On the Terrible Sonnets

Hopkin’s “terrible sonnets” of 1885, the bitter fruit of his pained years in Dublin, culminate his sporadic career as a poet.  These six sonnets have attracted more attention than any of his other works except The Wreck of the Deutschland (1875-1876) and “The Windhover” (1877).  In all their brevity, they command a respect accorded greatness that can scarcely be claimed of any comparably small group of poems in Victorian or modern British literature.  It must therefore seem odd, if not perverse, to write of them….as failures.  An explanation is in order.

…Hopkins saw in these poems the fragmentation of his capacity to represent his Christian vision adequately; he took their radical shift in imaginative procedure, as measured against his earlier work, to be the mark of his decline.  As he wrote frankly to his lifelong friend Robert Bridges, the poems came to him “like inspirations unbidden and against my will.”  Hopkins oxymoronic simile, loaded with nuance, is not only a religious confession but the implied statement of an aesthetic position.  Although he derived his phrase from Shelley (“To a Skylark,” stanza 8), he here winced at Shelley’s delight in the spontaneity of “hymns unbidden.”  By “unbidden,” Hopkins meant “unwanted.”  The six sonnets did not manifest that penetrating delineation, that inscaping of Christ in nature which had formerly been his joy; nor did they serve a communal function by implicitly ministering to an imagined congregation.  The poems verged towards nightmare:

....He must have had some sense of their poetic merit, whatever their spiritual worth; for he subjected them neither to neglect nor to burning (as he had most of the poetry written prior to his conversion) but to extensive revision.  And he had the courage to revise with an eye for literary excellence, not conformity with religious convention.  If one or two muddled images mar the poems (notably in “Patience”). they are the minute but significant indications that the spiritual crisis which promped the poems left its mark upon his craftsmanship.  But there is precious little here that evinces any diminution in power of conception, diversity in technical skill, or emotional range in delineating the soul’s operations.  Indeed, the “terrible sonnets” show a sudden and darkly brilliant heightening in Hopkins’s scope and linguistic incisiveness.  It is an irony in his tragic life that the “inspirations unbidden” he could not entirely accept have generally achieved a fame far greater than the poems of which he approved....

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The ‘terrible sonnets’---“Carrion Comfort,” “No Worst, There Is None,” “To Seem the Stranger,” “I Wake and Feel,” “Patience,” and “My Own Heart” 1---are unique in Hopkins’s canon; it is both rare and provocative to find so abrupt an alteration as these poems represent.   

Inspirations Unbidden: The “Terrible Sonnets” of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Daniel A. Harris, Univ. CA Press, 1982

Preface:xiii-xv