Selected Sonnets and Other Lyrics by Gerard Manley Hopkins

‘coil’ – bustle, confusion.

THOUGHTS
While it may be suggested that suicide is at least implicit in ‘No worst there is none…,’ there cannot be much doubt about its presence in Carrion Comfort (as this poem has become known – the title is not Hopkins’ own, hence the brackets). The ‘comfort’ he evokes is that of a dead body (‘carrion’), the traditional fruit of despair, and the fate of Judas. The reiterated negatives – ‘Not, I’ll not…’ – only serve to show how hard the fight against this particular temptation is going to be. Hopkins, however, tries to preserve his resistance to thoughts of suicide, promising not to ‘untwist…these last strands of man/In me,’ and, later, though through even more convoluted negative constructions, he states that he ‘can…not choose not to be.’ Even so, his assertion in lines three and four – ‘I can/Can something, hope, wish day come’ sounds like the last gasp of a man sinking into the quicksand of despair.

The second quatrain brings an extraordinary and surprising new element into this poem as God Himself appears to intervene in Hopkins’ struggles. We might easily expect the ‘Comforter’ of ‘No worst there is none…’ or ‘Mother Mary,’ but in fact we face what is one of Hopkins’ most terrifying image of the Deity, Who he visualises scanning him ‘with darksome devouring eyes’ like some demon from Hell. This God ‘lays a lionlimb’ against him, and has the power to ‘rock,’ and indeed to ‘wring’-out, the whole world with his ‘right foot.’

Hopkins’ first explanation for this terrifying theophany is that he is being winnowed by these ‘turns of tempest’ so that the bad in him might be removed (the ‘chaff’) and his (good) ‘grain lie sheer and clear’ (traditional images deriving from Psalm 1). The next lines, however, seem to contradict this straightforward interpretation, and bring Hopkins to a much more intriguing (and potentially confusing) conclusion:

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.

The very struggle with God seems to invigorate Hopkins and bring him out of his suicidal depression. Perhaps divine comfort would not have shocked him out of his despair.