Arts, Faculty of
English Language and Literatures, Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Page, Connor
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
In the journals of Victorian poet, priest, and scholar Gerard Manley Hopkins, the most basic stimulus for writing is meteorological. A catalogue of âfine,â âfair,â âdull,â and âfoggyâ days keeps the time of personal history. Among the few writings he published during his lifetime are meteorological observations contributed to the popular science journal Nature; responding in part to the after-effects of Krakatoaâs 1883 eruption, these letters are part of a collective project of understanding local weather in connection to a trans-regional, planetary climate. Hopkinsâs poetry, meanwhile, returns consistently to the distinctive movements and metamorphoses of clouds and winds. This thesis investigates Hopkinsâs engagement with atmospheric science, reading his poetry in dialogue with the global meteorological conversations transacted in Nature in which he enthusiastically participated during the 1880s. The methods of the recent âatmospheric turnâ in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies, I suggest, provide a fruitful point of contact between the concerns of Hopkinsâs ecocritics and canonical accounts of his scientific interests. While Hopkinsâs characteristic attention to the air reflects the historical emergence of knowledge infrastructures capable of diagnosing and debating atmospheric disruption on a planetary scale, it also bears witness to the accumulating and accelerating geophysical changes named by the Anthropocene. I argue that Hopkinsâs works reimagine the dimensions of this newly dynamic atmosphere, taking up its experimental materials to test the boundaries of a structure of feeling and ethical concern accommodating discontinuities in both space and time.
THE ATMOSPHERES OF GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS by CONNOR PAGE B.Mus., The University of British Columbia, 2021 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (English) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) April 2024 © Connor Page, 2024 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the thesis entitled: The Atmospheres of Gerard Manley Hopkins submitted by Connor Page in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English Examining Committee: Pamela Dalziel, Associate Professor, English, UBC Supervisor Vin Nardizzi, Associate Professor, English, UBC Supervisory Committee Member Alexander Dick, Associate Professor, English, UBC Supervisory Committee Member iii Abstract In the journals of Victorian poet, priest, and scholar Gerard Manley Hopkins, the most basic stimulus for writing is meteorological. A catalogue of âfine,â âfair,â âdull,â and âfoggyâ days keeps the time of personal history. Among the few writings he published during his lifetime are meteorological observations contributed to the popular science journal Nature; responding in part to the after-effects of Krakatoaâs 1883 eruption, these letters are part of a collective project of understanding local weather in connection to a trans-regional, planetary climate. Hopkinsâs poetry, meanwhile, returns consistently to the distinctive movements and metamorphoses of clouds and winds. This thesis investigates Hopkinsâs engagement with atmospheric science, reading his poetry in dialogue with the global meteorological conversations transacted in Nature in which he enthusiastically participated during the 1880s. The methods of the recent âatmospheric turnâ in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies, I suggest, provide a fruitful point of contact between the concerns of Hopkinsâs ecocritics and canonical accounts of his scientific interests. While Hopkinsâs characteristic attention to the air reflects the historical emergence of knowledge infrastructures capable of diagnosing and debating atmospheric disruption on a planetary scale, it also bears witness to the accumulating and accelerating geophysical changes named by the Anthropocene. I argue that Hopkinsâs works reimagine the dimensions of this newly dynamic atmosphere, taking up its experimental materials to test the boundaries of a structure of feeling and ethical concern accommodating discontinuities in both space and time. iv Lay Summary The writings of Victorian poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) display a lifelong interest in the cutting-edge science of the day, from evolutionary theory to thermodynamics. This thesis proposes new readings of select poems by Hopkins in light of his particularly intense engagement with weather science during the 1880s. The study of the atmosphere as a unified climatic and mechanical system achieved at this time an unprecedented popularity among amateur scientists and a decisively global scope. Drawing on contemporary Victorian scientific writings, I argue that Hopkinsâs poetry reimagines the dimensions of atmosphere in space and time, conceptualizing global environment, planetary threat, and climatic history as domains of ethical concern. v Preface This thesis is original, unpublished, independent work by the author, Connor Page. vi Table of Contents Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary ................................................................................................................................. iv Preface..............................................................................................................................................v Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................... vi List of Abbreviations .................................................................................................................... vii Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................... viii Dedication ...................................................................................................................................... ix Introduction ....................................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: Inside the âAir we Breatheâ ......................................................................................9 1.1 Under the âcrystal roofâ .................................................................................................. 9 1.2 âWorld-mothering airâ .................................................................................................. 13 1.3 âWild airâ ...................................................................................................................... 22 1.4 Conclusions ................................................................................................................... 29 Chapter 2: Airborne Persistence and the Time of the End ......................................................32 3.1 Minding the Times ........................................................................................................ 32 3.2 The Production of Permanence ..................................................................................... 37 3.3 Disremembered Changes .............................................................................................. 47 3.4 Atmospheric Futurity .................................................................................................... 53 Works Cited ..................................................................................................................................55 vii List of Abbreviations C Correspondence (The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, vols. 1 and 2) J The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins MW The Major Works viii Acknowledgements I would like to thank the faculty of UBCâs Department of English Language and Literatures for modelling both the responsibility and the delight of critical enquiry, and for helping to equip me for a lifetime of reading and thinking. I am especially grateful to the members of my committee for their kind encouragement, their valuable feedback, and (beyond the thesis process) their inspired teaching. To Dr. Pamela Dalzielâs magnanimous, wise and patient mentorship I have owed innumerable lessons large and small, along with many opportunities to savour the âthoughtfulâ and âthought-provoking.â This research benefited from support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and from the generous donors who have funded scholarships in this department and in the UBC School of Music, to all of whom I offer my thanks. To my family I extend my gratitude for every blessing of our âLove-lacedâ lives. ix Dedication To my parents 1 Introduction âLook overheadâ: Gerard Manley Hopkins issued this reminder of atmospheric attention , addressed to his Jesuit community at Stonyhurst College during the spring of 1883, with specific homiletic intentions in mind (âThe Blessed Virginâ 73).1 At the same time, however, he was voicing a broader cultural imperative. In the scientific conversations that Hopkins followed (and to which he contributed) most enthusiastically, the skies were a venue of intensified curiosity and aerial mediation was in the spotlight. During the first half of the decade, the popular science periodical Nature printed an almost continuous succession of letters gathered under headings such as âOptical Phenomena,â âSun-Glows,â and, eventually, âThe Remarkable Sunsets.â This last phrase predominated after a series of prolonged sunset glows of unusual duration, colour and intensity were observed in England and abroad in the autumn of 1883 (and intermittently afterwards). The remarkable sunsets were quickly linked with reports of green suns in India and a variety of strange halo effects, and evidence accumulated in the pages of Nature to trace these atmospheric novelties (not without controversy) back to the enormous eruptions of Krakatoa at the end of August. This exemplary moment in collaborative weather science inextricably bound up the skyâs local modifications with a common, global atmospheric system, and made looking overhead a collective task of attentive observation, accurate description, intelligible compilation and contested interpretation. Hopkins contributed four letters about atmospheric phenomena to Nature within the space of two years between November 1882 and October 1884. His most ambitious appears in 1 All quotations from Gerard Manley Hopkinsâs poems are drawn from The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by N.H. MacKenzie and W.H. Gardner, Oxford UP, 1970. 2 the issue for 3 January 1884, following the editorâs survey of testimony from the Swiss Alps, the Malaysian Strait of Sunda, Vancouver Island, the Mongolian frontier, San Francisco, India, and the observatory recently established on the summit of Ben Nevis (222). Hopkins appeals to the âbody of evidence now brought in from all parts of the worldâ before making a detailed argument for the sunsetsâ genuine novelty with a catalogue of their characteristic differences from ordinary phenomena in time, place, behaviour, colour, light and texture (222). This product of Hopkinsâs abundant visual lexiconâwith elements of traditional meteorological description (folk descriptors such as âfish-scaleâ clouds as well as scientific nomenclature), poetic metaphor (âcloudracksâ give âthe appearance of quilted crimson silk, or a ploughed field glazed with crimson iceâ), and technical artistic vocabulary (vaporous âbodies like . . . what are called gadroons, or as the Japanese conventionally represent wavesâ)âbears witness to an incursion of atmospheric chemistry, and thus of geophysical history, into Ruskinian aesthetics (222-223). Much as Hopkinsâs poetry performs innovations in measure and syntax, his meteorological letters work experimentally toward a grammar of atmospheric description, a historical semiotics of sunsets that might discern the meaning of the skyâs changing appearances and discriminate differences between the commonplace and the extraordinary. Sunset attracted attention at the time as a boundary phenomenon, a product of terrestrial and optical margins. As Hopkinsâs contemporaries had come to understand, the sunsetâs intensified mediation produced heightened significance (as well as splendour). Its glowing colours resulted from a maximum of sunlightâs transit through the thickness of the atmosphere: as the sun sinks towards the horizon the atmospheric distance increases. . . . The transmitted light under such circumstances must pass from yellow through orange to red, and thus, while we at noon are admiring the deep blue of the sky, the same rays, robbed 3 of their blue, are elsewhere lighting up the evening sky with all the glories of sunset. (Lubbock 410) The remarkable sunsets of the 1880s suggested that otherwise imperceptible factorsâlike the ashes, gases and dust disgorged in vast quantities by the Krakatoa cataclysmâmight become temporarily visible at such moments. Discussions of the extraordinary skies revolved therefore around several interrelated questions: questions of scale (the necessary magnitude of an event purported to have global effects); questions of time and sequence (the possible speed of atmospheric dispersion and the rate of subsidence or abatement); and questions of legibility (the forms of evidence capable of establishing causal connections between disparate phenomena). In this thesis, I read Hopkinsâs poetry in dialogue with the practices of aerial enquiry that charged the remarkable sunsets of the 1880s with such meaning and fascination. If Hopkinsâs engagement with atmospheric composition and atmospheric change links him to an emerging network of global observation, it also addresses the substance of our own shared geological contemporaneity, our common inhabitation of what Nathan K. Hensley and Philip Steer refer to as a âcarbon modernityâ (3). Whereas Hensley and Steer remind us that âthe carbon-saturated atmosphere we breathe today is, in both metaphorical and brutely chemical senses, the atmosphere of the British Empire,â Hopkins bears witness both to that atmosphereâs consolidation and to the forms of observation and response that make it apprehensible, the âalignmentâ noted by Jesse Oak Taylor between the âconceptual rubrics and epistemological framesâ central to understanding anthropogenic climate change and the âbroader ecological impacts within which they occurredâ (âAnthropoceneâ 575). His journals keeping the time of personal history with their catalogue of âfine,â âfair,â âdull,â and âfoggyâ days, his pastoral appointments confronting him with âsmoke-ridden Sheffield airâ (C 291), cholera-stricken 4 Liverpool, and the âsmokyâ aura of Dublin (C 662), Hopkins leveraged atmospheric awareness near the end of his life into a thoroughgoing critique of the âfilth[iness]â (elsewhere the âhollownessâ) of the centuryâs civilization (C 505): our whole civilisation is dirty, yea filthy, and especially in the north; for is ^it^ not dirty, yea filthy, to pollute the air as Blackburn and Widnes and St. Helenâs are polluted and the water, as the Thames and the Clyde and the Irwell are polluted? (C 981) Although Hopkins here grounds his objection in the local airs of industrial Lancashire and Merseyside, the atmosphere provides a figure of social and ecological concern that extends speculatively even to the level of the âguilty globeâ (âThe Blessed Virginâ 39). The âmultifariousâ capacity of literary airs to be both mobile and place-specific, to wield both material and metaphorical significance, has attracted the attention of contributors to a recent aerial or atmospheric turn in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies noted by Erin Lafford and Rhys Kaminski-Jones (117). The scholars from whom this thesis draws its inspirationâsuch as Thomas H. Ford, Tobias Menely, and Jayne Elizabeth Lewisârecognize a persistent entanglement between the terms of poetic and atmospheric self-description; airâs properties (its ubiquity and invisibility) âgive figurative language . . . an active and dynamic roleâ in its âconceptualization and investigationâ (Lewis 3), while the new vocabularies of aerial enquiry in turn mediate between the disciplinary domains of (literary, cultural) communication and physical science at the moment of their consolidation (Ford, Wordsworth 10). Taking its bearings from the environmental and energy humanities, the atmospheric turn thus recapitulates a (post-)Romantic impulse to consider anew the feedback between figuration and materiality in light of the collapsing distinction between human and natural history spelled by the Anthropocene (Chakrabarty 26). The Victorian periodâand, to be even more selective, the brief timespan 5 witnessed by Hopkinsâs writingsâpresents, in Taylorâs words, âa glimpse of the Anthropocene in medias res, from the midst of still-unfolding slow-motion catastropheâ (âAnthropoceneâ 575), and the uncanny timeliness and liveliness of its artefacts ask us to acknowledge âlanguageâs active role in affecting the workings of natureâ (âStorm-Cloudsâ 5). As Seán Hewitt has argued, the study of aerial phenomena stimulated Hopkins to develop a âtrained visionâ reconciling scientific observation (along with contemporary scienceâs evolutionary paradigms) and religious contemplation, embodied in an âexperimental languageâ that circulates among his journals, meteorological correspondence, and poems (294, 305). The atmospheric therefore provides a common term between the science studies approach of Hopkins scholars such as Gillian Beer, Daniel Brown, and Thomas A. Zanielloâwho have done invaluable work to resituate Hopkinsâs thinking in its various intellectual milieusâand the ethical concerns of ecocritics such as John Parham, Julia Saville, and Daniel Williams. Whereas Savilleâs keynote address to the 2021 International Gerard Manley Hopkins Conference has recommended an attention to the âplanetaryââa figure, theorized by Dipesh Chakrabarty and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, that exceeds individual cognition and is disclosed by historical and scientific mediationsâas a domain of ecological concern in Hopkinsâs work, this thesis proposes, in part, that the planetary became most tangibly (and yet still enigmatically) present to Hopkins and his contemporaries through the globalizing discourse of weather science. Mary Favret has demonstrated that the new meteorological sciences around the turn of the nineteenth century provided a âphysics of global communication,â a virtual media network whose affective resonances tended to remain unplaced and unsettled (134). In Hopkinsâs day, this notion of global meteorological communication was institutionalized and instrumentalized in the empire-wide observation network coded into the pages of Nature. In 1839, John Ruskin (as 6 Ford describes) had already called for a âthorough-going collectivization of [meteorological] knowledge productionâ in response to the scienceâs new âunderstanding of atmosphere as a global arena of physical and chemical dynamicsâ (âLate Romanticismâ 197-198). An 1874 prospectus for meteorologyâs future, emphasizing the need for ârigorously uniform methods,â proposes the assembly of climatic knowledge as an aspect of imperial destiny: The extent of the British dependencies . . . and the readiness British âexilesâ show to forward meteorological inquiries, point out that it is mainly to Great Britain we are to look to fill up the present blanks in the meteorology of the globe. (âMeteorologyâ 100) Climate becomes the uncharted frontier, graspable only by amassing data in what Bruno Latour has called âcentres of calculationâ (Science in Action 215). Katherine Anderson has shown how the infrastructures of meteorological knowledge served to exert imperial control (or rational âdisciplineâ) on global natures, but also to query the roles of local or folk knowledge and international cooperation in an aspiringly global science whose universality depended on âstandard registration forms and instrumentsâ (235, 290). Hopkinsâs work, viewed in the light of our common carbon modernity, shows how the enormities of planetary climate shade into the texture of the everyday, and into the (variously intimate and public) register of poetic speech. As John Durham Peters remarks, the preoccupation with routine weatherâregularly reported and assimilated into the structure of quotidian lifeâcould only be a âsymptom of modern telecommunications infrastructures,â a departure from older meteorological tastes for the prodigious, catastrophic, and unpredictable (249). In Hopkins, the quotidian and the calamitous converge, as they are prone to do in the present-day experience of climate change, if only, again, through the mediations of telecommunications networks and scientific apparatus. 7 In Chapter 1, I read âThe Blessed Virgin compared with the Air we Breatheâ in light of Hopkinsâs scientific interest in the atmosphere as a total enveloping system. The poemâs baroque mixture of scientific analogy and devotional fervour, I suggest, affords a unique poetics of planetary space attentive to the contradictions of an element that defines both the vital interior of earthly life and the invisible exterior of embodied experience. As theories of the greenhouse effect came to regard the atmosphere as an insulating layer between the geological planet and interstellar coldness and the energy sciences became attuned to its benign modulation of solar radiation, Hopkins positioned the air as a medium for the dynamic and generative exchange between inner and outer spaces. As that which both enables and exceeds conceptual containment, Hopkinsâs atmosphere proves to be at once the ground of a humanly livable âworldâ and the field on which a âwildâ potential for disruption and change becomes visible. The sunsets of the 1880s were described as âweirdâ or âuncanny,â making âone feel as if something out of the common was going to happenâ (Bittleston 152); unusual appearances on the horizon created atmospheres of expectation heavy with the hint of future or past calamity. Taking inspiration from Anne-Lise Françoisâs reappraisal of lyric time in the Anthropocene, Chapter 2 investigates this sense of atmospheric prophecy as it is reflected in two late Hopkins sonnets, âThat Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrectionâ and âSpelt from Sibylâs Leaves.â Even as aerial appearances brought spatial scales into contact, they also spelled the possible collapse of different orders of time: the constant flux of clouds, the iterative reappearance of events like the Krakatoa eruption, the slow succession of what one long-running discussion in Nature called âGeological Climates.â I argue that Hopkinsâs sonnetsâboth initiated by changes in the skyâdevelop a mode of apocalyptic responsibility attentive not only to loss and forgetting but also to prospects of novel permanence. Rather than drown the future in 8 total annihilation, Hopkinsâs revelatory vision inflects the present with an urgent question of care toward what will remain in a subsequent world and what is allowed to pass away. If the atmospheres scrutinized by Hopkinsâs fellow researchers were becoming, through their ready collection and uncertain relinquishment of residues of the past, both timely and untimelyâhistorically specific and historically displacedâthen the same might be said for Hopkinsâs own thinking. The âdeeply conservative revolutionaryâ who, as Jill Muller remarks, sought to root the new vitality of sprung rhythm in Anglo-Saxon antiquity also entwined the practices and ideas of the scientific avant-garde with the evolving continuum of religious tradition (3), demonstrating the mutual dependence that Taylor, following Raymond Williams, posits between âresidualâ and âemergentâ domains of conceptualization: The work of history in the Anthropocene is thus not simply to uncover the all-too-common instances of ecological devastation in the past, or even to ask whether the participants understood the implications of their actions (they often did) but rather to find in that encounter those excluded, decried, or trivialized residues from which an alternative vision of modernity can emerge. (âStorm-Cloudsâ 17) On the one hand, Hopkinsâs atmospheres testify to the globalizing progress of modernity in the dominant mode. On the other, as I hope to demonstrate in the chapters that follow, they hold out structures of thought, feeling and concern that might be productively resuscitated orâconsidering Hopkinsâs own instruction to âtake breath and readâ his poetry âwith the earsââ rebreathed (C 355). 9 Chapter 1: Inside the âAir we Breatheâ 1.1 Under the âcrystal roofâ In her exploration of nineteenth-century glass culture, Isobel Armstrong remarks in passing that, to Victorian eyes, atmosphere was âthe lens writ largeâ (10). The air universalizes mediation; whether you turn your eyes on a nearby object or on a remote star, something always intervenes. In a lecture delivered at the Royal Institution and published in Nature in 1885, the American astrophysicist and aviator Samuel P. Langley draws attention to the insidious distortions that this view from the inside might introduce to our knowledge of extraterrestrial reality; he asks his readers to recall a passage in which Plato inquires what would be the thoughts of a man who, having lived from infancy under the roof of a cavern, where the light outside was inferred only by its shadows, was brought for the first time into the full splendors of the sun. We may have enjoyed the metaphor without thinking that it has any physical application to ourselves who appear to have no roof over our heads, and to see the sunâs face daily; while the fact is that if we do not see that we have a roof over our heads in our atmosphere, and do not think of it as one, it is because it seems so transparent and colourless. (Langley 17) Langley reiterates, changing his chosen metaphor, that â[w]e ourselves are, in very fact, living at the floor of a great aërial sea, whose billows roll hundreds of miles above our heads,â and he proposes that, âif we want to break [the] chainâ of perceptual habit, âwe should put ourselves, at least in imagination, under conditions where it no longer binds usâ (18). Langleyâs expositionâwhich leads into an unorthodox account of the colour of sunlightâexemplifies the figurative shifts of aerial enquiry: first a âcrystal roofâ and then a 10 gaseous ocean, the atmosphere seems to require a constant tropic metamorphosis in order to be kept in view. At the same time, materializing the air goes hand in hand with materializing metaphor. By reading the âphysical applicationâ of Platoâs allegory of the cave, Langley unexpectedly anticipates what Jesse Oak Taylor has recognized as âecocriticismâs founding gestureâ: a turn toward the literal and descriptive meanings underlying our apprehension of figure, or what Langley calls âthe metaphorâ (âWutheringâ 32). Atmosphere thus calls for all the resources of language to be made tangible and, strangely, resembles language in that unwonted tangibility. The exemplar of almost immaterial being (or the ânext degree to nothingâ), the air has, as Steven Connor, Thomas H. Ford and Jayne Elizabeth Lewis have argued, shared the vital conceptual space of other seeming immaterials: the environing climates of literary and historical mediation and the âbody of thoughtâ itself (Connor 31). For Hopkins and his contemporaries, air was the indispensable element for thinking through what it meant to live inside a world, and in this chapter, I take Hopkinsâs work as a lens through which to explore the contradictions of an emerging discourse of planetary interiority. Langleyâs methodological move toward a notional outside view, as he presents it, recapitulates the originary allegory of a species of critique envisioned as a process of becoming external to oneâs previous relationship with the world. Such an externalization captures part of the rhythm of what Connor, borrowing Peter Sloterdijkâs concept of âexplicitation,â views as a distinctly aerial phenomenology: âwe recognize and construct our immersion and thus, leaving and resuming it at once, we âimmergeâ with the world, into a knowledge of our immersion, in which we are both inside and outside our previously implicit relation and inside and outside our knowledge of itâ (Connor 31). Nineteenth-century sciences of atmosphere thrived on an oscillation of unsteady spaces of relative containment and intermixture, from Langleyâs macroscopic world-cave to the 11 experimental milieu (most closely associated in the later century with John Tyndall) of isolated airs bounded by miniature âcrystal roofs,â along with the intermediate scale addressed by the observational practices of meteorology and spectroscopy and the ardent empiricism of Hopkins and fellow weather-watchers. In what follows, I turn to a side project that Hopkins undertook while corresponding with Nature about Stonyhurst sunsets, a conceit poem entitled âThe Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe.â Part of a collective exercise in Marian devotion during May 1883, âThe Blessed Virginâ rehearses Hopkinsâs interest in the sky in an extraordinary register, correlating the global aerosphere modelled by contemporary science with the spiritual formsânotably, Marian intercession and divine graceâthat ensure a livable world, and with poetryâs own opening of an intimate sphere of oral/aural meaning. Ecocritics have noted that the Anthropocene sees past and present exert a new weight on each other: whereas new interpretive models are brought to bear on old events, past phenomenaâsuch as the âatmosphere of the British Empireâ described by Nathan K. Hensley and Philip Steer (3)âcome to envelop the present in an aura of long-durational effects that become recognizable only in retrospect. Such conditions invite us to reconsider the âphysical application to ourselvesâ of Hopkinsâs skies: the real senses in which we are contained by them and the forms of historical causality and eventfulness that they might embody. âThe Blessed Virginâ theorizes internality by way of an emerging imaginary of planetary space, its project of creative forecasting enacting the kind of âoscillation (between material, meteorological, and spiritual terms)â in which Taylor, reading John Ruskin, locates âthe space for conceptual emergenceâ (âStorm-Cloudsâ 7). My analysis oscillates in turn between the two seemingly contradictory epithets provided by the poem for addressing the air: âworld-motheringâ 12 and âwild.â Whereas Hopkins is at pains to portray âworld-motheringâ activity (conception, gestation, nurturing), he leaves âwildâ a conceptual blank: acknowledged, self-evident even, but unelaborated. (Although not unexpected in its application to air, âwildâ produces nevertheless a defamiliarizing frisson: it is an unusual epithet with which to characterize the Virgin Mary.) A simple question, then, motivates this chapter: what is wild about Hopkinsâs air? Appropriately, this question exceeds the descriptive sphere of the poem itself and so enquires into what is present by way of absence, negation, or exclusion; invoking the undomesticated signals the porosity of the textâs own boundaries. As Taylor remarks, âatmosphereâ has always implied an imagined internality experienced somehow from the outside, from its first application to the gaseous envelopes of distant celestial bodies to the comparative basis of Earth System Science (âWutheringâ 39). Atmosphere, material and figurative, thus comes to indicate at once an internality crucial to biological and literary experienceâimmersion in the life-sustaining Earth system and in a storyworldâand a âradical openness of textsâ by which they âaccru[e] new meanings, invok[e] new associations, and assembl[e] new communitiesâ beyond their spheres and moments of immediate reference (âWutheringâ 44). By attending to the atmospheres of Hopkinsâs work, I focus on the specific dimension in which cultural artefacts might not only condense the real conditions and relations underlying their production but also collect otherwise inchoate histories into new patterns of possible feeling and action. In âThe Blessed Virgin,â the sciences of the ethereal and the language of devotion form the basis of a distinctive poetics of planetary space. Following Connor and Taylor, I show how Hopkins envisions atmospheric internality not as a straightforward relationship of containment but rather according to a form of contradiction: a dynamic interplay of outside and inside, 13 emergence and immergence. The aerial, characteristically, performs a variety of mediatory crossings, from the large-scale movement of rarefied materials to the individual organismâs metabolism and the translation of scale that links the two. My first section considers crossings between and among, arguing that Hopkinsâs aerial discourse models an interior produced by interaction, underwritten by figures of arrangement like chiasmus and poetic gestures such as apostrophe. The second section focuses on crossings over, suggesting that Hopkins acknowledges the (regulated) transgression of spatial boundaries as crucial to the vitality of aerial mediation. Air, finally, is what requires us to think what is in here and out there at the same time. 1.2 âWorld-mothering airâ Like the language of meteorology and atmospheric optics, Hopkins makes aerial immersion explicit. Their common reflective practices make invisible media tangible, offering reminders that, whereas the habituated senses might tell us we are settled on dry land, we are also plunged in a âgreat aërial seaâ or wrapped in the embrace of a ânursing elementâ (Langley 18; Hopkins 10). Such figurative displacements give the needed leverage to make small excursions out of the space of routine (non-)perception: just as the atmosphere (by analogy with Marian intercession) âMantles the guilty globe,â so on a smaller scale it âNestl[es],â âGirdlesâ the minutest material articulation, as Hopkins directs a defamiliarizing gaze on the imperceptible but vital force of atmospheric pressure (2,4, 39). Thus constructing immersion from the outside, however, serves not to invalidate the interior view but rather to renew and reaffirm it: âFold home, fast fold thy childâ (126). The outside is never somewhere to live for long, yet Hopkins makes the thought of it inseparable from the viable (spiritual as well as biological) forms of habitable space. Being in a âworldâ is the product of both conceptual and material intermixture. 14 For all its cosy imagery of insulation, âThe Blessed Virginâ develops a poetic language to capture the subtle inversions of relative agency and position emphasized by contemporary practices of aerial enquiry, and so to envision insideness according to a model of dynamic mediation and interaction. The representative figure for this vision is chiasmus, which frames the poem on a global scale with its invocations to âWild air, world-mothering airâ and âWorld-mothering air, air wildâ and informs its local imagery of enfolding (âFold home, fast foldâ; 1, 124, 126). If chiasmic structures invite us to consider our experience of the text as occupying a kind of literary internalityâa bounded space or, as Daniel Williams puts it, an âatmospheric embraceâ (142)âthey also embody a spatial arrangement that is literally formed and delimited by the interchange of places and attributes. Hopkinsâs chiasmic vision vitalizes the âbetweenâ of any interaction, the space produced by an exchange of roles and properties. The airy âbetweenâ describes not only the zone of Hopkinsâs material interest in âThe Blessed Virginâ but also the poemâs method. The purposed project of âcompar[ing]â the Blessed Virgin to the air we breathe might imply that the air (Langleyâs chain of metaphors notwithstanding) had assumed concrete positive properties with which to anchor theological speculation. Hopkinsâs initial description of air as âmothering,â however, makes it clear that air is just as dependent on Marian attributes for its characterization in the poem as Mary is on the properties of the atmosphere. Thus brought into proximity, they confer a kind of mutual visibility; Hopkins cites the atmosphereâs multiple agency as the surrounding milieu of terrestrial life, the medium of verbal (and thus poetic) communication, and the intermediary between the earth system and extrinsic energy flows as analogues of the Virgin Maryâs role as inspirator, mediatrix, and intercessor. The blended ecological-theological concept that emerges addresses the question of mediation in all the rich accretions of meaning classically enumerated by 15 Raymond Williams: political or religious reconciliation, intervening mechanical agency, and transformative expression (or dissimulation) of real relations (207). The poemâs self-reflexive title and discourse markers (âI say,â âAgainâ) draw attention to analogyâand the mutual crossings between seemingly remote domainsâas itself a mode of perception, working in an intermediate space where fluctuating material and religious concepts might reciprocally inform one another. Hopkins calls for a higher-order, mediatic vision that recognizes both what is seen and what is seen throughâthe Ruskinian injunction (as in âThe Starlight Nightâ) is to âlookâ: âlook overhead / How air is azurèdâ (73-4). Scientific observers at the time were indeed newly alive to the visibility and the vital importance of a broadening spectrum of âmediateâ materiality: the marginally perceptible world of dust, vapour, smoke, ozone, microbes and particulate matter. Since the beginning of the 1870s, Tyndallâs publicized experiments with beams of light and variously treated samples of air had brought airborne dust into the focus of scientific debate. Hopkinsâs own letters to Nature transmitted Tyndallâs experimental interest in the ââbodyâ in the air, without which the propagation of the beams could not take place,â from sealed glass chambers to the outer atmosphere (C 637). In the 1880s, the eruption of Krakatoa intensified public interest in atmospheric dust and debris, as well as âaqueous vapourâ and other rarefied substances, as the causes of optical phenomena in the sky. Invisible and âunsuspected agenciesâ assumed responsibility for everyday as well as extraordinary weather; fine dust in the upper air was credited with providing the ânucleiâ of condensation necessary for clouds to form and rain to fall (Lodge, âDust-Free Spacesâ 611), and with the benign dispersion of sunlight responsible for the skyâs familiar blue (Lodge, âDustâ 267)âthe referent of Hopkinsâs âsapphire-shot, / Charged, steepèd skyâ (79-80). 16 Hopkins was attentive to the ways in which such equivocal matter gives body and texture to otherwise invisible forms and phenomena. His early observations in landscape aesthetics take note of âthe body there is in the air,â which âgives depth and projection to the landscapeâ (J 168). Mediate matter, the âbodyâ in the air, lends visibility to the ambient surrounds that, while often taken for granted, constitute a recognizable âworld.â The invisibles central to meteorology (and to everyday life) were air and light. An amused puzzlement often ensues from the invertible agency suggested by light and airborne dust: âWhen you see motes dancing in a sunbeam, it is not the motes which render the sunbeam visible, but the sunbeam the motesâ (Lodge, âDust-Free Spacesâ 267). Tyndall phrases it more pithily as a kind of paradox: âNothing could more forcibly illustrate the invisibility of the agent which renders all things visibleâ (340). The vision with which one Nature writer on âTornadoes, Whirlwinds, Waterspouts, and Hailstormsâ admires âthe light they throw on the actual movements of the whirlwind which the dust-laden air currents of the storm present in a visible form to the eyeâ resembles that of Hopkinsâs journals (291). An 1873 entry, for instance, records a south wind that he âseemed to put . . . on like a gownâ: âit rippled and fluttered like light linen, one could feel the folds and braids of itâand indeed a floating flag is like wind visible and what weeds are in a current; it gives it thew and fires it and bloods it inâ (J 233). The vocabulary of embodiment provides Hopkins a model for the creative tension between figures and their surrounds. âThe Blessed Virginâ lends substance to the âbodilyâ activity of the environing air, which it renders as the typically maternal gestures of girdling, nestling, enfolding and embracing. It is by thus embodying itself that air sustains the corporeal integrity of immersed bodies with its pressure. Incarnation, the appropriate theological theme of âThe Blessed Virgin,â characteristically inverts the terms of containment: Mary âGave Godâs 17 infinity / Dwindled to infancy / Welcome in womb and breast,â much as the poem itself parses the âinfinite airâ in dwindled three-beat lines (18-20; âDeutschlandâ 100). Hopkinsâhis closest model here might be âcrazyâ William Blakeâportrays embodiment less as product than as process (C 821); the Virginâs activity of âmould[ing]â human âlimbsâ (104-105) resembles the awful divine biogenesis that, in âThe Wreck of the Deutschland,â âbound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh, / And after it álmost únmade, what with dread, / Thy doingâ (âDeutschlandâ 5). âWorld-mothering air,â then, oscillates in its meaning between the withdrawal of an enfolding matrix and the participation of a kindred body; air âmothersâ the world by being both a part of it and apart from it. Poetry, merging vital and verbal breath, affirms aerial immersion through a similar inversion of outer and inner space. The figure of apostropheâwhich for Sara Guyer exemplifies the pretensions of lyric address to animate or make âliveâ (19)âsets off a kind of feedback loop when applied to the âworld-mothering air.â Hopkins rehearses, in a devotional mood, the power of apostrophe to assert a presence that turns out to be the necessary condition of lyric utterance in the first place: âThis air, which, by lifeâs law, / My lung must draw and draw / Now but to breathe its praiseâ (13-15). In other words, airâs presence is both explicit (as the object of speech) and implicit (as the condition and substance of speech) at once, and naming that presence is always to already change its conditions, if only by the minute portion internalized and figured forth as âpraise.â By imaginatively bridging the discontinuity between a total atmosphere and the modicum of air incorporated and excorporated at every breath, Hopkins suggests that poetry affirms a necessary containment both in and of airâs âinfinityâ (18). The framing depictions of an element that both âgoes home betwixt / The fleeciest, frailest-flixed / Snowflakeâ and finally âFold[s] homeâ its children enact a subtle process of mutual domestication (4-6, 127). Hopkins 18 dwells elsewhere on atmospheric ânestlingââthe âHoly Ghostâ that âover the bent / World broodsâ (âGodâs Grandeurâ 13-14) or the âcordial airâ that âmade those kind people a hood / All over, as a bevy of eggs the mothering wingâ (âIn the Valley of the Elwyâ 5-6)âbut only here does he stress the complementary possibility: that the total air takes shelter in the hollow âeverywhereâ of individual beings (2). Whereas atmosphere is the encompassing medium of terrestrial life, those who breathe are also its media, its transmitters and transformers. âThe air,â as Connor argues, becomes âmediation itself. We find our own image in this mediate matter (mediated and mediating), not just because we communicate through our (largely airborne) media, but because we are the throughput of those mediationsâ (31). According to this vision of reciprocal mediation, poetry not only bears witness to atmospheric conditions but also, somehow, remediates and recreates them. Hopkinsâs own characterizations of poetryâand particularly poetic rhythmâcontribute to this tension between surrounding ambience and determinate figure. Hopkins, for the benefit of his pupils at Roehampton, defined verse as âfigure of spoken soundâ: âspeech having a marked figure, order/ of sounds independent of meaning and such as can be shifted from one word to others without changingâ (J 269). This understanding of poetic metre as a manifestation of design capable of being abstracted and transmitted independently of content informs Hopkinsâs comment to Richard Watson Dixon that âThe Blessed Virginâ is âin the same metre as âBlue in the mists all dayââ (that is, Dixonâs poem âNature and Manâ; C 581). Thus formed, verse is distinct from what might be thought of as the âtranslucentâ medium of everyday oral discourse. Hopkins also describes the origins of sprung rhythm, his signature innovation, in suggestively atmospheric terms: âI had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm which now I realised on paperâ (C 317). âThe Blessed Virginâ is not in sprung rhythm, but it is where Hopkins most explicitly 19 makes a claim to transform atmospheres by invoking and enacting an utterance, both finely wrought in ârecognizable makeâ and diffusively environmental (âRemarkable Sunsetsâ 223), that âstirs inâ or âhauntsâ the ear. The odic breath with which Hopkins speaks both airâs and Maryâs âpraiseâ couples elemental and communicational media, and brings both into the sphere of rhetorical intervention; âThe Blessed Virginâ imagines an environment in which life-giving material blends thoroughly with the life-giving Word. With his invocation of a simultaneously vital and lyric breath, Hopkins draws on the productive entanglement between atmospheric and poetic description recently analyzed by Thomas H. Ford, who suggests that the vocabulary of atmosphere filled in for an as-yet latent concept of poetic (but also cultural and historical) mediation (2). Whereas John Durham Peters reminds us to be attentive to such crossings in an age in which âthe cloudâ is a model of information storage and retrieval and the skies swarm with messages (253), Hopkinsâs own lifetime witnessed an etherealization of communication. Technologies such as electrical telegraphy not only spread channels of communication across the globe but also led, as John Guillory and previous media historians have argued, to the emergence of communication as a conceptual domain defined by a multiplicity of technical media (321). Whereas histories of the media concept have suggested that âaround the middle of the nineteenth century, the term âmediumâ underwent a disciplinary mitosis that parsed out âlifeâ and âcultureâ to different fields of knowledge productionâ (Mitchell 145), Hopkins exemplifies a persistently syncretic attitude in the later century for which the concerns of organism and organization on the one hand and communication on the other continued to be in dialogue, under the aegis of new developments in biology, geology, and the energy sciences. 20 In âThe Blessed Virgin,â elemental media and the collectives, or spheres of communion, convened by media practices (such as poetry) create and contain the space of each otherâs possibility. Indeed, the âAir we Breatheâ implies a âweâ from the very beginning, something Hopkins does not shy away from defining in (literally) catholic terms: it implicates âevery least thingâs lifeâ (6-8). The point to notice is that âAirâ and âweâ are mutually predicated on each other; a total atmosphere is imagined by way of the breathing collective, and that collective is posited on the basis of a common atmosphere. Similarly, Hopkins gathers the poemâs audience into a shared sphere of spatial reference through the deictic availability of âThis airâ (13). This is, perhaps, appropriate to the poemâs occasional nature; as a contribution to the polyglot devotions âhung upâ (as Hopkins reports in a letter) at Stonyhurst during the month of Mary, âThe Blessed Virginâ can be counted as one of Hopkinsâs more public poems (he acknowledged it as âpartly a compromise with popular tasteâ; L 576). At least, it exceeded the (usually) familiar sphere of letter-writing in which most of Hopkinsâs work circulated during his life, and addressed a religious community of cosmopolitan dimensions. Hopkins thus finds patterns of thought and expression that depict the ground of a meaningful âweâ as (in Taylorâs apt phrase) âboth substance and space of interactionâ (âWutheringâ 39). Whereas meteorological observers of the time (Hopkins among them) laboured to coordinate local data to model climate as an interconnected planetary system, Hopkinsâs poetry recurs to the situated, embodied view and to the existential stakes of what Bruno Latour (among others), borrowing from the Earth sciences, calls the cri tical zone: the narrow and variegated (âdappled,â Hopkins might say) region where elements meet in such a way as to make life possible (Gaia 140). As Latour describes, the critical zone shifts planetary thinking away from the homogeneous space of a sphere to the densely and tenuously interwoven 21 relationships formed at the intersection of lithosphere, biosphere, and atmosphere: âthe space in which we live, that of the critical zone, is the very space toward which we are conspiring; it extends as far as we do; we last as long as those entities that make us breatheâ (Gaia 106). Hopkins figures this vital space as a textured web or garment draped over the inorganic geosphere: âShe, wild web, wondrous robe, / Mantles the guilty globeâ (38-39). Hopkinsâs quasi-geological image of a planetary âmantleâ predates the termâs official introduction to the Earth sciences by over a decade. Rather than theoretically plumbing the lifeless depths of the Earth, however, Hopkinsâs spiritual stratigraphy focuses on what is most essential to continued common life. Mary, as the matrix of Godâs incarnation, resembles the âneedfulâ element that is both alimentary (âMy more than meat and drink / My meal at every winkâ) and constitutive of a common perceptual horizon (âa sapphire-shot, / Charged, steeped skyâ); just as air sustains every living thing, Mary âholds high motherhood / Towards all our ghostly goodâ (47-48). Each is an inexhaustible global commons, ânever spent,â on which everything relies (9). Hopkinsâs poetry is intent on acknowledging âthose entities that make us breathe.â What âThe Blessed Virginâ suggests is that poems themselves may number among those entities, allowing a kind of âconspirationâ that turns shared inherence to good account: Men here may draw like breath More Christ and baffle death; Who, born so, comes to be New self and nobler me In each one and each one More makes. (66-71) 22 Drawing breath, drawing Christ: both operations reconstitute persons in a small transcendence of prolonged existence. Each also carries the need to be reenacted and renewed: Christ is spiritually conceived, newly incarnated, âmorning, noon, and eve,â while âairâs fine flood,â as well as giving life, lays âThe deathdance in [manâs] bloodâ (51, 52, 62). This âdeathdanceâ is Hopkinsâs kenning for metabolic life, the co-implication of respiration and expiration. The poemâs breath of âpraiseâ is therefore a modest gesture of transformation and translation; it aims to translate traditional understandings into a living idiom and to transform auditors (or conspirators) into persons reformed along the lines of a distinctive atmospheric citizenshipâpersons who inhabit the world anew according to a revealed profession of aerial and spiritual interconnection. 1.3 âWild airâ So far, I have been concerned with the ways in which Hopkins calls attention to the predicament of internalityâof existing in, among and through vital media, those things and relationships that constitute a âworld.â Even as the framing chiasmus of âworld-motheringâ and âwildâ air forms a literary internality analogous to atmospheric immersion, however, it also calls into question the boundaries of internal space and what remains exterior or unaccommodated. Invocations of wildness both precede and succeed the comfortably human relationship with a âworld-motheringâ element, suggesting a presence that is both marginalâdeterminative of the relevant boundariesâand pervasive, almost taken for granted. Hopkins never explicitly characterizes airâs wildness in the poem. Why, then, does he foreground this descriptive absence? John Parham has argued that Hopkinsâs âwildâ designates an ecological principle predicated on respecting the autonomous self-organization of non-human systems (180); Hopkins laments (most explicitly in âInversnaidâ) an understanding of âworldâ as exclusive of, 23 or unable to accommodate, âwild.â I would like to amend Parhamâs reading by suggesting that, in this case, âWild airâ signals the unpredictable co-implication of systems and scales that might be taken to be bounded and autonomous, and thus non-communicating. In this, it embodies the paradox of aerial mediation, which both ensures and destabilizes a secure boundary between inside and outside. For Hopkins, atmosphere models not so much outer (with respect to the body) or inner (with respect to the interstellar vacuum) space as the lifegiving transgression that suspends without wholly invalidating that division. Indeed, the poem itself is vitalized by the notion of analogical crossings between domains that appear to be categorically distinct. In Hopkinsâs usage, comparison asserts at once the sameness and the difference of real terms; he was equally impatient with Coventry Patmoreâs reduction of scientific facts to the ornamental signs of religio-poetic insight and with scientific writingâs tendency to evaporate the material world into abstract formulae (C 798-9). Depending on the angle and scale of view, atmosphere can be both an indispensable envelope and an emblem of terrestrial permeability, the element of what Connor calls our âimmixtureâ (31); Hopkins maps out this apparent contradiction by successively describing air as a sustaining matrix (1-33) for individual bodies and as an intermediary (74-113) between the bounded planetary interior and an external system on which that interior turns out to be wholly dependent: the flow of solar energy, an otherwise unaccommodated exterior, âWhose glory bare would blindâ (108). Hopkins writes this oscillation of formal containment and transformative surplus into the poemâs metrical plan, which unpredictably introduces rhyming tercets among the usual three-beat couplets. The triple rhymes both intensify the sense of aural closure and open up wider possibilities of extension, modelling a preservation of constants across 24 the poemâs characteristic translations of scale: from the outer expanses of a âwildâ element to an intermediate âisledâ position to the reduced dimensions of the swaddled âchildâ (123-125). Although the âwild and self-instressedâ motion of local airsâthose same âfolds and braidsâ of energy that âdappleâ perceptibly on the body (J 233)âmay have been most present to Hopkinsâs mind, he emphasizes homologies of behaviour applying to both extremes of the scalar spectrum (âThe Handsome Heartâ 7). The expansively âworld-mothering airâ sets in motion a fractal, microscopic inclusivity, extending âhomeâ to the smallest physical articulation, a level of detail that effaces the distinction between organic (âeyelash or hairâ) and inorganic (âthe fleeciest, frailest-flixed / Snowflakeâ) matter (1, 3, 5-6). The microscopic composition of air had indeed become popularly embroiled with the questions of life and disease, pursued in the minute limit cases of organic being. When Tyndallâs researches on dust and haze were first published, they attracted controversy because of their explicit connection with germ theory. For Tyndall, observing the particulate contents of air and their reactions to light yielded resul ts relevant to epidemiology as much as meteorology, and the seemingly rarefied study of atmospheric optics had a direct impact on public health. Following these experiments, Tyndall became an early advocate for the use of respirators to contend with the newly (at least hypothetically) visible dangers of a shared atmosphere, claiming that cotton wool filters could provide the salubrious equivalent of âair of the highest Alpsâ even in compromised surroundings (342). Air and life, as investigators such as Tyndall showed, are mutually ârifeâ and âriddledâ in an exemplary chiasmus of physical and biological (and, further, economic, cultural, metabolic) systems. Hopkinsâs almost physiological description of âThis air, which by lifeâs law, / My lung must draw and drawâ highlights the porous membrane between bodily interiority and an emphatically âshare[d]â atmosphere (13-14, 44). The mixing and riddling of aerial mediation 25 thus disclose a âtranscorporealâ condition (to use Stacy Alaimoâs term)âa vision of the living âthingâ as shot through with and even puzzled by foreign (or âwildâ) presence. Tyndallâs rhetorical production of clean Swiss air anticipates a theme of aerial mobility, of rapid geographical movement and planetary dispersion, that would become increasingly commonplace (and increasingly literal) in subsequent decades, as local climates and their inhabitants became subject to an interconnected system apprehensible only through collaborative data modelling. An empirical macro-dynamics of what meteorologist Alexander Buchan calls the âGreat Movements of the Atmosphereâ (75) emerged most evocatively not through the global coordination of barometric readings but rather through the observation of attentive sunset watchers such as Hopkins, and through speculations about volcanic dust: âIt would seem,â Hopkins himself reports, âas if the volcanic âwrackâ had become a satellite to the earth, like Saturnâs rings, and was subject to phasesâ (C 687). The possibility of a local eventâs magnitude disturbing the composition of the atmosphere unsettled its traditional association with the inviolable, transcendent whole; such an event, with its unpredictable and widely dispersed downstream consequences, could no longer be considered purely local. As Taylor suggests of Ruskinâs âStorm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century,â the transgressions of scale perceptible in the evening sky could not be easily assigned either to the category of the natural or to that of the human (âStorm-Cloudsâ 1). Human influence on the weather was a recurring subject in the pages of Nature. One correspondentâs review of the tantalizing evidence for weatherâs sensitivity to âartificial meansâ attempts to forge a link between historical momentousness and meteorological influence, reflecting an enduring interest in catastrophic events such as battles, fires, explosions (Laughton 306-307). On the other hand, observers of all stripes remarked that great industrial cities created their own atmosphere on a 26 daily basisâa confluence of weather and the energy economies of coal-dependent homes, businesses and manufactures that the Smoke Abatement Exhibition of 1881 (extensively documented in Nature) attempted to addressâas well as in the case of calamity: âEven the smoke of a conflagration so utterly insignificant, compared with nature's scale, as the burning of Chicago, was . . . perceived on the Pacific Coastâ (âEnvelopeâ 324). Others, in terms that have gained in resonance, tried to systematically infer changes in global climate consequent on anthropogenic fuel emissions: whether by âthe year 1900, all animal life would cease, from the amount of carbonic dioxide,â or whether excess hydrocarbons and marsh gases might cause a greenhouse effect while rendering rain and wind more extreme (Phillips 127). Atmospheric disruption, although still mainly speculative in connection to planetary habitability (discussions of anthropogenic climate change), was a tangible reality when it came to atmospheric optics and lingers, I suggest, on the horizon of Hopkinsâs poem. Such disruption is visible in âThe Blessed Virginâ as the negative of its petition for untroubled skies and through its counterfactual vision of atmospheric absence. Exercising an imaginative analogue to his scientific contemporariesâ techniques of observation by negation, Hopkins focuses on perceptual alienation rather than the more obvious biological perils of a world deprived of aerial mediation: Whereas did air not make This bath of blue and slake His fire, the sun would shake, A blear and blinding ball With blackness bound, and all The thick stars round him roll Flashing like flecks of coal, 27 Quartz-fret, or sparks of salt, In grimy vasty vault. (93-102) Unshielded, the sunâs âblear and blinding ballâ likewise blears and blinds mortal eyes. Contemporary discussions linked such altered skies to forms of spatial and temporal extremity: contributors to Nature remarked that photographs from high altitudes and balloon expeditions âshow skies that are nearly black by comparison with bright objects projected against themâ (âSunlight and Skylightâ 586), and that the âprimeval earthâ of deep timeâa âfiery and half-molten mass, where no organic life can dwellââlacked âthe atmosphere which we now haveâ (Ball 82). Gillian Beer has associated Hopkinsâs quasi-apocalyptic images of the uncentred indifference of astronomical phenomena with contemporary anxieties about cosmic entropy and the heat-death of the sun (225), but Parham is perhaps right to point in this case to the contemporary recognition of atmospheric gasesâ role in filtering ultraviolet light that anticipated concerns about the degradation of the ozone layer (184). In my view, the real surprise of Hopkinsâs vision is that, in an implicit response to the rhetoric of emergence, it links atmospheric absence, with its attendant sense of cosmic exposure, to an anxious feeling of subterranean confinement: without the benign concealment of a âCharged steepèd sky,â the whole perceptible universe becomes a âgrimy vasty vaultâ (80, 102). To be thus âearthlessâ (as Hopkins would later write in âSpelt from Sibylâs Leavesâ) is not to emerge into unmediated knowledge but rather to have viable relations with oneâs (former) exteriors definitively foreclosed. If, as Jude Nixon observes, âHopkins would have agreed with Simone Weil that âa science which does not bring us nearer to God is worthless,ââ then this must mean in part that it is worthless without coming home to and renewing our singularly dependent inherence in those forms that make life possible (149). 28 Finally, Hopkinsâs vision of an un-skied Earth suggests a wildness not of sublime indifference nor of absolute exteriority but rather of retroaction, the dark side of his economy of exhaled âpraise.â The depthless cosmos he depicts betrays an uncanny and almost accidental closeness to the spectral luminescence of an occulted mineral economy: âFlashing like flecks of coalâ (100). The common life-giving flows of divine light and Marian intercession being absent, we have the barest glimpse here of the estranging stock of a carbon energy regime. Indeed, we need only recall the Natureâs coverage of Krakatoaâs global fallout to acknowledge the impending fragility of Hopkinsâs âglass-blue daysâ (83). If geological upheavals like volcanic eruption can upset the spectrum, the texture, the chemical make-up of the sky, then so can industrial pollution. Hopkins remarks that even his âmuseâ is liable to turn âsullenâ in Sheffieldâs âsmoke-riddenâ air (C 291). Echoing the deadening bilabials of this poemâs âblear and blinding ball / With blackness boundâ (96-97), âGodâs Grandeurâ proclaims that all is âbleared, smeared, with toilâ (6). Whereas the âglass-blue days are those / When every colour glows, each shape and shadow showsâ (âBlessed Virginâ 83-85)âan apotheosis of form and legibilityâHopkinsâs conception of industrial pollution as a pervasive âsmudgeâ distorts even the atmosphere (âGodâs Grandeurâ 7); as Joseph Feeny remarks, the spring of morning âat the brown brink eastwardâ suggests a dulled and discoloured horizon (557). Parham has pointed out that âin an 1879 sermon Hopkins had compared âblue sky, which for all its richness of colour does not stain the sunlightâ to âsmoke and red clouds, [which] doââ (185); atmospheric disturbance is thus marked as both a moral and an ecological problem. âBlue be itâ (86): more than a statement of established fact, the subjunctive expresses a prayer for continuity. Untainted but defamiliarized, this blue both mystifies and confirms the poemâs unstated premise: atmosphereâs proximityâand thus its sensitivityâto human exhalation. 29 1.4 Conclusions In âThe Blessed Virgin,â no storm-cloud of the nineteenth century darkens Hopkinsâs horizons; instead, there is âsweet and scarless sky,â the richly blank and untraumatized canvas upon which any deviation might become visible (120). On the one hand, this pristine blue exemplifies what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls âmutualityâ (183): the intuition of a uniquely privileged relationship with the world, taken as a reliable ground for perceptual and figurative activity. Light, in other words, is âsifted to suit our sightâ (113). Hopkinsâs iterative language of experiment (âNay do but stand / Where you can lift your hand / Skywardsâ) and of prayer (âBlue be itâ), however, imply the possibility of disruption over time and the necessity of maintenance (75-77, 86). In âThe Blessed Virgin,â mutuality becomes recognizable as an uncertain condition of wildness, constantly in need of being renewed and rebreathed. Hopkinsâs eco-theological reverence makes vividly perceptible a planetary environment susceptible to the rituals of religious care and the transformative effects of religious speech, and thus opens up the prospect of a science responsive to existential questions of habitation and a spirituality attentive to mundane conditions of habitability. Rooting this deterritorialized imaginary, as I have suggested, in the new regime of meteorological observation, however, means acknowledging once more with Chakrabarty the emergence of the âplanetââan ensemble of interconnected systems that sustain the conditions for complex life in the critical zoneâfrom the âglobeââan anthropocentric construction historically contingent on European expansion and the associated globalizing forces of capital and technological modernity (4). At the same time as he develops terms with which to think about planetary cohabitation, Hopkins seemingly reduces it to the imaginary unity of a sublimely inflated intimate sphere, a shared fetal position disclosed by elementary sense experience and proprioception: âWound with thee, in thee isledâ (125). He 30 thus shapes the world according to what Peter Sloterdijk would recognize as a âutero-mimeticâ mode, and ânothing,â Sloterdijk warns, âmisjudges the autonomous laws of micro- and macrospheres alike as much as the attempt to turn the whole dark, overpopulated world into a transparent and homogeneous home for all without further adoâ (616). Yet the negative vis ion of Hopkinsâs work, the instability it instils in categories of âinsideâ and âoutside,â points precisely to the aerial sphereâs un-transparency and inhomogeneity, the edge of wildness to be found, at every scale, at the heart of home. We need to look elsewhere in Hopkinsâs poetry to assign positive content to the âwildâ insisted upon by âThe Blessed Virgin.â âThe Wreck of the Deutschland,â for instance, emerges from an acute sense of atmospheric disjunction and, at the same time, of a shared existential situation: Away in the loveable west, On a pastoral forehead of Wales, I was under a roof here, I was at rest, And they the prey of the gales. (âDeutschlandâ 184-187) The goods and threats of this wild air are theoretically common but differently distributed, internally variegated, volatile and changeable. In a movement familiar to the audiences of news reporting, the experience of mediated catastrophe decentres âhereâ into a privileged âAwayâ removed from but also sensitive to the scene of disaster. For Hopkins the reader of newspapers, this sense of simultaneity is constructed in retrospect and at a distance. It depends rhetorically, though, on shared exposure to common elements, more or less mitigated by the basic domestic infrastructure of âroofâ and ârest.â The question posed by âThe Blessed Virginââhow to extend and renew the sphere of the homeâtakes on a new urgency and complexity, in that it asks for a 31 kind of hospitality that accommodates but does not erase the strangeness of the one âat our doorâ (âDeutschlandâ 273) nor of âevery least thingâ (âBlessed Virginâ 8): the first and definitive Marian act is that of giving âWelcomeâ (20). The thrust of Hopkinsâs atmospheric poetics, finally, is not only to conceptualize something like a planetary condition but also to imagine a cosmopolitanism answerable to that condition. 32 Chapter 2: Airborne Persistence and the Time of the End 2.1 Minding the Times A self-conscious innovator in metrics and prosody, Hopkins was no stranger to claims of novelty. His scientific letters insist, however, that such claims must be assessed with care: âIt is . . . right and important to distinguish phenomena really new from old ones observed under new circumstances which make people unusually observantâ (C 687). Hopkins is keen already to evaluate subjective versus objective novelty in his first letter to Nature, which notes that things common at home have sometimes first been remarked abroad. The stars in snow were first observed in the polar regions; it was thought that they only arose there, but now everyone sees them with the naked eye on his coatsleeve. (C 549) Apparent novelty is readily domesticated by routine perception, while fresh attention can easily make things seem new. By the mid-1880s, however, the âvolcanic sunsetsâ had qualified as âphenomena really new,â appearing in Hopkinsâs correspondence as a byword for the unprecedented, comparable to a genuine ânew departureâ in art or music (C 704). Unexpectedly, the âAir we Breatheâ comes to metaphorically anchor a sense of historical dynamism, a susceptibility to radical departures as well as regular modifications. Atmospheric study, in other words, prompted a revaluation of time. Mary Favret describes how the new meteorologyâs view of weather as a âdynamic, overarching system of changesâ enabled a science of prognostication focused on âmetamorphoses over space and timeâ: âtheir weather was not merely comparable to our weather; in time, and with some translation, their weather became our weatherâand our weather would soon become someone elseâsâ (134). Any atmospheric present thus contained someoneâs past and someoneâs future. In Hopkinsâs day, observation networks developed both hard and soft infrastructures to trace the path of those 33 translations; Natureâs years-long accumulation of meteorological data (prose descriptions, barometric and spectrographic readings) in the wake of the Krakatoa eruption is one such attempt to reconstruct a global chronology of atmospheric disruption and dispersion. E. Douglas Archibaldâs suggestion that America might function as Europeâs âweather prophetessâ couples the prognostic orientation of Victorian meteorology with the affordances of emergent channels of communication that might outrun the pace of atmospheric change (9). Even on relatively small scales, weather science posed complex challenges in the coordination of time; the usefulness of telephony in cloud measurementâto provide âeasy intercommunication between the different observers, so as to fix on the particular part of the cloud of which the height was to be measuredââis a reminder that even simultaneity, when stretched across distances, may only be available as a media effect (De W.A., âHeights of Cloudsâ 630). Hopkinsâs response to phenomena such as the northern lights suggests that the register of temporal speculation (and affective effusion) often associated with geological âdeep timeâ was equally applicable to astronomical and meteorological enquiry: This busy working of nature wholly independent of the earth and seeming to go on in a strain of time not reckoned by our reckoning of days and years but simpler and as if correcting the preoccupation of the world by being preoccupied with and appealing to and dated to the day of judgment was like a new witness to God and filled me with delightful fear. (J 200) Displaying macrosystemic currents as well as moment-to-moment local changes, charged with volcanic dust, industrial pollution, and other equivocal matter, the atmosphere was visible as a meeting place of usually separate chronologies. In this chapter, I consider how this temporalized, polychronic, uncertainly legible atmosphere offers a rereading of the apocalyptic vision 34 developed by Hopkins in two late sonnets, poems that discern signs of the times overhead and on the horizon. In its attention to the unsettled but decisive outcomes inherent in the present time, this vision may, I suggest, help to answer the need, prophesied by Bruno Latour, âto engage for real in an apocalyptic discourse in the present timeâ (Gaia 194, emphasis original). Latour proposes a defence of apocalyptic discourse as affordingâin opposition to the historiography of the Modernsâtotal present transformation in response to a radical uncertainty about ends. Placing Hopkinsâs own apocalyptic discourse in our extended atmospheric present invites a re-engagement with the âEarnestâ concern that makes such a present sensitive to representations of the future (âSpeltâ 1). As Hopkinsâs governing tropesâchemical and mechanical transformations such as combustion, torsion, and indentationâindicate, both atmospheric process and apocalyptic crisis lend themselves to description in the language of energy. Hopkinsâs practical and theoretical interest in contemporary energy science is well documented and has been productively explored. Daniel Brown has argued that Hopkinsâs metaphysics draws its key terms from energy physics, while Jude Nixon has shown how thermodynamics provides a uniting conceptual vocabulary for Hopkinsâs thinking about optics and individual perception, salvation and spiritual well-being, aesthetics and poetry. Nixonâs description of poetic instress as performing or reenacting âcontainment and controlled releaseâ of observed (ultimately divine) energies (144) echoes John Parhamâs identification of the transition of âan initial phenomenological stimulus structured by empirical description into a depiction of energy exchangeâ as the paradigm of Hopkinsâs mature writing, foreshadowing an incipient ecological science and outlining a practice of âsustainable poetryâ (169). This practiceâs insistence on âproper managementâ of energy (Nixon 145) draws 35 its coordinates, in turn, from the long timelines of resource âexhaustionâ recently brought to light by Elizabeth Miller in her investigation of nineteenth-century âextraction ecologiesâ (Miller 9). Indeed, the Victorian energy sciences (as Nixon and Gillian Beer have demonstrated) often evoked thoughts about finitude: cosmic entropy, the heat-death of the sun, the slow recession of thermodynamic conditions conducive to life. Discussions of this âapocalyptic angstâ (Nixon 149), however, have betrayed something of the tendency, identified by Latour, of (Modern) critical thought to situate itself after the historical relevance of apocalyptic thinking (193). Daniel Williams, for instance, assigns only a negative âecological salienceâ to these late sonnets because he takes the title of âThat Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrectionâ at its word as depicting an antinomy of absolute flux and eternal stasis, both unhistorical and reconcilable only in an âabstract doctrine of revelationâ that annihilates the earth and the multiform affordances of âecological perceptionâ (143). In contrast, I attempt a reading of âHeraclitean Fireâ and âSpelt from Sibylâs Leavesâ that holds human agency and âelemental physical and cosmic systemsâ simultaneously in view by focusing on the overlap of scales modelled, for Hopkins and his contemporaries, by atmospheric phenomena and meteorological observation (Williams 144). I depart from Williamsâs interpretation that Hopkins performs a âsetting aside of embodiment as such,â in the first instance, by observing that such a setting aside could not be consistent with the doctrine of the Resurrection as Hopkins understood it, insistent as it is on renewed life in the flesh (Williams 144). I approach the sonnets instead as parables of persistence uncannily (although ambivalently) calibrated to our own temporal and ethical riddles with their timelines of sudden urgency and prospective concern. These late poems, initiated by changes in the sky, enquire into the overlap of human and non-human scales of time, proposing a mode of utterance that mediates between the quick and 36 the long-durational. As Anne-Lise François has argued, lyric poetryâs status as a collection of temporal techniques exploring the friction between fast and slow timescales gives it a newly heightened relevance in the Anthropocene. Hopkinsâs late sonnets, I propose, intervene in the crucial themes of Françoisâs analysis and of Anthropocene discourse: the sequestration, transmission, and/or release of energies built up across millennia or in the blink of an eye, the course of a breath. The Anthropocene both intensifies and, sometimes, ironically reverses Hopkinsâs concerns. Whereas the poet laments that manâs âfiredint,â natureâs âclearest -selvèd spark,â is effaced or âDrownedâ all too soon by timeâs âenormous dark,â one distinctive challenge of climate change is the prospect of anthropogenic residua that âvastnessâ does not promise to âblurâ nor âtimeâ to âbeat level,â at least within frames of reference meaningful to ordinary life (âHeraclitean Fireâ 11, 12-13, 16): to consider one benchmark of Anthropocene chronology, â[t]he lifetime of fossil fuel CO2 in the atmosphere is a few centuries, plus 25% that lasts essentially foreverâ (Archer 11). In this connection, Hopkinsâs invitation to âworldâs wildfireâ to âleave but ashâ acquires a new and disturbing resonance at the same time as it prompts us to consider anew the gestures of conversion that oppose such a holocaust with the obdurate materiality of âimmortal diamondâ (âHeraclitean Fireâ 20, 23) âHeraclitean Fireâ and âSpelt from Sibylâs Leavesâ revisit, with apocalyptic urgency, the horizon as a site of collective empirical enquiryâa field of meaning that condenses multiple chronologies (historical eventfulness, quotidian life, eschatological time, geo-history) in a story upon whose human significance Hopkins insists. Formally and thematically, both poems take up the question of duration: âHeraclitean Fireâ as an experiment in the caudate sonnet, unravelling in excess of the conventional structure; âSpelt from Sibylâs Leavesâ as âthe longest sonnet ever made and no doubt the longest making,â whose long eight-foot lines stretch the formâs temporal 37 proportions (C 840). Despite this stress on prolongation, Hopkinsâs sonnets draw their images from matter in solution and in transitâclouds, dust, ashesâas if to make the lasting and the ephemeral mutually dependent; responsive to practices of meteorological enquiry focused on residual energies and materials that embodied multiple times, Hopkins explores the same coincidence of flow and finitude. Far from eschewing human scales of embodiment and agency, his apocalyptic sonnets affirm a jointly apprehended and humanly significant present, a medial zone or meantime conditioned both by past determinations and by future ends, and affording new temporalities of care. 2.2 The Production of Permanence Maria Lichtmann has astutely observed, following Sr. Marcella Holloway, that âHeraclitean Fireâ is Hopkinsâs âmost radical use of antithetical parallelismâ (126). Seemingly, Hopkins encourages us to think of flow and fixity, time and its fulfillment, in dualistic, even oppositional terms. His âheartâs-clarionâ (the promise and utterance of âThe Resurrectionâ) interrupts talk of mortality and the sonnet form in which it is couched (17), fulfilling the thematic binary predicted by the poemâs title: âThat Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrectionâ (emphasis mine). These opposing âdiatonicâ principlesâon the one hand death, change and multiplicity and on the other the achievement of unified and durable formâpermit, Lichtmann argues, âabsolutely no modulationâ (126). Without rejecting Lichtmannâs insight, however, my reading of âHeraclitean Fireâ considers the vanishingly small point of contact that she denies: the space of âmodulationâ or, perhaps more appropriately, conversion between otherwise incommensurable forms or scales of activity. Although the poemâs conversion of frangible material into âimmortal diamondâ does not follow any causal logic recognizable from its previous depiction of cyclical fluctuation (23), it retrospectively imbues that process with a 38 potentiality for sudden and decisive change in a meeting of fast and slow time that Hopkins recognized as crucial to contemporary study of the interaction of geological and atmospheric systems. Against Williamsâs claim that the sonnet âefface[s] all indices of human agency by setting them against the scale of elemental physical and cosmic systemsâ (144), I contend that Hopkins situates that agency precisely and deliberately in the âbetweenâ of continuous change and novel permanence, at the interface of different rhythms of change and endurance. From the sonnetâs opening parade of cloud-forms, weather is the primary index of time in âHeraclitean Fire,â both delineating a quotidian intervalâa lived âmeantimeââand marking the interruption that punctuates such time with eventfulness. His language carrying a playful hint of catastrophe, Hopkins relates in a letter that the sonnet was conceived from a state of atmospheric exception: âone windy bright day between floodsâ during the course of a âpreposterousâ Dublin summer (C 945). A similar feeling for meteorological time pervades the poem, providing the terms for articulating both the passage of time as a sequence of discrete occurrences (todayâs âbright wind boisterousâ and âyestertempestâs creasesâ) and their subsumption into an undifferentiated and ongoing present (ânatureâs bonfire burns onâ; 5-6, 8). Hopkinsâs paratactic syntax blurs the line between succession, juxtaposition, and synonymy; the metaphoric shifts of âCloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillowsâ could reflect transformation in both space and time, marking a series of morphological changes that proceed as quickly as the language itself (1). These eddying patterns of moment-to-moment variation occur alongside compressed geological (earthly âcreasesâ) and hydrological (âparch[ing]â moisture) processes, suggesting that weather positions an observer not only between distinct events, but also between different scales of eventfulness (6). 39 Looking to the sky produces an experience of time in solution, since atmosphere becomes both timely in its relationship with geohistory and untimely in its collection of residual materials, the poemâs âdustâ and âashâ (6, 20). Contemporary discussions historicized climate in relation to the global distribution of continents and to prevailing oceanic and atmospheric currents, debating the value of paleo-botanical evidence, mathematical models and comparative ecological methods in speculatively reconstructing past climates (see, for example, Samuel Haughton, âGeological Climatesâ). Hopkins himself betrays an interest in the impact of such large-scale geophysical systems on local phenomena in his first published work, the sunset poem âWinter with the Gulf Stream.â The suggestion that the âever-moving atmosphereâ itself wielded earth-shaping agency implied a complex of reciprocal effects between earth and air systems (Czerny 240); Francis Czerny claims that by redistributing moisture, transporting strata-forming material and impelling wave erosion, the wind ârenders active the principle of constant transformation in opposition to that of stability, and seeks to alter the contours of dry landâ (240). In his correspondence, Hopkins acknowledges adapting an image in his sonnet âIn Honour of St. Alphonsus Rodriguezâ from geological understandings of formation by means of such âtrickling decrementsâ: It is true continents and so on are partly made by âtrickling incrementâ; but what is on the whole truest and most st strikes us about them and mountains is that they are made what now they are ^we see them^ by trickling decrements, by detrition, weathering, and the like. (C 969) âWeatheringâ is the principle of slow erosional figuration, both âhewingâ entities into striking form and volatilizing their earthly detritus into the air, as Oliver J. Lodge describes in terms that suggestively couple terrestrial dispersion and atmospheric permanence: 40 a fine, impalpable dust is produced by every terrestrial activity. The wind blowing through trees, the waves tossing up sprayâall these natural activities disperse into the air very fine particles, which are up borne and carried so far from their source that they form quite a permanent part of the atmosphere. (âDustâ 266) As with Hopkinsâs âoozeâ âparche[d]â or âSquander[ed]â to âsqueezed | dough, crust, dust,â to endure weather may finally be to become it (6-7). The âbright wind boisterousâ of âHeraclitean Fireâ is thus both formative and fatal, marking an interval between the vital environmental âselvingâ or âhewingâ of âmarkedly featuredâ form and the prospect of erasure (5; C 969). The sestetâs switch to an ignean (rather than aerial) imagery confirms that elemental transformation (like Hopkinsâs âdeathdanceâ in âThe Blessed Virginâ) is the condition of both mortal persistence and transience (52). Whereas ânatureâs bonfireâ threatens a fiery consumption, Hopkins depicts the existential precarity of its âclearest-selvèd sparkâ as a local termination or exhaustion of that combustive metabolism: being âquench[ed]â or âDrownedâ (9, 10, 13). That which persists enjoys a fragile equilibrium between the worldâs figuring energiesâthe kinetic and caloric intensity communicated by the octaveâs moving picture of the mutual resistances between wind, clouds (1-2), trees (3), earth (4-5), and water (6-7)âand its disfiguring violence. If Hopkinsâs decision to (counterintuitively) ground earthly change in the variable face of the sky stresses evanescence, it also asks about the means of observation and record capable of drawing durable form out of constant flux, a question âHeraclitean Fireâ shares with contemporary cloud science. Lorraine Daston proposes that nineteenth-century cloud classification was a project of systematizing collective perception; crafting a science of types out of the minute and ever-changing particulars of cloud-forms amounted to an exercise in 41 âcollectively willed ontologyâ dependent on the cognitive infrastructures of a standardized vocabulary and common media of visual representation (53). âNaming was part and parcel of the perception of types,â Daston argues, and such standardization applies not only to objects and instruments but also to âpersons joined in a collectiveâ: âIt is a prerequisite for a shared worldâ (67). Daston thus identifies what John Durham Peters refers to as the âontologicalâ stakes of media visible in the history of weather science, for which âthe standards (formats) for packaging and readingâ information were less forthcoming than the technological and infrastructural âchannels for movingâ it (252). Hopkinsâs descriptive language strains after a balance between such shareable standards and an idiosyncratic vision schooled in John Ruskinâs tradition of honouring the minute particulars of observable fact. His philological curiosity, which includes regional specificities of pronunciation and dialect, dovetails with his attention to cloud nomenclature, as when he records seeing âa wonderful rack of what I hear they call âflock-of-sheepâ cloudsâ (J 150). Hopkins also deals in the reified metaphors of Luke Howardâs Latinate taxonomy (e.g., âcirrus cloud like the swaths of a hayfieldâ; âShadow-Beamsâ 55), following the ongoing elaboration of precise terminology that took place in the pages of Nature (see, for example, André Poëy, âNew Classification of Cloudsâ). The task of common seeing, and its production of a shared present, were central to both Hopkinsâs meteorological commentaries and his poetics. Meredith Martin discusses the most immediately visible (and controversial) feature of Hopkinsâs poetryâhis use of stress marksâas embodying a struggle to provide âone law to which all eyes and ears adhere concordantlyâ (72). Much as cloud taxonomy aimed to assert a stable type amid changing and contingent particulars, Hopkinsâs stress marks strive âto indicate a kind of âbeingâ in the wordâ even as they acknowledge âthat each word . . . contains its own multiplesâ (58, 66; emphasis original). As 42 Martin describes, Hopkinsâs interest in the materiality of English accent and graphic signs for stress reflects a fascination with the âmarkedness of natureâ; the metrical sign, in turn, re-marks or âmakes muchâ of a wordâs being as a natural object (59, 66). It is a curious coincidence that both Hopkins and Howardâwhose seminal Essay on the Modifications of Clouds (first published in 1803) proposes a hieroglyphic shorthand for recording cloud-formsâdevised systems of graphic signs that never achieved widespread circulation. Although not one of Hopkinsâs most extensively marked manuscripts, âHeraclitean Fireâ is his most concentrated experiment in keeping time with overlapping tempos of markedness and erasure: âglitter[ing]â lines of clouds, earthly âcreases,â mortal âmanmarksâ and âManshapeâ (2, 6, 7, 13). Human embodiment, accordingly, breaches the surface of the poemâs cosmological vision in the form of residual traces or âmarksâ enduring at the interface of elemental forces: âSquadroned masks and manmarks | treadmire toil there / Footfretted in itâ (8-9). The face is a topos shared by the science of cloud classification and Hopkinsâs thinking about the vicissitudes of individually distinctive being. Daston notes the coincidence of rigorous cloud taxonomy and scientific physiognomy as attempts to fix âmobile and fluidâ modifications of appearances into clear types in a synoptic, abstracting glance (66). For Hopkins, the âfeatures of menâs facesâ exemplify the âinteraction,â in Brownâs words, âbetween the principle of Being . . . and the principle of Not-being, the manifold nature of matter,â that âproduces conditioned, that is, distinctive, beingâ (âkingfishersâ 14; Brown 179); âSelf,â Hopkins writes elsewhere, âflashes off frame and faceâ (âMortal Beautyâ 11). As the material manifestation of natureâs âclearest-selvèd spark,â the face also embodies a condition of being for and through the other, through the unconscious emanations of self to other eyes. Physiognomic observation, then, manifests a kind 43 of energy to affirm both type and individuality, to recognize and stress other selves by attributing to them an underlying durable form. The poemâs spectacle of anonymous, collective and contingent physiognomyââSquadroned masksââhowever, portrays âselvingâ as an ongoing process, as faces are weathered into being (8). Although Hopkins may not leave behind (as Williams argues) the scale of human embodiment, perception, and agency, he does leave them curiously encrypted, folded into a succession of geophysical processes and couched in some of the poetâs more opaque descriptions. Indeed, agency is difficult to locate grammatically on this intermediate scale; the âSquadroned masks and manmarksâ attributed with world-shaping âtoilâ are also ambiguously subject to the âbright wind boisterous,â which, in the previous line, âstanches, starchesâ (5, 7, 8). Hopkinsâs phonic patterning is particularly dense here: âstarches,â an aural and conceptual rhyme to the previous lineâs âparches,â alliterates across the line break with âSquadroned masks,â which shares a kind of initial rhyme with âSquandering oozeâ (6-7). As a figure of syntactic continuity across formal divisions, enjambment extends the field of application of verbs like âstanchesâ and âstarchesâ in an open-ended overflow of verbal intensity; it formally models the overlap of ecological agencies and energies that invite us to picture human faces, disconcertingly, as coagulated and stiffenedâthat is, formed and made recognizableâby the same elemental whirl of motion that threatens to reduce them, like âooze,â to âcrust, dustâ (7). Before presenting mortal life in idealist terms as âmark on mindâ in the sestet (11), Hopkins glances at an agglomerate human condition, palpably material but rhetorically estranged: the metonymy that identifies human presence by its signs and traces (âmasks and manmarksâ) exemplifies the general representational strategy by which Hopkins depicts phenomena 44 according to implicit association, from the multiform clouds (1-2) and the play of light and shadow (3-4) to fluctuations of the âearthâ (5-8). The octetâs condensed expression of human embodiment expresses a moment of simultaneous formation and decay: âFootfretted in itâ (9). As with âquartz-fretâ in âThe Blessed Virgin,â the primary sense derives from Hopkinsâs architectural vocabulary: the OED glosses âfretâ as an âornamental pattern composed of continuous combinations of straight lines, joined usually at right angles,â with an associated usage referring particularly to âCarved ornamentâ in ceilings (âFretâ). Hopkins inverts the association with ceilingsâand the opening vista of exuberant formations in the skyâto imagine figuration as an operation underfoot; human dwelling (especially the work of âtreadmire toilâ) becomes a process of terrestrial inscription akin to that which produces âyestertempestâs creasesâ (6). Whereas the geometrical extension of fret as ornamental pattern applies to the large-scale âmanmarksâ on managed landscapes, the preposition (âinâ) suggests a more intimate scale: a mutual rubbing or âfrettingâ away that causes foot and earth to wear away at each other. Being âthere,â Hopkinsâs language indicates, entails a relationship of configuration, in the rich sense proposed by Amanda Jo Goldstein to account for the reciprocal shaping of organisms and environments (57). Prospectively, Hopkins enriches the now-common environmentalist metaphor of an ecological âfootprintâ so that it images not simply an anthropogenic impression on natural systems but rather a continuing process of mutual formation (quite likely an alienated one, as Hopkins suggests when he remarks elsewhere that âthe soil / Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shodâ (âGodâs Grandeurâ 7-8)). An additional, still-familiar implication of âfretâ is that this is a condition of (in the words of âRibblesdaleâ) âcare and dear concernâ (14). 45 As a term in common between environmental, embodied and poetic figuration, a unit of metrical and corporeal time, the synecdochic âFootâ represents human embodiment as an intersection of various scales of change and recurrence. Hopkinsâs study of, and experiments in, poetic rhythm consist in âarranging feetâ (as opposed to syllables) and crafting patterns of emphasis, length, and weight (C 747). âFootfretting,â fretting in feet, is indeed an apt description of the rhythmicized anguish of much of Hopkinsâs Dublin-era poetry. But it also answers more generally to his poetryâs aspiration of transformative contact, a brush against distinctive being that engenders expressions of care, or what I will, with a glance at âSpelt from Sibylâs Leaves,â refer to as âreckoning.â As in the Pauline social theory of âTomâs Garlandâ (which Hopkins explains in a letter to Bridges), the foot is a configurative relay between economic and ecological metabolisms: it âhas to wear ^and be worn by^ the ground,â both on the âgreat scaleâ in which labourers âin gangs and millions, mainly trench, tunnel, blast, and in other ways disfigure, âmammockâ the earthâ and on the âsmall scaleâ in which they â^singly,^ and superficially ^stamp it with^ their foot printsâ (C 918). In the later sonnet, Hopkins portrays both face and foot as produced by and extracted from common processes of figuration and disfigurement. The world of âHeraclitean Fire,â like that of the cloud-watcher, is full of physiognomic intimations: not only âmasksâ but also âShivelights and shadowtackleâ that âin long | lashes lace, lance, and pairâ (4). For Hopkins, acknowledging the lasting in that which changes amounts to an ethical task that calls, as in âThe Blessed Virginâ for coordinated observation and the resources of poe tic language. Despite the poemâs rejection of mortal changes (âEnough!â), the potential for sudden, radical and lasting change characteristic of conversion consists not in a denial but rather in an intensification of those changes (16). Ironically, Hopkins reaches his climactic image of mineral 46 endurance by replicating the metamorphoses of âCloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillowsâ in the sphere of earth-bound rather than aerial detritus: âThis Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, / Is immortal diamondâ (23-24). Whereas the earlier accommodation of terrestrial tempos to atmospheric flux seemed to guarantee transience, here the collapse of slow time into fast compresses the slow subterranean pressures needed to instantaneously produce âimmortal diamondâ (23). Hopkinsâs manuscript records his decision to cancel the copula (âisâ) before the first utterance of âimmortal diamond,â making an apparently radical transformation indistinguishable from the implied synonymy of paratactic addition, then reinforced in the audible tautology âimmortal diamond, / Is immortal diamondâ (23-24). Predication literally comes too late to a conversion that happens all âIn a flash,â mediated by the minimal written trace and temporal interval of the comma (21). François observes that the common lyric devices of parataxis and succession âemerge . . . as two instruments for registering both scalar transference and nontransferability and for indicating both the simultaneity and noncoincidence of different tempos of change and mortalityâ (251). Here, Hopkinsâs preference (noted by Lichtmann) for antithesis, parataxis and asyndeton (48) projects backwards into Heraclitean flux a potential for decisive conversion, even as the rhyme with âdiamondâ retroactively fuses âI am, andâ into a single semantic unit expressive of Hopkinsâs additive, paratactic logic (22-23). With this image of selective sequestration, Hopkins redirects attention from loss as such toward disparate modes of remaining beyond lossâdisparate but uncannily similar, bearing in mind Brownâs reminder of the common elemental makeup of entropic ash and the condensed carbon of immortal diamond (180). Although Williams takes these late poems to âembody certain affective and generic temptations of Anthropocene discourse, specifically the allure of totalizing forms of elegy and 47 lamentâ (143), the modal shift of âHeraclitean Fireâ indicates the insufficiency of totalized elegy to account for a process of differentiated dissolution and persistence. Hopkins proposes a kind of agencyâand its attendant vision of posthumous continuityâthat consists precisely in the letting go of mortal changes: âFlesh fade, and mortal trash / Fall to the residuary wormâ (19-20). Shadowing the abdication of flesh is a dark affirmation of the capacity of things to pass away; the âresiduary wormâ stands as an inheritor (a residuary legatee) of discarded remains and as itself an ambivalently vital residuum, an enduring margin of decompositional, decreative activity. Hopkins, in fact, rejects a praxis of mourning (âgriefâs gasping | joyless daysâ) and proposes instead an eschatology of intensified relationship with posteriority, imaged in the divergent carbon destinies of ash and diamond. The apocalyptic urge of âHercalitean Fireâ is to put the lived meantime in touch with a fateful question of care toward what is preserved and what is allowed (or even invited) to dissolve unminded and unmourned, past hope of recollection in the ordinary course of things. 2.3 Disremembered Changes The materials of Hopkinsâs late poetry, drawn from the fields of enquiry of thermodynamics and atmospheric science, bring into view a conjunction of dissolution and endurance, a plane of marginal, minimal survival. âHeraclitean Fireâ predicates the achievement of âimmortal diamondâ on an acceptance of âash,â a decomposition into âresiduaryâ matter, even as the imperative to conclude (âEnough!â) brings about an unwonted extension of sonnet form (16, 20). âSpelt from Sibylâs Leaves,â the sonnetâs precursor and companion, similarly takes up the temporal traces legible (âSpeltâ) in residue and debris: the scattered Sibylline leaves which, in the Dies Irae, testify to the worldâs reduction into ash, embers, or glowing motes. This âlong sonnetâ takes duration as its method and theme, as Hopkins writes to Bridges: 48 Of this long sonnet above all remember what applies to all my verse, that it is, as living art, should be, made for performance and that its performance is not reading with the eye but loud, leisurely, poetical (not rhetorical) recitation, with long pauses ^rests^, long dwells on the rhyme and other marked syllables, and so on. This sonnet shd. be almost sung: it is most carefully timed in tempo rubato. (C 842). The rhythms of Hopkinsâs prose, with its emphasis on âlongâ rests and dwells, mirror the poemâs goal of distending and articulating time in the manner of the flexuous temporal manifold afforded by music. Whereas âThe Blessed Virginâ imagined a âweâ by way of participation, analogy, and present-tense collaboration, âSpelt from Sibylâs Leavesâ addresses a temporalized collective answerable to the signs of apocalyptic fatality, apprehended in the plural possessive: âÃur évening,â âóur night,â âÃur tale,â âóur oracleâ (8, 10). Like the âvolcanic sunsets,â then, the sonnet implicates the common spectacle of evening with an urgent, unprecedented historical directionality (C 704). The middle moment I have delineated in âHeraclitean Fire,â then, is shot through with the time of the end, whose oracles, as usual, are discernable in the sky. In âSpelt from Sibylâs Leaves,â Hopkins sees the Earth dissolve into a distinctly atmospheric sense of history, marked both by the unravelling of determinate boundaries and by the persistence of uncanny, âdisremember[ed]â remainders (7). Hopkins, I suggest, gives prophetic expression to the collision of quotidian and apocalyptic that underlies the need, in Latourâs words, to live in the time of the end (193), but, more than that, he develops in response a polychronic figure of concern for a subsequent, posthumous world. He articulates this concern through the imperative to âreckâ or âreckonâ the retroactive exigencies of a future world (13). In âRibblesdaleâ the observation that ânone reck of world afterâ voices an encompassing critique of ecological 49 exploitationâthe âthriftless reaveâ (13) of abstracted resource potential that underpins what François calls âcapitalismâs uninterruptible, sleepless, and ceaselessly available presentâ (248)âthrough a simple appeal to subsequence. In âSpelt from Sibylâs Leaves,â concern for a âworld afterâ reaches a pitch of crisis that consummates the union of âreckingâ and âwreckingââmanifestations of care and forms of existential collapseâvisible in so many of Hopkinsâs writings (âRibblesdaleâ 13). Whereas I have suggested that âHeraclitean Fireâ exercises a mode of observation that affirms a stable and intelligible type in fluctuating particulars, I now identify a counter-stress, an awareness of the disremembered residues that persist beyond such a conversion. This awareness, I argue, enjoins an imperative care toward, or reckoning of, otherwise neglected modes of persistence. âSpelt from Sibylâs Leavesâ recaptures in an intensified register the interest of Hopkinsâs meteorological letters in âperiodic action or behaviour,â the atmosphereâs manifestation of belated traces belonging to different scales of eventfulness and recursion (222, emphasis original). Hopkins specifies, for instance, that the recent sunsets distinguish themselves from ordinary phenomena in the time of their appearance as âafter-glowsâ (222); this interstitial moment, because it filters sunlight through the maximum thickness of the atmosphere, makes legible the sedimented detritus of past terrestrial cataclysms, the âvolcanic wrackâ that Hopkins suspects might go through its own âphasesâ (687). Depending on the what level of periodicity is held in view, evening embodies either repetition or termination, continuity or finitude. If âSpelt from Sibylâs Leavesâ explodes the notion of sunsetâs availability for disciplined and unbiased description, it nevertheless extends Hopkinsâs exploration of the fraught temporalities of âEveningâ with the affordances of poetic form (2). In his insightful reading of the poem, Justin Tackett proposes the concept of âformâ as an intermediary between 50 technological and poetic design; Tackett views âSpelt from Sibylâs Leavesâ as a product of phonographic thinking, exploiting in its form and imagery the material affordances characteristic of cylindrical media: continuous inscription, compact storage, and replay (152-153). Françoisâs discussion of lyric time helps us to see how such media effects participate in the attempts of Anthropocene discourse âto hold together overlapping yet semi-autonomous temporal scalesâ (243). Hopkinsâs long sonnet communicates the âstrain[]â of keeping in tension the moments of universal historyâ âtimeâs vást, | womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all nightââand those of individual agency: the times of recurring environmental cycles, of moment-to-moment detail in perceptible phenomena, and of subjective departure, transformation, or recollection (2). What interests me about Tackettâs media-historical reading is not so much the specific affordances of a phonographic poetics as the suggestion that Hopkins is theorizing lyric as a medium that participates in newly salient temporalities of storage, transmission, and replay. Such media model a conversion of dispersive energies into marked, durable, and legible form, but also the forgotten afterlives of material brought into the domain of information. If Hopkins, as Nixon suggests, rehearses the (characteristically poetic) possibility of reconstituting complex order from entropic decay, then he also draws attention to the unattuned surplus left over from such a transformation. Leaves, ash, and the residual light on the horizon bring divergent times into the sphere of meaning while at the same time negating the histories they tell. Paradoxically, Hopkins describes the compressed storage of Earthâs âdáppleâ as âDisremembering, dismembering,â a meltdown of the organization that sees parts as distinct participants in a whole (7). âDisrememberingâ recalls the âHeraclitean Fireâ sonnetâs reduction of the world to âashâ (20), a dissolution of the boundaries that sustain determinate beings: âself ín self stéepèd and páshedâ (6). But, like the belated matter of ash, disremembering contains its own negation; it is both 51 forgetful of its past and a memorial to it, cancellation and consummation. Hopkins takes the affordances (following Tackett) of mechanical storage media as a model for the bare endurance of what (almost) passes away, anticipating an Anthropocenic condition troubled not only by accelerating losses of biospheric dapple but also by âtoo much retention, too much accumulation, too much permanenceâ (François 256). The moral imperatives of Hopkinsâs apocalyptic thinking, then, are grounded not so much in the apprehension of (and attempt to rectify or forestall) total loss as in the uncanny retentions that accompany and outlive it. This is in keeping with his eschatological meditations, which attribute the torment of damnation to autogenous effluvia that persist beyond any possibility of change and any mitigation of distance: âit is their own sin; they wallowed in it willingly, now against their will they must for ever wallowâ (MW 294); âtheir scourge to be / As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worseâ (âI wake and feelâ 13-14). Sin is the pollution of self, anticipating in microcosm âthe inescapable atmospheric permanence,â noted by Thomas H. Ford, of the âmost passing and incidental moods and actions, which form entries in an indelible archive of the triviality of the presentâ (Wordsworth 94). âSpelt from Sibylâs Leaves,â in turn, attempts to close the gap between the âtriviality of the presentâ and final ends that can speak in exclusive, unconditional imperatives: âréckon but, réck but, mínd / But thése twoâ (12-13). Hopkinsâs prophetic after-world takes the form of a binary system of âbláck, white; | ríght, wrong,â where âbút these | twó tell, éach off the óther,â radicalizing both Celeste Langanâs image of poetic âdiscretizationâ of an information stream and his own concept of âdiatonicâ variation (10, 11; n.p.). As the absence of atmospheric mediation in âThe Blessed Virginâ leaves the sun âA blear and blinding ball / With blackness boundâ (97-98), so the reduction of 52 embodied morphological complexity here leaves digital units empty of any content but the opposition through which they âtellâ (13). Through this virtual resolution of earthly debris into a stark and exigent but as yet inaccessible meaning, Hopkins proposes a mode of care or wariness for the emergent world that inheres in present times through their wreck or dissolution. Whereas âThe Blessed Virginâ assumes a total view of âevery least thingâs lifeâ (8), then, these two late sonnets settle on a mode of attention responsive to the universal as negation or residue: âquíte / Disremembering, dismembering | all nowâ (âSpeltâ 6-7); âworldâs wildfire, leave but ashâ (âHeraclitean Fireâ 20). This âreckoningâ of the remainder accommodates both retrospective and prospective attention as it struggles toward an appropriate affective response (âHeart, you round me rightâ) to a present moment in dissolution (7). Rather than âremov[e] the eye entirely from viewâ (Williams 143), Hopkinsâs apocalyptic attention focalises the residual distinctions sustainable on the verge of (almost) dissipated memory and (all but) imponderable futurity: âOnly the beakleaved boughs dragonish | damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black, / Ever so black on itâ (9-10). The last shades of perceptible difference emblematize a structure of feeling attuned to finalityânot in the sense of termination but in that of the irrevocable changes and unknown ends that already penetrate the fabric of the everyday. In that sense, the apocalyptic has less to do with imminenceâthe impending endâthan with immanence; âÃur évening is óver us,â the time is already here, and the decisive text is already in the process of being written (8). How does one worldâs passing become legible in the world that succeeds it? Ford suggests that if something of the past can indeed become legible in weatherâif the air does carry traces of historical meaningâthese will likely appear only indirectly and obliquely. They 53 will be present as silence, disremembering and absence: in the non-referentiality of poetic metre and rhyme, for example. (51) The evening sky, in âSpelt from Sibylâs Leaves,â is a zone incipient absence, where all things go to disappear. Looking past the vanishing point of diminishing differences, however, Hopkins articulates the paradox of such aerial âtracesâ in the coincidence of two seemingly contradictory vectors of catastrophe and revelation: on the one hand a âHomogenoceneâ (âall throughtherâ) or âheat-death of maximum exchangeâ (Mentz 68), and on the other a kind of Semiocene or universal consolidation as digital, disembodied information. Differences are both nullified and magnified in their subsumption into a stark and uncompromising binary. âDisremembering,â then, ironically names the fate of a world without negativity, in which every trace is made to âtellâ (13). Hopkins places us in the moment of wary anticipation of such an emergent but as yet implicit regime of meaning, one in which no loss can be assumed to be completely and immediately accomplished or incapable of producing haunting afterlives. 2.4 Atmospheric Futurity The prospects of total mutation and mediated persistence glimpsed by Hopkinsâs sky sonnets inflect routine observation with the hermeneutic urgency noted by Peters: ânot only is it legitimate to look for images in the clouds, but it has become urgent. Our survival may depend on knowing how to read the signs in the atmosphereâ (260). The Anthropocene signals a newfound legibility as âÃur taleâ and âóur oracleâ of archives formerly held to be indifferent to human scales of activity (10): the geological record and, by extension, atmospheric and geobiological systems. What begins in the two long sonnets as a familiar anxiety about scalar non-transferenceâthe enormities of âvastnessâ and âtimeâ (âHeraclitean Fireâ 16)âbecomes an enquiry into paths of translation and modes of endurance. Endurance is not in itself, necessarily, 54 a comfort; the subsequent âworldâ of âSpelt for Sibylâs Leavesâ enjoins vigilance more than it provides consolation. Hopkinsâs apocalyptic temporality intensifies rather than dissolves the imperative of rightly directing care or negligence, and of negotiating between preservation and release, reckoning and disremembering. 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Thesis/Dissertation
eng
English
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Dalziel, Pamela
The atmospheres of Gerard Manley Hopkins
Text