Stanzas 24-30: Understanding the nun's cry

Stanza 24

Hopkins is gradually re-focusing on the storm, but before he completely does so, he recalls that all the while this was happening he was safe in Wales, ‘On a pastoral forehead', reminding us of the quiet rural setting of St. Beuno's. We often think of where we were when we hear of some other disaster, and then always associate the two.

Finally, Hopkins is ready to return to the climax of the storm and the poem itself. We hear just what the nun was calling- we've waited for her words from stanza 19 till now. ‘O Christ, Christ come quickly' were her words, echoing almost the last verse of the Bible:

• ‘christens' is a technical term denoting baptism: to name someone as a Christian
• the oxymoron of ‘wild-worst Best' comes to mean that in her worst extremity she is calling Christ, her best, to her.

Stanza 25

Hopkins asks the question: ‘What did she mean?' He makes two suggestions.

Firstly, that she is wanting Christ as her bridegroom or lover:

• he contrasts that attitude with the disciples' panic when they thought they were sinking and wanted Jesus as their rescuer:

• ‘Gennesareth' is merely another name for the Sea of Galilee, the name of the lake in northern Israel, prone to such sudden storms.

The second suggestion is that she was asking for martyrdom (‘the crown') to come quickly.

• Hopkins plays with the word ‘keen' to mean both ‘biting cold' and ‘eager'.
• ‘crown' is tied to martyrdom in the Bible, as in:

Stanza 26

The stanza expands on this last suggestion of what the nun may have meant, working it up to almost mystical proportions. The contrast, or opposition, set up at the end of the previous stanza forms the basis for a series of further contrasts that become quite visionary.

Just as the heart is lifted on a misty, murky day when a clear blue sky finally emerges, so the nun may have felt comfort now, especially if we imagine a spring day, when the sky seems especially high. Or if it is at night when the mist clears, then how high the sky seems ‘with belled fire and the moth-soft Milky Way'. The soft, sibilant sounds are in stark contrast to the earlier description of the storm. Such a contrast seems almost escapist in its beauty. Certainly, it seems to lift us up right out of the hurly-burly of the storm. Is this what the nun wanted, to be lifted straight into the beauty of heaven? Was this her ‘heaven of desire'?

The last line echoes a biblical verse:

Stanza 27

Hopkins rejects both the previous two suggestions. It was neither a cry for help from her lover, Christ, nor a desire to escape to heaven as a martyr that caused her cry. Hopkins explains why not:

• it is primarily a difficult, sorrowful life that would cause such cries, not the sudden danger of a storm
• in such a difficult life, the appeal is to the suffering Christ (‘the Passion'), in the sense that Christ understands human suffering, too, and will draw near to comfort, especially in times of private, personal prayer (‘prayer apart')

However:

• the nun was in a sudden crisis, not in a life of drudgery
• ‘Other... her mind's burden' means her actual concerns at the moment of her cry were quite different from those of personal comfort or escape.

Stanza 28

Finally we come to what Hopkins believes the nun meant by her cry, ‘O Christ, Christ come quickly'.

The lines and verse form become broken as his excitement and stress grow to an emotional and imaginative climax. He can hardly get the words out. In a sense, this climax is the result of his training in the Ignatian mode of meditation, where the person is encouraged to live through an experience of Christ's life imaginatively and so become connected emotionally to it. Here, he is imagining the physical details of the nun's last moments and gets totally caught up in them.

What the nun experiences is no less than a vision of Christ coming towards her, walking on the water, as it were, coming as ‘the Master'.

We can link Hopkins' previous statements about Christ as master (stanzas 1, 10) with the Bible verses when his disciples use that term of him:

or

It is as though Christ has come again and called for the nun, as her master.

The diction here is full of terms of sovereignty:

• ‘Ipse' is the Latin for ‘himself', and the word used for Christ in the liturgy of the Mass. So it is as if Christ, the Lord and Judge of the living and dead, has come to take the nun personally. Hence her call
• ‘doom' is an older word for ‘judgement', as in ‘Doomsday'
• ‘ride in his triumph' could be an allusion to Christ's triumphal entry into Jerusalem:

or to the following Psalm:

which Paul quotes in the New Testament in connection with Christ's triumphal Ascension into heaven (Ephesians 4:8).

Stanza 29

What has happened to the idea of theodicy? Hopkins establishes in this stanza that a ‘good death' is always possible, however bad the causes of that death, and that this death is therefore a triumph, not a tragedy:

• the nun ‘read' the night aright, she knew the ‘who and the why', which after all, are the questions theodicy asks - Who did this? Why?
• if she knew the answers and accepted them, that is a ‘good death'
• in this, she is a ‘single eye', a reference to:

• not only did she ‘read' the truth, but her cry was a ‘wording' of this. Hopkins again plays with the idea of Christ as ‘the Word' of John 1:1, which we have already looked at.

The reference to Simon Peter is complex:

• it was Simon Peter who went to meet Christ when the latter was walking on the water:

• it is Simon Peter who is called the rock (‘Tarpeian' refers to a rock in Ancient Rome which was variously a place of execution, and where the Capitol was built.):

So in ‘the blast' of the storm, the nun is rock-like, unmoveable, and, in fact, becomes a beacon of light (back to ‘single-eye') which burns more brightly the harder the wind blows.

Stanza 30

Although Hopkins has more or less been addressing Christ, he now focuses on this address:

‘Jesu, heart's light, Jesu, maid's son..'

using the diction of a really simple hymn:

• ‘Jesu' is only used in devotional language, not theological. It is seen as one of the most intimate, personal ways in which believers can address Christ

• the language of l.4 is similarly intimate, almost sexual, ‘hadst glory of'.

He relates the date of the nun's actual death, 7th December, early on the Tuesday morning, to the Feast of the Immaculate Conception on 8th December (see Mary). In Catholic doctrine, Mary was conceived and born sinless, ‘without stain'.

In an elaborate conceit, Hopkins plays with the two meanings of the word ‘conceive':

• to become pregnant (Mary conceived Jesus physically)
• to form an idea of (the nun conceived Jesus in her mind or heart).

Thus the nun delivered the word/Word (carried over from the previous stanza) in a ‘heart-throe' (as opposed to the throes of physical labour), so that he was ‘birth of a brain'. (In Greek mythology, Zeus is sometimes credited with giving birth to Pallas Athene out of his head.)

• Tweet