals that reward study. They reveal an intensely curious mind and a taste for precise observation and description that would passtransformedinto his later poetry. As a student of natural phenomena, he followed the injunctions of John Ruskin; as a student of phenomena of language, he
 
Page 469
worked in accordance with methods and doctrines of mid-Victorian philology.
While Oxford was no longer the seedbed of religious controversy that it had been in the time of Newman and the Oxford Movement, it harbored opposing religious tendencies and views that were no less firmly held for being quieter in profession. By temperament disposed to religious rigor, Hopkins fell in readily among the ritualist heirs of the movement, led by E. B. Pusey and H. P. Liddon. The poetry that Hopkins wrote at this time is uneven in quality, though at its best (as in "Heaven-Haven" and "The Habit of Perfection") it reveals a delicate poetic talent in the making, one that has learned lessons of Keats and Tennyson. As a foreshadowing of his mature work, however, it is pale.
To appreciate Hopkins's decision to leave the Anglican Church of his family, friends, and spiritual mentors at Oxford, one must bear in mind the profound interpenetrations of ecclesiastical and national identities in England. To enter the Catholic Church was to abandon Canterbury and England for Romea step overhung with suspicions of treachery and "perversion," and often causing the rupture of the closest personal bonds. Before entering the Jesuit order, Hopkins symbolically burnt his poems, having taken care to secure the survival of copies of most of them. More significant, however, he resolved to write no more verse, on the grounds that to do so would interfere with his "state and vocation." To this resolution he held firm for over seven years, writing no poetry unless asked by superiors to supply ''presentation pieces" on religious occasions.
Even the best of these"Ad Mariam" and "Rosa Mystica"scarcely rise above the run of Victorian religious poems and offer no foreshadowing of the poetic language or perceptions that would emerge suddenly with
The Wreck of the Deutschland
. But he continued to keep journals until about ten months before beginning work on the ode, and in these he recorded observations of the natural world in prose of great descriptive exactness and sometimes beauty. Here he makes use of a private terminology that first found its way into his writing in a set of notes towards an essay on Parmenides.
Two of these terms,
inscape
and
instress
, have proved useful enough to merit entries in the 1976 Supplement to the
Oxford English Dictionary
. While his use of them is not always consistent, one may begin to define
inscape
as the essential form dwelling within natural things and

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