36 - Christina Rossetti and Hopkins

Summary

Writing one of his characteristically bubbling letters to William Mowbray Baillie in July 1864, Gerard Manley Hopkins told him that, ‘I have now a more rational hope than before of doing something – in poetry and painting. About the first I have said all there is to say in a letter; about the latter I have no more room to speak, but when next I see you I have great things to tell. I have been introduced to Miss and Miss Christina Rossetti. I met them and Holman Hunt and George Macdonald and Peter Cun[n]ingham and Jenny Lind at the Gurneys’.’ Clearly Christina was something of a celebrity and the undergraduate Hopkins was at the height of his ambitions of belonging to the artistic avant-garde as he knew of it in London. He had, he told Baillie, ‘nearly finished an answer to Miss Rossetti’s Convent Threshold, to be called A voice from the world, or something like that, with which I am at present in the fatal condition of satisfaction’. Rossetti’s ‘Convent Threshold’ is not an account of demure spiritual yearnings but depicts the turmoil of a woman caught between forbidden love and a petrifying fear of damnation, a fear of the sort engendered at Christ Church, Albany Street where Christina worshipped; critics have pointed to Pope’s ‘Eloisa to Abelard’ as a literary precedent. Hopkins’s ‘answer’ reveals both the strengths and weaknesses of his immature verse. The initial paragraph contains vibrant natural description, including the extended metaphor of cuckoos calling, with the precise observation that the call varies between five notes and seven and that it can be heard earlier in some years than in others, but Hopkins had not the range of human experience to convey with conviction the pain of losing a lover.