Inscaping the Heart

from Hopkins: Inscaping the Heart

(the Terrible Sonnets)

In 1884, in the lonely began of Dublin Hopkins underwent a spiritual crisis far more stormy and wrecking than the one he had experienced as an Oxford student. Recorded in the terrible sonnets, the rendering of the experience of the dark night of the soul owes some of its frightening power to the depiction of the heart. Being mastered again, tested in its acceptance of Thy terror, O Christ, O God, the heart finds itself enveloped by the darkness of confusion blurring the difference between heaven and hell. Although, as made clear in To seem the stranger (1885), it was viewed as the main source of wisdom and creativity, now all the heart's attempts miscarrry, stifled by hell's spell or baffled by the ominously dark heavens. Under the siege of such enemies the heart closes itself to them and in this remove of its own doing, deprived of any outside help, it must cope with its fears and resentment completely alone.
The torment intensifies in I wake and feel (1885), where, the dis-incarnate (cf. Harris, 55), despairing poet, enters into a relation with his own heart. On the one hand he perceives it as part of the space of the self into which he has plunged and through which he gropes. On the other hand, the heart appears to him a separate entity, a companion - perhaps the Sacred Heart of Jesus - (cf. Goggin, 93) independent enough to explore the horrors of darkness going its own ways.

Estranged from the self-torturing poet, though still retaining its role of an addressee, the heart becomes the witness of Hopkins's negative metamorphosis. Like a rebel, dogged in a den, having forgotten that every dark descending is of God's doing, the man, alienated from his heart, and therefore no longer truly human, can perceive and interpret reality only in a fragmented, defective way Burning with its gall, poisoned by the sin of pride, the heart becomes an impenetrable border which not only does not allow for any divine intervention, but also prevents Hopkins from meeting and communicating with his truest self.

Patience, hard thing (1885) provides another insight into the man's natural heart which emerges as a peculiar cemetary of hopes, whose ruins are masked by Patience. Allied with the elective rather than affective will, the heart's very special inhabitant eventualy causes the war within which, fought between the man's instinctive and religious selves, brings about his spiritual maturity. The fight's painful intensity is effectively rendered by the sound of grating and it is to this accompaniment that the man's rebellious wills are bent, thus completing the process of reforging of the heart. Now the wisdom instilled through dear bruising will teach man to accept God on God's terms.

Complete again, wiser for another toss he has taken, filled with patience and hope, the poet can finally instruct his heart:

My own heart let me more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable, not live this tormented mind
xWith this tormented mind tormenting yet. (102)

After the promise of God's smile and the clear skies Betweenpie mountains, the darkness sets anew in Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves (1886), where the disintegration of the dismembered and disremembered world is additionally marked by the split between the poet and his heart. This separation, enhanced by the heart's double status (the poems' speaker and its addressee) is further emphasized by the multiple use of our.

Heart, you round me right
With:

Our evening is over us; our night whelms, whelms, and will end us.(97)

However, despite their physical alienation, the man and the heart seem to experience a unique sense of togetherness, spiritually bound by the dark truth to the earth's dapple being at its end. Of the two remaining witnesses of the catastrophe, it is the heart that emerges as a moral authority, and taking its last chance to rebuke and warn, it spells ... Our tale, O our oracle -- demonstrating that everything in man's life oscillates round the fundamental choice between good and evil. Listening to the heart's whisper, accepting the rebuke he feels to be rightly given, the man clings to the oracle-stirred hope: that even in the face of the imminent end of all creation, the choice of the white spool can save man from the doom of a rack and its eternal torment.

The epitome of Hopkins's priestly conscience, concerned, like his sacramental poems first and foremost with the fate of the world, the heart fulfills its duty to the last. Its didactic preoccupations become evident in On the Portrait of Two Beautiful People (1886), where the priestly heart's eye grieves, discovering how easily man's beauty can be corrupted by sin if it is not entrusted to Christ. Pained by this truth, by the self-torture inflicted when his heart strains beyond his ken, and almost ready to give up, father Hopkins realizes how fundamental for his vocation it is to bear my burning witness... / Against the wild and wanton work of men. If it were deprived of the passionate intensity which keeps it burning, the heart would prove worthless as light for all the world it was chosen to become...