   Hopkins’s Approach to Mortality and His Innovations in Poetic Form Brett Beasley Loyola University, Chicago Perhaps no aspect of Victorian society is as memorable as its rites of death and mourning. Victorian funerals were famously lavish, and the set of customs surrounding them became elaborate. Mourners bought mourning stationery, and they donned black mourning garb. Mourning jewelry made of polished jet or the hair of the deceased person also became commonplace. Periods of mourning could extend up to several years depending on one’s level of intimacy with the deceased, although some widowed women, following the example of Queen Victoria herself, extended their time of bereavement until their own deaths. So complicated did these rituals become that mourners often purchased guidebooks designed to help them observe a death with the proper decorum. 1 But the Victorian obsession with death didn’t stop there. Some of the most heated theological debates of the time were over the nature of the last judgment and the afterlife. 2 The era’s literature also reflects this preoccupation with death. Deathbed scenes, for instance, became a commonplace in Victorian fiction, and many of the most celebrated poems of the time seek solace for the loss of a loved one. Whether they looked to mourning rituals, to doctrine, or to literature, the Victorians were zealous—even desperate—for comfort in the face of mortality. But what of Gerard Manley Hopkins? Did he share in the general Victorian preoccupation with death? Like his contemporaries, Hopkins sought comfort in the face of mortality, but he sought it in a unique way. Other Victorians sought comfort that could abstract them from the concrete reality of death. But Hopkins refuses to consider death in the abstract. He uses concrete images to represent death and the shadow it places over every human life. Thus, as other commentators have noticed, Hopkins rarely represents the afterlife in