The question of the contribution of Christianity to modern English Literature is an exceedingly complex and difficult one to answer. The simplest and perhaps most satisfactory way of dealing with it is to show how the Christian faith unites the work of two poets who seem to have little in common beyond their faith and their influence on the present generation. I refer to Hopkins and Eliot, the Roman Catholic priest and the Anglo-Catholic layman. Considering that both may be regarded as representatives of Catholic Christianity, and that they are contemporaries, if not in life, at least in literary influence (the first two editions of Hopkins' Poems were more or less contemporary with Eliot's Prufrock and Ash Wednesday), it would seem only natural to look for some resemblance, if not inter-dependence, between them. But this tendency has been discouraged by Eliot himself with his disparaging remarks on Hopkins in After Strange Gods (1934). Here he openly confesses his inability to “share the enthusiasm which many critics feel for this poet.” Moreover, it must be admitted that echoes of Hopkins seem few and far between in Eliot's poetry, and that, for all their common Christianity, the sensibility of one is entirely foreign to that of the other.

It is true that Canon Philip Martin has juxtaposed The Wreck of the Deutschland with Ash Wednesday in his book Mastery and Mercy: A Study of Two Religious Poems (London, 1957); but he does not profess to find any influence of Hopkins on Eliot, nor does he institute any detailed comparison between the two poets. He simply studies the poems side by side, as two instances of the “poetry of conversion,” whose difficulty calls for interpretation. Perhaps because of this absence of comparison, he fails to notice a fundamental difference between these poems: that whereas Ash Wednesday may well be described as a “poem of conversion,” the poetic expression of Eliot's recent confirmation in the Anglican Church and of his spiritual difficulties as a new convert, The Wreck of the Deutschland is a mature poetic statement of Hopkins' Catholic view of life after seven years of “elected silence” within the Society of Jesus. In this respect of maturity, the latter poem is more aptly to be compared with the Four Quartets of Eliot, who may be said to develop in them his own mature Christian view of life. Between these two poems there are, in fact, not a few parallels of thought and even of phraseology, which suggest that Eliot may have revised his opinion of Hopkins in the meantime. The question of influence is, in any case, of secondary importance. It is more interesting and instructive to draw a comparison between two poets who stand, in their different ways, for the Catholic inheritance in modern English literature. However widely they may differ in temperament and background, they are increasingly drawn together by their common faith and by the imprint this makes on their poetic imagination.

In the first place, the general theme of shipwreck in The Wreck of the Deutschland naturally suggests a comparison with Dry Salvages, the third of Eliot's Four Quartets. Hopkins has taken for his poetic subject a particular disaster which occurred at the mouth of the Thames, when the German liner was driven upon a shoal amid “the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps.” Eliot likewise reflects, though in more general terms, on the imminence of such disaster over the lives of the Gloucester fishermen, as they sail northwards to the fishing banks off the Newfoundland coast only to “end their voyage on the sand.” He sympathizes particularly with the “anxious worried women” who have “seen their sons or husbands setting forth, and not returning.”

There are further similarities of detail. Both poets have a feeling for “the granite teeth” which circumscribe the ocean, and for “the ground swell” underlying “the menace and caress of wave that breaks on water.” Only in Hopkins this feeling is explicitly related to God Himself, as “ground of being and granite of it,” who encloses the “gulf's sides” by His divine power. Both poets, likewise, have the idea of a“bell of the last annunciation” which serves to warn men of impending death and to prepare them for eternal life. Only in Hopkins the bell is metaphorically identified with the “virginal tongue” of the nun who calls out: “Christ, come quickly!” Finally, both poets lead up to the thought of Mary, the Mother of God, whom Eliot hails in the beautiful lyric of his fourth movement as “Figlia del tuo figlio” (recalling St. Bernard's prayer in Dante's Paradiso). Only Hopkins, while meditating on Mary and her feast that “followed the night” of disaster, directs his prayer to “Jesu, maid's son.”

Within these similarities, however, there is a notable difference of religious outlook, owing to the different temperament of the two poets. On the one hand, there is a sensuous immediacy in Hopkins' poetic description of the shipwreck, which is “felt on the pulses.” Yet for him sense is not divided from spirit; rather it is through sense that spirit operates. Hence he views the disaster as a “stroke” of the providence of God, who is both “sway of the sea” and “master of the tides.” In the eternal design it is to bring in a harvest of souls, who are saved by the word of the nun which gives meaning to “the unshapeable shock night.” For the terror of the tempest is, in reality, no more than a manifestation of the love of Christ, the word of “the Father compassionate.”

Eliot, on the other hand, ponders at length and in abstract terms on the meaning of “the drifting wreckage,” “the slow leakage,” “the wastage” that litters the surface of the ocean. Mournfully, he looks over “the waste sad time stretching before and after,” in a spirit of monotony no less than of meditation. Wearily, he asks, “Where is there an end of it?” and as wearily he answers, “There is no end, but addition.” Not here, it seems, is that divine presence which for Hopkins is everywhere; not here, is the hand of God which for Hopkins is ever thrusting through the appearances of this world and infusing new meaning and life into them.

Here is only the bell, “rung by the unhurried ground swell,” whose tolling is as monotonous as the unending expanse of the ocean itself, or as the days in the lives of the fishermen which succeed each other with dull regularity, “while the North East lowers over shallow banks unchanging and erosionless.” Amid this regularity, there is but one disturbing element, and that is “the undeniable clamour of the bell of the last annunciation,” where in the prevailing fear of disaster seems to have its grim fulfillment. Yet the picture is not wholly one of despair. As a Christian poet, Eliot points to a gleam of hope amid the “encircling gloom”: “only the hardly, barely prayable prayer of the one Annunciation.”

It is precisely in this whispered prayer to Mary, the Ave Maria or “angelic salutation,” recalling the thought of Ash Wednesday, that Eliot rejoins the religious poetry of Hopkins. Central to the Christian thought of both poets is the mystery of the Incarnation; and this mystery is itself enshrined in their common devotion to her who is the Mother of God.” Only, as we have seen, whereas Eliot addresses his prayer directly to her, both in Dry Salvages and in Ash Wednesday, Hopkins perfers to speak through her directly to Christ.

Even here, however, there is an important difference between the two poets. Eliot is not so much a religious, as a meditative poet: the thought of his poetry is directed not so much outwards to God, as inwards to his own soul. Four Quartets is a private meditation on man in the modern world; and its movement is away from the deception of outward appearances “into the world of perpetual solitude”—the inner self whose center is “at the still point of the turning world.” This point is conceived not as a personal being, nor as an object of prayer, but as the goal of man's contemplation and aspiration. Even if it is described in terms of Incarnation, its stillness seems to point rather to Greek or Indian mystical philosophy than to the Incarnate Word of Christianity.

Hopkins, on the other hand, for all his passionate absorption in Scotist metaphysics, or perhaps because of it, is always intensely personal in his religious poetry. Even amid the metaphysical conceits of his poem The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe, he is never merely meditative. For him, as a follower of Ignatian spirituality, meditation is never an end in itself but only a means to personal prayer and living contact with God. Hence, from beginning to end, The Wreck of the Deutschland is a prayer to Christ, a personal relationship between “thou” and “me,” as stated in the very opening line. Its steadfast aim, repeated in the conclusions of each part, is the Ignatian ideal of “the greater glory of God.” Its movement, unlike that of Four Quartets, is impulsive and enthusiastic, as expressed in the “fling of a heart” with which the poet finds refuge in “the heart of the Host.”

Such an attitude, so characteristic of religious poetry, may—as Eliot suggests in After Strange Gods—involve a limitation of poetic range; but it certainly contributes to a greater intensity of poetic feeling. One might even say that there is more poetic feeling packed into a single stanza of The Wreck of the Deutschland than there is in all the Four Quartets together. But this would perhaps be an unfair comparison. The characteristic strength of Hopkins is in his intensity of feeling while that of Eliot is in his quiet tone of meditation.

This contrast between the enthusiastic devotion of Hopkins and the more restrained meditation of Eliot recalls a similar contrast between the Catholic-Crashaw and the Anglican Herbert—two metaphysical poets of that seventeenth century in which both Hopkins and Eliot have their spiritual roots. This parallel points to a difference in spirituality between the Roman Catholic and the Anglican Church, which seems to have persisted from the time of the Reformation, and which becomes particularly apparent in ages when the Catholic influence is renewed within the Anglican Church.

In general, one might say that the Anglican spirituality, as revealed in Herbert and Eliot, has a sober, refined quality, delighting in what Eliot terms (in his essay on “Dante”) the “pageantry of the high dream.” Yet for this very reason, it is removed from the reality of common life, while, on the other hand, it tends to envisage God as remote “in a cloud of unknowing.” It is not perhaps a spirituality for all men, but only for such as fit harmoniously within the English “establishment.” All the same, it would be wrong to overlook the individual differences between Herbert and Eliot. There is more of a personal tone in the religious poetry of the former; while the somewhat cold and abstract meditations of Eliot may owe as much to his Puritan background in New England as to his Anglican profession.

The Catholic spirituality, on the other hand, as revealed in Crashaw and Hopkins, has a more personal and intimate quality of tender devotion. It takes full account of the human need of imaginative and emotive aids to prayer; and at the same time it seems to penetrate that “cloud of unknowing” between the soul and God on which Eliot lays such emphasis. Thus it is less “aristocratic” than the Anglican spirituality; and, if at times it seems by contrast somewhat vulgar and lacking in artistic taste, it may be said to have a wider appeal, and an instinct for human needs.

If the parallel between The Wreck of the Deutschland and Dry Salvages is more obvious on the level of subject-matter, there is a closer and more fundamental parallel with Little Gidding, the last of Four Quartets. Here the element is no longer that of water, but that of fire; and this is the element that is more congenial to Hopkins' impulsive temperament. Outwardly, it seems that water is the setting for the theme of shipwreck; but in the religious vision of Hopkins, the water is itself surrounded and penetrated by the divine element of fire.

From the beginning of his poem, Hopkins presents the action of God in terms of “lightning and lashed rod,” to which he reacts “with fire of stress” so as to “flash from the flame to the flame.” For him the living God is a “burning fire,” whether under the fearful aspect of lightning or under the gentle aspect of love; and as a result of his personal experience of the divine action, he prays that “with fire” God may forge His will even in rebellious man. It is, indeed, the searing effect of God's mastery, triumphing over man's sinful opposition, that disposes the soul to welcome the revelation of His merciful love—“To bathe in his fall-gold mercies, to breathe in his all-fire glances.”

The Wreck of the Deutschland may be said, as a whole, to look from the element of water, in which the ship meets with temporal disaster, to the higher element of fire, in which the crew and passengers find eternal life. Everything in the poem leads, as by a kind of sacramental symbolism, through “the all of water” and the ocean of man's “motionable mind” to the fiery sunrise of Christ's risen glory. For if the water is symbolic of the passion, into which He plunged for our sins, the fire of sunrise is symbolic of the resurrection, in which He rose for our justification. Hence the climax of the poem occurs in the opening words of the penultimate stanza:

Now burn, new born to the world, Double-naturèd name, The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled, Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame.

This unexpected connection of water with fire is derived from the Christian symbolism of baptism. For in the New Testament it is repeatedly stated that, whereas John the Baptist baptized with the “water of repentance,” the baptism of Christ would be in water and fire—or in water and the Holy Spirit. Thus before His ascension into heaven, Christ is reported as telling His disciples: “John indeed baptized with water; but you shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost, not many days hence”—that is, on the feast of Pentecost.

It is to this spiritual fire that Eliot makes explicit reference in Little Gidding, whose opening words “Midwinter spring” seem to echo Hopkins' description of God's action as “a winter and warm.” In the same paradoxical vein, he speaks of “pentecostal fire in the dark time of the year,” which “stirs the dumb spirit” with “glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier.” The fire follows the water, just as in the sacrament of baptism the anointing with chrism (signifying the Spirit) follows the cleansing with water, or as baptism itself is followed by the further sacrament of confirmation.

The subsequent lyric of the fourth movement is charged with parallels to The Wreck of the Deutschland; and one suspects that Eliot must have re-read this poem on the very eve of composing Little Gidding. The “pentecostal fire” is now represented in the traditional form of “the dove descending”—not with peace and love, as we would expect, but “with flame of incandescent terror.” For the poet is thinking not only of the Holy Spirit, but also of the German bombers with their deadly load of incendiary bombs spreading terror in wartime London. Yet, just as Hopkins mystically identifies his own spiritual anguish in Part I, and the sufferings of the passengers in Part II, with the Passion of Christ, so Eliot here identifies the destruction of the German bombers with the descent of the Holy Spirit.

The parallelism does not merely consist in the way both poets find the presence of divine love in human evil, but extends to their very phraseology. The general idea of Eliot's “the dove descending” seems an echo of Hopkins' conclusion in Part I:

Thou are lightning and love, I found it, a winter and warm; Father and fondler of heart thou hast wrung; Hast thy dark descending and most art merciful then.

In particular, the “flame of incandescent terror” is reminiscent of the “lightning and lashed rod” which forced Hopkins to confess the “terror of Christ”; while “the only hope” proposed by Eliot, “to be redeemed from fire by fire,” is surely suggested by the expedient of Hopkins in the same situation, “to flash from the flame to the flame”—that is, from the flame of destruction to the living flame of divine love. The former “intolerable shirt of flame” (in Eliot's phrase) recalls the frantic efforts of Hopkins to escape from “the frown of his face” and “the hurtle of hell” before and behind.

Thus, whereas the element of water only served to emphasize the difference in human temperament between the two poets, the element of fire brings them as it were together in a single jet of inspiration. In this connection, the thought and even the phraseology of the two poets are identical; and their general intention, too, is much the same. Hopkins sees all things as leading to “hero of Calvary, Christ's feet” according to the design of divine providence, while Eliot presupposes, with Dame Julian of Norwich, that

All shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well By the purification of the motive In the ground of our beseeching.

In both poets there is, moreover, the same ambivalent attitude to fire. On the one hand, in its destructive force it is destined to bring an end to all things, as Eliot recognizes in his allusion to “that destructive fire which burns before the ice-cap reigns” in East Coker II. Hopkins likewise speaks of “world's wildfire” that “leaves but ash” in his poem “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire.” On the other hand, in its inner meaning fire is at once the symbol and the effect of divine love, which is destructive of the impenitent sinner, but creative of grace and new life in those who receive it with welcome. Here, too, both poets are in accord: just as Hopkins looks in his conclusion to “our hearts' charity's hearth's fire,” so Eliot finally envisages the time

When the tongues of flame are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one.

In this way, from their respective standpoints as Catholic and as Anglican, Hopkins and Eliot bear witness to the one Christian ideal in the contemporary world. As poets their work has to be judged by poetical standards; but these poetical standards cannot be limited to questions of style and word-music—they cannot exclude the further questions of imagery and thought-content. And it is precisely here that the Christian influence is present, reaching through the thought to the poetry, for the one is inseparable from the other. The Christian ideal to which these two poets bear witness is that of the Incarnation, which has given new meaning to human life, and which is continued in the Church through the sacramental symbolism of water and fire.

It is a venerable tradition to which each bears witness; but in each it becomes youthful again, and appears in its original freshness. They do not merely repeat words they have heard without understanding, even if they regard the words as divine and beyond human reason. Rather, they have striven to make the words their own, and to conform themselves to the deep meaning contained in the words. In neither of them has this been an easy task. For Hopkins it involved “the midriff astrain with learning of, laced with fire of stress” and even “the dense and the driven Passion, and frightful sweat,” akin to that of Christ in His agony. Likewise for Eliot it involved “the darkness of God” and “the agony of death and birth,” the renunciation of himself in order to put on the new man in Christ.

Yet is was precisely in this endeavor of each poet to control himself and to submit himself to the higher control of divine love, that each has been able in his own way not only to approximate to the Christian ideal, but also to contribute to the well-being of contemporary literature. In each of them, Christianity is not merely accidental to poetry, as though they were poets who happened to be Christians and who therefore included Christian references in their work. Their poetry is essentially Christian, to such an extent that without the Christianity there would be no poetry—or at least, there would be poetry of a very different kind.

On the other hand, in neither poet is there any attempt to employ their Christian faith for merely literary purposes, as it were subordinating the divine to the human. Rather, they seek in their poetry to express and to develop their understanding of the Christian faith and the Catholic tradition, yet without neglecting or minimizing human and literary values. These two elements, the divine and the human, are skilfully harmonized in their poetry, in a condition of fruitful “stress” or “tension”: the divine enlightening the human, while the human is raised up to the divine.

This divine harmony is, indeed, continually subjected—as Eliot repeatedly complains in the autobiographical passages of Four Quartets—to the threat of discord and division as a result of the operation of chaos in time, symbolized by the element of the water. But the danger is averted by the contrary operation of grace, the “intersection of the timeless with time,” which draws all things together by the fire of divine love. This is the common legacy of Hopkins and Eliot, in a unity underlying their individual differences, to the men of this generation.