Emily Dickinson, Hopkins and Wrestling with God

For many years, I have taught Gerard Manley Hopkins and Emily Dickinson back-to-back in a course called The Poet’s ‘I’: Poetry and Autobiography, essentially a study of how poets transform their life experiences into art.  Students read biography, letters, journals, drafts of poems—as well as a great many actual poems—in order to explore how those poems get made. Both Dickinson and Hopkins used their poetry to express and comment upon their personal spiritual and religious journeys in ways that speak to nearly universal questions of the spirit. That movement—from the personal to the universal—is what we study in that course. Comparing Dickinson and Hopkins is on one level, fairly obvious. Both are mid-to-late nineteenth century writers who were white and well-educated and relatively privileged, but were also essentially self-taught poets who transformed the sound and texture of English verse through their experimentation with meter, rhythm, diction, syntax, and punctuation.  Interesting too, is that both also wrote during their lifetimes for an extremely limited audience, perhaps knowing they would be misunderstood by their contemporaries. Hopkins sent his poems a few at a time in manuscript to his poet friend Robert Bridges, and to almost no one else (his long poems being the exception); Dickinson shared her poems with only a few close friends, and with the writer and editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson; only 11 of her 1789 extant poems were published in her lifetime, and those anonymously.  Dickinson explicitly put her faith in an immortality to be conferred by later generations, while Hopkins expressed no such confidence—except in the gesture of making sure his poems were preserved.  As it happened, the authentic collected poems of each were eventually presented to a modern and even post-modern literary world entirely ready to receive and understand the results of their experiments—Hopkins in the fraught year of 1918, and Dickinson post-World War II.

That both were essentially Christian religious poets makes the comparison even more compelling.  Dickinson was on the mental and spiritual run from the conservative Puritan orthodoxy that had defined the terms of her existence since her birth in 1830, whereas Hopkins could well be described as runningtoward a similarly conservative but very different discipline of faith, half a generation later and across the Atlantic from Dickinson. Yet for both, and perhaps this is why I have always thought of them together, their poems are in dialogue with, in conflict with, in the words of critic James Olney an absent presence in Hopkins’ case, and a present absence in Dickinson’s (57)—that is, an invisible and ultimately unknowable transcendent realm that nevertheless lives alongside and within what we see and know (Hughes 68). In other words, God. They differ, though, in their modes of addressing God, in the differing agency and confidence each felt in that exchange.

Despite her thoroughly Christian and Puritan upbringing, Dickinson famously rejected the call to recommit herself as an adult to the church and to God, as revival meetings swept through Western Massachusetts, where she lived, in the 1840s.  All of her family and friends obeyed the call and made professions of faith; but, as a teenaged Dickinson wrote to her friend, It is hard to give up the world and, despite the possibility of shipwreck, I love to buffet the sea (qtd in Wolff 101-02, 104). This was the great conflict of Dickinson’s whole life, and when it was done, she was isolated from her community and alone in her argument with God, whose existence she accepted, but who seemed to demand that she give up her mind, her consciousness, her very self in favor of a blind and unquestioning faith. Her other great quarrel with God was over his refusal to appear in the world, reserving the truth about his existence and nature to be discovered only—and only supposedly—after one dies.  In about 1858, she launched a poetic discussion with God, if you will, which she conducted with considerable confidence and force.

This argument is carried on throughout Dickinson’s 1789 poems, and early on she links her sense of the impossible situation God has placed human beings in to the story of Jacob’s wrestle with the angel, told at the end of Ch. 32 of Genesis.  In that story, you may recall, Jacob is walking alone at night and gets into an altercation with what looks like a man.  They wrestle all night, and Jacob prevails—but will not release the man except thou bless me. Jacob receives his blessing and is rechristened Israel and calls the place Peniel for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved. Jacob is remembered as the last person ever see to God while living, and Dickinson is understandably fascinated this story.  She retells it in her poem #145 A little East of Jordan:  

A little East of Jordan 
Evangelists record 
A Gymnast and an Angel 
Did wrestle long and hard –

Til morning touching mountain – 
And Jacob, waxing cite, 
The Angel begged permission 
To Breakfast – to return!

Not so, said cunning Jacob! 
“I will not let thee go 
Except thou bless me” – Stranger! 
The which acceded to –

Light swung the silver fleeces 
“Peniel” hills beyond, 
And the bewildered Gymnast 
Found he had worsted God!

This is a typical Dickinson poem in some ways—the Bible is her go-to source of stories and language for talking about the fate of humankind relative to God.  In other ways, it’s not very typical. The succession of exclamation points in the second half of the poem is highly unusual and suggests how foundational the story was to her.  The final stanza is pure Dickinson wit. The silver fleeces of dawn recall cunning Jacob’s trickery with sheepskin elsewhere in the story, but also moves the imagery into the domestic realm.  The bewildered Gymnast / Found he had worsted God!  “Worsted” is wool, of course—yarn (“fleeces,” again), and usually when we talk about a wrestling match, we say that the winner “bested” the loser. Angry as she was about God’s refusal to appear, she imagines the “blessing” Jacob extracted as a curse—no more would God move among us in the world, no more would we have empirical knowledge of Him. Dickinson saw herself, like Jacob, as one who was doomed or destined to wrestle with God, but on fairly equal terms, at least rhetorically.

Emily Dickinson presents this image of the wrestle with God in several other poems as well.  I will just list them:  #227 Two swimmers wrestled on a spar; #255 The Drop that wrestles in the sea; and #1228 Longing is like the seed / that wrestles in the ground. #255 is especially interesting as a version of Jacob’s story.

Dickinson’s argument with God cast her into despair at times—she is perhaps the greatest poet we have of extreme states of consciousness, including existential doubt and dread. But she also expresses her anger brilliantly and trenchantly.  I know that He exists. she says in poem #365:

I know that He exists. 
He has hid his rare life 
From our gross eyes.

‘Tis an instant’s play –
‘Tis a found Ambush – 
Just to make Bliss 
Earn her own surprise!

But – should the play 
Prove piercing earnest – 
Should the glee – glaze – 
In Death’s – stiff – stare –

Would not the fun 
Look too expensive! 
Would not the jest – 
Have crawled too far!

Here the invisible God is hiding, and it’s like a game of hide and seek, she says, except that in order be “found” we have to die. Should the glee – glaze -  / in Death’s – stiff – stare – the “fun” turns to tragedy, the quest to find God seems “too expensive” if the answer can come only with death. Note the relatively rare exclamation points here, too—she feels the unfairness of the game God plays very deeply.  And yet, she discusses that unfairness in very human terms, a child’s game of hide and seek.

My favorite and most compact expression of Dickinson’s frustration with this “present absence” and the predicament he has left humankind in is #581, “Of Course – I prayed”

Of Course – I prayed – 
And did God Care? 
He cared as much as on the Air 
A Bird – had stamped her foot – 
And cried “Give Me” 

My Reason – Life – 
I had not had – but for Yourself –
‘Twere better Charity

To leave me in the Atom’s Tomb – 
Merry, and nought, and gay, and numb – 
Than this smart Misery.

This little poem illustrates some of Dickinson’s grammatical strategies for expressing her intense argument with an invisible and absent, yet existing, God. The opening is expressed in Dickinson’s child-voice—which you may know from better-known poems like Papa above, regard a Mouse and I’m nobody! Who are you?  the child here all but throwing a tantrum at not being paid attention to. But after that petulant first half the poem switches, after quoting the hypothetical bird saying Give me—to profound philosophical questioning of God (now addressed in the second person) about the irony of being born a human with a brain at all, when what God asks of us is blind faith.

A plausible reading of the second half would be something like You gave me my Reason (my ability to think); I only have a reasoning brain because You gave me one.  It would have been kinder, she says, if I had never been born (had stayed, in the Atom’s Tomb) (I always hear a pun on “Adam” here) without a mind: Merry, and nought, and gay, and numb. That non-existence would have been better than this smart misery.  Having the OED open when reading Dickinson is always a good idea—and if you look up “reason” you get to “rational mind” fairly quickly; and if you look up “smart” you get to the same place, but also to a string of definitions involving “sharp pain.”  “This smart misery” is both ironically intelligent, and acutely painful. Why give me a brain and then tell me not to think? Why make thinking so painful?

I could go on and on.  One can find Dickinson in every sort of mood and stance in her poems about God and faith—from wrestling to submission to outright blasphemy. But I will leave Dickinson with this one, #215:

I shall know why – when Time is over – 
And I have ceased to wonder why – 
Christ will explain each separate anguish 
In the fair schoolroom of the sky –

He will tell me what “Peter” promised – 
And I – for wonder at his woe – 
I shall forget the drop of anguish 
That scalds me now – that scalds me now!

Note the cheeky attitude here.  When I am dead (and no longer care) I will know why I suffer as I do now in this life, the meaning of this smart Misery.The ironic certainty in this poem is gainsaid by a dozen or so other poems in which Dickinson actually imagines her own death—most famously I heard a Fly buzz when I died and I Felt a Funeral in my Brain.  They all—all—end with blankness or nothingness, not with answers to these questions about pain and suffering and doubt.

*  * *

If Dickinson spent her creative life discussing and addressing a present absence—or, to use Dickinson’s own term, an Eclipse, Hopkins might be said to have addressed an absent presence. In looking at the physical world around him, Hopkins saw both the organized individuality of each person, animal, tree, leaf, and flower (the inscape of each) and believed in the invisible energy and power that animates the physical/visible world: the instress, perhaps the will of God, who gave all things their form and life. The marvelous poems of Hopkins’ happiest time as a Jesuit—God’s Grandeur, Pied Beauty, The Windhover, Spring, The Starlight Night—capture in metaphor and meter and diction his own experience of unity: the presence of God in the created world.

And yet, from his earliest extant work to the Sonnets of Desolation of his last years, Hopkins also saw himself in the figure of Jacob, the one who wrestles with God. We see from our twenty-first century perspective the young man profoundly uncomfortable with the urges and desires of his body seeking discipline in a demanding faith, but I am not sure we can know what exactly was at stake in those night-long, years-long contests that Hopkins describes.  

Even in his early, pre-conversion poems, we find Hopkins expressing the same kind of frustration Dickinson did in Of Course – I prayed / And did God care? though he is different from Dickinson in that his quarrel is more often with his own sins and failures than with God:

My prayers must meet a brazen heaven 
And fail or scatter all away. 
Unclean and seeming unforgiven 
My prayers I scarcely call to pray.

I cannot buoy my heart above; 
Above it cannot entrance win, 
I reckon precedents of love, 
But feel the long success of sin.

My heaven is brass and iron my earth:
Yea iron is mingled with my clay, 
So harden’d it is in this dearth 
Which praying fails to do away.

Nor tears, nor tears this clay uncouth 
Could mold, if any tears there were. 
A warfare of my lips in truth, 
Battling with God, is now my prayer.

This is not a great poem, or even a very good one, but it is characteristic of the striving, battling, wrestling war imagery that appears throughout Hopkins’ work alongside his recognition of God and Christ at work and expressed in nature and humankind.  My prayers cannot penetrate the brass-lined heaven, he says—and I remain heavy and earthbound, embodied despite my ambitions to rise, and the struggle is ongoing:  A warfare of my lips in truth, / Battling with God is now my prayer.

Nondum, from the same period, opens with a similar complaint about God’s silence and invisibility.  Its epigraph is from  Isaiah Verily Thou art a God that hides Thyself.

Lectures from GM HOPKINS FESTIVAL 2023

• Vision and perception in GM Hopkins’s ‘The peacock’s eye’ Katarzyna Stefanowicz

Gerard Manley Hopkins’s diary entries from his early Oxford years are a medley of poems, fragments of poems or prose texts but also sketches of natural phenomena or architectural (mostly gothic) features. In a letter to Alexander Baillie written around the time of composition He was planning to follow in the footsteps of the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood who had been known for writing poetry alongside painting pictures ... Read more

• Hopkins Trees and Birds Margaret Ellsberg

Margaret Ellsberg discusses Hopkins's connection with trees and birds, and how in everything he wrote, he associates wild things with a state of rejuvenation. In a letter to Robert Bridges in 1881 about his poem “Inversnaid,” he says “there’s something, if I could only seize it, on the decline of wild nature.” It turns out that Hopkins himself--eye-witness accounts to the contrary notwithstanding--was rather wild. Read more

• Joyce, Newman and Hopkins : Desmond Egan

Joyce's friend, Jacques Mercanton has recorded that he regarded Newman as ‘the greatest of English prose writers’. Mercanton adds that Joyce spoke excitedly about an article that had just appeared in The Irish Times and had to do with the University of Dublin, “sanctified’ by Cardinal Newman, Gerard Manley Hopkins and himself Read more ...

• Hopkins and Death Eamon Kiernan

An abiding fascination with death can be identified in the writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Easily taken for a sign of pathological morbidity, the poet's interest in death can also be read more positively as indicating, his strong awareness of a fundamental human challenge and his deployment of his intellectual and artistic gifts to try to meet it. Hopkins's understanding of death is apocalyptic. ... As will be shown, apocalyptic thought reaches beyond temporal finality. Hopkins's apocalyptic view of death shows itself with perhaps the greatest consequence in those few works which make the actual event of death a primary concern and which, moreover, leave in place the ordinariness of dying, as opposed to portrayals of the exceptional deaths of saints and martyrs. Read more

---

Lectures from Hopkins Literary Festival July 2022

• Landscape in Hopkins and Egan Poetry Giuseppe Serpillo
• Walt Whitman and Hopkins Poetry Desmond Egan
• Emily Dickenson and Hopkins Poetry Brett Millier
• Dualism in Hopkins Brendan Staunton SJ Brendan Staunton SJ

---




Lectures delivered at the Hopkins Literary Festival since 1987

• Topics since 1987
• Speakers since 1987
• Most viewed Lectures in last 6 months

---

© 2023 A Not for Profit Limited Company reg. no. 268039