ABSTRACT
It is one of her discussions of feeling in Victorian poetry that prompts the ideas I wish to develop in this essay: the chapter on Gerard Manley Hopkins in her book The Advantage of Lyric: Essays on Feeling in Poetry (1977), based on a lecture she delivered to the Hopkins Society in 1970 on the topic ‘Forms and Feelings in the Sonnets of Gerard Manley Hopkins’.3 Her focus in that chapter is on the relation of the poet’s ‘knowledge, belief and thought to the poetic passion’. Noting ‘his refusal to condense the difficulties of being human into a conf lict between intellect and feeling’, she declares that ‘Hopkins is a lyric poet whose values are constantly and intimately blended with his passions’. For Barbara Hardy, the intellectual and the emotional are ineluctably imbricated. Hopkins’s passion was for God, and, as she argues, sonnets such as ‘Pied Beauty’ and ‘Hurrahing in Harvest’ are ‘love-poems, as Hopkins knew. He said that the poetic impulse was strong feeling, usually love,
and we could say of his verse [...] that it works out many different experiences and aspects of love.’4 Hopkins’s passionate, sometimes poignantly unrequited love for Christ, in its ‘many different experiences and aspects’, is indeed the wellspring of his poetry and of his theology, and it is this that I wish to pursue in relation to his own literary and religious aesthetic and also to that of a contemporary Roman Catholic poet, Alice Meynell, for whom Christ was similarly figured as ‘the Beloved’.5 In addition to thinking about the place of the feelings in their writing, I will explore the role of the senses, and in particular the visual, in their experience of being in the world and their belief in God’s spiritual and phenomenological manifestation in that world. My interest is in how their work articulates a reconceptualized natural theology for a post-Darwinian age; in how their experience of God involved feeling intensely and looking intensely at the physical world; and in how the development of an incarnational, Christocentric natural theology meshed with, and was enabled by, contemporary transformations of visual experience that valorized affect and embodiment.
