Of our selection of Hopkins's poetry, the first three samples come from the Welsh sonnets (those written in 1877 when he was studying theology at St. Beuno's College in Wales) and the next three from the "terrible" sonnets (written around 1885 when he was a University lecturer in Dublin, Ireland). The last was written about a month before his death from typhoid fever in June 1889.

1. Describe as precisely as you can the difference in the tone or mood of the Welsh and "terrible" clusters. Avoid vague oppositions like "happy" and "sad" and search instead for precise and subtle terms to identify the speaker's frame of mind.

2. Consider the relationship of the speaker to his god in each cluster. What differences and similarities do you find?

"God's Grandeur"
3. Hopkins is a very careful craftsman, using his chosen form to maximum advantage. To what use does he put the volta or turn between octave and sestet in this Petrarchan sonnet?

4. What do the two similes "like shining from shook foil" and "like the ooze of oil / Crushed" tell us about the power of Hopkins's God in the octave? How do these figures differ from the metaphor used to describe the Holy Ghost in line 14? Do you find any reference to Christ in the poem?

"As Kingfishers Catch Fire ..."
5. In this sonnet, Hopkins seems to claim that all God's creatures, from animate kingfishers to inanimate stones and bells, have "selves" that they proclaim to the world in different ways. If each creature is unique, what do they share in common?

6. Carefully compare Christ as he is described in the sestet here with Christ the Hero of "Carrion Comfort."

7. By studying GMH's manuscripts with infra-red scanning machines, scholars estimate that these three "terrible" sonnets were written in this order:
1. "I wake and feel the fell of dark ..."
2. "No worst, there is none."
3. "Carrion Comfort."
Do you find anything in the content of the poems that might support this claim? For instance, does the pessimism increase or decrease? Does comfort seem to be more, or less, possible?

8. "Thou art indeed just" was one of GMH's last poems before his death. Would you say it was closer in quality to the Welsh, or to the terrible, sonnets?
 

The "Woman Question" is more than one question: it is a constellation of concerns about the status of women of all classes in Victorian society. Most of the intellectual debate is conducted by the upper middle-class intelligentsia and is colored by their perspective.

After the lecture, work through these positions thinking about which texts provide exemplars of which positions, and the logic on which these positions are based. Take care here: we are not asking you simply to give YOUR opinions of women's rights, but to visualize the cultural contexts in which differing opinions arose from differing initial assumptions.
 

Some Recurrent Questions:

1. What is a woman's role within the marriage contract?
--Should she be granted independent status before the law, or it is right that she should forfeit her legal identity when she marries, and be subsumed under her husband's?
--Should she be entitled to own her own property?
Some possible positions?--:
Position A: A woman's dependence is divinely willed. She should be submissive and obedient to her husband.
Position B: A woman should be a companion to her husband as well as a helpmeet.
Position C: A woman should be her husband's equal enjoying equal civic, economic, religious, and other social privileges and responsibilities.
 

2. What kind of education should a woman pursue?
Position A:
She should cultivate the heart and sensibilities rather than intellectual capacities or powers of reason [as Wollstonecraft prescribed]. Bear in mind that a woman's brain is believed to be smaller than a man's (page 1719 of NA).
Position B: She should strive to be accomplished. Although it may not be necessary for her to educate herself in formal fields (like the Classics), she should learn a modicum of facts; she should understand basic theology; she should be companionable to her husband if not quite up to his intellectual standards.
Position C: Women should receive the same educational opportunities as men. They should be permitted to go to formal schools and universities, be taught by educational experts not amateurs (governesses or mothers), and participate in the current intellectual debates with their male contemporaries.
 

3. Should women pursue vocations, and if so, would it be possible for a woman to pursue her own career as well as be a wife and mother?
Position A: The vocation of wife and mother is naturally what women are born for.
Position B: Yes; women should pursue their own careers. It would be possible for them to do so if certain modifications were made in domestic arrangements.
 

4. Should women be permitted to vote?
Position A: The issue is too radical even to arise.
Position B: No, women are not capable of the kind of reasoning that voting requires.
Position C: Yes. Unless they vote, they cannot express their opinions publicly and so influence government policy.