A few days ago Artemesia posted a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins titled "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection." The title is a mouthful, and the poem didn't look any easier. But skimming it, I realized it would be a perfect selection for the "History of Religious Poetry" class I'll probably teach next year. So I spent some time on Google learning what I could about the poem and then wrote a mini-essay to solidify what I had read. What do you think of it?

Both before and after publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 1859, writers in the Victorian era struggled to reconcile conservative Christian ideas about the Bible’s statements about creation with the empiricism of science, in which only the power of human knowledge is presumed. Darwin himself saw no conflict. At the conclusion of The Origin of Species, he writes --

I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock

the religious feelings of any one .... A celebrated author and divine

has written to me that “he has gradually learnt to see that it is just

as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few

original forms capable of self-development into other and needful

forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply

the voids caused by the action of His laws.”

But not everyone could reconcile Faith and Science like Darwin’s “celebrated author.” In “Dover Beach,” Matthew Arnold (1822 – 1888) laments the “withdrawing” of “The Sea of Faith / [that] Was once... round earth's shore.” His poem expresses despair at Man's having lost sight of God, and, for Arnold, this world, which appears at first to be “like a land of dreams, / So various, so beautiful, so new,” is in fact a chaotic darkness – “a darkling plain... Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 – 1899) wrote that he examined Nature carefully but could find there no explanation for man’s existence. But unlike Arnold, Hopkins does not experience a crisis of faith. Rather, like Darwin, he accepts that the world is a chaotic “Struggle for Existence,” a phrase from The Origin of Species. Hopkins is able to accept the chaos of the world because his Catholicism and the fact of the Resurrection allow him to conclude that man must be due, not to chance, as Darwin suggests, but “to some extrinsic power.”

In “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection” (eventually published in 1918), Hopkins goes so far as to acknowledge the futility of this struggle for existence. In the poem, everything is, in time, reduced to dust -- every event, and every life. Rather than despair, he feels simply “pity and indignation.” He regards Christ, his self, and his faith as the “immortal diamond” -- constants amidst the chaos.

Hopkins studied Greek and Latin at Oxford and was appointed Professor of Greek at University College, Dublin. Greek themes are often found in Hopkins's creative work.

Heraclitus (c. 540 – c. 480 BC) believed that all things were in a state of permanent flux or change. The essential element of the cosmos was fire. At death, the souls of the virtuous, which were themselves made of fire, joined the great cosmic conflagration. In “That Nature…” Hopkins begins with Heraclitus’s philosophy but ends up constructing a Christian argument. In a letter to Robert Bridges in 1888, Hopkins wrote, “lately I sent you a sonnet, on the Heraclitean Fire, in which a great deal of early Greek philosophical thought was distilled; but the liquor of distillation did not taste very Greek, did it?”

THAT NATURE IS A HERACLITEAN FIRE AND OF THE COMFORT
OF THE RESURRECTION by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows ' flaunt forth, then chevy* on an

air-

built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers,* in gay-gangs ' they throng; they

glitter in marches.

Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, ' wherever an elm arches,

Shivelights* and shadowtackle in long ' lashes lace, lance, and pair.

Delightfully the bright wind boisterous ' ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare

Of yestertempest’s creases; in pool and rut peel parches

Squandering ooze to squeezed ' dough, crust, dust; stanches,* starches

Squadroned masks and manmarks ' treadmire toil there

Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, ' nature’s bonfire burns on.

Hopkins describes nature’s bonfire as the continued movement of the clouds and winds, which eventually “beats earth bare” and “parches / Squandering ooze to squeezed… dust.” The wind stops the flow of “manmarks ‘treadmire toil there / Footfretted in it [dust?].” He notes the “million-fueled” quality of nature’s multiplicity.

But quench her bonniest, dearest ' to her, her clearest-selvèd spark

Man, how fast his firedint,* ' his mark on mind, is gone!

Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark

Drowned. O pity and indig ' nation! Manshape, that shone

Sheer off, disseveral,* a star, ' death blots black out; nor mark

Is any of him at all so stark

But vastness blurs and time ' beats level.

Even nature’s “dearest”—man – is unable to leave a permanent mark and ends up in “an enormous dark / Drowned.” Once man was a star, but nature sheers him off, leaving only a blur of vastness. Hopkins says this poem is a sonnet with two codas. The first half of line 16 ends the conventional sonnet; what follow are the codas.

Enough! the Resurrection,

A heart’s-clarion!* Away grief’s gasping, ' joyless days, dejection.

Across my foundering deck shone

A beacon, an eternal beam. ' Flesh fade, and mortal trash

Fall to the residuary worm; ' world’s wildfire, leave but ash:

In a flash, at a trumpet crash,

I am all at once what Christ is, ' since he was what I am, and

This Jack,* joke, poor potsherd,* ' patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,

Is immortal diamond.

The light of the eternal beam, the Resurrection (which occurred after Heraclitus’s time), dispels the grief and dejection one feels when contemplating how the world reduces everything to ash. When Christ became man and then was crucified, he was not transformed to mere ash-like carbon. And since Christ “was what I am,” my human soul is not ash either. If God is a radically different kind of carbon -- an immortal diamond, then a “Jack, joke, poor potsherd” like me is also an immortal diamond. My faith is my “immortal diamond” now, just as my soul will be one when it ascends to heaven. The Resurrection gives me comfort that God has the power to resist nature’s “Heraclitean Fire” and that my soul will resist it as well.

NOTES: Chevy – chase; roysterers – noisy revelers; shivelights – slivers of light; stanches – stops the flow; firedint – mark made by fire (cf Heraclitus’s belief in the human soul as fire); disserveral – not together; clarion – shrill, bright trumpet; Jack – colloquial expression for ‘ordinary man’; potsherd – fragment of earthen pot