Snow Waves and Strings of Root

Feb. 24, 1873: Journal

‘Snow Waves’

   In the snow flat-topped hillocks and shoulders outlined with wavy edges, ridge below ridge, very like the grain of wood in line and in projection like relief maps.  These the wind makes I think and of course drifts, which are in fact snow waves.  The sharp nape of a drift is sometimes broken by slant flutes or channels.  I think this must be when the wind after shaping the drift first has changed and cast waves in the body of the wave itself.  All the world is full of inscape and chance left free to act falls into an order as well as purpose: looking out of my window I caught in the random clods and broken heaps of snow made by the cast of a broom.  The same of the path trenched by footsteps in ankledeep snow across the fields leading to Hodder wood through which we went to see the river.  The sun was bright, broken brambles and all boughs and banks limed and cloyed with white, the brook down the clough pulling the way by drops and by bubbles in turn under a shell of ice.

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On his depressions:

This was not the first time that he had experienced such feelings. Throughout his life his temperament had been sensitive and highly strung. In 1873 he recorded the effect of a strenuous journey:

In fact, being quite unwell I was quite downcast: nature in all her parcels and faculties gaped and fell apart, fatiscebat, like a clod cleaving and holding only by strings of root. But this must often be.4

In a Journal note of 1873, when he was 30, he says,
The ashtree growing in the corner of the garden was felled. ..and seeing it maimed there came at that moment a great pang and I wished to die and not to see the inscapes of the world destroyed any more. (4)

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More and more I find articles disparaging the idea that Hopkins suffered from depressive bouts and fought despair.  Even Christ ‘bled blood tears’ in Gesthemani.  It is a wrong ignorance to not cast the human being in his true mileu which does not lessen one’s view of his greatness or even his holiness [I am irritatingly reminded of the ignorant, shallow and worldly ‘outcry’ against the dark battles Mother Teresa suffered.].  It ignores the fact that each of us is a sinner, born ‘after the fall’, incomplete and wounded.  Mother Teresa, Hopkins and others knew that fact ‘intimately.’  The greatness of their lives lies in the fact of ignis fatuus of duty in the face of such struggles.