Selected Sonnets and Other Lyrics by Gerard Manley Hopkins

‘No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief’

GLOSSARY
‘pitched’ – the primary sense is musical – ‘tuned’ – but there is also a sense of being thrown. ‘Pitch’ in the same line also suggests darkness.

‘forepangs’ – a coinage: previous sufferings.

‘wring’ – violently squeezed, but here also with a sense of ‘ring’ as often with Hopkins.

‘Comforter’ – a common translation of the Greek word parakletos or Paraclete, used of the Holy Spirit.

‘herds-long’ – driven and crowded endlessly together until as large as a herd of animals.

‘fell’ – fierce.

‘force’ – perforce, unavoidably.

‘no-man-fathomed’ – to ‘fathom’ is to measure a depth of water with a sounding-line. No man knows the depth of the cliffs Hopkins describes.

‘Durance’ – endurance.

THOUGHTS
Shakespeare’s King Lear lies behind much of the imagery of this poem. An entirely self-obsessed and irascible old man, Lear falls through his own stupidity into a world of unremitting despair and suffering. He becomes a houseless mad old man wandering through a wilderness in an apocalyptic storm. Lear’s supporters also experience a parallel fall, one of whom, the character Edgar (who is forced to imitate a poor mad beggar) utters the words that inspired the first line of Hopkins’ poem:

O Gods! Who is’t can say ‘I am at the worst’?
I am worse than e’er I was…
And worse I may be yet; the worst is not
So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’