The Terrible Sonnets, the Dark Night and Depression

Excerpt from:

THE ‘TERRIBLE SONNETS’ OF GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

AND THE SPIRITUALITY OF DEPRESSION  ~Hilary E. Pearson

Depression is a very lonely disease. Sufferers are unable to see beyond the blackness enclosing them, even if they are surrounded by loving friends and by a supportive family. It is difficult for them to talk to people who do not share their experience, and difficult for those others to understand how they feel. Although there is evidence that depression has been experienced since the earliest times, it was only in the twentieth century that it began to be studied systematically and that its symptoms were classified for diagnostic purposes. Even today diagnosis is not easy.

…The ‘Sonnets of Desolation’ or ‘Terrible Sonnets’ of Gerard Manley Hopkins are a group of untitled poems probably written during 1885- 1886. Unusually, these poems were not sent by Hopkins to his friend Robert Bridges, but were found after his death. There are six poems, usually referred to by their opening words as: ‘To Seem the Stranger’, ‘I Wake and Feel’, ‘No Worst’, ‘Carrion Comfort’, ‘Patience, Hard Thing’

and ‘My Own Heart’. Not all commentators believe that Hopkins was suffering from depression when he wrote them, but the evidence seems strong that he was.

…For many years I was plagued with depression related to hormonal disturbances. At times it was so bad I could barely function three weeks out of four, although throughout much of this period I was living the intense life of a litigation lawyer. When I was depressed, I found Hopkins’ poems, particularly these poems, to be a source of comfort. He described vividly how I felt.

Was Hopkins Depressed?

The Circumstances of Writing the ‘Terrible Sonnets’

At the time when Hopkins wrote these poems he was feeling very isolated. His sense of alienation is expressed in ‘To Seem the Stranger’:

To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life

Among strangers. Father and mother dear,

Brothers and sisters are in Christ not near

And he my peace, my parting and my strife.

England, whose honour O all my heart woos, wife

To my creating thought, would neither hear

Me, were I pleading, plead nor do I: I weary

of idle a being but by where wars are rife.

I am in Ireland now; now I am at a thírd

Remove. Not but in all removes I can

Kind love both give and get. Only what word

Wisest my heart breeds dark heaven’s baffling ban

Bars or hell’s spell thwarts. This to hoard unheard,

Hear unheeded, leaves me a lonely began.

This is a threefold alienation.

First, Hopkins is alienated from his family by his conversion to Catholicism. Then he is alienated spiritually from his beloved country, since England had failed to make the return to the Catholic Church for which he longed.²  His move to Ireland in 1884 added physical separation from England, the ‘third/Remove’ of the poem.

The appointment of the English Hopkins to the Classics Fellowship at the new Royal University caused a political row. Desire for Home Rule was growing and Hopkins, an English patriot, was not sympathetic to this movement, so he was alienated from his Irish coreligionists. His work was not congenial: the Royal University had inadequate facilities and most of the students were uninterested in learning. He had to spend a great deal of time marking examination papers which were generally of a low standard, and he felt that this burden kept him from creative activities. He was not a successful teacher and did not get on with most of his colleagues.

Hopkins’ General Psychological Health

Most of the evidence about Hopkins’ health while he was in Dublin comes from his letters to his closest friend, the poet Robert Bridges. From the very beginning he complains about weakness, sometimes showing desperation, as in the outburst ‘AND WHAT DOES ANYTHING AT ALL MATTER?’ About the time the poems were composed he wrote to Bridges, ‘I think that my fits of sadness, although they do not affect my judgment, resemble madness’.³

In ‘No Worst’ he presents a vivid image of the depressive’s terror of falling over the edge into insanity:

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne’er hung there ….

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

…Hopkins’ letters and journals that each period of teaching in his life was accompanied by tiredness, lack of energy and inability to complete anything he took up, although until the Dublin post none of his teaching jobs had been by any reasonable measure onerous.

Some secular commentators regard Hopkins’ Jesuit vocation as the sole cause of his mental problems. This view seems to be based more on prejudice than evidence…

…There are other clues to Hopkins’ state of mind in the ‘Terrible Sonnets’ themselves. The opening of ‘I Wake and Feel’ is a vivid description of the sleep disorder characteristic of depression: lying awake for hours with tormented thoughts, finally falling asleep to be haunted by disturbing dreams, then waking in darkness to find the torment still there.

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 longer light’s delay.

Here Hopkins is describing his own experience—‘With witness I speak

this’—and it is not the experience of just one night.

The beginning of ‘Carrion Comfort’ may represent Hopkins’struggle with a temptation to utter despair…

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 chose not to be.

It is remarkable how often Hopkins manages to use ‘not’ in these four lines; they are a cry of desperate refusal to surrender to the darkness pressing in on him…(There was)… ‘disintegration of an appropriate and healthy sense of self ’.¹¹

Depression and the ‘Dark Night’

Issues for Depressed Christians

Anyone who suffers from depression tends to think that they are abnormal. Depressed Christians are liable to think that their experience is a sign that there is something wrong with them spiritually, for surely depression is not a ‘normal’ part of the Christian experience. Aren’t we supposed to ‘rejoice always’? The belief that this is an abnormal experience leads to feelings of guilt and self-loathing.

Sufferers feel that they are losing their faith…a serious sin, adding to their guilt and self-hatred.

Dorothy Rowe has found in her work with the depressed that those with a religious belief suffer at the hands of both Freudian psychiatrists, who believe that religious beliefs are evidence of neurosis,…and Christian ministers, who can only provide platitudes about God’s forgiveness.²²…Some Churches make this worse by treating depression as evidence of sin, or even of ‘demonic possession’.

Christians suffer especially greatly when their depression seems to arise from a life situation which was freely chosen in response to what they were convinced was God’s calling. Does this mean that they were mistaken? How could walking in God’s will for them result in such suffering?

   [Most Christians struggle against the damning, prevalent societal ignorance and persecution but those suffering from depression attract even worse virulent and mocking attacks.]

The ultimate weapon against desolation is patience.

  [ However, the sufferer finds even the need for ‘patience’ a veritable war zone when forced to live in the midst of such cruel attacks.  No one was with Jesus in the darkness of Gesthemani, in the abuse heaped upon him by the Sanhedrin or the soldiers, and especially not in the midst of the maddening crowd on His way to the Cross.  Mary, His Mother, and John along with the other Marys were there though at the Crucifixion.]

There is a strong tradition throughout Christianity which regards ‘darkness’ as necessary to spiritual growth.²⁴

A developed description of this tradition is found in the writings of John of the Cross. He emerged from the terrible experience of imprisonment and ill-treatment by his own order with profoundly spiritual lyric poems. He later wrote detailed theological commentaries on these poems. He teaches that the soul’s movement towards God requires a painful stripping away.

This process begins with ‘active’ purification, requiring ascetic human effort, but this alone is not enough. The ‘passive dark night’ is God’s purifying activity, getting at the roots of sin and ‘immeasurably more terrible and costly than the active night alone’.²⁵

John understood that, experientially, what we now call depression could not be distinguished from the passive ‘dark night’. He gave three signs for distinguishing between the dark night and dryness from other causes, including ‘bad humours’ (The Dark Night, 1.9).

First, there is no satisfaction from anything, physical or spiritual. Second, there is consciousness of dryness and a ‘painful care’ towards God. As these are not sufficient to distinguish some psychological states, he adds a third sign: inability to meditate imaginatively. Denys Turner discusses the relationship in John’s thinking between depression and the ‘dark night’, concluding that they can only be distinguished in their outcomes and causes.²⁶

When the passive dark night has passed the self is transformed; when depression lifts the

previous state of selfhood is restored. The ‘dark night’ is caused by God; depression is caused by some physical or psychological imbalance.

Of course, God can use depression as part of the dark night experience: the differentiating test is the outcome…

How Can the ‘Terrible Sonnets’ Help Those Suffering Depression?

Spiritual Help

There are many definitions of spirituality, but they have in common an emphasis on experience and practice in the search for God. For many people suffering from depression, who often have low self-esteem, spirituality depends on their answers to questions about whether they have any relation to God at all, whether God has interest in them and whether they can do anything to reach out to him. Hopkins gives the

sufferer from depression help in finding answers to these questions.
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“...However, I have a saying: until you deal with the core of your being and the injuries that wrote on the slate of your soul, behavior modification is like putting "frosting on shit." Pain is a breaking of the shell. It is a sign that the physician within us wants to heal us. If those around us cannot understand that, they have a problem, not us. If you have even one close friend to "let it all out" with, you are blessed. ♥
Sometimes the one you need to tell is a counselor...”   ~Ruth, We Are One

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