also to see it or experience it, so Hopkins is saying that he has witnessed his own suffering and the proof of this is his tortured feelings: ‘With witness I speak this.’


As if ‘black hoürs’ were not hyperbolic enough, Hopkins returns to this claim and writes: ‘But where I say/ Hours I mean years, mean life.’ His suffering is not taking place during a single night, but every night. In fact, his entire life is an eternal night. This bleak statement is heartbreaking to read, as is the next: ‘And my lament/ Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent/ To dearest him that lives alas! away.’ A lament is a passionate expression of grief or sorrow. Hopkins’  that are sent but not answered. While many presume ‘To dearest him’ to mean God, it may instead be a reference to Digby Dolben, a young English poet with whom Hopkins may have been in love (although they only met once, they wrote to one another and read each other’s poetry). Dolben died when he was just 19 years old, and this would also explain the phrase ‘dead letters’. It may simply be a reference to Hopkins’ good friend and fellow poet, Robert Bridges, to whom he also wrote (even to tell him about this sonnet) and upon whose friendship and advice he relied.


If the octet is harrowing, the sestet is even more so, beginning with the staccato line: ‘I am gall, I am heartburn.’ To describe oneself as gall, which is bile from the gallbladder, a sour sickening substance, or heartburn, which is acid from the stomach that causes terrible discomfort, is surely to reveal a deep degree of self-loathing. It is also a reference to Hopkins’ poor physical health. It is hard to know if his depression worsened his ailments, which included indigestion, nausea, diarrhoea, exhaustion and headaches, or if his poor health worsened his depression. Either way, he believes this suffering is what God has decreed for him: ‘God’s most deep decree/ Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;/ Bones built  It is easy to understand how chronic suffering would make you depressed. There are many instances of severely depressed people having the type of chronic illnesses Hopkins endured. (Sylvia Plath suffered from recurring sinus infections and Kurt Cobain had severe stomach pain.) The alliteration of ‘bitter’, ‘bones’, ‘blood’ and ‘brimmed’, and the repetition of ‘taste’ emphasise how bitter Hopkins tastes to himself. This idea continues with the metaphor of man as being like a loaf of bread. In order to turn out right, the yeast has to be of good quality, but Hopkins feels that his ‘Selfyeast’ – the ‘yeast’ inside his soul – has ‘soured’ his dough. In simpler terms, his mind has ruined his body: ‘Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours.’


Hopkins compares himself to those who are ‘lost’, a Christian term for those who are ‘lost’ to God. It was a term reserved for ‘hopeless cases’: ‘I see/ The lost are like this, and their scourge to be/ As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.’ and if their ‘scourge’ or tragedy is to be their ‘sweating selves’ or lost selves, then so is his. The ‘but worse’ is ambiguous. Hopkins may be saying that his punishment is worse or that the lost are somehow worse than he is. If the latter meaning is correct, it suggests Hopkins still considers his knowledge of God to elevate him from the ‘lost’, but there is something deeply troubling about his claim that his scourge is to be himself.


This sonnet was written by a man in deep emotional pain, a man who was suffering, and it explores the theme of hopelessness in a very profound way. Like the other ‘terrible’ sonnets,  demanding positions by the church that he only sought to serve.


230 VERSE 2025


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