A 'Terrible' Sonnet by Hopkins

 

My own heart let me more have pity on; let

Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,

Charitable; not live this tormented mind

With this tormented mind tormenting yet.

     I cast for comfort that I can no more get

By groping round my comfortless, than blind

Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find

Thirst's all-in-all in all a world of wet.

Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise

You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile

Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size

At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile

's not wrung, see you, unforseen times rather--as skies

Betweenpie mountains--lights a lovely mile.

In this poem, Hopkins gives himself good advice, which he unfortunately never heeded. Hopkins was, of course, very religious in the conventional sense; but he got, in my opinion at least, the message of religion only half-right. The commandment of all religions is to love one’s neighbor as oneself; attempting to love one’s neighbor while despising oneself is always misplaced. We can look at the great commandment then not as a commandment at all but as a statement of fact: One loves one’s neighbor only to the degree that one has love for oneself. Hopkins once wrote this beautiful line: “There lives the deepest freshness deep down things.” If one couldn’t find that deepest freshness deep down things in oneself, one wasn’t looking hard enough or was looking in the wrong direction.

It is well known that Hopkins had a strong carnal nature. His sexual orientation was basically homosexual. He once wrote that he decided not to become a painter or sculptor because he would have to deal drawing naked men, which presumably caused him much grief and even panic.  He decided that the only way for him to overcome his self-disgust was by giving himself up to God--The god of the Catholic Church, which strictly forbade homosexuality and masturbation.

We’ve learned a lot since Victorian times. Homosexuality is no longer synonymous with sin for the very reason that gays are able to love--one must agree with the current pope that in this regard, “Who am I to judge?”

I do not wish to psychoanalyze Hopkins’s sexuality here; I just present it as a potential source of his self-disgust. That he was a very unhappy man and rejected himself is obvious from reading his poems, especially his later poems, when God didn’t deliver that which he expected: peace and joy. Obviously, you don’t have to be gay to suffer from an animus against the self; family pathology, peer rejection, and insistence in getting from the universe what the universe is unable to deliver are other frequent causes of self-rejection.

Life is a rare phenomenon in the universe, advanced life even rarer. We have all won the lottery, as it were, and are incredibly lucky to be alive. Most of us realize this; the genius Hopkins apparently did not. Let us now turn our attention to Hopkins’s great sonnet and indicate why his noble idea to be less hard on himself ultimately failed. Notice the obsession with self; the poem begins with ‘My own heart.’  He admits that he is ‘comfortless' and finds no way out from the hell he is in.

He refers to himself as 'poor Jackself’ who is 'sad' and ‘jaded’—not a good start. One gets the impression that Hopkins at this point in his life saw himself as a mess and threw himself on the mercy of God for relief. But God, for whatever reason, remained silent, which abetted Hopkins’s despair.

The poem ends with one of the most beautiful images in all poetry. Hopkins acknowledges that joy does indeed come sometimes, but it arises spontaneously. It ‘lights a lovely mile,’ as sunlight does when breaking through  clouds. Whenever I read these lovely lines, I seem to see sun breaking through; a beautiful image. That the clouds in his internal sky were largely self-caused, however, Hopkins would have probably denied. Too, too bad.

One has no right to reject oneself. If you share Hopkins’s despair, fight, fight, fight for your right for a happy life. (Humility and despair are polar opposites.) Remember what nuns and priests used to say, and perhaps still say, "God loves you just the way you are." Some of us moderns might say instead, "The universe accepts you just the way you are," not the way your ego insists how things should be.

A beautiful poem about a man who is stuck in a hell of his own making.