Breath, Speech, Caress

Images of breath exchange form some of Hopkins' most effective and beautiful portrayals of union between God and humanity. For Hopkins, breathing involves not only the individual but also another who sustains the breath by returning it to him or her. In his writings, this other being, more than any other, is God. In the previous chapter, I explored breath exchange in relation to conception, pregnancy and birth. In this chapter, I develop an understanding of this exchange in relation to touching, communicating and kissing. In Genesis, God's act of breathing into the body of Adam initiated the first intimate exchange between God and humanity. Hopkins reminds us of this first contact in his description of the deity as the ‘giver of breath and bread’ (‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, stanza 1). Breath may be intangible to the naked eye, but it caresses us in ways that we do not immediately recognise. The breath that we inhale, and to which we are thus open, touches, passes through, and sustains every living cell in our bodies. It reaches us from the bodies of other living and breathing beings; in this way, others touch us in a most intimate manner. Similarly, others inhale our exhalations, and as a consequence, we touch them. In other words, by our exhalations and inhalations, we caress, and are caressed by, others.

‘Speech’, notes Friedrich Max Müller, ‘is pre-eminently significant sound’.