AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OF Christopher Adamson for the degree of Master of Arts in English presented on April 8, 2014. Title: “Sorrow’s Springs are the Same”: Synoeciosis in the Poetry of Alfred Tennyson and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Abstract approved: ______________________________________________________ W. Chris Anderson Tennyson and Hopkins scholarship is dominated by a focus on antithetical dichotomies. Tennyson’s speakers are fractured selves focused on the gap between matter and spirit, faith and reason, solitude and community. Likewise, Hopkins’ doubled vocation as priest and poet is presented as a contradiction to the point that the transition from his early nature sonnets to his later terrible sonnets is seen as analogous of that conflict. However, both poets tend to represent contraries through the figure of synoeciosis rather than antithesis. Synoeciosis is the coupling of two contraries without the intention to oppose them. Rather than being a contradiction for its own sake, synoeciosis serves to illuminate a hidden truth, much like its parent figure, paradox. In this thesis, the poetry of Tennyson and Hopkins are read through the hermeneutic of synoeciosis, with the purpose of moving beyond dialectical thinking. Following Hopkins' writings on mystery and Giorgio Agamben's presentation of the influence of Messianic time on poetry, this thesis proposes that the Incarnation, as the coupling of the divine and human natures of Christ, is the pattern that influences all forms of doubling for these poets. ©Copyright by Christopher Adamson April 8, 2014 All Rights Reserved “Sorrow’s Springs are the Same”: Synoeciosis in the Poetry of Alfred Tennyson and Gerard Manley Hopkins by Christopher Adamson A THESIS submitted to Oregon State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Presented April 8, 2014 Commencement June 2014 Master of Arts thesis of Christopher Adamson presented on April 8, 2014 APPROVED: _____________________________________________________________________ Major Professor, representing English _____________________________________________________________________ Director of the School of Writing, Literature, and Film _____________________________________________________________________ Dean of the Graduate School I understand that my thesis will become part of the permanent collection of Oregon State University libraries. My signature below authorizes release of my thesis to any reader upon request. _____________________________________________________________________ Christopher Adamson, Author ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, I would like to thank my thesis advisor, Dr. Chris Anderson. Without his calm, yet persistent, prodding and generous support, I am certain that this project would neither have proceeded so smoothly nor as vigorously proposed the root of doubling for Hopkins. I am indebted to his instinct that there would be an established rhetorical figure describing the pattern of doubling found in the poetry. I would also like to thank my committee members, Dr. Peter Betjemann and Dr. Raymond Malewitz, whose advice has helped me clarify my thinking and make my prose more accessible. Through their courses, they have also given me essential skills for framing a project of this kind. I am grateful to the graduate school representative, Dr. Mark Porrovechio, for donating his time to this thesis committee. I would also like to extend my thanks to Dr. Meghan Freeman for her help and feedback when I was first formulating this project and for introducing me to “St. Simeon Stylites.” In tandem with everything else, I must thank the entire OSU community, especially as it is represented by the School of Writing, Literature, and Film, for its example of collegiality, which has strongly influenced my understanding of synoeciosis as communion. Finally, a most grateful thank you to my wife, Kristen, who paradoxically reignited my interest in Tennyson by introducing me to C. P. Cavafy. She was the answer when I entreated the Lord of life to “send my roots rain.” TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Introduction ...................................................................................................................1 1 Ghost Guessed: Reading Hopkins through the Hermeneutic of Synoeciosis ...........12 1.1 “Spring and Fall”...............................................................................................12 1.2 “The Windhover” ..............................................................................................21 1.3 Heraclitean Fire .................................................................................................26 1.4 The Continual Synoeciosis of Chronos and Kairos ..........................................29 1.5 Give Beauty Back .............................................................................................31 2 Things Fall Apart and Gash Gold-Vermillion: Reading Tennyson through Hopkins ........................................................................................................................39 2.1 Now No Matter Child the Double Name ..........................................................42 2.2 Send My Roots Rain .........................................................................................45 2.3 The Perfect Flower of Human Time .................................................................50 2.4 Neither Heaven nor Haven ................................................................................54 2.5 Come, Blessed Brother, Come: Participative Synoeciosis................................63 Conclusion: Eternal Processes Moving On ..................................................................68 Synoeciosis as an Act of Reading ...........................................................................71 Notes ............................................................................................................................75 Bibliography ................................................................................................................77 Adamson 1 Sorrow’s Springs are the Same: Synoeciosis in the Poetry of Alfred Tennyson and Gerard Manley Hopkins Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world In William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” the falcon goes up in in a helical movement that keeps getting wider, increasing the interstitial space between falcon and falconer. There is less meaning. There is less understanding. There is less communication. The opposites of heaven and earth find no meaningful connection. Being opposites, they seem to lack the ability to understand one another. The falcon is too far away and cannot hear the falconer. They are only brought back together by the grotesque abomination of the sphinx lumbering out of its ancient lethargy: an anti- incarnation. Yeats’ widening gyre is an excellent image for how we now read poetry and how we have read Gerard Manley Hopkins. He is either a hybrid of the falcon and falconer, spread between contrary inclinations and vocations, or the falcon to our falconer, whose “countless cries” become less intelligible as he rises in his ecstasy to that bright sun. We do not understand how the sensual falcon can find its way back to the celibate falconer. We do not understand how the same crushed, desiccated soul of the terrible sonnets can end with the final coda, “I am happy, so happy” (Martin, 413). We do not understand because we are looking for a confused, tamed falcon in a wild windhover. The falcon may not hear the falconer, but we can see where wings, wind and even the very boundaries of that gyre buckle and “Fall, gall themselves, and Adamson 2 gash gold-vermillion.” Whether clasping all things together or bursting apart into a fire a “billion / Times told lovelier, more dangerous,” the bird shows itself and stirs the falconer’s heart. Whereas the imagery employed by Yeats suggests that there is only emptiness between two contraries, the soundless air, the imagery of Hopkins suggests that meaning is found in that same space, which is not empty, but filled with an underlying hypostasis symbolized by fire. Hopkins’ poetry suggests that contraries are a method for communicating meaning, rather than inhibiting understanding, As with Hopkins, we have read Alfred Tennyson through the hermeneutic of the widening gyre. The more he looks into the paradox of a nature that is “red in tooth and claw” or a faith that suggests we believe what “we cannot prove,” the further the falcon gets from the falconer. We are drawn in when he unabashedly rejoices in the dark joys of mourning, but turn away when his attempts at dialectics offers us a tacked-on and flattened-out epithalamion after canto after canto of raw elegy (Shaw 4).1 The antithetical nature of the widening gyre is encoded even into his speakers, who are largely seen as fractured selves focused on the gap between matter and spirit, faith and reason, solitude and community. However, above the cyclical sorrows of the speaker of In Memoriam, the morning star and the evening star are only names that signify the same celestial body, daily reminding us that Tennyson mimics Dante’s hope that everything is moved by: That God, which ever lives and loves, One God, one law, one element, And one far-off divine event, To which the whole creation moves. (In Memoriam, Epilogue: Lines 144-147) Adamson 3 Whereas Yeats’ poem exemplifies the painful relationship of two irreconcilable contraries, Hopkins’ entire oeuvre is marked by complementarity, as he celebrates the unity of “all things counter, original, spare, strange” (133). Tennyson may seem a marked contrast to Hopkins, in some respects the epitome of a poet of the widening gyre, but when we read Tennyson through Hopkins, we notice the same pattern of doubling. This is a poetics not of antithesis but synoeciosis, where the priest-poet and the Laureate both proclaim harmony rather than rupture. As the OED defines it, synoeciosis is “a figure by which contrasted or heterogeneous things are associated or coupled, e.g. contrary qualities attributed to the same subject.” A linked compound itself of the Greek words for with and one’s own, synoeciosis is the coupling of two contraries without the intention to oppose them (Burton). Like economy, it has its roots in oikos, the word for a household, and was used to describe the joining together of demos and polis to form the early city-states (Agamben). In botany, the same roots form syneocism, denoting plants that have both sperm and eggs on the same gametophyte. Following that, synoeciosis can be the inclusion of two contraries in one subject. Rather than being a contradiction for its own sake, synoeciosis serves to illuminate a hidden truth, much like its parent figure, paradox. In The Lives of the Poets, Samuel Johnson refers to this figure as discordia concors and defines it as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike” (200). In their poetry, Hopkins and Tennyson link contraries to make a shared space where heaven and earth can meet.2