“To See Thee I Must [See] Thee, to Love, Love”

Abstract

In early poems from his years at Oxford, before his conversion to Roman Catholicism and reception into the church by John Henry Newman, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote several poems, “The Half-way House,” “Nondum,” “Let me to Thee,” and “My prayers must meet a brazen heaven,” where the absence of God—of the direct, immediate experience of God—is the theme. The poet seems to long for an ontological moment of being in his words, “inscaped” by God. In his childhood faith of the established religion of the Church of England, he has known only a God who is “above.” When he prays the paradox, “To see Thee, I must see Thee, to love, love,” Hopkins is setting out a major theme of his poetic and personal endeavors. This note of longing for an immanent God will be both fulfilled and frustrated in his life and in his art. Duns Scotus’s two incarnations of Christ, into the Eucharist and into human nature, will bring much of that fulfillment philosophically, as his acceptance of the Real Presence brought it spiritually.