Selected Sonnets and Other Lyrics by Gerard Manley Hopkins
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Most poignant of all is the way in which the (celibate) Hopkins describes his relationship with God as a love affair between two people who are forced to live apart. His passionate love letters are, by some sad chance, never delivered: ‘dead letters sent/To dearest him that lives alas! away.’
The first tercet of the sestet is unremittingly physical in its evocation of a bitter taste that is no doubt meant to recall the fruit of Adam’s Fall. ‘Gall’ is used to represent bile, here, the same substance that causes acid reflux or ‘heartburn.’ Hopkins is, literally, ‘tasting himself’ and the taste is disgusting and painful. A bitter drink called ‘gall’ in some translations of the Bible was given to Christ on the cross (Who was, in a typological sense, re-enacting the Fall of Adam in reverse). His whole selfhood seems to him to be cursed in the Fall, and he concentrates on his flesh, his physical nature, traditionally seen to be at war with the spiritual side of man: ‘Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse’ (Rom 8:1-12). Quite what provoked Hopkins’ extraordinary depression in his final years remains a mystery, but this poem certainly suggests that it has its roots in bodily passion.
Flesh, however, is simply flesh, and bodily passions are stimulated by mental and spiritual weaknesses, and Hopkins brilliantly uses the image of a selfish spiritual ‘yeast’ that corrupts the dough of the body. If it were not for this brilliant line – ‘Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours’ – then Hopkins would be describing a naïve dualism of body and soul. What in fact he gives the reader is a portrayal of a human being wracked by sinful feelings and remorse for those feelings. He also recognises that he is in a kind of hell in which he is torturing himself, and that the real hell is similarly a place of self-torture – ‘the lost are like this’ – which is a more sophisticated theological view of this state than many would have held at the time, the belief that God punishes sinners in hell still being fully current in the nineteenth century. Hopkins does not yet feel ‘lost;’ the damned are like him, ‘but worse;’ nevertheless this poem describes someone as near to hell as one could easily imagine.
The first tercet of the sestet is unremittingly physical in its evocation of a bitter taste that is no doubt meant to recall the fruit of Adam’s Fall. ‘Gall’ is used to represent bile, here, the same substance that causes acid reflux or ‘heartburn.’ Hopkins is, literally, ‘tasting himself’ and the taste is disgusting and painful. A bitter drink called ‘gall’ in some translations of the Bible was given to Christ on the cross (Who was, in a typological sense, re-enacting the Fall of Adam in reverse). His whole selfhood seems to him to be cursed in the Fall, and he concentrates on his flesh, his physical nature, traditionally seen to be at war with the spiritual side of man: ‘Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse’ (Rom 8:1-12). Quite what provoked Hopkins’ extraordinary depression in his final years remains a mystery, but this poem certainly suggests that it has its roots in bodily passion.
Flesh, however, is simply flesh, and bodily passions are stimulated by mental and spiritual weaknesses, and Hopkins brilliantly uses the image of a selfish spiritual ‘yeast’ that corrupts the dough of the body. If it were not for this brilliant line – ‘Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours’ – then Hopkins would be describing a naïve dualism of body and soul. What in fact he gives the reader is a portrayal of a human being wracked by sinful feelings and remorse for those feelings. He also recognises that he is in a kind of hell in which he is torturing himself, and that the real hell is similarly a place of self-torture – ‘the lost are like this’ – which is a more sophisticated theological view of this state than many would have held at the time, the belief that God punishes sinners in hell still being fully current in the nineteenth century. Hopkins does not yet feel ‘lost;’ the damned are like him, ‘but worse;’ nevertheless this poem describes someone as near to hell as one could easily imagine.
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