著者

林 茂子

出版者

東京女子大学

雑誌

英米文学評論 (ISSN:04227808)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.6, no.2, pp.93-127, 1959

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Hopkins' poetry strikes us with the beauty and strength of the unique tension with which it overflows. In this essay the writer attempts to consider the nature of this tension in connection with the poet's notion of "self" and his sense of beauty. The poems of nature of the 1870's in which Hopkins admiringly describes beautiful individual things of nature impress the reader with the beauty and strength of tension and give him a feeling of vitality and animation. The present writer considers this tension to spring out when each one of God's creatures expresses its beautiful "self" to the full, unconsciously giving glory to the Creator. The beauty of the tension of self-expression is also perceived in "Harry Ploughman" in which the subject is not nature but a human being. Such is the basic form of Hopkinsian beauty. However, when human beings and therefore consciousness and will are involved, there can be a still higher kind of beauty, the most perfect and ideal of which is seen in Christ's character-unselfish love, magnanimity, tenderness, and the sternness which enabled him to go through the Passion, sacrificing himself for the sake of mankind. It is, in other words, the beauty of the tension of self-exhaustion or self-sacrifice, and this kind of beauty is what most strongly appeals both to the poet's soul and to the poet's senses. The former kind of beauty is, so to say, a beauty at saturation-natural, exhilarating, free, and at ease; while the latter is a beauty beyond saturation, intensely strained, spiritual, often "dangerous," laborious, and pathetic. At the end of this essay, "The Windhover" is referred to as a work in which these two kinds of beauty are contrasted and the poet's aspiration after the highest beauty is most touchingly presented.