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

Darkness

The imagery of night immediately suggests the dark night (of the soul) and the sense of God's absence that goes with it (Lamentations 3:2; Lamentations 3:6). The suffering is spiritually expressed rather than psychologically (see Carrion Comfort).

Bitterness

Words describing the bitterness of the experience: ‘gall’, ‘heartburn’, ‘Bitter’, ‘taste’, echo the book of Lamentations in the Bible (Lamentations 3:15; Lamentations 3:19 and thus such terms seem appropriate to Hopkins' lament also.

Investigating I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark
  • What is different in the way Hopkins describes the dark night experience here, compared to some of the other sonnets on the same theme?
Today's New International Version
2He has driven me away and made me walk in darkness rather than light;
King James Version
2He hath led me, and brought me into darkness, but not into light.
Today's New International Version
6He has made me dwell in darkness like those long dead.
King James Version
6He hath set me in dark places, as they that be dead of old.
Today's New International Version
15He has filled me with bitter herbs and sated me with gall.
King James Version
15He hath filled me with bitterness, he hath made me drunken with wormwood.
Today's New International Version
19I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall.
King James Version
19Remembering mine affliction and my misery, the wormwood and the gall.
An expression used to describe a period of despair and doubt by a believer which is ended by renewed hope.
The Christian Bible consists of the Old Testament scriptures inherited from Judaism, together with the New Testament, drawn from writings produced from c.40-125CE, which describe the life of Jesus and the establishment of the Christian church.
5 laments which reflect on the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 587BCE, seen through the eyes of one unknown individual.

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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