Depression in Hopkins Sonnets of Desolation Essay -- Sonnet essays

Depression in Hopkins Sonnets of Desolation Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) was, first and foremost, a human of the cloth. He seems to have scar his gifts in musical composition, drawing, and poetry at a distant second to his ecclesiastical duties for most of his life, causing him to experience howling(a) bouts of depression. Hopkins poured out this depression in what are known as the Sonnets of Desolation, including I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day, Not, Ill carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee, and No Worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief. In his 1970 essay entitled The Dark Night of the Soul, Paul L. Mariani tells us that while Hopkins friend Robert Bridges feeling that Carrion Comfort was probably the sonnet Hopkins told him in May was written in blood, No worst, there is none was probably meant (59). No Worst seems to be set rather firmly in the lowest valley of that depression, and the cumulative effect of unrealized professional goals, poli tical visions, and artistic skills contributed to its construction. The very finality of the phrasing Hopkins chose to exculpated the sonnet with brook no argument things can get no worse. Part of this despair sprung from Hopkins abstinence from writing. He was a Jesuit who converted to universality in 1866. Due to his religious beliefs, he attempted to deny his talents he felt that the level of pleasure he derived through poetic expression approached the wicked and burned his youthful verses, determining to economise no more, as not belonging to my profession (Britannica 1). Yet Hopkins seems to have been drawn uncontrollably to poetry. By 1875 he had begun to write again stirred by the death of five nuns who drowned ... ...iterature, History, and Culture in the Age of Victoria (Brown Universitys Context 61). Ed. George P. Landow. 1995 http//landow.stg.brown.edu/victorian/hopkins/hopkins12.html Mariani, Paul. The Dark Night of the Soul. Originally visual aspect in A Comment ary on the Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Cornell University Press, 1970. From Modern Critical Views Gerard Manley Hopkins, Harold Bloom, ed. Chelsea House Publishers, New York. 1986. Hopkins, Gerard Manley. No Worst, There is None, I Wake and Feel the dangle of Dark, and My own heart let me more have pity on 1918. London Humphrey Milford, 1918. New York, Bartleby Online Oct. 1999. http//www.bartleby.com/122/45.html Reid, John Cowie. Hopkins, Gerard Manley, Encyclopedia Britannica Online. (c) 1999- 2001 Britannica.com Inc. http//www.britannica.com/ed/article?idxref=503256