Complete Text
Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair,
not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands
of man
In me or, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose
not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou
rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb
against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruised bones?
and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic
to avoid thee and flee?
Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer
and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems)
I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole
joy, would laugh, cheer.
Cheer whom though? The hero whose heaven-handling
flung me, foot trod
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it
each one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with
(my God!) my God.
Summary
The poem opens with a rejection of Despair, that “carrion
comfort.” To “feast” on despair, Hopkins avers, would be like eating
something dead and vile. Nor will the poet unravel his “last strands”
of humanity by giving up hope, though he is close to hopelessness
and the strands are already “slack.” He makes the feeble but determined
assertion “I can,” and then goes on to explore what that assertion
might mean, what basic action or spiritual gesture might serve to
counteract despair: doing “something” that expresses hope, even
if it is as minimal as wishing for morning or as negative as deciding
not to kill himself.
Having skirted the pit of despair, the poet questions
God about the suffering that has drawn him so close to hopelessness.
He asks why God would, so roughly, with his powerful right foot,
“rock” his world and send him writhing. Why would God swipe at him
with the dull and indiscriminate blow of a “lionlimb”? Why, then,
maliciously look at him lying there with “bruised bones” and further
torment him with gales of “tempest,” while he cowers, “heaped there,”
wanting to escape but exhausted and with nowhere to run?
Then the poet attempts an answer. The “tempest” was actually
a harvest wind, shucking the “chaff” from the wheat to expose the
kernels of goodness concealed within. In patient acceptance of divine
vengeance, the poet has “kissed the rod” of God’s punishment—or
rather, he corrects himself, he has kissed the hand that held that
rod. Since then he has suffered “toil” and “coil,” yet the act of
acceptance has also brought a resurgence of optimism, mounting gradually
to a “cheer.” But this word prompts another round of questioning
(“Cheer whom though?”); now that he knows that God’s rough treatment
of him was for his own good, should he now applaud God for having
treated him so? Or does he congratulate himself for
having struggled, for having met God directly? Or both? The speaker,
however far he has come from the brink of despair, is perhaps still trying
to come to terms with that dark “year” of suffering in which he
struggled with God.
Commentary
Hopkins wrote this sonnet at a time when he had just emerged
from a long period of depression and inner anguish. The poem is
carefully designed to surprise the reader and dramatize the moment
of recognition that the speaker experiences in coming to terms with
his own spiritual struggle. The interpretation of the poem depends
in large measure on how one reads the transitions between the poem’s
three sections (the first quatrain, the second quatrain, and the
sestet). In particular, ascertaining the poem’s chronology can be
troubling, in part because Hopkins withholds an important piece
of chronological information until line 10,
when the poem first shifts into the past tense. In the second stanza,
there is a disturbing immediacy in the poet’s urgent protests against
God’s unrelenting persecution; only in line 10 does
the poet reveal that the trial has already passed. In light of this
recognition, the reader must reevaluate the preceding lines. What
is the order of cause and effect? Why does Hopkins use the present
tense for the past events of the poem?
The order of the events described in the first two quatrains
seems to be reversed in the telling. Presumably, the struggle against
despair in lines one through four provided a sequel to the violence
depicted in lines five through eight. Yet the fact that this second
quatrain is written in interrogative form brings it into the present of
the poem. It both tells of past events and asks about their meaning
from a retrospective vantage (as if from the present). In this interpretation,
the poem contains two different narrative lines superimposed on
one another. The first deals with a “now done” crisis of suffering
and resistance, in which the poet struggled in futility against
God. The second “plot” takes place later than the first but is also,
one hopes, nearing consummation via the thinking processes that
have contributed to the making of the poem itself. This plot is
the poet’s attempt to understand the initial crisis—and it is this
plot that takes place in the “present” of the poem. In this latter
narrative, the content of the second quatrain does temporally
follow that of the first; it constitutes the (partly self-pitying)
questions that still remain even after the poet has decided not
to give up hope. These four lines mark the problem of understanding
still at hand for the poet, a problem that will then be resolved
in the sestet. There, the poet abandons the tone of impassioned
self-protection and seeks theological explanations for suffering
and spiritual struggle.
Another chronological ambiguity centers on line 10.
One might assume that the “toil” and “coil” Hopkins has experienced
since he “kissed the rod” are precisely this struggle for understanding,
after the experience of complete abjection before God forced his
spirit into submission. It is out of that second struggle, in which
he acknowledges both God’s and his own roles in the earlier, more
wrenching struggle, that his heart is able to recover. On the other
hand, we might read the phrase “since (seems) I kissed the rod”
differently. In light of that puzzling parenthetical “seems,” one
might decide that all the violence of the second quatrain has taken place
after Hopkins thought he had made his peace with God. In that case,
the crux of the theological problem would lie with the inscrutability
of a God who would inflict such suffering on even Hopkins, a priest
who had devoted his life to God’s service.
