G.M. Hopkins: Landscape with a Rainbow
G.M. Hopkins: Landscape with a Rainbow

Author(s): Aleksandra Kędzierska
Subject(s): Theoretical Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Studies of Literature, 19th Century, Philology, British Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: Hopkins; landscape; rainbow; aestheticism; Divine
Summary/Abstract: Hopkins’s poems abound in landscapes. Sometimes, as is the case with “Pied Beauty,” “plotted and pieced, / fold, fallow and plough,” they offer a panorama of the world “charged” with the grandeur of God. The power, yet also humour and beauty, of the Creator reveal themselves in numerous cloud- or sea-scapes, and in truth all nature captured in Hopkins’s poetic vignettes - rocks and meadows, trees and plants, stars, rainbows and sunsets - allows an insight into the glory of creation. Through his aesthetic of the Christian belief, Hopkins, as Charles Taylor has it, forges “a surprising new itinerary” for faith in an age of disenchantment, as a poet “graced with rare insight” to see the concrete “particular in all its specificity” participating in a universal “communion” of Divine love, wisdom, and beauty (764). Focusingon Hopkins’s fascination with rainbows and discussing the treatment of “nature’s arc” in his poetry, this paper will demonstrate how this particular “inscape of his environment” (Nelson), channeling Christological, ontological, and also ecological didactics, narrates the story of Hopkins’s relationship with the Divine: the poet’s plunge into aestheticism followed by his discovery of the prismatic, rainbow-like nature of the Divine.

• Details
• Contents