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Chapter Two - Virgin Marriage and the Song of Songs
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2012
Summary
Public and Private Marriages
Hopkins and Coventry Patmore, both converts to Roman Catholicism, first met in July 1883 and exchanged letters until Hopkins' death in 1889. Hopkins had admired Patmore's poetry for many years, as he readily admits to Bridges:
I read his Unknown Eros well before leaving Oxford. He shews a mastery of phrase, of the rhetoric of verse, which belongs to the tradition of Shakespeare and Milton and in which you could not find him a living equal nor perhaps a dead one either after them. (Bridges, 93)
And a few months earlier: ‘But for insight he beats all our living poets, his insight is really profound, and he has an exquisiteness, farfetchedness, of imagery worthy of the best things of the Caroline age’ (82). Hopkins' assertion turns on his judgement that Patmore's poetry, particularly his collection, the Unknown Eros, offers a ‘really profound’ insight. While he does not elucidate the nature of the text's profundity, the volume's title provides an indication of the subject to which he was most likely referring. Aubrey de Vere, Patmore's friend and fellow Catholic, describes the Unknown Eros thus:
It consists of a series of poems, many of them odes…embodying trains of very lofty and occasionally of somewhat mystical thought, in subtle, expressive, and musical language. Their chief characteristics are continuity of meditation and richness of illustrative imagery, but also bound in passion – that is, passion in its intellectual and imaginative, not sensuous form.
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- Touching GodHopkins and Love, pp. 35 - 66Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2012
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