The Terrible Sonnets of Gerard Manley Hopkins

A. HIRIYANNAIAH

“The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation” of the early sonnets is missing in the terrible sonnets of Gerard Manley Hopkins. He, being a first rate craftsman, finds the sonnet, in its original Petrarchan form, “an implicit form that is functional to the precise rendition of the individual experience.”

The aim of this note is to examine closely the connection between the “individual experience” as such and its “precise rendition” in the terrible-sonnet sequence.

These terrible sonnets, seven in number * are the products of his Dublin stay, 1884-1889, giving expression in the sonnet form to his “grief’s gasping, joyless days, dejection” experienced on his spiritual voyage as God-seeker.

These terrible sonnets, “the new maps of hell”, are sombre, in their anguish, steeped in sterility, conflict and desolation; reflecting the period of depression. In his correspondence with Robert Bridges, the counterparts of these poetic moods could be noticed: “Four of these (sonnets) came like inspirations unbidden and against my will. And in the life I lead now, which is one of a continually jaded and harassed mind, if in any leisure I try to do anything I make no way - nor wit my work, alas! but so it must be.” (A letter to R. B. of Sept. 1, 1885)

In an accompanying note, Hopkins has confided that some of them have been “written in blood” wrung out of anguish. The stress and strain experienced in the realisation of godhead, not only left him exhausted but “desolate.” Hopkins has attempted to record precisely the tone, the tenor, and the intensity of the felt-experience:

“...and why must disappointment all I endeavour end?”

The nightmarish quality of the mystic phase, “Dark Night of the Soul”, is intensified by the bitter realisation of despair, “in last strands of man”, with bruised bones, still defiant, refusing to capitulate, is distilled in the sonnet, “Carrion Comfort” (41). This terrible feeling is imaginatively rendered in terms of wrestling between the seeker and the “terrific” sought. The excruciating pain and the fright of the heart which could have “lapped strength, stole joy” gets deepened by the terrific experience of “a lion limb” and “darksome devouring eyes”. The escaping sigh, “That chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear” echoes the exhausted gasp of the yielding spirit.

“No worst, there is none” (42) orchestrates the universal pain “the blight man was born for.” The sharp cry that escapes under the terrible agony betrays the abandonment, in sheer desperation, “past pitch of grief” of the seeking soul.

Caught in anguish, “grieved at the schism in the soul”, the tormented soul shoots forth questionings:

“Comforter, where, where is your comforting?

Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?”

But these questionings remain unanswered, leaving the self-consuming rage reeling out wincing and screaming:

“My cries heave, herds-long, huddle in main, a chief

Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil, wince and sing.

Then lull, then leave off.”

Right on the very cliff of despair, wincing and singing, shrieking and banging, the dispirited soul makes a vain attempt to clutch at the poorest of the poor consolation, “all life death does end.” Words twisted and forced into new combinations attempt to capture the geography of Hell-psyche in terms of mountains, cliffs, sheer deeps, sweeping whirlwind and its impact on the soul; hell-bent in search of godhead:

“O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Fightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed, hold them cheap

May who never hung there, nor does long our small

Durance deal with that sleep or deep, Here! creep,

Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind all

Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.”

The terror “no man fathomed” is suggested by the alarm-words, “creep”, “wretch”, shelter.” These words recreate the desperate soul vainly seeking an escape-way. The garbled sharpness of the spiritual anguish, hounded and frightened by its own state “pitch past grief”, throws up the image of the hamstrung psyche “hammered and tossed.”

“Carrion Comfort”, “No Worse there is nose”, and “Spelt from Sibyl’s leaves” form a group of three nightpieces in which the suffering spirit, put in rack, hammered on the anvil, howls in shrill despair, its protest against God.

“I wake and feel the fell of dark” (44) is the fourth of the series in which the bitter mood of revulsion at its state of helplessness. “Self-yeast of spirit dull dough sours” emanates the foul smell. The word “fell”, attracting to itself the meaning of animal pelt as well as the sense of cruelty whips up the ghastly imagery of palpable Darkness stifling “lifetime of suffering.”

“To seem the stranger lies my lot” (43) is a bitter complaint against Hopkin’s” triple-fold isolation” – spiritual separation, political apartness, and physical distancing. All set in a very austere language gathering itself into a heap of oppressive isolation:

“This to hoard unheard,

Heard unheeded, leaves me a lonely began.”

The sharpness of self-pity, dampened by the endless groping, is plummeted in this sonnet, “My own heart let me more have pity” (46):

“I cast for comfort I can no more get

By groping round my comfortless, than blind

Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find

Thirst’s all-in-all a world of wet.”

“Patience, hard thing” (45) is a mockery of the bruised heart, at the meaningless act of Patience ever engaged in masking. “the ruins of wrecked past purposes”:

“We hear our hearts grate on themselves: it kills

To bruise them dearer.

A refreshing contrast to this mood of anguish of desperate isolation is found in the sonnet, “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire” in which the gust of a new mood of self-illumination makes itself felt in a dashing reassurance:

“Across my foundering deck shone a flash,

at a trumpet crash.”

The harrowing experiences of the agonised spirit in search of God (or godhead), packed with tension and anguish, doubt and despair, have their precise rendition in these terrible sonnets, by the strategy of confrontation and concentration, on spiritual plane, omission and compounding on the linguistic level. Compound epithets, omission of conjuncts and prepositions, exploiting the subtle sound textures contribute to the poignant anguish felt and experienced. The fusion, under high pressure, of “pitch,” “stress” and “inscape” renders in its absolute precision the spiritual anguish recalling the Mallarmean touch.

The sensuous imagery, supported with the auditory rhetoric, communicates vigorously the pitch and intensity of the high voltage tension of the tortured spirit on its quest-journey of “immortal diamond.”

Sprung and counterpoint rhythm, “the least forced, the most rhetorical and emphatic of all possible rhythms,” lend themselves to the rich and varied tonal effect. Subtle rhythms and “oversaturated” imagery, noticeably absent in other poets, make these sonnets “sparkle like rich, irregular crystals in the gleaming flow of the poet’s limpid thought.”

Though the buoyancy of the early sonnets is wanting, the deepening sense of privation, in all its pitch and intensity, has been rendered in authentic note that the sensitive reader fails not to feel the quick-heat of the “naked thinking heart.”

The greatness of Hopkins, the poet-priest, lies, as has been aptly observed by W. H. Gardner, in his creative originality, in twisting and turning the language-medium to render truthfully and precisely all the “toil and coil” the spirit of the poet-priest subjected ever since it “kissed the rod”:

“The fusion of thought and form, the combination of rare insight and even rarer power and music in the presentation, lifts the poetry from the personal to the universal plane.”

* The numbering of the sonnets–41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46 and 51–is based on W. H. Gardner’s Edition: Penguin. Rptd. 1954.

Back