Chapter 7 - Incarnating elegy in The Wreck of the Deutschland

Summary

In Memoriam A.H.H. is an elegy which drifts towards a conclusion which is premised on another's act of consent, ‘Her sweet “I will”’, which makes the poet's sister sacramentally ‘one’ with another in marriage. The poem ends with an active choice for union, no matter how the means of getting there have so passively courted disunity and possible annihilation. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ elegy The Wreck of the Deutschland is involved with no such drifting. It begins with the assent required of the human in another type of sacramental union, Holy Orders, and goes on to test the integration of the human and divine will in its account not of drift but of wreck. Hopkins seeks out the annihilation of the self in order to demonstrate the ways in which that self can only come to fulfilment through its own powers of will. Before Hardy's poetry confronts volitional powers with a necessity which is pictured determining all through the Immanent Will, Hopkins attempts to work the choices and decisions of the consenting human will into the will of a benign God.

Hopkins' career as a theologian was thwarted by his Jesuit superiors, and, for one so preoccupied by the importance of consent, it was beset by the procrastination and fear of publication which meant that he delivered little. He followed none of his theological work through to publication, and gave up, too, a brief and unsuccessful career as a preacher.