Selected Sonnets and Other Lyrics by Gerard Manley Hopkins

The sestet begins with one of the most powerful expression of despair in English poetry. If we remember Gloucester, who, in Shakespeare’s play, believes that he is jumping off a cliff edge to commit suicide, then the image of ‘cliffs of fall’ becomes even more potent. Edgar, in fact, has tricked his father, who falls only a short distance, but he vividly describes a fellow gathering a herb (‘sampire’) half-way down the cliff, and this perhaps suggested Hopkins’ idea of someone hanging on to a sheer rock face. Whatever its source, the image could hardly be more vivid.

The last lines remind us of Lear and his companions seeking shelter in the terrible storm (here a ‘whirlwind’). The only true comfort is death, though it is some escape from this desolation to know that ‘each day dies with sleep.’

Just as Shakespeare has been criticised for making King Lear too bleak, is there a case for levelling the same charge against Hopkins? This is certainly one of his darkest poems, and there are only the faintest glimmers of hope. His ‘cries’ do, perhaps, gain him some sense of communion with the rest of suffering humanity as they ‘huddle’ into a ‘world-sorrow;’ perhaps the image of the anvil suggests that something positive is at least being fashioned out of all this pain, and there is finally the realisation that the hammer blows will ‘lull’ and ‘leave off,’ perhaps when Hopkins is finally granted sleep. It must be said, though, that such things are cold comfort in this most bleak of all the terrible sonnets.

(Carrion Comfort)

GLOSSARY
‘carrion’ – dead meat, such as that fed upon by crows and other scavengers.

‘darksome’ – gloomy.

‘fan’ – the image is of a winnowing fan used to throw the grain against the wind, thus separating it from the chaff.