Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Song of Songs‪.‬

Although Hopkins' biblical and devotional themes in "The Wreck of the Deutschland" (1876) have been extensively examined, there has been little discussion of the central importance to the poem of the Song of Songs and its tradition of related commentary. The Song famously portrays what has been read as an allegory of Christ's relationship with the Church, the Virgin Mary, and the individual soul, and a single article by James Finn Cotter focuses on this last interpretation to chart a series of thematic and imagistic parallels within Hopkins' "Wreck." (1) Arguing that the exegetical tradition associated with the Song formed an integral part of nineteenth-century seminary training, Cotter draws on the work of patristic and later commentators to suggest a reading of "The Wreck" as an allegory of the soul as the Sponsa Christi. While acknowledging the specific textual parallels drawn by Cotter's argument, this article seeks to demonstrate that Hopkins' allusions to the Song in "The Wreck of the Deutschland" are of a more rigorously ecclesiological character; from the early Fathers on may be seen the relationship between the Song of Songs and the waters of baptism, and it is this relation that critically defines Hopkins' application of the Song. For Hopkins as for the Fathers, the Song is a nuptial hymn to be read in the terms of that baptismal union set out by St. Paul in Ephesians: Christ and Church are united in the washing of water by the word (Ephesians 5.26-32); in baptism is continued the nuptial union achieved first in the Incarnation. These are the grounds by which commentaries on the Song would come to be linked with the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Christ; as the sacramental streams that flowed from Christ's wounded body directed attention to their interior source, a parallel was seen between the Church formed from the side of Christ and the dove that famously nestles in the clefts of the rock (Song 2.14), in the wounded heart of Christ)