The third Hopkins’ poem I’ve chosen to guide us on our journey from
despair to delight is called Carrion
Comfort.
Not,
I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not
untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man
In
me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I
can;
Can
something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But
ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy
wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With
darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O
in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?
Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay
in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand
rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.
Cheer
whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród
Me?
or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of
now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.
Now
there’s a fair bit of difficult stuff in this poem, which we’ll not worry about
too much. For example how Hopkins likes
to use adjectives like ‘rude’ as verbs; or phrases like ‘I kissed the rod’
which means taking holy orders, becoming a priest.
Let’s
focus on the first four lines, which are all about his thoughts of suicide. Hopkins
is not just accepting his despair. Now has started to wrestle with it. He is
not going to die. He is not going to let anyone or anything feast on his rotting remains. He is not
giving up – even though he knows how hard it is to keep going - as we can see
from his double negative ‘not choose not
to be’. He can. He can stay alive.
He can hope.
Unlike
Hamlet wondering whether ‘to be or not to
be’, or Keats who was ‘half I love
with easeful death’, Hopkins is determined
to survive. Like the conatus – desire
- of my favourite philosopher Spinoza, these lines are all about his dogged,
bloody-minded resolve to keep going, come what may. And we can draw immense strength from that.
There’s
a lot more wrestling in the rest of the poem, but it’s no longer with himself.
Now it’s a conflict between Hopkins and his God. We can take this more generally. Since we have
decided we are going to stick around, we can decide there is no point in just
meekly accepting our fate. We can decide to stand up and be counted. We can
decide to do battle with the conditions that have been grinding us down.
But
what’s the point?
Maybe
it’s to strip away the ‘chaff’, the rubbish that surrounds us, so that our ‘grain’,
our inner being, lies ‘sheer and clear’. Maybe it’s to find out that we are
strong, strong enough to grapple with the toughest of them all, and not be
defeated.
And
we have a clue in the last line that the worst is over, as ‘of now done darkness’ shifts these
experiences from present to past tense.
I love the defiance that came through from the off and the energy that almost skipped through this poem ( by comparison).
ReplyDeleteI read it quicker
Picked up a pace
Almost mirroring the poet himself