Mon Oncle, Gerard Manley Hopkins “. . . the great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of the earth remains to be written.” – Stevens (from Necessary Angel) Parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents and cousins, nephews and nieces, and even close friends have dynamics that depend in part on whom was born first: who has developed a personality and who remains in the process of developing a personality. For instance, a nephew may choose to emulate one uncle and ignore another in the nephew’s continuing process of self-development. Often times it is an affinity of interests or respect for behavior that determines emulation; otherwise rejection is often chosen. If we expand the idea of ‘family’ further to vocation where a novice chooses among possible mentors we can see that professionals in a field may be seen as a family of sorts. Artists and poets pick and choose among mentors and heroes for all sorts of reasons. It has been suggested in blogs that Wallace Stevens may have purposely chosen Gerard Manley Hopkins to emulate, chosen him as a mentor an uncle of sorts. If he did choose Hopkins early in his career as a kind of uncle, Stevens chose him as the kind of uncle that one pushes against, to debate as a nephew might argue with an uncle at a family gathering. Stevens probably had lots of respect for his uncle Gerard but ‘begged to differ’ regarding Hopkins romance with and reliance on religion and language as a poet and person in the 20th Century. Gerard Manley Hopkins would have been the perfect sounding board for Stevens’ differences with Ezra pound and William Carlos Williams as well. Hopkins’ ideas of Inscapeand Instress were adopted by the modernist. Pound stripped Inscape of its religious significance and used the idea in Imagism and its movement. The image took center stage for much of modern poetry and its articulation maintained its magic (or supernatural possibility). Hopkins certainly thought the Inscape image had a supernatural connection to Christ. The secularists, attempting to rid the image of connotation that makes it a symbol, attempted to make the image more particular, more actual, to make all objects equal. (Morse, Life as Poetry,116) Modernism often attempted to associate itself with magic or pseudo-science. Rimbaud believed that through the image the poet might be able to roll back experience to ‘the fall’ and thus alter or create the reality of his choice. This core concept underpinned Rimbaud’s poetry in his effort to make it what Stephen Spender called “absolutely modern.” (Lecture) When he turned nineteen and recognized his mistake, he smartened up and dropped poetry to become a more profitable gun-runner. Pound also believed in ‘abracadabra.’ His tiger cage experience in Pisa Italy where the allies caught up to him during WWII is only one example: He demanded to speak to Roosevelt. He informed his captors that with the right arrangement of words he could make the President see the error of his ways and join the Fascist’s side of the war. Even T. S. Eliot uses an analogy between chemistry and poetry in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” After reading a blog that attempted to draw a connection between Hopkins and Stevens using the fact that Stevens uses the word “vermillion” and a red bird in his poem I took up the challenge of re-reading “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” with Hopkins “Windhover” as my monocle. Stevens’ poem is a likely successor to his earlier “Sunday Morning” pigeons and all, a step further away from Imagism and toward symbolism. In “Sunday Morning” Stevens grapples with modernity’s dismissal of tradition and religion and what that dismissal means for the culture. In “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” Stevens goes further to rid the mind of any romance for the supernatural in language. In doing so, he rebuffs Pound and Williams and Hopkins, implying that they are carrying with them a tradition, not something new. Williams would have felt the sting that the poem delivers, and for different reasons Hopkins would have as well. To make clear my reading of the philosophical “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,” we would first need to agree on our understanding of Hopkins’ religious poem and its relationship of inscape to imagism. Then, I would need to point out the key ideas that lead me to the understanding I have had since bringing these two poets together. To achieve the first of these tasks, I went to Poets.org for a popular and yet respectable understanding of the poem “Windhover” by Ange Mlinko. Mlinko summarizes: Hopkins’s mimetic language turns from describing the kestrel’s flight in the first part of the sonnet (the eight-line octet) to describing how its dynamics are also hidden in other things—and, ultimately, his own soul. As when the kestrel is buffeted by the wind and then comes back stronger, fire breaks from things when they “buckle.” (Poets.org) Mlinko goes on to suggest to us that Hopkins is reminding his readers that so like the bird of the air, earth too is in its behavior, the poet writing and the reader too behave similarly. Many readers of “Windhover” refer to it as a love poem because of its intense affirmation of connection that it attempts between life and Christ. The poem is similar to “God’s Grandeur” in its pointing out the harmony of life and the supernatural and the similarity between the poet and god. Mlinko instructs the reader on Hopkins’ basic tenet of Inscape, including its connection to his spiritual mentor whose ideas he embraced, the medieval theologian Duns Scotus: For Hopkins, being able to glimpse the inner form of things—as the ashen ember breaking open and revealing the glowing gold—is a special gift of the poet, courtesy of God the Maker. . . . The poet, then, sees through mere appearance to the particularity and freshness of every living thing. (Poets.org) Inscape then is the “glimpse” of the “inner form of things.” For Hopkins the glimpses were given by Christ, perhaps as Christ would see them, sacred when seen by the reader or viewer. (Poets.org) Inscape may have a connection to William Blake’s “Everything is blessed.” The intensity of the poem has caused many readers to think of it as a kind of love sonnet to Christ, a romance of sorts. Before I move on to my reading of “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” we should recognize the similarity between Hopkins’ Inscape and what has been called secularized Inscape or what the Imagists were attempting to do with poetry. In the book The Imagist Poem by William Pratt he uses Pound’s definition to clarify F. S. Flint’s famous three rules in writing the Imagist poem: “An ‘Image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” Pound goes on to declare, “It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.” (18) Pratt lets T. E. Hulme clarify Hulme’s image as a “visual chord” by including, “Each word must be an image seen, not a counter.” (28) Pratt does summarize what constitutes an Imagist poem: “A moment of revealed truth, rather than a structure of consecutive events of thoughts.” How far away is Hopkins’ Inscape from these definitions of Imagism? I contend that they are one and the same after we leave religion out of the equation. The reader is experiencing a “maximum of visual content” (29) that allows him/her to “glimpse the inner form of things,” (Poets.org) to see “through mere appearance to the particularity and freshness of every living thing.” (Hopkins) In Stevens’ poem we have something very different in style going on. Stevens leans more heavily on symbolism. Anna Balakian in her book The Symbolist Movement tells us that Symbolism is somewhere between Guy Michaud’s and Edmund Wilson’s definitions. Michaud tells us, “symbolism would seem to be a ball tossed from one epoch to the other, until it disappears, uncaught into a pit.” (156) Wilson is a little more helpful: “Symbolism may be defined as an attempt of carefully studied means—a complicated association of ideas represented by a medley of metaphors—to communicate unique personal feelings.” (156) Balakian clarifies: “The most successful form of the symbol was that created by the fusion of the concrete or physical reality with abstract or inner mood.” (110) When in the first stanza of Stevens’ poem he “mocks” “in magnificent measure,” he is mocking the supernatural utterances made in the poem by an imagined woman, but we must remember it it his imagined woman. He realizes he is mocking himself because his words don’t suffice to articulate the meaning he intends. He joins the “radiant bubble” so that his mocking is also a “watery syllable.” (Poems, 16) By mocking both the woman’s supernatural suggestion and his own utterance he is promising to explain in the poem why magic or supernatural expectations and explanations don’t work in poetry. It isn’t going to be the abracadabra that changes anyone reading poetry. Stevens is outlining his realist naturalism for the reader, recognizing the gap between thought and articulation, the inadequacy that is language, or as Hugh Kenner stated, “language . . . can mime the wordless world only by a kind of coincidence.” (Modern Views, 119) In the second stanza of his poem we have a direct assault on Hopkins’ Inscape if we choose to read the poem not as more generally a poem on love and language as many scholars do but more specifically as a poem demonstrating the limits of language and debunking it as a passageway to a religious experience. Though this stanza is often seen as his not being able to cross into experience love as a youth, it may be in this reading that Stevens is not able to go back to religious anecdotes. If the “red bird” is meant to be a windhover flying across the vermillion field while looking for its choir, then the bird will be rewarded when ‘birds of a feather’ are found. Stevens asks the reader as the reader’s benefactor whether the reader would like him to “uncrumple this much crumpled thing.” He may be suggesting that he is willing to unbuckle or open for inspection any thing for his heirs (who “persist with anecdotal bliss”). If he did open a “thing,” an object he would not be revealing Inscape or the “truth” of Imagists but the limits of language to utter the intended meaning. Now that the West has crossed the ‘meridian’ into modernity and arrived with its science, things may be made clear to those who literally “make believe a starry connaissance:” Reason rules. In his effort to remind the reader of the curls in nature, that there are other religious traditions, other than ones who bring a god into every thing uttered. (Poems 16) In stanzas four through nine the poem rescues love from the myth of Eden and the supernatural star to give us the skull like an apple falling from its own weight to rot. The fiery couples merely measure “the verve of earth” and might be better thought of as fireflies that possess a quick “bond to all that dust.” Men over forty paint in the universal hue of slate and lecture as introspective exiles on “Hyacinth alone.” Each of the five stanza, or “parables” as Stevens suggests, reminds us that the honey of earth (earth always with a lower case e) “comes and goes at once,” and once the honey is gone couples are grotesque, warty squashes that the sky laughs at as it washes “into rinds by rotting winter winds.” Again and again the reader is brought back down to earth with a lower case e. With these images in mind how should Stevens, made of love, find the “music and manner of paladins / To make oblation fit . . . this great hymn?” (Poems, 17-19) Stevens leaves the reader seeing life more as a scientist than a priest or minister, more in the cycle where death brings life without pretending here is anything else. From Stanzas 10 to 12 Stevens brings the reader back to “silver-ruddy, gold-vermillion fruits” on a tree that lacks balm or magic, no tree of knowledge or life. Yes, the poem suggests, the poet may place in his poem the “memorabilia of the mystic spouts” that water their soils (not souls). Stevens calls our attention to the fate of all birds, even in their choirs, even in their mythology of purpose and destiny – that even in the starry night the frog croaks very odious chords. If “Sunday Morning” didn’t put the matter of religion to rest, Stevens brings back a pigeon, blue this time circling, tired. Stevens when young studied man and found him (himself included) a gobbet, the food for worms perhaps and not a reason for celebrating his being “dapple-dawn-drawn.” When old, Stevens studied love, nothing concrete, and the studious ghost found “that fluttering things have so distinct a shade.” (Poems, 29) Is he suggesting that love is more like a bird, a pigeon perhaps or is he suggesting the fluttering things or abstract things are distinct shades separate from concrete things that are other kinds of shades? What does this mean for Inscapes secular or otherwise? If Stevens’ poem were mine, I may have named it “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” to bring in the lack of two eyes being used to see the world by my uncle. I would have also liked the pretension of the style during the era that produced the monocle. When Stevens brings in the ancient Chinese in section 3, he brings in for me the use of the second eye. (Poems, 17) The world owns more than one religion, more than one way to view that world and each one sees itself as the truth. For me, if I had written the poem with Hopkins’ romance with Earth and Christ in mind and Stevens’ “earth” also in mind, Stevens’ title would have fit just fine.