Wrecking “The Wreck”

Finally, after months of priming the proverbial pump with a dozen or so of Hopkins’ more palatable works, I tried my vocal cords at the one his best friend Robert Bridges considered the most formidable and obscure. Being able to time it with the anniversary of the eponymous shipwreck was a bonus.

In the days of my podcast, I did record it once, and I think this YouTube playlist has come to enjoy the same dim popularity. By no means am I quitting my day job, but research, recitation, and writing on GMH, among poets one of the more challenging, has become a beloved pastime.

Better people than I have summarized “Wreck” for popular use, and I have scarcely begun to explore their efforts. The first Google result (viz., https://www.enotes.com/topics/wreck-deutschland) seems acceptable to me. Alice Jenkins wrote a great one. “Of the making of many books there is no end,” Qoheleth famously declared (Ecclesiastes 12:12); likewise of the reading.

“Wreck” was a 35-stanza ode that Hopkins’ Jesuit superior vaguely wished someone would write to commemorate the tragic dashing of a vessel off the coast of Kent. Composed not long after the event, it did not get published until 43 years later, 101 years ago. Like much of his work, it was best avoided in the minds of many, to their detriment.

Hopkins considered the starkness of his own conversion experience as a dramatic reference point for this maritime disaster. Christian theology, based on Sacred Scripture, asserts that God not only can, but does preeminently in the Paschal Mystery, bring good out of evil. Any and all suffering, joined to the supreme suffering of God Incarnate, thus enjoys unimagined capabilities.

The famed “Oxford Movement“ of Anglicans who became Catholic by the efforts of now Saint John Henry Newman was one noteworthy installment in the redemption of a religious heritage. Hopkins frames his own conversion within that larger project, and in this poem he suggests the Deutschland’s destruction can fulfill the same end.

Hopkins paints this picture in marvelous fashion, employing all his poetic prowess. It is rife with killer lines, phrases that pay. How deftly he unites the narration of his poignant experience of God, the emergence of one heroic Franciscan nun summoning the Savior during the dreadfulness, and both of these experiences to England’s return to Catholicism.

I am currently reading “Mined With a Motion” by Marylou Motto, an exposition of certain cherished poetic devices in Hopkins’ works. You won’t get a good book report out of me anymore; I can only trust that my digestion somehow improves my understanding and narration of his poetry, and otherwise enriches my life and ministry.

On Sin and Hell

We need to learn the realities of our holy faith so that they can strengthen God’s relevance in our lives. Understood, the right knowledge doesn’t automatically translate to the right actions. That’s why they told us in the seminary that "theology is best conducted on one’s knees": the enthusiastic fusion of learning, praying, and doing is what God and the Church are looking for, and what the world could use.

So let’s talk about hell, why don’t we? 

H-E-double-hockey-sticks. If you weren’t just a wee bit stirred over what Our Lord was saying today, you’d better check your pulse. Hell has all but ceased to occupy people’s minds, because sin has done likewise. Call me a downer, but these topics are worth revisiting. The Catechism of the Catholic Church has a brief section specifically on hell; it devotes only five paragraphs to the topic (1033-1037), but they’re meaty.

A mortal sin is a conscious and free choice against God, neighbor, or self in a serious matter. It results in our alienation from God, from neighbor, and from self. St. John, in his first epistle, reminds us, “He who does not love remains in death” (3:14). A callous and mindless neglect to make a good choice (a "sin of omission") achieves the same result. In the parable of the judgment of the nations, the king chastens those who failed to assist the hungry, thirsty, naked, ill, or imprisoned in their needs (cf. Mt 25:42-45). To die in this situation without repenting and accepting God’s mercy is to be forever alienated from the Source of our life and from all who have remained connected to that Source, the blessed. Hell is a “just punishment,” but the Judge acts without vengeance or impulsiveness, as we so often do. 

The only hope, or else despair

     Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre—

   To be redeemed from fire by fire.

(T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding," Four Quartets)

Jesus depicts hell as “an unquenchable fire,” while Dante envisions the depths of hell as icy and frigid. Either way, it is a stifling atmosphere in which we will feel “out of place,” but permanently. I say “out of place,” because God’s children were not made for eternal torment and separation, but rather for eternal peace and union. God's love for us nonetheless respects our freedom, the freedom even to reject Him if we wished. By the use or misuse of that freedom we "prepare" for our eternal dwelling —as much as one can prepare, anyhow, for just as the joys of heaven exceed our imagination, so do the pains of hell.

The Church’s teachings on sin and hell serve to call human beings to responsibility and conversion. The sooner the better, we want to grow in communion with the Lord so that we can place our personal desires in the greater context of His love that we are called to share with others. This is a lifelong, difficult endeavor. It involves discipline, as our second reading notes: not only God’s discipline over us (which we usually consider punishment), but also (especially!) the self-discipline that heals and strengthens us for worship and service.

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We cannot ever forget that God is on our side in this endeavor. He wants you to succeed, and He wants to restore you when you fail! The Church’s liturgical prayer puts flesh on the Lord Jesus’ prayer “that all may be one” in love of God and neighbor. Nourished by the sacred Fruit of that Liturgy, we put flesh on that prayer by our daily choices.

Reading "The Wreck," Stanzas 2-3

Our consideration of "The Wreck of the Deutschland" continues with the second stanza:

I did say yes
O at lightning and lashed rod;	10
Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess
Thy terror, O Christ, O God;
Thou knowest the walls, altar and hour and night:
The swoon of a heart that the sweep and the hurl of thee trod
Hard down with a horror of height:	15
And the midriff astrain with leaning of, laced with fire of stress.

Hopkins recalls his conversion to Catholicism as a tumultuous event ("lightning and lashed rod," "terror," an event that set his heart reeling.  Its effects were physical; he was apparently "bent out of shape."  Swoon, sweep and hurl suggest the violence of a shipwreck, to which the reader will be treated in due time.

"I did say yes"; "Thou heardst me"; "Thou knowest": While in the throes of a difficult time one may look back trustingly or ruefully at the moment of decision--whether the exchange of marital vows, the ordination candidate's folded hands inside those of his ordaining prelate, or whatever may apply.  Hopkins reaffirms his conversion, calling upon God to witness to the truth of his offering.

There seems to be a tension between the forcefulness of God's action within Hopkins and the freedom in which Hopkins assented to that action.  As ever, the Catholic "both/and" stance is the way to go.  At no point would one imagine Hopkins (or any convert/"revert") claiming to be forced into it.  The impulse to respond in concert with the Holy Spirit is strong, yet never assertive beyond one's ability to refuse.  "You duped me, O Lord, and I let myself be duped" (Jer 20:7).

Stanza three:

The frown of his face
Before me, the hurtle of hell
Behind, where, where was a, where was a place?
I whirled out wings that spell	20
And fled with a fling of the heart to the heart of the Host.
My heart, but you were dovewinged, I can tell,
Carrier-witted, I am bold to boast,
To flash from the flame to the flame then, tower from the grace to the grace.

I can imagine this act of faith taking place during nocturnal Eucharistic Adoration ("altar and hour and night," st. 2), where the worshipper is drawn, moth-like, toward the "Living Flame of Love" of which St. John of the Cross sang.

Hopkins stammers to acknowledge his "Catch-22" situation, in which neither fight nor flight suffice.
"I whirled out wings that spell": read during that spell (the fretful time in which he considers himself trapped by "the frown of his [God's] face before" and "the hurtle of hell behind" him).  Like his mentor John Henry Newman, he is not simply fleeing from Anglicanism, but flying to Catholicism.

He describes his surrender as "a fling of the heart to the heart of the Host."  This description of his conversion is not as dramatic as stanza 2 with its talk of a "midriff astrain."  With the swift determination of a carrier pigeon or a dove, he instinctively pursued his Pursuer.

"From the flame to the flame": I do not know if there is any literary dependence or homage in this observation, but fellow Anglican Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) seemed to draw upon several of Hopkins' images in the fourth section of "Little Gidding" (1942), the last of Eliot's Four Quartets:

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre —
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.

"Pyre or pyre"--As for Hopkins, so for Eliot and for all of us: what choice does there seem to be?  A monumental one.  The fire of heaven or the fire of hell; and if heaven, even the way-station Purgatory is traditionally described as flagrant.  This befits the human heart, made for experiencing depth and intensity.

So if we are looking to escape the fire of purification and transformation, there is no "place" ahead or behind for us to go.  There is only inward.  Perhaps we can think of divine love as an inevitable, "intolerable shirt of flame" that we wear on the inside, that we can comfortably remove no more than our own skin.  Our heart, also on the inside, knows where to go: to the heart of the Host (the hostia is the "victim," the Whole-Burnt Offering for our salvation).