crossref-it.info - AS/A2 English Literature Study Guides - texts in context.Poems for study » Carrion Comfort » Themes in Carrion Comfort
The Temptation to Despair
Despair is a not uncommon feeling. Hopkins has had to face this, but in a brave opening, he rejects it as ‘carrion comfort’. The crux of his resistance is that there is always a choice, an alternative to suicide specifically, even if it is ‘not choose not to be’, which must be the smallest, yet perhaps bravest, choice there is.
The temptation is also resisted by being totally honest. He sees God as a tyrant. A less honest person would not care to utter such a ‘non-politically correct’ phrase - at least not PC for a priest. This forms the drama of the sonnet, as it becomes a confessional poem.
The Dark Night of the Soul
The ‘dark night’ experience Hopkins refers to in the sestet appears to be in the past: ‘That night, that year...’:
- this might suggest the experience also described in the first part of The Wreck of the Deutschland
- or, if this poem was revised some two years after it was written, he may merely be referring to a more recent past. This seems more in keeping with the tone, which does not suggest any sort of real, or at least settled, resolution to the inner turmoil.
- Do you see any other themes in the sonnet?
- Is he ultimately concerned with
- God’s attitude to him?
- or his to God?
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 choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against
me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to
avoid thee and flee?
Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer
and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy,
would laugh, chéer.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling
flung me, fóot tród
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each
one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my
God!) my God.
Bookmark this page with: