SAMPLE INTRODUCTION


Gerard Manley Hopkins is an astonishingly original poet. His poems are meticulously constructed and he combines a unique mixture of archaic and obsolete terms with neologisms, consonant chime and vivid imagery to create poetry quite unlike anything else I have ever read. There is a clear dichotomy between the unadulterated joy of the bright sonnets celebrating the natural world, such as ‘God’s Grandeur’ and ‘The Windhover’, and the unmitigated despair of the aptly named ‘terrible sonnets’, particularly ‘No worst, there is none’. The contrast is so shocking that it is hard to believe the same poet wrote these poems.


SAMPLE PARAGRAPH


Having relished the gorgeous images, lively word-play and euphoric emotions of the bright sonnets, the first of the terrible sonnets I encountered, and one which revealed a man who was grappling with the deepest despair, was ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark’. What made this sonnet so distressing was the palpable suffering evoked by Hopkins’ innovative language. The simile ‘cries like dead letters sent/ To dearest him that lives alas! away’ really conveyed his sense of isolation. These letters are either dead in the sense that they are being ignored by God, or in the sense that the recipient might be dead. I do not know which is worse! The use of repetition emphasised the seemingly interminable long dark night of the soul the poet is experiencing: ‘What hours, O what black hoürs we have spent/ This night!’ The identification of himself as sickness itself - ‘I am gall, I am heartburn’ - indicated such self-loathing it was upsetting to contemplate how deeply mired in depression Hopkins must have been. I thought of his joyful heart stirring for a bird in ‘The Windhover’ and his exuberant nature poems and felt so sorry for the suffering that is evident in this desolate poem.


SAMPLE CONCLUSION


My study of Hopkins has led me to conclude that he was like a tragic hero in many ways. He was a man of exaggerated consciousness who felt every emotion to such a pitch that when he revelled in nature’s beauty, he felt that joy to the core, but when his living conditions and chronic illnesses plunged him into despair, he felt that awful pain to the same degree he had previously felt joy. Hopkins certainly is a poet of emotional extremes. He is also an extraordinarily innovative poet, whose original poems are memorable for their eccentricity and their beauty. It has been a very poignant experience, reading these poems. I found them very moving and thought-provoking and my heart went out to the gentle, tortured soul who wrote them.


250 VERSE 2025


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