In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Skies of Couple-Colour”
• Seán Hewitt (bio)

The poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins is full of clouds. First among his list of “dappled things,” of things that are “fickle, frecklèd” and show the various manifestations of a God whose “beauty is pást chánge,” are “skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow”.¹ In one of his last poems, “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection,” the clouds of the opening lines are indicative of the flux of “nature’s bonfire” (PW, p. 198): “Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth, then chevy on an air - / Built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs | they throng; they glitter in marches” (PW, p. 197). In his ecstatic sonnet “Hurrahing in Harvest,” the “sílk-sack clóuds” move in the “wind-walks,” and Hopkins again pays close attention to their protean nature: “has wilder, wilful-wávier / Méal-drift moulded ever and melted acróss skíes?” (PW, p. 148). The rolling clouds, forming and reforming over the sky, present both a challenge and a potential moment of spiritual ecstasy for the speaker. Elsewhere, the light of dawn “unsets / The lock of clouds” (PW, p. 54); or Hopkins is “possessèd by” the noise of a waterfall, “and clouds like mesh’d and parted moss” (PW, p. 78).

His aerial language is indicative of the scientific and philosophical problems posed by clouds: it is a language of occlusion and revelation, of the challenges aerial phenomena posed to contemporary debates on perception and observation. Drawing our attention to the importance of “theories of vision that are highly tactile,” Catherine Phillips has shown how Hopkins’s poems (in the words of “Ashboughs”) “touch heaven” through a focus on the intricacies of material form.² Likewise, Ann Colley discusses Hopkins’s replacing of the disinterested scientific eye with “a sensuous body that brushes up against and moves through its surroundings.”³ For him, the “lock of the clouds” was a real and physical presence, rather than a metaphorical or symbolic one. Clouds, and other aerial phenomena (such as rainbows, halos, and sunsets), presented a challenge that was at once scientific, linguistic, and theological. Mutable, shifting, ephemeral, connected to the earth but somehow distinct from it, the world of the skies required a trained observation, and a quick and fluid language, that appealed to Hopkins’s experimental tendencies. Critiquing the limitations of [End Page 291] nineteenth-century positivism as falling short of a true metaphysics, Hopkins nevertheless asserted close scientific study as an idiosyncratic method of divine apprehension. Despite the mechanistic nature of post-Newtonian physics and the natural theological arguments which often followed therefrom, Hopkins was indebted to such discourses, and managed to convert them into his own theological and aesthetic language, resulting in an entirely new convergence of science and theology. If the “reverent empiricism” of nineteenth-century natural histories employed detailed description as a form of theological wonder, Hopkins went further, emphasizing not a passive natural world to be described, but an active, stressed, divine Creation that did something more complex than merely represent a detached Deity.⁴

The Question of Metaphysics

Turning to his undergraduate essays and early poetry, we can see that Hopkins grappled with the “lock of the clouds” and its metaphysical implications. The working-out of a metaphysical basis for contemporary science was fundamental to Hopkins if he was to marry his scientific interests with his religious beliefs, and this meant challenging both traditional natural theology and the metaphysical implications of evolutionary theory. Natural theology—the practice of using the scientific study of nature to prove the existence, and characteristics of, God—was a long-standing tradition that found much favor in Romantic texts. In these early works, however, Hopkins began to challenge the natural theological notion that nature was a “book” that could be read for signs of God, attending to the problem of perception and observation in contributing to knowledge of the divine. For Hopkins, the divine is constantly manifested in the physical world, and the trained vision of the observer is fundamental to knowing God. Thus, the practices of...

中文翻译：

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杰拉德·曼利·霍普金斯（Gerard Manley Hopkins）的“一对色彩的天空”

代替摘要，这里是内容的简要摘录：

• 杰拉德·曼利·霍普金斯（Gerard Manley Hopkins）的“一对色彩的天空”
• 塞恩·休伊特（传记）

牛逼杰拉德·曼利·霍普金斯的诗，他是布满乌云。在他的“斑驳的事物”列表中，首先是“善变，雀斑”并显示出“其美貌就是糊涂”的上帝的各种表现的事物是“成双成对的牛像”。¹在他的最后一首诗中，“大自然是赫拉克利特人的火焰，是复活的舒适”，开头的云层表明“自然的篝火”在不断变化（PW，第198页）：“云层马勃球，被撕裂的簇绒，被扔的枕头| 炫耀，然后空中吹牛-/建立通途：同志帮派中的天堂骗子| 他们拥挤；他们在游行中闪闪发光”（PW，第 197）。在他欣喜若狂的十四行诗中，“小袋cl”在“风行道”中移动，霍普金斯再次密切关注其千变万化的性质：“曾经有过荒野，野蛮的/行/梅阿尔漂流过融化了刺骨的滑板？” （PW，第148页）。滚动的云层在天空上形成和重新形成，既给演讲者带来了挑战，也给他们带来了精神上的狂喜。在其他地方，黎明的光芒“开始/云的锁”（PW，第54页）；霍普金斯（Hopkins）则“被”瀑布的噪音，“以及像网状的和分开的苔藓一样的云”所吸引（PW，第78页）。

他的空中语言代表着云层所带来的科学和哲学问题：它是一种遮挡和启示的语言，代表着空中现象对当代关于感知和观察的辩论所带来的挑战。凯瑟琳·菲利普斯（Catherine Phillips）提请我们注意“高度触觉的视觉理论”的重要性，并通过关注物质形式的复杂性，展示了霍普金斯的诗（用“树枝”表示）如何“触及天堂”。^[2]同样，安·科利（Ann Colley）讨论了霍普金斯大学用“一个可以在周围环境中移动并穿过周围环境的感性的身体”代替无私的科学眼睛的问题。³对他而言，“云锁”是真实存在的，而不是隐喻或象征性的存在。云和其他空中现象（例如彩虹，光晕和日落）提出了既是科学，语言又是神学的挑战。易变的，易变的，短暂的，与地球相连，但与地球有某种区别，天空的世界需要训练有素的观察以及快速而流畅的语言，这吸引了霍普金斯的实验倾向。批判[End Page 291]的局限性霍普金斯认为，十九世纪的实证主义没有真正的形而上学，但他断然认为紧密的科学研究是一种神志不清的特质方法。尽管后牛顿物理学具有机械性质和随之而来的自然神学争论，霍普金斯还是沉迷于这种话语，并设法将它们转化为自己的神学和审美语言，从而使科学与神学有了全新的融合。如果说十九世纪自然史的“崇高经验主义”将详细描述作为神学奇观的一种形式，霍普金斯走得更远，强调的不是要描述的被动自然世界，而是一种积极，强调，神圣的创造，其作用要比复杂得多仅代表一个超然的神灵。⁴

形而上学的问题

谈到他的本科论文和早期诗歌，我们可以看到霍普金斯正在努力解决“云锁”及其形而上学的涵义。如果霍普金斯想将自己的科学兴趣与他的宗教信仰相结合，那么为当代科学建立形而上学的基础是他的基础，这意味着既要挑战传统自然神学，也要挑战进化论的形而上学含义。自然神学是利用自然界的科学研究来证明神的存在和特征的一种做法，是一种长期存在的传统，在浪漫主义著作中得到了广泛的青睐。但是，在这些早期作品中，霍普金斯开始挑战自然神学的观念，即自然是一本“书”，可以作为上帝的征兆来阅读，在促进神的知识上关注感知和观察的问题。对于霍普金斯来说，神总是不断地在物质世界中显现，而训练有素的观察者的视野对于认识上帝至关重要。因此，...的做法