“Press thy hands and crow”: The Garland of Rachel and Robert Bridges’ Rewriting of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall”

Abstract: The close friendship between Robert Bridges and Gerard Manley Hopkins has long prompted the study of the many ways in which each poet influenced and supported the other, including their shared prosodic theories. However, little is known of Oxford publisher Henry Daniel, and even less is known about the publication The Garland of Rachel (1881), a collection of poems written by celebrated Victorians to commemorate the first birthday of Daniel’s daughter Rachel. Bridges and Lewis Carroll were among the contributors, but Hopkins was not. Only thirty-six copies of the Garland were printed, and the poems (except for the Carroll doggerel and its replacement) were never republished, making them and the volume in which they appeared relatively unknown to scholars of the Victorian period. This essay explores the history around and the nature of The Garland of Rachel , along with Robert Bridges’ contribution to it, “Press thy hands and crow,” a poem that appears to draw richly from Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall,” but without acknowledgment or concealment. Nowhere in his correspondence, including his letters to Hopkins, does Bridges hint at his contribution. The essay reads the Hopkins and Bridges poems in the context of the volume’s endeavor to memorialize early childhood.