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Poems for study » I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark » Synopsis of I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark

Sleepless torment

This is another of the ‘terrible sonnets’, written in 1885. It naturally pairs with No Worst, There is None in being about the dark night (of the soul). Whereas that sonnet finishes with the consolation of sleep, this opens with its impossibility. It is also like To Seem the Stranger, in that it is a complaint, though Hopkins calls it a lament. A lament is usually in the form of ‘Woe is....’, and although there is an element of ‘Woe is me’, here it is also a dialogue with an ‘absent God’, disguised as a dialogue with a very present heart, about being in such a wretched state.

Investigating I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark
  • Can you see any difference between a complaint and a lament?
    • If so, how would you categorise this sonnet?
A sonnet is a poem with a special structure. It has fourteen lines, which are organised in a particular manner, usually characterised by the pattern of rhyming, which changes as the ideas in the poem evolve.
An expression used to describe a period of despair and doubt by a believer which is ended by renewed hope.
In literature, a sub-genre where the writer objects or protests about something.
Expression of grief. A lament is a literary form used to express grief and sometimes questioning caused by a crisis.
The Bible describes God as the unique supreme being, creator and ruler of the universe.
A sonnet is a poem with a special structure. It has fourteen lines, which are organised in a particular manner, usually characterised by the pattern of rhyming, which changes as the ideas in the poem evolve.

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hoürs we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light's delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.

I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

 
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