O the Mind, Mind Has Mountains: Searching for the Heart of Hopkins

O What Black Hours

Introduction

There is a soothing darkness that brings blanketing stillness and welcome sleep. There is an enchanting darkness that brandishes the spellbinding beauty of gliding moon and circling stars. There is a deepening darkness that invites wonder at the vastness and mystery of our stupendous universe. How thankful we are for those who sing of these darknesses blessing our being.

But there are darker darknesses, known, too, by us, that more resemble light-devouring abysses, that fill us with fear and foreboding. Depression, dread, despondency, despair—we know them by many names. For these darknesses, too, perhaps especially for these darknesses, we need those whose cries in the night announce companionship even in the blackest of holes.

Which calls to mind Gerard Manley Hopkins. Poems written by Hopkins in 1877 are among the most lyrical that we have in the English language. Poems written by him in 1885, sonnets others have termed “terrible,” are among the most desolate that we have. That one who soared so high could sink so low might seem incongruous if not pathological until we look within, and remember the range of our own emotions. Perhaps the capacity to experience the full gamut of emotions is what marks an alive human being. Perhaps we resonate so deeply to poets like Hopkins for helping us embrace our own wildly fluctuating feelings as we are swept along this perplexing human stream.

From among the dark sonnets, none entitled, that Hopkins sent his friend Robert Bridges in 1885, I am choosing one beginning with “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.” It is not only representative of the others but is a likely candidate for the one alluded to by Hopkins in an accompanying letter. First he tells Bridges that these poems came “like inspirations unbidden and against my will.” He then grimly adds, “If ever anything was written in blood one of these was.” Before beginning to take a close look at a poem written in blood, let us place it in context.

Context

In early 1884 Hopkins arrived in Dublin where he was to remain until his untimely death, apparently due to contracting typhoid, five years later. If his year and a half serving poor Catholic parishioners in “Museless” Liverpool felt bleak to him, his years in Ireland felt even bleaker. A number of factors contributed.

First, let us remember that Hopkins was English through and through. While his years in Ireland helped him gain sympathy into the plight of the Irish, into what he increasingly came to consider was their just desire for Home Rule, the revolutionary fervor of the Irish for this cause, among Catholic hierarchy as well as laity, ran stridently against his own conservative Tory instincts. So even though he had converted to Catholicism and was now serving the Catholic population in Ireland as a Jesuit priest, he was still at best suspect in the eyes of the students he taught and of the Dubliners around him. Traveling back to his parents’ home in Hampstead only once in the first seventeen months of his stay in Dublin, during which he wrote his dark sonnets, intensified his sense of exile.

Exile of a different kind had actually begun for Hopkins back in 1866 when, as a 22-year-old student at Oxford, he had converted to Roman Catholicism to the deep dismay and bewilderment of his family and friends. Protestantism had taken strong hold in England after Henry VIII, and its antipathy to Catholics in general and Jesuits in particular was still entrenched in the late 19th century. One can only imagine how Hopkins’ entry into the Society of Jesus two years after his Catholic conversion widened the gulf separating him from both family and fellow countrymen.

An enigma to the English world that he had grown up in, and now an anomaly to the Irish whom he was serving, Hopkins felt doubly exiled. To make matters worse, the work he was assigned to in Dublin—teaching Latin and Greek, having to correct numbing numbers of examinations, occasional preaching—was as arduous and exhausting as had been the parish work of his Liverpool years. Possessing a brilliant mind but unable to bring lofty concepts down to earth either in classroom or sermon, Hopkins found the grind of his labors fruitless. And as for his periodic forays into poetry, ever since a Jesuit publication had earlier refused to publish a couple of his longer poems, he gave up even trying to publish. In fact very few in his life, beyond Jesuit community and family back home, even knew he wrote poetry. The exceptions were three fellow writers, particularly his friend Robert Bridges, with whom he exchanged poems. Even these three were often baffled by Hopkins’ strained vocabulary and poetic innovations, not to mention his Catholic faith. Thankfully Bridges retained all of his work and published much of it in 1919, a full twenty years after Hopkins had died. While he was alive, he truly felt himself to be “time’s eunuch and never to beget.” This self-assessment perhaps felt particularly keen upon arriving in Dublin as he had just turned 40. Looking back at mid-life he could only see efforts that had come to naught.

Then there was the proneness to melancholy that had dogged him since childhood. (1) Add to that chronic health problems which had worsened through his Jesuit years. As if he needed something to further weigh upon him, he received news while in Dublin of several suicides of friends and associates. (2) So add a measure of grieving into the already depressing mix.

Perhaps the heaviest weight of all was the spiritual aridity that he was experiencing. While his faith in Christ and his devotion to Mary never wavered, the felt presence of both had disappeared. Here are lines from another of the anguished sonnets from this time:

Comforter, where, where is your comfort?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
…O the mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall
Frightful , sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May, who ne’er hung there. (3)

I don’t recall reading that Hopkins ever labeled what he was going through as a “dark night of the soul,” but the ingredients for one certainly seemed to be there. How might a deeply sensitive man of faith who was also a poetic genius render into words the excruciating night that was upon him in those early years in Dublin? We are now ready to see.

The poem line by line:

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.

Normally one wakes to light of day, but there is no such waking here. The darkness told here wakes to deeper darkness. And then words better cried aloud than tamely read:

What hours, O what black hours we have spent This night!

Not just the repetition of hours, but the wrenching “O what black hours!” Can we not feel an abyss opening? And then suddenly “we.” Of course, the only one who could possibly know the terrifying things seen, the fierce fray within, the fearsome interior ways traveled, is his own heart.

What sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.

Hopkins had addressed his heart elsewhere, in ecstasy, in “Hurrahing in Harvest”: “And eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?” But here he and his heart have experienced the crushing opposite of ecstasy. Who remembers more keenly than this symbolic seat of all our feelings lodged in our very breast? Who besides our own heart can remember how there have been times in our lives when not a speck of light could be spied at the far end of a black tunnel?

Writers sometimes try, usually unsuccessfully, to disguise the projection of themselves into the stories they write. Less so poets more prone to lay bare. Here Hopkins lays bare.

With witness I speak this.

And what may appear but a metaphor feels in the oppressive moment to be agonizingly more:

But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life.

How easy it is, when engulfed by a despondency that perhaps borders on despair, to magnify the blackness, casting it over all that has been, over all that will be. And then the perfect image to convey the utter forlornness:

And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.

No more fervent believer in God was Gerard Manley Hopkins, committed as a Jesuit priest to a life of poverty, chastity, and obedience for the greater glory of God. But fervent belief is no guarantor of comfort, no bulwark against doubt, no protection against desolation. Whom could he be crying out to, sending letters to, beseeching help from than the very Source of his being whom he is serving with his life? But this “dearest him” alas seems to live so far away as to not hear his cries, not receive his letters. What could feel more dispiriting, disheartening, than to write desperate letters to a loved one, and to feel that these letters were never answered, perhaps never even received?

“No worse, there is none” was how Hopkins began another his searing sonnets. The final six lines of the sonnet we are considering puts flesh on those stark bones.

I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves, but worse.

These words are hard even to read, much less to dwell on. Here a Catholic priest, consumed with self-loathing and literally warding off madness, (4) can imagine none whose scourge to their sweating selves is greater than his own than the damned in hell. But there they are, utterances first that make us shudder, then that evoke our awe at the poetic execution (“the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!”) (5), and finally that extend to us a great gift.

The great gift is to each of us who has experienced, perhaps at this moment is experiencing, overwhelming, mind-numbing, spirit-sapping darkness. The configuration of events, outer and inner, with which Hopkins contended in those harrowing Dublin years is of course unique. But so is the ambiguity and complexity of the drama within each of us, sometimes reaching dark extremes. Tell me there is a person knowing the torture of insomnia that can’t identify with Hopkins’ “black hours.” Tell me there is a person who has contemplated ending his or her life, has perhaps unsuccessfully attempted to do so, who cannot find a measure of hope to read of someone knowing well such an abyss who did not commit suicide, whose faith, however tested, carried his commitment to life forward. May dear Hopkins be smiling from the wings, at last, to realize with joyful amazement that, lo and behold, words from “time’s eunuch” have improbably begotten, and continue to beget, legions of his grateful offspring.

The Entire Poem:

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! What sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.

With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.

I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves, but worse.

Notes

1. “The melancholy I have all my life been subject to has become of late years not indeed more intense in its fits but rather more distributed, constant and crippling. One, the lightest but a very inconvenient form of it, is daily anxiety about work to be done, which makes me break off or never find all that lies outside…There is no ground for thinking I shall ever get over it.” Paul Mariani, Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life. Viking (Penguin Group, USA), 2008, p. 348.

2. “Three of my intimate friends at Oxford have drowned themselves, a good many more of my acquaintances and contemporaries have died by their own hands in other ways.” Mariani, p. 347.

3. from “No Worst There is None.”

4. “[I fear I’ll soon] be ground down to a state like this last spring’s and summer’s, when my spirits were so crushed that madness seemed to be making approaches—and nobody was to blame, except myself partly for not managing myself better and contriving a change.” Mariani, p. 358. 5. from “The Windhover: To Christ Our Lord.”