dost thou touch me afresh? Over again I feel thy finger and find thee. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1) The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first. Blaise Pascal (2) I must tell you," writes Hopkins to Robert Bridges in 1878, "I am sorry you never read the Deutschland again." (3) Bridges's resistance to his friend's dense and difficult poem had been immediate, intense, and enduring: following his first encounter with it in 1877, he assures Hopkins that he would "not for any money read [the] poem again" (CW, 1: 282). Even when he eventually brings it into print more than forty years later, Bridges characterizes the ode as "a great dragon folded in the gate" of Hopkins's work--a phrase that has since become something of a critical commonplace. (4) And not without reason: Hopkins admits to his frustrated friend that his poem "needs study and is obscure" and allows, with telling litotes, that he was "not over-desirous that the meaning of all should be quite clear" (CW, 1: 295). Nearly a century of divergent commentary on the poem has confirmed Hopkins's understatement while validating Bridges's experience--described in his notes to the ode--of being "shamefully worsted" by the dragon "in a brave frontal assault" (p. 106n). Some scholars have taken Bridges's advice (which is modeled on Hopkins's own advice to him) "to circumvent [the poem] and attack [it] later in the rear" in both literal and figurative senses. That is, some readings of "The Wreck" approach it not only from oblique points of entry, but from unconventional critical perspectives. (5) In the 1960s, for example, Elisabeth Schneider suggested that a miracle is represented in the ode, arguing that its obscure twenty-eighth stanza contains the involuted account of a divine vision granted to the five drowned nuns that the poem commemorates. (6) Revisiting the issue some twenty years later in his Martin D'Arcy Lectures, Norman H. MacKenzie gave voice to the current critical consensus that the poem contains no such vision--nor a miracle of any kind. (7) Yet, as Lesley Higgins put it in a recent reappraisal, Schneider still "persuaded two generations of Hopkins critics to read [Stanza 28] miraculously." (8) Bridges's advice (and Schneider's example) notwithstanding, most critics have preferred to engage with the more obvious themes of the ode, exploring its theodicean theology, its biographical resonances, and its peculiar literary form. This last topic is one of the most frequently addressed issues in Hopkins scholarship, and many commentaries have considered the relation of the poem's two uneven parts in great detail. To take a recent example, Imogen Forbes-Macphail has explored the mathematical ratios of the unevenly divided ode, drawing on calculus to clarify its bifurcated form: "the two halves of the poem," she argues, "are held in an integral/differential relationship with each other," with "Part the First" displaying "God's nature in the abstract" and "Part the Second" "describing] God's presence manifested or 'integrated' into the real world." (9) Dennis Sobolov, for his part, takes a rather different critical approach, reading Hopkins's oeuvre through the lens of "semiotic phenomenology," yet his conclusion is not dissimilar: the strategic division between abstraction and integration that Forbes-Macphail finds in the form of the poem, Sobolov sees within the poet himself. His engagement with "The Wreck" thus forms the final chapter of The Split World of Gerard Manley Hopkins because, on Sobolov's reading, it showcases a symptomatic gap that runs throughout all of Hopkins's work between the faith he professed and his own lived experience. (10) Like the suggestion that Bridges offers in his note to the "The Wreck," these antinomies--between theory and practice, between faith and experience--have their origin in Hopkins, too. His letters and journals are replete with worries about wasting time on poetry, and his early concerns about the incompatibility of verse writing with his religious life led to the period of "elected silence" during which he abandoned poetic composition altogether. …

中文翻译：

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“德国的沉船”与诗人的诞生：文学形式、表演性话语和霍普金斯的“眼泪的礼物”

你重新摸我吗？我又一次摸到你的手指，找到了你。杰拉德·曼利·霍普金斯 (Gerard Manley Hopkins) (1) 在创作一部作品时，人们发现的最后一件事就是把什么放在第一位。布莱斯·帕斯卡 (2) 我必须告诉你，”霍普金斯在 1878 年写给罗伯特·布里奇斯的信中说，“我很抱歉你再也没有读过《德意志》。”(3) 布里奇斯对他朋友的密密麻麻的诗的抵抗是直接的、强烈的、和经久不衰：在 1877 年第一次遇到这首诗后，他向霍普金斯保证，他“不会再花钱读这首诗”（CW，1：282）。即使他最终在四十多年后将其付印，布里奇斯将这首颂歌描述为霍普金斯作品中的“一条折叠在大门中的巨龙”——这句话从那时起已成为一种批评家常便饭。（4）并非没有理由：霍普金斯向他沮丧的朋友承认，他的诗“需要学习，而且晦涩难懂”，并通过旁白告诉他，他“并不过分希望所有的意思都应该很清楚”（CW，1：295）。近一个世纪以来，对这首诗的不同评论证实了霍普金斯的轻描淡写，同时证实了布里奇斯的经历——在他的颂歌笔记中描述——被龙“在一次勇敢的正面攻击中”（第 106n 页）“可耻地被精纺”。一些学者采纳了布里奇斯的建议（以霍普金斯自己对他的建议为蓝本）“在字面和比喻意义上“绕过[诗]并在后面攻击[它]”。也就是说，对“沉船”的一些阅读不仅从斜切点接近它，但从非常规的批评角度来看。(5) 例如，在 1960 年代，伊丽莎白·施奈德 (Elisabeth Schneider) 建议在颂歌中表现奇迹，认为其晦涩难懂的第 28 节包含对这首诗所纪念的五位溺水修女的神圣异象的内卷叙述。(6) 大约 20 年后，在他的 Martin D'Arcy Lectures 中重新审视这个问题，Norman H. MacKenzie 表达了当前的批判性共识，即这首诗不包含这样的愿景——也没有任何形式的奇迹。(7) 然而，正如莱斯利·希金斯 (Lesley Higgins) 在最近的一次重新评估中所说的那样，施耐德仍然“奇迹般地说服了两代霍普金斯评论家阅读 [第 28 节]”。(8) 尽管有布里奇斯的建议（和施耐德的例子），但大多数评论家更愿意参与颂歌中更明显的主题，探索它的神学神学、它的传记共鸣和它独特的文学形式。最后一个主题是霍普金斯学术界最常讨论的问题之一，许多评论都非常详细地考虑了这首诗两个不平衡部分的关系。举一个最近的例子，伊莫金·福布斯-麦克菲尔探索了不均匀分割颂歌的数学比例，利用微积分来阐明其分叉形式：“这首诗的两半，”她认为，“以积分/微分形式举行彼此之间的关系”，“第一部分”显示“抽象的上帝本性”和“第二部分”“描述]上帝的存在体现或‘整合’到现实世界中。” (9) 丹尼斯·索博洛夫，就他而言，采取了一种截然不同的批评方法，通过“符号现象学”的镜头阅读霍普金斯的作品，但他的结论并没有什么不同：福布斯-麦克菲尔以诗的形式发现抽象和整合之间的战略划分，索博洛夫在诗人身上看到了他自己。因此，他与“沉船”的参与构成了杰拉德·曼利·霍普金斯的《分裂的世界》的最后一章，因为在索博洛夫的阅读中，它展示了贯穿霍普金斯所有作品的有症状的差距，他所宣称的信仰与他自己的生活经历之间。(10) 就像布里奇斯在他对“沉船”的笔记中提出的建议一样，这些二律背反——理论与实践之间、信仰与经验之间——也起源于霍普金斯。他的信件和日记充满了对在诗歌上浪费时间的担忧，而他早期对诗歌写作与宗教生活不相容的担忧导致了“选举沉默”时期，在此期间他完全放弃了诗歌创作。…