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Summary
‘Journeys end in lovers meeting’
–Shakespeare. Twelfth NightReturn to Virgin Terrain
The word ‘emotion’ is etymologically linked to ‘motion’, as Giuliana Bruno notes:
The Latin root of the word emotion speaks clearly about a ‘moving’ force, stemming as it does from emovere, an active verb composed of movere, ‘to move,’ and e, ‘out.’ The meaning of emotion, then, is historically associated with ‘a moving out, migration, transference from one place to another.’
Love and desire, as I have argued, compel us to reach out and touch the other; in ‘The Windhover’, even a ‘heart in hiding’ can be moved and ‘Stírred for a bird’. The epigraph from Shakespeare suggests that the object of (e)motion is union with the beloved. With union comes home, rest and the end of the journey. Love is to home what a journey is to its destination: one leads to the other.
In this chapter, I concentrate on home as the thing for which we most yearn. Home satisfies several desires; it provides sanctuary, a place of belonging, a haven of intimate relationships. The hunger of the adult draws on the desires of the child. The adult, like the child, longs for shelter and tenderness, and finds it in the arms of a lover or a mother figure – or in objects of home standing in for them. In a world of pollution, disease and death, Hopkins sees parallels between the lost youth of the earth and that of the individual.
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- Touching GodHopkins and Love, pp. 101 - 114Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2012