Gerard Manley Hopkins, “No Worst, there is none”
Gerard Manley Hopkins
No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old anvil wince and sing —
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief."'O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.For Paul and Sharon, and in memory of Julian
Emily Dickinson began a poem, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant – /Success in Circuit lies.” Sometimes, as she recognized, we need to work our way into truth, since it can be terribly painful and cannot be addressed straight out. This poem is about pain and how difficult it is to bear. We will work out way towards this awful recognition, slant-wise.
I will begin with literary history, even though that is not what I really want to write about. The nineteenth century, in England, was an asymmetrical time for literature. No great drama was written in English in the nineteenth century. For poetry, those hundred years began a little early, in 1798, with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, and in the first quarter of the century five great poets wrote: Wordsworth (1770 – 1850) and Keats (1795 –1821), as well as Coleridge ( 1772 –1834), Shelley (1792 –1822) and Byron (1788 –1824) .
Jane Austen wrote in the same era as the poets I have just mentioned (her novels were published 1811-1816). And then came an outpouring of great fiction, with Charles Dickens leading the way from 1836 to 1865: he was perhaps the greatest novelist to write in English. But he was challenged by the Brontë sisters, Emily (Wuthering Heights was published in 1847) and Charlotte (Jane Eyre, also 1847), William Makepeace Thackeray (Vanity Fair was a year later, in 1848), George Eliot (great novels from 1851 to 1876, crowned by Middlemarch, 1871-72), and the prodigious Anthony Trollope, who began in 1847, wrote his Barchester Chronicles from 1855 to 1867 and his Palliser novels from 1865 to 1880. Quite a time for fiction.
The poets? They are well known, much beloved, but not as great (in my view) as Wordsworth or Keats. Alfred Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and the dramatic monologues (greatly important to T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound in the following century) of Robert Browning. Much to the consternation of colleagues who teach Victorian literature (Queen Victoria reigned from 1837-1901, and accordingly her name was used to refer to the last 60 or so years of the nineteenth century), the greatest poets of the middle of the nineteenth century were both American: Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. (America was no slouch in the fiction department, either: think Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mark Twain.) The last years of the century saw the poetry of Thomas Hardy and early Yeats – hardly the kind of extraordinary outpouring which the early years of the century had ushered forth.
So many names, so many dates: and all for what? (I imagine you are thinking, ‘if I wanted an encyclopedia article, I could have gone to Wikipedia…’) But I started out with all these facts to enable my telling you that near the end of the nineteenth century there was an eccentric poet who wrote difficult and yet phenomenally beautiful and moving poems. His name was Gerard Manley Hopkins, and it is one of his poems that I shall be writing about. “No worst, there is none.” He wrote in less-than-optimal poetic times, and he wasn’t at all sure he should be writing poems. Well, he was sure, but then there is his story…
Hopkins went off to Oxford and came under the intellectual sway of a charismatic priest, John Cardinal Newman, and eventually converted to Catholicism. Well, that is not all he did. He decided to become a priest, and not just any priest, but a Jesuit. His family would have none of it. Although he wanted to be a poet, he thought that poetry was too, I don’t know, self-indulgent and therefore he abandoned poetry.
Then a ship called the Deutschland sank in the English Channel with five nuns aboard, all of whom died. Ah, Hopkins decided, God would want me to memorialize those nuns. So he began writing poetry again, writing a long poem called “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” And then he was in it, writing poems about….well, there is some doubt about what he was writing about. Many critics say he wrote about nature. Me, I think he was too ‘Catholic’ for that and see his poems as I think he saw them, about how one can encounter God in the natural world if only one looks intently, or perhaps – some poems suggest this – if only one were open to Christ’s manifestation in the world. He called his sense of the inner order of things ‘inscape,’ and he felt that the inscape of the world and the inscape of his poems should match.
But it is not ‘inscape’ that he became noted for, but a new meter related to ‘instress,’ which is the recreation of inscape in a poem Hopkins was attentive to rhythm in poems, and he noticed that it was not regular meters that charged a poem’s words with meaning, but the unique set of stresses that could inhere in a line or stanza. So he invented what he called ‘sprung rhythm,’ a notion that is more complex in the hands of commentators than it need be. Hopkins saw that a line could be based not on syllables (as in French poetry, which conventionally has twelve syllables in a line: a so-called alexandrine), which works well for unaccented languages like French; nor on counts of syllables-and-accents, which was the standard in Greek poetry and then in English poetry (called accentual-syllabic meters) and which we all know in its most familiar version, iambic pentameter. Oh, the tyranny of English teachers, who like to pretend that there is something mystical about ‘iambic pentameter,’ which only means that there are ten syllables in a line, alternately unstressed and stressed in five equal feet until the ten syllables have been reached, and a new line can begin. Shakespeare used this line, and because he was such a master of language, it became the standard for English poetry.
But Hopkins saw that Shakespeare did not write iambic pentameter, or not always: he varied the placement of the stresses so that his lines sounded like speech, so that some words had more emphasis and others less. They were not rhythmically regular, as speech is not rhythmically regular. That reminded Hopkins that old English poetry was not composed in an accentual syllabic meter, but in what we call a strong stress meter. For early English poets, all that counted, finally, was the number of stresses in a line. In Old English poetry, one finds a stressed syllable on either side of middle of the line, and these stresses are buttressed by alliteration. For the alliteration determined the stresses.
Out of this – Shakespeare’s variations of iambic pentameter, old English strong-stress meter (in which the number of syllables did not matter), and older Welsh poetry (he studied Welsh poetry) – Hopkins came up with a new way of writing poetry: sprung rhythm. Each line would be shaped by its stresses (as in strong stress meter) but, as with pentameter verse, there would be five stresses to a line. With a variable number of syllables.
This sounds recondite, but isn’t. Five stresses to a line, a variable number of unstressed syllables. Alliteration would be important. That’s it.
So why have I walked you through all this discussion of prosody? Because Hopkins seems hard. In fact, he is hard to read. We are not accustomed to writing like his, and I would further argue that his discomfort in writing poems, his need for us as readers to search for inscape instead of merely sailing along with the words, led to poems that seem very knotty.
But rest assured, the poems, once we work hard at them, make sense. And, more, because of the way in which Hopkins wrote, because of his sprung rhythm, those poems seem extraordinary, unlike anything we have ever read before yet, unerringly right, even perfect.
Hopkins wrote his wonderful God-is-in-the-world poems. Difficult at first, but of a beauty and a newness which startles. They are remarkable: fresh, compelling, memorable.
And then he was sent off to be a priest in Ireland, where he found himself alien and alone. While there, and in the short time before he died, he wrote a number of sonnets that are not about nature or God as much as they are about his inner torment. They are known as the “Terrible Sonnets,” not because they are bad poems, but because the subject of the poems is, well, terror.
I’ve gone slant-wise long enough, through a potted history of writing in the nineteenth century, and prosody, and a brief biography of Hopkins. It is time to turn to one of the most powerful and moving poems ever written in English, “No Worst, There Is None.”
First off, the poem is a sonnet: fourteen lines, built of an octave (the first eight lines) and a sestet (the final six). It is Petrarchan in form – the two halves of the octave rhyme abba; the sestet rhymes, well, in one of the ways a Petrarchan sonnet can rhyme. If you are attuned to the rhymes I am sure you are ahead of me, for you will have noticed how intensely rhymed the poem is: both abba quatrains use the same rhymes, and the sestet uses only two rhymes: cdcdcd. In other words, four rhymes and the whole poem is encompassed. Unlike conventional sonnets, though, the meter is not iambic tetrameter, but sprung rhythm. Like many sonnets, there is a ‘turn’ at the start of the sestet, for what has been specific here turns into a general statement of the human condition.
Now if you are paying attention to the poem, and not just reading along what I have written, you will have noticed that the lines are more ‘conventional’ than I have led you to believe. The first three lines have ten syllables; all of the sestet save the penultimate line have ten syllables. But iambic? Scarcely. Stresses pile up, then subside[1].
Let’s look at the opening sentence. First, we encounter the strange situation that it is not actually a sentence. There is no subject to the first phrase. “No worst.” Not ‘There is nothing worse.’ No subject, and we have jumped to the superlative – worst – without nodding at the comparative, ‘worse.’ This is, the poet is telling us, the worst it gets. “There is none.” Or in more usual English, there is nothing no thing, none, that is worse than this. Much is implied here: ‘nothing can be worse than this, this is the very worst,’ is what we take the phrase to mean.
No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
It is not as if things become clearer as we move into the second half of the first line, and into the second line. But we have been clued in, I think, by that use of the word ‘worst’ in the opening phrase. We are in the realm of that which is beyond compare: we are past the “pitch of grief,” at a higher?deeper?darker? pitch than even the worst of grief. “No worst, there is none.” We are at a pitch – a degree of things beyond even grief – that is beyond expression, and yet we are in some way ready for it, for our pangs (of pain? of despair?) have learned from the pains or despair we have experienced already, on the trail to this place. Our pangs have been “schooled at forepangs," taught by the pangs that came before. And so as we descend into the worst, we find the pangs wilder, more unruly; they are wrung from us by the suffering we are encountering.
What at first may have seemed incomprehensible has, as we work through it, become meaningful. We are in a place at the edge of our experience, where things cannot get worse, where we are experiencing some kind of totality of pain.
Perhaps, then, it is no surprise that the following lines are comprehensible, especially since they come from a Catholic priest:
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
There is no difficulty reading these lines. The first is an agonized cry to Christ, who should be offering him comfort, telling him that he, the poet, can find no comfort. The second is another agonized cry, this time to Mary, mother of Christ (and for Catholics, the intercessor who relays human concerns to the Godhead), asking for surcease from his pain, from the “worst” which encompasses him and which he is encompassed by.
The difficulties resume in the next four lines. Although, if we read them slowly and attentively, they prove to be no problem:
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old anvil wince and sing —
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief.'
He starts this quatrain with a metaphor. Crying out to God or Mary, as he has just done, is like herding sheep: as with sheep, there are a lot of them (cries) and they seem to not only come one after another, but huddle in a mass. Like sheep, his cries need to be herded. They are awful -- the chief woe of him, who utters them – and one of the chief woes of the world, for the world is full of sorrow. Men are tested – we move from the metaphor of sheep to the metaphor of iron hammered on an anvil – by the suffering piled, pounded, upon them. Hopkins, the priest, understands that our suffering tests us, and that in the process of being hammered b y what life heaps on us, we may be more clear about what life is all about: Christ and his infinite mercy. In another of the ‘Terrible Sonnets,’ “Carrion Comfort,” he asserts the pounding – in that poem it is like thrashing grain – has an aim, which is to clarify and leave the glistening grain (the soul) to shine forth to God. He writes, in that poem, that he hopes “That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.”
But we are in this poem, not that one. Here there is no clarity. Only pounding. And somehow (only clankingly referred to) the hammering seems to bring forth singing. But what good is that? Or this poem? He is pounded on the anvil, and then the pounding is over. He has winced and then, the “no worst” past, he sings. But then there is only, well, the lull and the leaving off. No more pounding. No more of anything, except maybe that briefest of songs.
The final two lines of this quatrain, which end the octet, are strange, strange. The fury of his suffering has abated into that “lull;” it is as if, the suffering in abeyance, the fury over, the fury informs him that although suffering is brief – the poem will end with references to the brevity of life and of each day – it can be all too full of suffering. That “fell” is a strange term. Hopkins seems to be calling on the literary usage of the term, where it means deadly or of terrible ferocity, but the term also connotes destruction, as when we fell a tree, bringing it down. Let me be terribly ferocious since your suffering life is finite, it seems to say I will bring you down.
So the opening of the sonnet, the octave, tells us that he is experiencing the worst of what a human can face: suffering to the greatest degree. He cries out but can find no comfort. (In another ‘Terrible Sonnet,’ “My Own Heart Let Me More Have Pity On,” he proclaims, “I cast for comfort I can no more get/By groping round my comfortless, than blind/Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find/Thirst's all-in-all in all a world of wet.” There is to be no comfort for Hopkins, as there is no day in the dark and no satisfaction of endless thirst even in a world that is full of wetness.) The suffering will be severe, the more so since it does not go on forever.
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
The personal of the octave gives way to the universal of the sestet. If, in the first stanza, the poet describes the dimensions of his suffering, in the second stanza he says’ this is how it is.’ We suffer, internally. “Not without hope we suffer and we mourn,” Wordsworth proclaimed, but we are not in Wordsworth’s territory now. Hopkins in this poem goes where Wordsworth does not go.
One of my favorite passages in literature appears in Saul Bellow’s novel, Henderson the Rain King. Henderson is the novel’s narrator, and he has gone Africa (‘the dark continent’) in search of light. While there, he befriends a native chieftain, Dahfu. Then Dahfu dies.
At one time, much earlier in this life of mine, suffering had a certain spice. Later on it started to lose this spice; it became merely dirty, and, as I told my son Edward in California, I couldn't bear it anymore. Damn! I was tired of being such a monster of grief. But now, with the king's death, it was no longer a topic and it had no spice at all. It was only terrible.
Suffering is only terrible. That is, I think, what the sestet tells us. No longer a ‘spice,’ no longer ‘unbearable.’ Only terrible.
We have great depths within us, and we can fall deep into those depths. “The mind was built for mighty Freight,” Emily Dickinson wrote, but she had, I think, even more courage than Hopkins. It is my view what Dickinson exemplifies what Hopkins says in this final part of the poem: she explored the great depths within the human mind, plumbing to the very edge of what can be said – beyond that is only the silence of speechlessness. No one, I think, every explored that inner landscape as bravely and with as much attentiveness as Dickinson. The territory she explored was that mountain range, with its “cliffs of fall frightful,” that Hopkins describes.
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.
These are, of course, the inner mountains of the mind or soul. What transfixes Hopkins, here, are not the peaks which we so often long for, but the huge abysses in which we may fall. They are indeed frightful. They are “sheer,” straight down, without handholds to enable one to climb out with. No one falls into them and comes back having measured their depth. These abysses swallow us up. (Myself, I think Emily Dickinson did explore those depths, and come back with reports: these reports are the substance of some of her very best poems, and her bravest.)
The line continues, even as the sentence we have just looked at has ended.
Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep.
If you never encountered those abysses, Hopkins suggests, you will think little of them. Pooh-pooh them. ‘Hold them cheap.’ If you haven’t gone inward into those dark places – remember, the poem began with “No worst there is none” – you will no doubt underestimate how strong, how overwhelming, how deep, they are. And we cannot deal with those deep chasms for long. Notice the opposition between ‘long’ and ‘small:’ we cannot for long resist the steep chasms of the interior of the mind, the deepest darks which can afflict us in our suffering. Our lifetimes are short and limited, a “small durance.” We cannot suffer for long, for life is not endless. Our lives, like the candle Macbeth refers to in his famous soliloquy, are brief.
Hopkins finds in this limitedness a small hope, although I am stretching things to call it a hope. We are wretched creatures, doomed by the conditions of existence to suffer. Yet there is cold comfort in this limit to our endurance. Death and sleep are a kind of (non-Christian) salvation. Once again, a sentence concludes and yet the line continues, now to its devastating conclusion.
Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
Our ‘comfort’ is that it will all be over. We will die; each day of suffering ends, somehow, with sleep.
Did Saul Bellow think of Hopkins when he wrote the passage I just cited? Maybe. Maybe not. But it is incontrovertible that he thinks like Hopkins in the lines which follow Henderson’s pain at Dahfu’s death. “But maybe time was invented so that misery might have an end. So that it shouldn't last forever?”
Hopkins concludes his great sonnet with small and, I have suggested, cold comfort. Maybe no comfort at all. Everything we experience in life has an end, and that end is death. That is our comfort when confronting the worst of things. (Short of death, there is always sleep, the end of our day of suffering.)
It has always been a marvel to me that I can like this poem so much, that I can love a poem that is about great suffering, about how we cannot live with it much, about how it destroys us as we fall into chasms of despair from which we cannot climb out. About how our only refugee is each night’s eventual sleep, and finally, death. How can that be?
How can I love such a bleak poem. For surely it is bleak.
Partly, there is an irony in this poem. This particular irony may be one of the main motives for reading ‘literature.’ We can confront the worst, and see that it is terrible. This knowledge by itself is terribly depressing. But the telling of the “worst” itself, in this poem, has a music that is at odds with what the poem is saying. Form and content are in conflict: Shape and music skirmish with the “worst” the poem insists on. Mind and the imagination, as so often in art, triumph even as what we are confronting is – as well as seems – hopeless. If we are not in sympathy with this irony, art can seem false or the refuge of cowards. Even if we are in sympathy with the irony, recognizant of the shaping power of the imagination, terror and depression do not fade away. They are real, and no art can make them disappear. Still, there is a recognition that the mind can deal with the “worst” through its esemplastic (a word favored by Coleridge) power.
Perhaps, too, I love the poem because in reading it I have the recognition that we do not suffer alone, that others – such as Hopkins and Dickinson – have also suffered. That in this difficult universe we inhabit, we are not alone. Not alone. Maybe that is a comfort to me, and so despite its terrible subject, I can love the poem because in reading it I realize that I am not alone when I sometimes find life almost unbearably painful.
Perhaps it is also the recognition that no matter how difficult the circumstances, we not only wince but “sing” – remember that odd word Hopkins used when he felts himself to be hammered on the anvil of being? So often we seek easy and satisfactory answers, perhaps proclaiming that suffering leads to wisdom or that pain can be turned into song. The almost-unrelievedness of Hopkins’ sonnet convinces me that maybe pain has, not so much a meaning, but a final end. It ends only when we end; but along the way maybe, maybe, it can be hammered into song.
Let me not end on too optimistic a note. Hopkins has told us, emphatically, that pain has is unbearable. Even if it can sometimes, briefly, be hammered into song, only the end of day, and finally only the end of life, can bring us a final surcease to pain. We know this to be true: the only comfort we wretches can find is that pain will have an end. And not, somehow, in our life, but only with our own death.
Footnotes
[1] If you want a more clear example of sprung rhythm – endless syllables, a set number of stresses, in each line, here is the beginning of the wonderful “Hurrahing in Harvest:”
Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?
In the sixth line of “No Worst”, there are two actual accentual marks. They were put there by Hopkins, as his way of saying, ‘Don’t read this iambically. See how the stresses come where we do not expect them.’ Ah, we are in sprung rhythm, even though the lines look – ten syllables – like normal poetic lines. Late in his life, faced with isolation, alienation and pain, Hopkins pared his lines down so that they looked conventional (ten syllables) but the impact of his embrace of sprung rhythm inheres in the lines….