Hopkins Re-Constructed
Wheeler, Edward T.
the "three-personed" God of trinitarian tradition. Let me probe the issue from another perspective. In her discussion of the Christian hope for an ultimate destiny with God beyond history,...
...The meditative analysis of the first line of "God's Grandeur," which begins his reading of the poems, moves from a technical classification of the language used to references to Wallace Stevens and Dr...
...Lawler even advises anyone not interested in his criticism of the critics to skip the first two chapters and go right to the reading of the poems...
...Justus Lawler has done justice for Father Hopkins...
...Johnson posits, in keeping with the Catholic tradition, the hope of an ultimate personal and communal fulfillment, beyond all imagining: a communion of persons transformed in the "Incomprehensible Mystery" of God...
...Over and over again, Lawler can stop you in the midst of a poem with a discovery, a real disdosure...
...Lawler gesticulates in print, practically slaps the podium in outrage at the nonsense written...
...The ragged breath slips and then catches on the edge of the cliff from which she hangs, and she's back in the bed, saying What day is it...
...The total absence of "Father" from this otherwise very catholic book more than disappoints...
...But be warned, Lawler can also befuddle: "But it is the hylomorphic complementarity engendering the transcending hypostasis that is of primary interest...
...His title tells us that he dismisses literary de-constructionwthis book aims to "see Hopkins plain...
...Lawler's polyglot style he often uses Latin, German, and French-shows a concern for the liturgical aspects of Hopkins's world and makes a Latin response almost obligatory...
...He loves Hopkins's poetry, admires the man, priest and poet, and makes a strong case for Hopkins as eternal child, anima candida, one more lost in wonder at a universe which speaks to him singularly rather than one which tells him he is isolated in his singularity...
...But even that invitation has to have its own caveat: his critical analysis uses a methodology he developed in an earlier work, Celestial Pantomime, twenty years old but reissued recently in a revised edition...
...in this book there is total silence concerning the spiritual blight of abortion...
...His style bears all the verbal signs of the lecturer's voice which jibes, unsettles, and makes extravagant claims in an effort to wake up the chap staring dully out the window...
...Commonweal 2 6 October 23, 1998 is a fine book--and Lawler must be a terrific lecturer...
...The case he makes against Martin's reading, using the same evidence, is persuasive enough, and one can almost feel the rush of pent-up energy as Lawler dismantles those who have invented a dark sexual side to a young man who was actually enmeshed in a struggle about whether or not to go over to Rome...
...After destroying the lunacies of the contemporary criticism, Lawler goes on to attempt a rescue of Hopkins from one of his most recent biographers, Robert Bernard Martin (Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life...
...Hopkins was neither an eccentric nor an anomaly for his ~rne, Lawler argues...
...Then Johnson's depiction of the "prayer of lament" will be fully Catholic and inclusive: "[Lament] calls us out of passivity into active engagement against all premature death caused by human beings...
...Anne Higgins Chardin and to a sinologist, Joseph Needham, turns the analysis at the close of this four-page reflection to a characterization of Hopkins's poetic vision...
...Surely a comprehensive discernment of the Communion of Saints needs to be extended to embrace the unborn...
...Lawler's passion, intelligence, and daunting breadth of reference give the book its value...
...Delirious, she's letting old secrets slip out around the oxygen mask...
...The review of the critical literature is trenchant and very funny...
...He cites precursor poems by Herbert, Vaughn, Donne, Marvel, Keats, and many others and puts Hopkins in a proper relationship with the tradition...
...Lawler begins each of his analytical chapters with a poem, which serves to anchor the discussion and provide links for the following development...
...In a book so rightly reverential toward the relations of life, so discerning regarding the contemporary threats to human solidarity and the spiritual peril of ruptured connections...
...it risks countenancing a less than trinitarian, ultimately impersonal, vision and prayer...
...A further unaccountable absence needs to be noted...
...SHAKING OUT THE FOIL Edward T. Wheeler m e have to give thanks to any writer who lets us read anew familiar poems and so to Justus George Lawler gratias agamus...
...A link to Teilhard de Margaret Her black Irish eyes, practical as tile, suddenly open like onyx wells as she snaps out of sleep...
...Indeed, Lawler offers a blistering dismissal of a great deal of the criticism written on Hopkins in the last twenty-five years...
...They include a sense that there is one substructure or pattern in all verse, that the tradition really links all poems, and that Hopkins was a painstaking craftsman and immersed in the literary tradition...
...Edward T. Wheeler is dean of the faculty at the Williams School in New London, Connecticut...
...in a book that rises to passionate eloquence regarding the bond between generations and that summons us to nurture companionship in memory and hope...
...This is heady and illuminating stuff...
...The biographical note says he has taught at various middle western universities, published many books on religious matters, and contributed to Commonweal...
...Particularly informative are his comparisons of Hopkins to Newman and Tennyson, which reveal a man whose supposed idiosyncrasies come out of a religious and literary tradition many of his critics simply know nothing about...
...Lawler's reading rests on a few premises...
...If the moon answers to the name Old Woman Who Never Dies, what should I call her, whose waning hand holds mine as she pulls away from me into the air of the clean cold Sunday morning...
...In her discussion of the Christian hope for an ultimate destiny with God beyond history, Johnson gently distances herself from Rosemary Reuther's immanentist eschatology of the self-effacing abandonment of personal being into the great "Matrix of life...
...Lawler wishes to dispel an "utterly dubious and tendentious theory" that Hopkins had strong homosexual desires for an extravagant AngloCatholic youth, Digby Macworth Dolben, and that the early poems record both a sexual encounter and a deep sense of loss at Dolben's accidental death...
...All this said, Hopkins Re-Constructed Robert P. Imbelli, a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, teaches theology at Boston College...
...Now such an appeal to the Incomprehensibility of God, beyond all telling, can rightly claim warrant in the Great Tradition from Gregory of Nyssa through Thomas Aquinas to Karl Rahner...
...He divides the chapters into subsections headed with subtitles in teasing puns (many of which link this work to the critical methodology of his earlier book), and his exegesis is brilliant if, at times, bewildering...
...Given these, a reader can start anywhere in Hopkins and wind up everywhere, which is not altogether a bad description of what Lawler himself does...
...What day...
...HiUis Miller's blurb on the cover refers to the book as an "advanced introduction...
...Hopkins asserted in "As Kingfishers Catch Fire" that "the just man justices...
...It's the cusp of October, humid, tropical, storming through the long afternoon...
...Hopkins Re-Constructed requires that readers be familiar with the critical literature and with Martin's biography...
...She's emptying the last closets where worries of the details of graduations, anguish of lost colleges, irreplaceable keys quiver in the corners...
...The ideal Hopkins reader would obviously be Catholic and have spent at least a year in a Jesuit novitiate...
...Johnson, to a distinction between "grandeur" and "glory"--especially in terms of Ignatian spirituality...
...But, in them, such awed "agnosticism" about God's true nature is still situated within the doxological context of the revealed Name of God in whom the whole Communion of Saints is baptized: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit...
...A page or two of that study reappears verbatim in the work under review...
...His commanding voice is such that it is hard to resist him, decry his polysyllabic and polyglot manner as we might...
...Commonweal ~ 7 October 23, 1998...
Vol. 125 • October 1998 • No. 18
