A note on "Jack, Joke" in Hopkins's "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection".

The word "Jack" (1. 23) is generally interpreted by critics of "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and the Comfort of the Resurrection" as signifying "Everyman" (Trilling 687). However, this does not take into account the appositive character of "joke" (1. 23). To Hopkins, this "Jack" is not merely a "joke," a ludus naturae, but a joking Jack, an actor who fulfills the thematic idea of "-ster" stated in the phrase "heaven-roysterers" (1. 2). The suffix "-ster" indicates an agent, one who does something with skill or as an occupation. What Hopkins's joking Jack does is serve as an agent of the "king" (French roi) in "heaven." Hopkins emphasizes the royal aspect of such "gay-gangs" (1. 2) by using the obsolete spelling of "roisterers": "roysterers."

Basically, Hopkins's Catholic vision in "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire" is comic; but the means by which he achieves the poem's final comedy is not only dialectical but also polemical. Under cover of Heraclitus, Hopkins really attacks the Aestheticism of his sometime Oxford tutor, Walter Pater. He begins in a Hamletian vein speculating on clouds and the shapes they take (1. 1). but moves on to affirm that the natural elements (such as rain and "wind"; 1. 5), when viewed from the aesthetic perspective, are merely "Squandering ooze" (1) (1. 7) and producing "Squadroned masks" (1. 8; that is, aesthetic moments doctrinairely masking the Paterian's sensibility). At this point, the putative subject of the poem--Heraclitus's notion of the logos qua fire--tilts very decisively in the direction of the "hard gemlike flame" (prismatic impressionism) of which Pater speaks in his "Conclusion" to Studies in the History of the Rennaisance. To Hopkins, this sort of practiced openness to the sensual allurements of really extraordinary perceptiveness culminates only in just that: perceptiveness, whose object and content is perception. Thus, the Aesthete strains perceptiveness to a point of frustrated titillation and must let the moment pass on its way into the area of rueful romanticism tinged with philosophy. The Aesthetic stage proliferates with "Squadroned masks" (1. 8), all ready to make forays into the no-man's-land of exquisite sensation.

Ironically considered, such is the wisdom of the world, couched in the nervous system and armed with the stone--if not the slingshot--of aporia. Not to be so open is to be humbug's devotee, (2) a zany.

With a good deal of optimistic humor, Hopkins blithely pits the "Resurrection" (1. 16) of the "king" ("roy"; 1. 2) against the "squeezed dough, crust, dust" (1. 7) of the Renaissance (in the poem clinging to Heraclitus's underbelly); that is, against the leaven of the Pharisee (Pater).

Laughing from his zany place among "heaven-roysterers" (1. 2), Hopkins embraces the role deridingly assigned him as a Christian believer: he is a zany, a "Jack, joke" (1. 23), a domestic clown or jester ("patch"; 1. 23). And why not? The process as he sees it--and it is a process--is from humility to glory, with all the stages participating in the various phases of the Incarnation, including Christ's being laughed at: thanks to his faith, Hopkins is able to say of himself, "I am all at once what Christ is" (1. 22).

In the eyes of many, as Hopkins understood only too well, Christ continues to be the butt of amusement, a zany. In effect, perceptions hampered in and by the experiential constructive limits of a given sensibility are unable to mature to Apocalypse. To Hopkins, the stunted zany (the word "zany" derives from "Zanni," that is, "Jack," a dialectical nickname for Italian Giovanni, "John," and designates a masked subordinate clown in the Old Comedy) is the uninsightful unbeliever, who, constricted in the vagaries of material constructs, remains at the level of terminal "joke" (I. 23) qua ludus naturae. Rather wryly, Hopkins envisions himself and other Christian believers as being fools only in the estimation of fools but really richly participating actively and conceptually in the graces afforded by the Incarnation and Heaven's King. Such participation reveals "Christ" (1. 22) to the believer as being infinitely superior as a human agent to either Heraclitus's smoky dance of the fire/logos or Pater's sensate "flam e" darting wispily toward imploded pseudo-Platonic yearnings from an ideologically exclusively perceptual zircon temperament.

To Pater, in his "Conclusion," each "personality" (the Latin word persona means "mask" ) is "ringed round" by uniquely defining and therefore impenetrable (opaque) "impressions" that ineluctably reify "human" isolation. To Hopkins, the moral necessity of mutual strengthening in faith is intrinsic to human nature (the "comfort" of the poem's title) and accorded fulfillment not by the Renaissance but by the "Resurrection" (1. 16 ).

Substantively, the poem is about the real face of folly behind the mask of "personality": "We were deceived by the wisdom of the serpent, but we are freed by the foolishness of God" (St Augustine 1: 14, 13). The wisdom of the world is folly with God; and what the world laughs at, "the foolishness of God," is, to the believer, the true wisdom.

(1.) Familiar 'with the philosophy of Parmenides and a Professor of Greek, Hopkins is using "ooze" here as a pun on the Greek word Qusia: "being, substance, essence."

Works Cited

St. Augustine. De Doctrina Christiana 1: 14, 13. On Christian Doctrine. Tr. D. W. Robertson, Jr. New York: Liberal Arts, 1958.

Trilling, Lionel and Harold Bloom, eds. Victorian Prose and Poetry. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.