“Gorged with Proof”

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" “Gorged with Proof” "
Elizabeth Howard

Document Type	:	AL
Record Number	:	1081918
Doc. No	:	LA125547
Call No	:	‭10.1163/15685292-02204005‬
Language of Document	:	English
Main Entry	:	Elizabeth Howard
Title & Author	:	“Gorged with Proof” [Article]\ Elizabeth Howard
Publication Statement	:	Leiden: Brill
Title of Periodical	:	Religion and the Arts
Date	:	2018
Volume/ Issue Number	:	22/4
Page No	:	469–487
Abstract	:	This essay examines the narrated recollections of the spy in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s unfinished poem “A soliloquy of one of the spies left in the wilderness” (1863). Particular attention is paid to the spy’s account of the Israelites’ wilderness wanderings and slavery in Egypt in order to examine Hopkins’s depiction of a will in rebellion against God. After considering the poem’s relationship to Hopkins’s undergraduate years in light of his imminent conversion to Catholicism, the essay investigates the ways in which the soliloquy’s confused chronologies and emendations call attention to the spy’s spiritual disorders. By reading the spy’s internal disorder as a corollary to the social disintegration in Eden that Hopkins identified in Adam and Eve’s rebellion, the essay argues that the soliloquy attributes the speaker’s inner disorientation to his rebellious will set against God. Although the soliloquy appropriates descriptions of the lush Canaanite landscape to describe Egyptian slavery as comfortable, even luxurious, the vestiges of violence repeatedly interrupt the soliloquy’s relentless insistence on Egypt’s “pleasance.” As the soliloquy’s rhetorical maneuvers repeatedly fail to justify the spy’s rebellion, Hopkins explores and displays the impact of spiritual rebellion on the human psyche. This essay examines the narrated recollections of the spy in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s unfinished poem “A soliloquy of one of the spies left in the wilderness” (1863). Particular attention is paid to the spy’s account of the Israelites’ wilderness wanderings and slavery in Egypt in order to examine Hopkins’s depiction of a will in rebellion against God. After considering the poem’s relationship to Hopkins’s undergraduate years in light of his imminent conversion to Catholicism, the essay investigates the ways in which the soliloquy’s confused chronologies and emendations call attention to the spy’s spiritual disorders. By reading the spy’s internal disorder as a corollary to the social disintegration in Eden that Hopkins identified in Adam and Eve’s rebellion, the essay argues that the soliloquy attributes the speaker’s inner disorientation to his rebellious will set against God. Although the soliloquy appropriates descriptions of the lush Canaanite landscape to describe Egyptian slavery as comfortable, even luxurious, the vestiges of violence repeatedly interrupt the soliloquy’s relentless insistence on Egypt’s “pleasance.” As the soliloquy’s rhetorical maneuvers repeatedly fail to justify the spy’s rebellion, Hopkins explores and displays the impact of spiritual rebellion on the human psyche.
Descriptor	:	dramatic soliloquy
Descriptor	:	Exodus narrative
Descriptor	:	Hopkins
Descriptor	:	locus amoenus
Descriptor	:	rebellion
Descriptor	:	will
Location & Call number	:	‭10.1163/15685292-02204005‬