Steven Roberts revisits Gerard Manley Hopkins' 'Terrible Sonnets'.
Steven Roberts revisits Gerard Manley Hopkins' 'Terrible Sonnets'.
In those early poems, such as ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, we see the power and the passion that underpinned his conversion to Roman Catholicism and ultimately, as never a man for half measures, taking holy orders as a Jesuit priest. The self-sacrifice involved in turning his back on a promising academic career as a Classics scholar with a Double First, as well as on his High Church family, is evident in these lines:
I did say yes O at lightning and lashed rod; Thou heard'st me truer than tongue confess Thy terror, O Christ, O God; Thou knowest the walls, altar and hour and night:
The swoon of a heart that the sweep and the hurl of thee trod Hard down with a horror of height:
And the midriff astrain with leaning of, laced with fire of stress.
The violence of this conversion is evident in the Old Testament images of ‘lightning’ and ‘lashed rod’, coupled with a semantic field of ‘terror’ and ‘horror’ we might associate with religious inquisition. The glottal ‘h’ sounds of ‘hurl’, ‘hard’ and ‘horror of height’ convey a violent physical experience that affects the body right down to the pit of the stomach.
However, these images are balanced with a language more akin to romance, his yielding ‘yes’ coupled with the ‘swoon of a heart’ and ‘sweep’, as well as the images of ‘midriff astrain’, allude to a romantic but also profoundly erotic experience. Indeed, coupled with the sibilant ‘s’ sounds that characterise these moments, there is a suggestion in the pain of a ‘lashed rod’ of something bordering on sadomasochistic.
This complex and dualistic relationship with God characterises much of Hopkins’ early poetry. In the opening lines of ‘God’s Grandeur’ he announces:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed.
The verb of the opening line ‘charged’ captures the violent energy of Hopkins’ Old Testament God, balanced with images of the electrical energy that powered his age. However, ‘charged’ also suggests moral responsibility, a burden given to man by God, as well as an accusation, a legal charge to be faced by mankind. It is this balance of guilt and purpose that powers Hopkins’ early poems. It is also the embracing of pain as a necessary and even pleasurable part of religious experience that is captured in the fluid open vowels of the simile ‘like the ooze of oil’, lengthened by enjambment before being brought to a shuddering halt with the caesura that follows ‘Crushed.’ To Hopkins the ‘grandeur’ and beauty of religious conversion, like the beautiful sheen of olive ‘oil’, requires the complete mortification of self in mind and body.
These ideas are further developed in Hopkins’ most famous poem, ‘The Windhover’, where Christ is represented as a falcon, whose climb and fall mirrors both Christ’s sacrifice and ascension, as well as the conditioning of a penitent human soul.
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
Hopkins here characterises the humble life of Christ whose lesson the Jesuit order seeks to emulate, the ‘plod’, in heroic terms as ‘sheer’ in its extremity as well as simply an indication of the level of commitment required. The internal rhyme of ‘fall’ and ‘gall’, along with the alliterated ‘gash’ really emphasise the violence, suffering and mortification necessary for a life of devotion. However, this is balanced in the beautiful image of ‘sillion’, the sheen of soil as it is turned by the plough, the reward for the ploughman priest. Likewise, from the ‘blue-bleak’ embers the ‘gold vermilion’ that gushes from Christ’s side, are the reward for suffering, the glimpse of something transcendent and glorious.
Here Hopkins’ religious and creative life are at one. The energy of his radical breakthroughs in verseform is evident in his use of Sprung Rhythm. Take a fine poem of the era such as Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’:
Listen! You hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, At their return, up the high strand, Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in.
The long open vowels in the onomatopoeic ‘grating’ and ‘roar’ of the waves meeting the shore, as well as in the words ‘cease’ and ‘slow’, allow Arnold to imitate the ‘long, withdrawing roar’ of the ‘Sea of Faith’. The rhythm is dominated by the iambic pentameters in lines 2 and 4.
Contrast this with a line from Hopkins, taken from ‘The Windhover’:
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
What is so devastating about the later ‘Terrible Sonnets’ is the way that Hopkins turns this balance and energy in on itself. After a largely undistinguished period as a parish priest in a variety of deprived cities across Britain, and after repeated rejection of his poems, Hopkins is sent to Dublin in the hope that academic work at Trinity College will inspire him.
However, the long hours and monotonous routine drove him into a deep depression that he channels into these poems.
In ‘No worst, there is none’, this is evident in the opening lines:
No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief, More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
The free, open rhythm in complete accord with the imagery and action of ‘The Windhover’ is replaced by syntactic inversion, ‘No worst, there is none’, ‘Comforter, where, where is your comforting?’ as well as repetition, ‘More pangs will schooled at forepangs’, to convey a feeling of entrapment. The open vowels and sibilance is replaced with closed vowels and an array of harsher sounding fricatives and plosives to capture a harsh emotional landscape. Furthermore, the verb ‘pitched’, develops from the ‘hurled’ of the earlier poems, to convey violence, but in the suggestion of ‘pitched past pitch of grief’, also suggests a frequency of sound, an assault upon the senses past our comprehension of suffering.
Hopkins also looks to Shakespeare’s tragedies for inspiration, no more so than the most existential of Shakespeare’s plays, King Lear. The landscape of the poem, ‘O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/ Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed’ chimes closely with Gloucester’s description of the view from the cliffs atop Dover Beach that offer a clear indication of his suicidal thoughts:
There is a cliff, whose high and bending head Looks fearfully in the confined deep …
Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
Yet in their rejection of suicide in its basest forms, ‘carrion comfort’, Hopkins also offers a parody of the opening lines of Hamlet’s soliloquy, ‘To be or not to be: that is the question’, the elegance and poise of Hamlet’s musing replaced with a far more despairing, broken syntax.
Elsewhere in this collection of sonnets we get more direct references to Hopkins’ life. In ‘To seem the stranger’, he talks of a ‘third/ Remove’, his time in Ireland marking a further alienation from his family and England, his beloved country. In ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day,’ he alludes to ‘Dead letters sent/ To him that lives alas! away!’ that many critics have seen as an allusion to Digby Dolben, the object of Hopkins’ unrequited love as a young man and devastating grief when Dolben died prematurely.
However, it is not in biographical insights that the poems have their greatest power, it is in the way that they mark the development of Hopkins' aesthetics to such a conclusion. Perhaps the poems act as a form of catharsis for Hopkins. I hope so but we will ultimately never know. All we can do is take solace in the power and raw honesty of the poems and in Hopkins' final words from his deathbed only a few months after the completion of the sonnets: 'I am so happy, I am so happy. I loved my life.'