1 Batter My Heart

‘Batter My Heart’:
An Examination of the Sonnet as a Religious Form
Keenan Walsh
Bennington College
Senior Thesis in Literature
Recommended to the Faculty of Bennington College for acceptance by:
Katie Peterson (Thesis Advisor)
Marguerite Feitlowitz (Second Reader)

Many thanks to April Bernard, Katie Peterson, Marguerite Feitlowitz and Annabel Davis-Goff,
all of whom helped me greatly with this project.
Table of Contents
Introduction ………………………. .1
John Donne …………….………….. 8
As due by many titles (8)

Batter my Heart (11)
I am a little world (14)
Death be not Proud (16)
Oh might those sighs (19)
Gerard Manley Hopkins….……….. 22
As kingfishers catch fire (26)

(Carrion Comfort) (29)
No Worst (32)
I wake and feel (34)
My own heart (36)
Conclusion………………………….. 39
‘Batter My Heart’ 1
Introduction
In the following chapters, I am primarily concerned with how the sonnet functions as a
purely religious form. I am interested in the effects it has on the speaker in relation to his abstract
object of devotion, and those it has on the object of devotion in relation to the speaker. If we are
to regard the sonnet, historically, as an erotic act of devotion, what happens when this devotion is
divine? Is the position of God elevated (in its associations with the lover) or reduced (in its
associations with the earthly)? Is the position of the speaker, for that matter, elevated (to the
godly) or reduced (in contrast to God)? On a fundamental level, is the relationship between God
and man necessarily different than that of two lovers? These are the most immediately relevant
questions raised by placing the sonnet in a religious context.
I will focus on two poets in particular: John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins. If we are
to credit anyone with the development of the religious sonnet, it is these two—Donne more or
less fine-tuned a mode and mold to which Hopkins gravitated, with which he experimented, and
in which he thrived. Several critics (e.g. Parini, Stringer) have pointed out Donne’s direct
influence on Hopkins, thematic and prosodic, but I will refrain from taking part in this
conversation. I do not find it to be particularly helpful: not only is there a lack of any real
evidence that Hopkins read Donne more than anyone else (perhaps it is obvious)—I am not
positive the argument sheds a vast amount of light on either author’s oeuvre. That is, in the end, I
think these poems can be fully elucidated without this type of speculation. Many other critics
have read into these devotions with a strong biographical curiosity; I would like to avoid this at
all costs, moving through their sonnets formally. My main interest is that insofar as existential
abstractions—namely, God, Death, Despair—necessarily stand in for the unattainable mortal
beloved with which the sonnet is inextricably associated, the speakers of Donne and Hopkins use
their positions as sinful, despairing men to despair forthrightly. They de-deify the deity in order
to address Him directly—a tendency which is reflected formally in their respective tone, diction,
imagery and syntactical structure. However, this fundamental similarity notwithstanding, their
respective modes of address are vastly different. Together they embody two major tonal
tendencies of the sonnet—argument and meditation—and it is my hope that their proximity in
this analysis sheds light on that coexistence. I will more or less categorize Donne as an arguer
and Hopkins as a meditator, but these categories are not mutually exclusive. For example, Donne,
in all his rapid-fire imagery, subtly meditates on the nature of the mortal man’s passionate
corporeal energy in relation to the divine; Hopkins, in resting with his images, argues against St.
Thomas’ assertion that man cannot have direct knowledge of particulars. But before moving on to
their respective poems, we should first discuss, for the sake of context, the historical heritage of
the sonnet.
The sonnet is traditionally associated with earthly, corporeal love—Petrarch’s Laura,
Shakespeare’s ‘Young Man’ and ‘Dark Lady,’ Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella. Any lyric can
extend, as Vendler notes, horizontally (toward another human being) or vertically (upward
toward Heaven, or, to put it more broadly, toward “a physically inaccessible realm conceived as
existing ‘above’ the speaker,” (Vendler, Invisible 13)). The sonnet stands out, though, in its
associations with the Petrarchan notion that mortal love can lead upward toward, and potentially
grant access to, divine love. In this sense, the horizontal is indirectly vertical, and thus it could be
argued that the sonnet has since its conception been at least a tangentially religious form. Still,
though, I think there is a sharp distinction to be made between initial, intentional inclusion of the
divine and a peripheral, perhaps almost serendipitous (albeit hoped-for) chance encounter with it.
That is, early sonneteers may have made their way indirectly toward the divine via pining in the
mortal realm; a distinction should be made between this heavenly contact and the act of pining
for the divine all along. Indeed, it is a distinction I hope to make more clear in the coming pages.
But first we can approach the question more broadly: what is the difference between
divine love and mortal love? Is the process of loving the same? Are the ways in which we seek to
love and be loved by God similar to the ways we seek to love and be loved by another human? In
my mind, what separates divine love from mortal love is the simple fact that attempting to love
God necessarily gives birth to the problem of God’s existence in a way unmatched in the physical
realm. That is to say, Petrarch did not need to invoke Laura’s name to assure himself that she was
there; calling God’s name, however, and outwardly proclaiming faith, is almost always doubly-
directed. Perhaps this is an essentially modern and psychologically speculative notion, but I
would argue that even in the Psalms one can read loud, outward declarations of religious
conviction as inward attempts at assuring oneself that God actually exists. (“The lord is my
shepherd, I shall not want.”; “The fool hath said in his heart, [there is] no God.”)1 The product of
this tension within the confines of the sonnet is that God becomes the most unattainable of
unattainable beloveds.
Structurally, the sonnet is both simple and complex. Simple because, to an extent, we
know what to expect from the sonnet in terms of argument; its basic formal structure is handed to
the poet. But this strict enclosure renders its practice complex. Usually the sonneteer introduces a
problem in the first unit only to twist it toward (though not necessarily to) resolution in the
subsequent ones. In this complex simplicity, the sonnet functions as more than just a love song,
often begetting profound insights into the nature of time, love, beauty, mortality—insights
generally otherwise sown only by longer periods of meditation. In fact, perhaps it is helpful to
regard the sonnet as a short form concealing a longer one: in some ways, the sonnet seems to
succinctly paraphrase prolonged rumination so that its products might become more directly
accessible—indeed, more intense and passionate. Thus, what seems at first to be a 14-line ode to
1
All Biblical quotes are taken from the Authorized KJV.
an inaccessible beloved often becomes, upon closer inspection, a profoundly personal,
introspective trial of devotion.
In English, the form eventually becomes less meditative and more argumentative. This is
partially due to changes in its structural anatomy. The Elizabethan structure of four units, for
instance, (three quatrains plus a couplet), naturally gives birth to more twists and turns in the
mind than the two-unit Petrarchan structure (an octave plus a sestet), which caters more readily to
meditation. Vendler notes that the four parts can be placed in many logical relations to one
another, including but not limited to, “successive and equal; hierarchical; contrastive; analogous;
logically contradictory; successively ‘louder’ or ‘softer,’” (Art 17). To be sure, even in the
earliest translations of Petrarch, one can observe a tendency toward argumentative tonality often
characterized by a heated diction, rapid rhythm, and quick shifts in image and thought.
To highlight this point, let us compare translations of Petrarch’s Rime 189. Below is a
literal translation by Robert Durling followed by Wyatt’s translation from the 16th Century.
My ship laden with forgetfulness passes through a harsh sea, at midnight,

in winter, between Scylla and Charybdis, and at the tiller sits my lord,
rather my enemy;
each oar is manned by a ready, cruel thought that seems to scorn the
tempest and the end; a wet, changeless wind of sighs, hopes, and desires
breaks the sail;
a rain of weeping, a mist of disdain wet and loosen the already weary
ropes, made of error twisted up with ignorance.
My two usual sweet stars are hidden; dead among the waves are reason and
skill; so that I begin to despair of the port.
My galley chargèd with forgetfulness

Through sharp seas, in winter nights doth pass
’Tween rock and rock; and eke mine enemy, alas,
That is my lord, steereth with cruelness,
And every oar a thought in readiness,

As though that death were light in such a case.
An endless wind doth tear the sail apace
Of forcèd sighs and trusty fearfulness.
A rain of tears, a cloud of dark disdain,

Hath done the wearied cords great hindrance;
Wreathèd with error and eke with ignorance.
The stars be hid that led me to this pain.
Drownèd is reason that should me consort,
And I remain despairing of the port.
Much could be said about the differences between these two translations, but my main
interest is tone. In the first quatrain, Wyatt ascribes to the steering enemy a “cruelness” which is
not directly present in the literal translation: “…and eke mine enemy, alas, / That is my lord,
steereth with cruelness.” This places the speaker in a position of complaint as opposed to
lament—the main difference being that complaint requires at least an imaginary addressee,
whereas lament can exist on an entirely personal plane. In the literal translation, the entire first
quatrain’s image is handed to us with an almost passive grieving, almost as if to say, “Alas, look
how terrible my situation is.” Also interesting is the inversion of “enemy” and “lord.” While in
the literal translation “lord” is qualified with “enemy” (“…sits my lord, rather my enemy.”),
Wyatt instead qualifies “enemy” with “lord”. The effect of this inversion is magnified by the
difference between “rather” and “that is.” While “that is” can indeed be taken to mean “rather,” it
immediately reads as “who is” (i.e. mine enemy who is my lord). Again, the difference accounts
for a tone of disdainful complaint not present in the literal translation.
The second quatrain contains similar differences, especially in the description of the
wind’s effects on the sail: “A wet, changeless wind… breaks the sail,” and “An endless wind
doth tear the sail apace.” The tonal distinction here is subtle, but I would argue that a strong,
ceaseless wind can unintentionally—indeed, passively—break a sail by virtue of its own inherent
strength, whereas tearing the sail requires an angry volition. Also, as the sail is breaking, it is not
necessarily broken, whereas as it is tearing, one assumes it is torn bit by bit, and thus from the
first tear is already torn.
In the third quatrain, Wyatt continues to ascribe human volition to natural external
circumstances. In Durling’s translation, the rain and mist wet and loosen the already weary ropes;
in Wyatt’s, the rain and cloud “hath [already] done the wearied cords great hindrance.” Again,
Wyatt’s speaker dramatically complains while Durling’s mournfully observes. Perhaps the most
notable difference between the two translations, though, is the description of the stars. Wyatt’s
speaker describes the stars as the ones “that led [him] to this pain.” In the literal translation, they
are the “two usual and sweet stars” which are hidden. Wyatt’s speaker expresses his disdain for
the stars; Durling’s remembers them fondly.
Finally, what Wyatt made a couplet, but what is in the original Italian simply the final two
lines of the final tercet, is “Drownèd is reason that should me consort, / And I remain despairing
of the port.” The literal translation makes no claim that reason should have done something, as if
indebted to the speaker. Wyatt also inserts the word “remain,” implying that all the while he has
been “despairing of the port,” but in Durling’s translation, it is not until the last line that the
speaker begins despairing of the port.
Wyatt poses the speaker in a position of objection and criticism. In the original poem, as
evidenced by Durling’s literal prose translation, the speaker simply meditatively bewails his
circumstance. The former position naturally gives way to argument, as the speaker is forced to
prove that he is rightfully complaining. Wyatt’s couplet, for example, could be regarded as a sort
of thesis to the argument that is the preceding poem, while in the literal translation those images
are merely the final descriptions of a lamentable scene. I think it is safe to say, then, that Wyatt’s
own diction describes his tone—sharp, cruel, disdainful.
This is not a unique example—indeed many early translators of the sonnet imposed a
profound argumentative urgency on the poetry. In their sonnets, both Donne and Hopkins possess
a similar urgency. As I have already mentioned, I tend to regard Donne as more of an arguer and
Hopkins as more of a contemplative, but these categories are not cleanly cut; though they each
take the sonnet in distinctly different directions, both poets take on characteristics of each
tendency. And even amid their tonal disparities, both Donne and Hopkins are inextricably bound
by the very fact that they both explore aspects of man’s relationship with the divine by way of
approaching it within the confines of a traditionally erotic form. In the coming pages I will
investigate this gesture’s effect on man’s relationship with his divine object of devotion while
also detailing the tonal propensities of the English sonnet.

John Donne
Collectively, Donne’s religious poetry is known as the Divine Poems, the largest subset of
which is the Holy Sonnets. As I have noted, Donne’s use of the sonnet is a gesture toward the
secularity of the sacred, the human-nature of God, and the potential physicality of man’s spiritual
relationship with Him. The speaker implores God to answer him, spare him, save him or destroy
him, and he bemoans his seemingly inevitable damnation. P.M. Oliver suggests that in the Holy
Sonnets, Donne “experiment[s] with what it would be like to be a mortalist, or to feel almost
certainly damned…—above all…utilizes them to explore the position of a believer passionately
concerned about matters of salvation and damnation in the first place,” (134).
Historically a form for meditative struggle, the sonnet allows Donne to contemplate
dichotomies and paradoxes that give rise to the tension between himself and his chosen subject.
My aim is to display the sonnet in its argumentative structure as a form for repentant and
lamenting meditations. Given the context of its tradition, any struggle contained within the sonnet
necessarily enters into a conversation with the struggles of passionate, physical love.
To illustrate this point further, I would like first to examine ‘As due by many titles,’
which, in my mind, sets the trajectory of tone for the rest of his series. I will then move on to
discuss this trajectory in terms of its tonal, thematic and structural adherents and deviants using
the sonnets ‘Batter my heart,’ ‘I am a little world,’ ‘Death be not proud,’ and ‘O might those
sighs and tears return again.’
1 As due by many titles I resign

2 Myself to thee, O God, first I was made
3 By thee, and for thee, and when I was decayed
4 Thy blood bought that, the which before was thine,
5 I am thy son, made with thyself to shine,
6 Thy servant, whose pains thou hast still repaid,
7 Thy sheep, thine image, and, till I betrayed
8 Myself, a temple of thy Spirit divine;
9 Why doth the devil then usurp in me?
10 Why doth he steal, nay ravish that’s thy right?

11 Except thou rise and for thine own work fight,
12 Oh I shall soon despair, when I do see
13 That thou lov’st mankind well, yet wilt not choose me,
14 And Satan hates me, yet is loth to lose me.2
This poem rests on several points of tension. Though the speaker resigns himself to God
(i.e. to the will of God) throughout the poem, he simultaneously questions Him and begs Him to
act according to his own will. Though God has created the speaker and therefore owns him, as He
did and does the rest of mankind, He will not choose him or fight for him. Though Satan hates
him, he will not let go of him. And finally, all of this, presumably, is a result of the fact that the
speaker, though seemingly God-fearing and devout, has at some point knowingly betrayed
himself, and therefore God, in some unnamed sinful act.
The structure of the argument follows that of the traditional sonnet: the first quatrain
presents the main point, the second expands upon it, the third introduces a shift (though here it
may begin earlier), and the couplet acts as an accumulated climactic summary. The rhyme
scheme here is unique: a-b-b-a, a-b-b-a, c-d-d-c, c-c—almost an amalgamation of the Italian,
French and English forms of the sonnet. The octave follows the Italian model, but the Italian
allows only for several variations of two tercets after the volta; here, obviously, we have a third
quatrain and a rhymed couplet. Its argument structure resembles Shakespeare’s, but its rhyme
scheme is completely different. The last six lines of this poem seem almost like a variation on the
French model, which contains the same rhyme scheme as the Italian for the octave, but after it a
sestet (usually rhymed c-c-d-e-d-e). Though that is not entirely correct, either. Suffice to say,
then, that this poem is atypical in its structure, but not bafflingly so.
The first quatrain is relatively straightforward: Donne sets up the poem’s running list of
the titles by which he resigns himself to God. He argues that man was made for God, and that
2
All Donne poems and quotes are taken from John Donne: The Major Works.
when man sinned, Jesus suffered for his sake: “By thee, and for thee, and when I was decayed /
Thy blood bought that, the which before was thine.” Each line in this quatrain is enjambed,
making for a rapid, perhaps hurried and overeager tone—an eager proclamation of faith amidst a
confession of having sinned. The second quatrain continues with and expands upon the ideas of
the first; he lists the many titles by which he is obliged to resign himself to the Lord. “I am thy
son, made with thyself to shine,” he argues, echoing Matthew 13:43 (“Then shall the righteous
shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their father. Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.”) “[I
am] … / Thy servant, whose pains thou hast still repaid.” The speaker is God’s servant, and God
is repaying him for his labors.
The sonnet begins to turn in line 7—a shift which continues through line 9. “Thy sheep,
thine image, and, till I betrayed / Myself, a temple of thy Spirit divine.” We are finally introduced
to the main tension of the poem: though the speaker is a devout lover of God, at some point he
betrayed himself, and thereby betrayed God, insofar as he is a temple of the Holy Spirit. The
enjambment of line 7 into line 8 elicits surprise on the reader’s part: one assumes that “thee” will
follow “betrayed,” but instead he insists that he has betrayed himself. This points to the speaker’s
intrinsic connection with the divine, which further magnifies the contradiction of God’s distance.
He continues at the full-blown turn with a question: “Why doth the devil then usurp in me? / Why
doth he steal, nay ravish that’s thy right?” Why, he asks, has the devil raped the property of the
Lord? Moreover, why does God not fight back for his possession, nay his own creation—his own
Self?
In the familiar, second-person singular (thou as opposed to you), the speaker begs God to
fight against the evil that inhabits and ravishes him.
Except thou rise and for thine own work fight,

Oh I shall soon despair, when I do see
That thou lov’st mankind well, yet wilt not choose me,
And Satan hates me, yet is loth to lose me.
The shift in line 11 suggests that the speaker’s metaphysical angst is not entirely self-directed;
that this poem is no mere self-flagellating guilt-trip. Though he has betrayed himself, the speaker
seems to accuse God of infidelity, in that God will not “rise and for [His] own work fight.” The
speaker thus despairs at the ultimate paradox that is his fate: being man, he should be loved by
God and loathed by Satan, but in fact he has been seized by Satan while God passively stands
witness.
Ultimately, then, this poem is concerned with God’s unrequited love. Satan’s paradoxical
inhabitance is merely a side-note—the true problem is that God is apparently unwilling to chase
after what is rightfully His. How and why would an all-loving creator-God appear so out-of-touch
with His supposedly beloved creation—indeed, especially when this very creation is earnestly
calling upon Him for help? This essential dilemma gives way to the plethora of existential crises
in many of the proceeding sonnets. Only in a few does Donne directly address God; others
address other subjects, or act as personal laments. Before moving on to the sonnets with different
subjects, however, I would like to examine ‘Batter my heart’.
1 Batter my heart, three-personed God; for, you

2 As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend:
3 That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
4 Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new.
5 I, like an usurped town, to another due,
6 Labour to admit you, but oh, to no end,
7 Reason your viceroy in me, me should defend,
8 But is captived, and proves weak or untrue,
9 Yet dearly’I love you, and would be loved fain,
10 But am betrothed unto your enemy,
11 Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
12 Take me to you, imprison me, for I
13 Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
14 Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
This poem begins much more violently than the first, with the intense request that God
might nearly destroy the speaker in order to rekindle their divine connection. As Bloom notes,
Many of the clues to unlocking some of the subtle tensions within the
poem are contained in the dominant metaphor, “to batter.” In its most
obvious definition, to batter an object or a person is to strike that object
with repeated blows. It even contains a military context in which to batter
is to break down walls or other obstructions in one’s way. Within the
context of this poem we come to understand that the speaker is frustrated
by some obstacle that stands in the way of his connection to God, (John
Donne 46).
While this is true, Bloom neglects to acknowledge that Donne does not merely say, “Batter my
interior,” or “Batter my obstacle,” but in fact says very clearly, “Batter my heart.” This upholds
the aforementioned Petrachan tradition of earthly love which is so closely associated with the
sonnet.
“Batter my heart,” he says, “…for you / as yet but knock, breathe, shine and seek to
mend.” The metaphor here is obscure: in Donne’s England, it was common courtesy to breathe
on the spot where one had knocked and repair any sign of having knocked in order to keep the
door pristine.3 Donne is painting an image of the home that is his contained self, the door of
which separates him from God. “That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend / Your force,
to break, blow, burn and make me new.” Donne, treating his own heart as the gateway into his
soul, requests that God not merely stop by and knock lightly, but destroy the door and use His
force to break it, burn it down and reshape it into something more worthy of His love. Moreover,
the speaker is requesting that all the effort might remain on God’s end—that he might receive
grace by passively allowing a constructive destruction. Again, to quote Bloom, “In the Christian
metaphor of making all things new, grace is received, not achieved,” (John Donne 54).
3
I am admittedly indebted to April Bernard for this elucidation.
The second quatrain maintains the preset tone of violence, and the desire to be overtaken.
“I, like an usurped town, to another due, / Labour to admit you, but oh, to no end.” Like a
conquered town, the speaker ineffectively struggles to keep God out. “Reason your viceroy in
me, me should defend, / But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.” Reason, God’s governing
force in the mind of man, should act as an internal mechanism for the defense of God—a defense
against sin—but here the speaker laments even his own reason’s weakness. It, too, has been
captured in the usurped town that is his inner-self.
Having proclaimed himself nearly hopeless in the face of his own sin, and having vocally
sought from God a violent overthrow and creation of a new self, in line 9, Donne changes his
tone: “Yet dearly’I love you, and would be loved fain, / But am betrothed unto your enemy.”
Here he places himself between God and Satan, in a love triangle of sorts. That he is “betrothed
unto” Satan hints at the forthcoming sexual metaphor in the couplet. God should love our speaker
easily, as our speaker does God, but it seems the speaker is bound against his will to rest eternally
with Satan in the depths of his sin.
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,

Take me to you, imprison me, for I
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
The poem ends on a note of contradiction: the speaker will never be free unless God captures and
enslaves him; nor will he ever be chaste unless God Himself ravishes him. Harkening to his
previous cry to be violently overpowered for the sake of redemption, at the end he asks God, in
brutally sexual terms, to enter him.
Once again the tension between the speaker and his subject results from, or perhaps in, a
contradiction. That the speaker needs God to “ravish him” in order to be chaste; to imprison him
in order to set him free; to utterly destroy, “bend… break, blow, and burn” him in order to
construct him, results in a highly physical and emotional tension between the speaker and God.
Once again, it mirrors the tension between the lover and the beloved; the tension begot by a man
seeking the seemingly unattainable. Moreover, it is undeniably an argument, and Donne’s
speaker cries to God in a tone comparable to that of a rejected lover.
We see a similar desire to be consumed and destroyed by God’s force for the sake of
redemption in ‘I am a little world made cunningly’. In this sonnet, Donne explores the means of
extreme cleansing by the elements, and implores God to help “heal” him. It is different from the
other two poems, though, in that it is mostly a personal lament, and therefore addressed less
directly to God.
1 I am a little world made cunningly

2 Of elements, and an angelic sprite,
3 But black sin hath betrayed to endless night
4 My world’s both parts, and, oh, both parts must die.
5 You which beyond that heaven which was most high
6 Have found new spheres, and of new lands can write,
7 Pour new seas in mine eyes, that so I might
8 Drown my world with my weeping earnestly,
9 Or wash it, if it must be drowned no more:
10 But oh it must be burnt; alas the fire
11 Of lust and envy have burnt it heretofore,
12 And made it fouler; let their flames retire,
13 And burn me O Lord, with a fiery zeal
14 Of thee and thy house, which doth in eating heal.
The structure of this poem resembles the previous two I have examined, and the rhyme
scheme is the same as ‘Batter my heart,’: a-b-b-a, a-b-b-a, c-d-c-d, e-e. In the first stanza, Donne
presents himself as a microcosm of the macrocosm that is the outer world; the universe. He is
made “cunningly / Of elements, and an angelic sprite,”—a miniature model of the world in which
his physical elements and his soul coexist in perfect harmony. Perfect as he may be, however, he
thinks himself doomed. Somehow, sin has made its way into this perfect microcosm and
“betrayed to endless night / My world’s both parts,” (that is, both his body and his spirit), “and,
oh, both parts must die.” With his status at death determining his soul’s fate, he laments that his
dual self—contaminated on both ends by sin—will die.
The second stanza confronts the scientists which “beyond that heaven which was most
high / Have found new spheres, and of new lands can write.” Perhaps the discoveries of Ptolemy
(a ninth sphere, the Primium Mobile, beyond the fixed stars) or Galileo (if indeed this poem dates
before his 1610 Sidereus Nunciu, and his account of “new lands” on the moon) make way for
alternate understandings of the macrocosm’s inner workings. But new lands will not suffice:
Donne begs them to pour “new seas” [author’s ital.] into his eyes, so that he may drown his
world as God does in Genesis. Echoing one of his early sermons, Donne refers to tears as the
soul’s antidote against sin in repentance—“tears … should be thy soul’s rebaptization for thy
sins.” Or if his covenant to himself is likened to that of God’s to Noah (Genesis 9:11: “neither
shall there be any more flood to destroy the earth”), and if he cannot drown his world, at least, he
begs, let those tears wash his sin.
But it is not enough: a late volta in line 10 brings us to the conclusion that his soul must
be cleansed with fire: “But oh it must be burnt; alas the fire / Of lust and envy have burnt it
heretofore,” (see 2 Peter 3:7, 12). He cannot drown this flame, nor can he simply wash it away;
only God’s wrath can cleanse the foulness inside him. “Burn me O Lord, with a fiery zeal / Of
thee and thy house, which doth in eating heal.” Referencing Psalm 69 (“For the zeal of thine
house hath eaten me up; and the reproaches of them that reproached thee are fallen upon me.”),
he calls on God to cleanse him with that which, in that same Psalm, saves the speaker from the
“waters that [came] unto [his] soul,” and the “deep water, where floods overflow [him].” Like the
Psalmist, Donne is “weary of [his] crying,” and begs God to violently burn him and make him
new, as he does in ‘Batter my heart.’

In this poem, Donne sets up several dichotomies: fire and water, black sin and angelic
sprite, wash and burn, heaven and the world, God and man, sin and redemption. In doing so,
though the poem begins with an image of unity, Donne highlights the basic, inherent separation
of most things—most lamentably, his own separation from God. However, this poem differs from
the others I have examined in that God is not addressed until line 12, and only named in line 13.
The speaker is also less concerned with his direct relationship with God, and more so with his
own internal corruption; the poem is less sexually charged, though still maintains an intense
physicality. Nevertheless, the poem still serves as an example of how man can address God in
earthly terms and therefore, to an extent, remove him from the pedestal.
On that note, I would like to turn now to a slightly different poem; definitely one that
stands out among the rest. ‘Death be not proud’ is arguably the most well-known of the Holy
Sonnets. In it, the speaker not only upholds his (at this point) established confidence in the face of
an overwhelming force—he takes it a step further and kills Death with Death’s own sword. This
poem, not so much a lament as a battle cry, moves away from the speaker’s internal struggle with
God, and turns toward scripture to prove its case. It is one of the few in which the speaker comes
out on top.
1 Death be not proud, though some have called thee

2 Mighty and dreadful, for, thou art not so,
3 For, those, whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow,
4 Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me;
5 From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
6 Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
7 And soonest our best men with thee do go,
8 Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
9 Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
10 And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
11 And poppy, or charms can make us sleep well,
12 And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
13 One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
14 And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die.
The structure of this poem is almost Petrarchan. It consists of four quatrains and a couplet,
though its rhyme scheme differs slightly from the traditional Italian model. Donne chooses to
hold onto the a-b-b-a-a-b-b-a structure of the first two quatrains, but in the third and couplet
moves from c-d-e-c-d-e to c-d-d-c-e-e—presumably an aesthetic choice to maintain an already
established pattern. While its not without its metric variations (line 1 begins with a trochaic
substitution; line 2 contains one at the end; line 9 contains a spondee; etc.), the poem is set in
relatively straightforward iambic pentameter.
It begins by personifying a relative abstraction—death—and approaching it not in
trepidation, but with the confidence of a battle’s victor, as if Death were already the triumphed
and dying opponent. The speaker addresses Death in the familiar and singular second-person, and
whereas outside the realm of this sonnet death qua abstraction holds a mysterious authority over
men, here, a simple shift in tone robs Death qua personified-being of much of his power. To
accentuate Death’s mere humanity, he also accuses it, in the first line, of pride—a mortal sin. Just
as at times he seems to de-deify God with a simple change in tone, in this poem Donne robs
Death of much of its power simply by addressing him as mortal; as powerless.
This is, all in all, the aim of the first quatrain. The speaker acknowledges Death’s status
among men, and notwithstanding the fact that “some have called thee / mighty and dreadful,” the
speaker holds his ground, positing that “those, whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow, / Die not,
poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.” As if speaking to a child, Donne writes with an almost
sympathetic authority, as if Death had been hitherto unfamiliar with his own position; as if the
speaker’s job were not to conquer Death, but rather to explain to him his inherently conquered
state. “Those whom you think you kill do not die, poor idiot,” he says, “and moreover, you will
not—cannot—kill me.”
In the second quatrain, the speaker expands upon the ideas presented in the first. In line 5
we are presented with the idea that since rest and sleep are the images of death (“which but thy
pictures be”), death itself must be as pleasant as sleep. Lines 7 and 8 posit that our best men face
death willingly, and as soon as they die, their souls are delivered to heaven; that only the body
perishes, while in fact the soul—our very essence—remains intact. Not only is the act of dying
pleasurable, but it is altogether a non-act, as life itself never fades.
In line 9 there is a slight turn: while in the first eight lines, Death has been confronted like
a child—not insulted as much as explained-to—now he is defamed and slandered. “Thou art
slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men, / And dost with poison, war and sickness dwell.”
Having pointed out Death’s lack of power, now the speaker insists that not only is Death
powerless, but he is a slave, working at the will of those that kill, coming only when called.
Moreover, his roommates are poison, war and sickness—three vile companions. Not only is he a
slave but his company is putrid.
If, as we have already argued, death and sleep are relatively comparable in terms of what
they bring and what is begotten by them, then we must not ignore that other things—namely,
poppy and charms—do death’s job better than death itself. “Why swell’st thou then?” he asks;
why gloat and brag when you are but a second-rate version of your own counterfeiters?
Finally, in the couplet, the speaker delivers the final blow. We have been promised eternal
life (John 10:27, 28: “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: And I give
unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my
hand.”), so in fact, only death itself shall die (1 Corinthians 15:26: “The last enemy that shall be
destroyed is death.”; 1 Corinthians 15:54: “So when this corruptible shall have put on
incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the
saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.”). Only death itself is subject to the curse
and power it once claimed over men.
My main interest in this poem is the speaker’s tone when addressing Death: fearless,
accusatory, triumphant. For this reason, it both fits into and stands in contrast to the rest of the
series; as in the other sonnets, the speaker takes a strong stand against a being or concept that is
larger than life, but whereas in most others he generally backs away, begs, cries out or questions
himself and his fate, in this poem he stands his ground and at least feigns steady knees. It is an
angry and triumphant poem, and for once the speaker exercises his rhetorical strength to pull
himself up.
This is in direct contrast to the last poem I would like to examine, ‘O might those sighs
and tears return again.’
1 O might those sighs and tears return again

2 Into my breast and eyes, which I have spent,
3 That I might in this holy discontent
4 Mourn with some fruit, as I have mourned in vain;
5 In mine idolatry what showers of rain
6 Mine eyes did waste! what griefs my heart did rent!
7 That sufferance was my sin, now I repent;
8 Because I did suffer I must suffer pain.
9 Th’hypdrotic drunkard, and night-scouting thief,
10 The itchy lecher, and self tickling proud
11 Have the remembrance of past joys, for relief
12 Of coming ills. To poor me is allowed
13 No ease; for, long, yet vehement grief hath been
14 The effect and cause, the punishment and sin.
This poem is completely self-pitying, and unlike all the above poems, allows no room for even
the faintest glimpse of hope—not even in a vain cry for help. It mourns the speaker’s inexorable
suffering; mourns that since his grief has been hitherto misdirected, his punishment is now to
suffer more. “O might those sighs and tears return again / … which I have spent / That I might in
this holy discontent / Mourn with some fruit, as I have mourned in vain.” The speaker expresses
his wish to shed some cleansing tears and mourn for the sake of genuine repentance, but this wish
is undirected; there is no God figure to which he is praying, no mighty power from which he is
seeking assistance. Indeed, since his discontent is “holy”—that is, since he has sinned—any
prayerful wish is implicitly directed toward God, but the point is that unlike before, God’s power
is not explicitly invoked in a second-person address.
This man’s sin has been the worship of women, which has brought him nothing but pain:
“In mine idolatry what showers of rain / Mine eyes did waste!” As if he had a limited reserve of
tears, he laments that he has wasted them all fruitlessly. Moreover, he needs them to repent for
the very act of using them. His suffering was sinful, and “Because [he] did suffer [he] must suffer
pain.” The punishment for his suffering is merely a different flavor of suffering; a different genre
of pain.
At the poem’s turn, he begins to envy the drunkard, the thief, the lecherous man and the
“self-tickling proud,” because at least they, in all their punishment, can find solace in the
pleasures of their past indulgence. In the face of their inevitable damnation, at least they can turn
back and try (however vainly) to convince themselves their joy was worth their suffering. The
speaker, however, looks back in the face of his pain and finds only more pain—the immediate
grief his sin begot left no room for even fleeting elation. “To poor me is allowed / No ease.” He
treats himself as he treated Death—pityingly, defeated. Finally the poem lands on its climactic
summary: “For, long, yet vehement grief hath been / The effect and cause, the punishment and
sin.” Suffering has only given birth to more suffering; all his pains were futile attempts at
happiness that left him only in more pain.
This poem stands out from that last four in that it does not seek even painful consolation.
It is strictly a personal lament, and even its wishes are rather theatrical, as the speaker is aware of
his own prayers’ impotence. The contradiction is that suffering is the source of suffering, and it
engenders a tension between only the speaker and himself. Though it hearkens in its form to the
earthly love which the sonnet traditionally carries, there is no unattainable beloved. It is more
despairing than repentant.
Each of these five poems exhibits the nuances of the sonnet as a religious form; Donne
uses the sonnet to theatrically express the outward and inward laments of a generally sinful man.
Each of these sonnets rests to an extent on a contradictory point of strain, making way for a
tension between the speaker and the subject which resembles that of the lover and the beloved.
Sometimes this tension is expressed outwardly, sometimes inwardly. The point is that it is
expressed at all.
Donne created the model of the religious sonnet, and very few have entered into its
territory. If Donne shares the space with anybody, it is Hopkins, to whom I would like to turn
now. As I hope to show, Hopkins’s voice is much different than Donne’s, but their conversation
is undeniable, given the rarity of the gesture. Though there is no verifiable evidence that Hopkins
was a particularly avid reader of Donne, there is very little argument against the fact that he
deliberately entered into a dialogue with Donne’s work. Where Donne expressed the desire to let
God in so that he might find some faith, Hopkins’s gestures are much more repentant sobs of
despair. Indeed, he despairs at his own despair, for, to quote the Catechism, “Despair is contrary
to God's goodness, to his justice—for the Lord is faithful to his promises—and to his mercy.” As
such, if we are to view Hopkins’s later poems as despairing meditations, the very act of writing
them is sinful.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Hopkins is a poetic anomaly. He is arguably too modern for the Victorians and too
Victorian for the modernists, often viewed as a sort of proto-modern precursor to 20th-century
experimentation with form. Even in his earlier poetry one can see a tendency to push the limits of
the rhythmic and prosodic conventions of his day. He coined terms and developed a relatively
organized, idiosyncratic lexicon to describe his own aesthetic. He read lines of verse like bars of
music, and even if we did not have access to his journals and letters (which, for instance,
deliberately lay out the rules of his “sprung” and “counterpoint” rhythms), we would see in his
poetry an inner mathematical and musical logic at work.
It is no great surprise that Hopkins rose to stardom among poets in the early- to mid-
twentieth century; equally unsurprising is that much of the praise is directed at just a very few
later sonnets. As W.H. Gardner noted in 1949,
The seven or eight sonnets of ‘desolation’ (for Patience may perhaps be

regarded as ‘consolation’) are those of Hopkins’s poems which above all
others have captured the mind and imagination of his modern audience;
and the reason for this preference is not far to seek. Admittedly they show
a concentrated art which in an age of literary formlessness, of timid or
inhibited religious emotions, was bound to command a grudging or
wandering respect. But that quality would not explain all the praise
lavished on these poems at the expense of some of the equally fine earlier
ones. The truth is (though few are aware of it and not many will care to
acknowledge it) that these astringent later sonnets crystallize that sense of
frustration, of separation from God, which is the peculiar psychic disease
of the twentieth century, (87).
I quote Gardner not because I find his psychological assertions here to be unique or particularly
enlightening, but because I think he justly articulates the quality that separates Hopkins’s early
poems from those on which I will focus my attention. Indeed, some of the earlier sonnets—one of
which I will examine momentarily—jump out at the reader with a fervent faith and electric awe
in the face of God’s creation, and they are often no less structurally sophisticated than their
successors. But while the later sonnets “crystallize [a] sense of frustration, of separation from
God,” the earlier ones are directed outwardly and do not, I would argue, demonstrate fully the
extent to which the sonnet can function as an introspective, meditative structure. Moreover, in
proximity to Donne’s despair, they shed less light on themselves than do the later sonnets.
Any discussion of Hopkins’s verse necessarily bears in mind his unique prosody.
Therefore one is hard-pressed to begin a discussion of his poetry without first detailing, to some
extent, his more common idiosyncratic gestures. Instead of moving immediately to the poetry
itself, I would first like to offer a brief account of his distinctive prosody and poetic theory.
Anyone who is at all familiar with Hopkins’s work has at least heard the term sprung
rhythm. In the preface to one of his later manuscripts, Hopkins distinguishes it from regular
English rhythm (what he called Running Rhythm or Standard Rhythm), but even his definition of
“normal” is at times slightly abnormal. Normal English rhythm, as he says, “is measured by feet
of either two or three syllables and (putting aside the imperfect feet at the beginning and end of
lines and also some unusual measures in which feet seem to be paired together and double or
composite feet to arise) never more or less.”4 In normal rhythm, each foot has a principle
accented syllable and takes into account its slack or unstressed syllables—the five most common
English feet being, then, the iamb, the trochee, the dactyl, the spondee and the anapest. When the
stressed syllable begins the foot, it is a falling foot; when it ends the foot, it is a rising foot; when
it is sandwiched between two unstressed syllables, the foot is rocking. Hopkins asserts that “for
purposes of scanning it is a great convenience to follow the example of music and take the stress
always as first, as the accent or the chief accent always comes first in a musical bar.” This is
altogether an oversimplified way of scanning both music and poetry, and Hopkins himself notes
that it leaves room for only two possible feet: the trochee and the dactyl, and then only two
4
All Hopkins quotes, including his poems, are taken from Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works.
possible uniform rhythms: trochaic and dactylic—though somehow, he seems rather pleased with
this point. When these two rhythms are mixed, he says, “then what the Greeks called a Logaoedic
Rhythm arises,” (Hopkins, 143).
Scanning this way leaves room for only a few irregularities, and Hopkins notes that to
avoid becoming “same and tame” poets have brought forth several “licenses and departures from
rule to give variety.” Usually this takes the form of reversed feet—that is, using hard syllables
where, judging by the rest of the line, a soft syllable should be, or vice versa. If this happens more
than once in one line, the effect, according to Hopkins, is quite literally a musical one.
If … the reversal is repeated in two feet running, especially so as to include

the sensitive second foot, it must be due either to great want of ear or else
is a calculated effect, the superinducing or mounting of a new rhythm upon
the old; and since the new or mounted rhythm is actually heard and at the
same time the mind naturally supplies the natural or standard foregoing
rhythm, for we do not forget what the rhythm is that by rights we should be
hearing, two rhythms are in some manner running at once and we have
something answerable to counterpoint in music, which is two or more
strains of tune going on together, and this is Counterpoint Rhythm, (143-
144).
Strict sprung rhythm cannot, Hopkins asserts, be counterpointed—possibly because its
feet often vary so heavily between lines. Sprung rhythm takes into account only the stressed
syllables, and the feet can range from one to four syllables, with the stressed always coming first.
“[It thus] gives rise to four sorts of feet, a monosyllable and the so-called Trochee, Dactyl, and
the First Paeon,” (144). Like logaoedic rhythm (generally), in sprung rhythm “the feet are
assumed to be equally long or strong and their seeming inequality is made up by pause or
stressing,” (144). Here is where, I think, Hopkins’s verse most closely resembles music, in that
theoretically the lines in any particular poem should last equal amounts of time, as do bars of
music—though of course in both cases there is room for interpretive rubato, rhythmic crescendo
and decrescendo.
As McChesney rightly notes,
The basic idea of sprung rhythm is not new. Hebrew psalmody was
organized round a set number of stresses per line with any number of
unstressed syllables in between. The modern renderings set to Gelineau
music reproduce this effect. More to our point, however, Old English
alliterative verse was in sprung rhythm. It had a set number of stresses per
line, each stress clustered with a varying number of non-stressed syllables,
and each line having a number of alliterated consonants. There was no
rhyme, however, and each line was end-stopped, whereas Hopkins used
rhyme, both internal and end-of-line, and also liked to “overreave” his
verse, not treating the lines as units but running on the scansion from line
to line to the end of the stanza, e.g.
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his
riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, (74).
These rhythmic tendencies mixed with his “constant chiming” of rhyme and alliteration—
influenced by the Welsh cynghanedd—account for his complex patterns of interweaving rhythms
and cadences.
Finally, we must define two of Hopkins’s more important terms—inscape and instress—
though he himself never securely defined either one. To be brief, inscape is, more or less, the
design or pattern of each thing; it is the unique individuality of each object. Everything—from
the most inconsequential inanimate pieces of matter to the mind of man—has its own inscape,
which gives everything a “self” or identity. Again, to quote McChesney, “The mind of man is
unique, in that it can both create inscapes—in stone, paint, words, sound—and also recognize the
infinite inscapes of nature. Art and religion here meet, for Hopkins, because man can give praise
to God for the whole created world,” (78). Each man’s mind is unique and separately inscaped by
the Creator, and thus the variety of created and recognized inscapes is infinite.
Judging by Hopkins’s journals and correspondence, it sometimes seems that instress is
interchangeable with inscape, though this is not actually the case. Generally, Hopkins spoke of it
as the energy and organizing principle underlying inscape. “Discussing the early Greek
philosopher Parmenides, Hopkins interprets him as meaning ‘that all things are upheld by instress
and meaningless without it.,’” (McChesney 78). Thus, instress seems more foundational than
inscape, as it gives meaning and order to the infinite variety of the universe’s inscapes. It also
exists in the mind and allows us to make sense of the world. Recognition of instress in the world
requires diligent and intense solitary contemplation of simple objects. That Hopkins himself
deliberately practiced this way is evidenced by nearly all his poetry.
One poem in particular comes to mind—an earlier poem which differs from the others I
will discuss. It fits our purposes, though, not only in that it poetically defines inscape, but also in
that it exemplifies the aforementioned rhythmic structures and sheds light on Hopkins’s less
despairing use of the sonnet as a religious form.
1 As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;

2 As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
3 Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
4 Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
5 Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
6 Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
7 Selves—goes its self; myself it speaks and spells,
8 Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.
9 I say móre: the just man justices;

10 Keeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
11 Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
12 Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
13 Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
14 To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
Hopkins was highly influenced by the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus. Scotus’s
arguments for the existence of God were some of the most outstanding and substantial
contributions to natural theology. Hopkins especially had an affinity for Scotus’s argument that
man can indeed have direct knowledge of particulars. As McChesney notes, Hopkins rejoiced in
the infinite particularity of things, and thus needed, to some extent, to believe in their uniqueness.
This poem encapsulates that contention. Hopkins moves from descriptions of things in
nature to an argument that the mind of man is distinct in that it can choose how to express its own
inherent individuality. In short, this poem argues that everything has a unique essence, but that
unlike objects—let’s say a bell, which chimes its essence in one way, as nature prescribes—
man’s nature is revealed in his myriad everyday activities. He therefore has a choice, and the just
man chooses to “Act in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is— / Christ.” Man must decide to give
glory to and enact the will of God. “The moment we do this,” wrote Hopkins, “we reach the end
of our being,” (212).
Notice how the complex syntax and idiosyncratic vocabulary contributes somehow to a
lightness set forth by the images. The poem opens with images of flight, with kingfishers and
dragonflies catching the light of the sun on their wings; then a stone falls down a well into water,
skipping on walls in its decent; at last, we are given the resounding voice of a bell, suspended,
which, struck, “flings” out its name. The poem glides on itself, not unlike a kingfisher gliding
through the air, and one would be hard-pressed not to get caught up in the rhythmic buoyancy of
it.
The sprung rhythm accounts for minor differences in the number of syllables between
lines (ranging from nine to twelve). It also accounts for the bouncing rhythm and for the
proximity or disparity between stresses, both of which affect speed and rhythmic expectation.
Notice, for instance, the durational difference between lines 2 and 3. “As tumbled over rim and
roundy wells,” is written in perfect iambic pentameter, and glides normally (except that each two-
syllable word is split between feet, mimicking the skipping of a stone down a well). The next
line—“Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s”—though containing the same
number of syllables, takes considerably longer to read, as the stresses are less separated by
unaccented syllables; they are plucked like strings.

Within this unique rhythmic structure, Hopkins creates tension with internal rhyme. As if
the varying lengths of lines were not confusing enough to the ear, he rhymes internal words with
end words. Take, for instance, the word “ring,” in line 3. It is the first place we rest since “flame”
in line 1, which accentuates the off-rhyme, and indeed, without the text at hand, this sounds like
the end of a line. He continues this internal chiming throughout the poem: ring, rim, fling, string;
swung, tongue, one; wells, tells, bell’s, dwells, selves, itself, myself, spells; etc. The constant
rhyming both speeds up the poem’s rhythm and destabilizes conventional—or, at least,
anticipated—rests.
Whereas the first quatrain has hardly any rests, the second (especially in the latter half) is
fraught with them: “…each one dwells; / Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, / Crying
Whát I dó is me: for that I came.” Not unlike a runner who sprints the first half of a race and
pants the second, the structure of this first stanza is speed then stutter. The sestet moves in the
opposite manner, beginning with pauses then opening up. This connects the beginning of the
second stanza to the end of the first, thereby accentuating the transformation of innate things into
man, of being into action—a transformation which begins in lines 3 and 4, when a string is given
the ability to “tell” and a bell is given a “tongue”.
The poem is a Petrarchan sonnet. Traditionally the Italian form introduces the poem’s
main “problem” in the first quatrain, expands upon it in the second, and at the volta—at the
beginning of the sestet—either makes a comment on the problem or offers some solution;
Hopkins does something different. The octave introduces an idea without tension: “Each mortal
thing does one thing and the same: … / Selves—goes its self; myself it speaks and spells, / Crying
What I do is me: for that I came.” The idea is that every object in the universe is obliged to
become itself fully; the main tension comes after the volta. Normally one would expect the shift
to step toward a solution; instead Hopkins introduces the problem of man’s inherent moral
capacity. Sentient and self-conscious beings have a choice to stray from their prescribed nature; if
they do so, they do not ever fully become themselves. This contention necessarily carries with it
some weight; some sense of existential dilemma: how can we ever know if we are living to our
fullest capacity? But even here, Hopkins does not seem too concerned. Truly, his main purpose in
this poem is to express the fact that man’s fullest potential is realized in Christ, and lines 13 and
14 suggest that the loveliness arises when the spirit is born from the just man’s faultless self-
sacrifice in the name of the Savior.
But the fact that Hopkins would use the sonnet to format his argument is not as
compelling here as it is in the more despairing sonnets, in which God is, at times, directly
addressed; in which personal lament dominates the outward proclamations of faith.
Carrion Comfort is one of Hopkins’s better-known poems. In it, the speaker addresses
both the embodied figure of Despair and the frighteningly judging heavenly figure of Christ.
1 Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;

2 Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
3 In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
4 Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
5 But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me

6 Thy wring-earth right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
7 With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
8 O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?
9 Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
10 Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
11 Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, cheer.
12 Cheer whóm though? The héro whose héaven-handling flúng me, fóot tród
13 Me? or mé that fóught him? O whích one? is it eách one? That níght, that year
14 Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.
The poem is obviously another Italian sonnet, and is set in sprung rhythm with six stresses per
line. It begins and ends with confident, unquestioning phrases, though the bulk of the poem is
questioning, pleading and helpless.

Despair—like Donne’s Death—becomes personified as Hopkins addresses him directly.
“Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee.” He will not abandon himself to despair
because to do so would be to feed on spiritual death, despite that he is only hanging on by these
“last strands of man” in him. In line 3 the speaker attempts to shift from negative to positive
declaratives—from “Not, I’ll not,” to “I can; / Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose
not to be.” He can do more, and is determined to fight against the consuming power of Despair,
but the break between lines 3 and 4 suggests a hesitation—the pause this semicolon begets is one
of uncertainty, and line 4 begins with uncertain steps. “Can something”: one can feel the
speaker’s grasping for the “something”—anything—that he can do to avoid Despair. He can
hope, wait for day, “not choose not to be,”—in short, he can sit with the weak but positive
substance that is hope in the face of despair.
The second quatrain opens in direct address to God: “…O thou terrible, why wouldst thou
rude on me / Thy wring-earth right foot rock? lay a lion limb against me?” The speaker
references Job twice in this line—9: 6, (God “which shaketh the earth out of her place, and the
pillars thereof tremble.”) and 10:16 (“Thou huntest me as a fierce lion.”)—and questions why
God would press on him so harshly. Why would He watch over the speaker so unceasingly with
his “darksome devouring eyes”—especially at a time when speaker is so inclined to run from
salvation?
Why? Because as it says in both Matthew 3:12 and Luke 3:17, “… he will thoroughly
purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with
unquenchable fire.” In pressing on the speaker—in grinding him with the heel of his foot—Christ
is purging him of his chaff; dividing mankind as a farmer divides his usable crops from the
worthless bits. Since the speaker has “kissed the rod” and accepted life’s hardships to be tests
given by God, his heart has “lapped strength, stole joy.”

The exchange is clear, but its directionality is opaque; if man accepts Christ into himself,
are his pains, then, repaid by Christ to Christ? Or to the man that struggled? Or is it somehow
both man and Christ in their intrinsic interconnectedness? In the final tercet the speaker
contemplates the paradox, and the poem ends on a note of slight questioning: who is repaid for
the pains of “that night, that year / Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!)
my God”? Just as Jacob wrestled with the angel (Gen. 32:24), the speaker, at one point, has
wrestled with God, and in retrospect recognizes the event as a test, the fruits of which are in an
ambiguous pocket.
The main point of tension is, of course, that life’s trials sometimes bear unseen fruit; that
God presses on the heart of man with reason, and the faithful recognize the pains as arenas for
God’s lessons—only sometimes that faith itself is a more substantial entity than the actual lesson.
The first quatrain introduces the speaker as on the verge of despair, the second questions the
origin of his trials and tribulations, the first tercet answers the previous stanza’s questions, and
the last tercet opens up again. Thus the shape of this poem is an hourglass; line 9 introduces a
shift, but the resolution is only temporary.
Indeed, as the form is so closely associated with carnal love, one cannot help but note the
physicality of the speaker’s relationship with God. This is a God who steps on and crushes his
heart, who forces him, therefore, to the shores of despair, and with whom the speaker wrestles. It
would, of course, be all too easy to pull this observation too far. In no way do I intend to
extrapolate from the poem a buried desire for fleshly relations with Christ. I do, however, find it
necessary to note once again the clear physical tension any relationship presented within a sonnet
carries. Here, God plays the role—as he does so often in Donne—of the ruining, difficult, and
perhaps impossible beloved.

Some have called into question the chronology of this relationship. Did the struggle begin
after the speaker “kissed the rod”? One must assume so; therefore, the earliest point in retrospect
would be line 10. We can also assume from the last tercet that the speaker is speaking specifically
of some time in the past; that the struggles are over, and he has since “lapped strength [and] stole
joy.” But until line 10 the poem is in the present tense. As such, is the second quatrain a
presentation of God’s retaliation against the speaker’s feeble attempt against Despair? Indeed, the
second quatrain contains seemingly urgent objections to God’s brutality; is the octave, then, a
retrospective self-impersonation? These questions are real, but for the most part unanswerable
and uninteresting: the tension of the poem is that of a man struggling throughout an ongoing
battle with a supreme creator—a struggle which includes the past, present and future.
Let us move to two poems which embody even more this sense of abandonment, of
anguish in the face of God’s distance, of despairing in the face of Despair itself—No worst and I
wake and feel. The former is probably the most hopeless of all the Terrible Sonnets; even more
downward-spiraling than Carrion Comfort. As McChesney notes, “In most of the poems the
suffering penetrates to archetypal depths, and contains echoes, conscious or otherwise, of Job, of
Lear, and even of Milton’s Satan. In this particular poem, however, the echoes are especially
poignant, and nowhere, not even in ‘Carrion Comfort’, is Hopkins’s despair at the crushing
savagery of his spiritual torment better expressed,” (112).
1 No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,

2 More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
3 Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
4 Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
5 My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief-
6 Woe, wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old ánvil wínce and síng—
7 Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked ‘No ling-
8 Ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief.’
9 O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

10 Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
11 May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small
12 Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
13 Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
14 Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
The poem opens with the idea that there is no such thing as “worst”; that no matter how
low one plummets, there is still more room to fall.5 Moreover, the emotional pangs begotten by
his tormenting thought have become treatment-resistant; that is, they have mutated like a disease
and grown stronger against his “forepangs”. This poem is fraught with shifts in tone; in line 3
already, the speaker, from confident declarations of the infinite depths of hell, turns to heaven in
a questioning, protesting, defeated tone: “Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?” The main
problem of the poem, unlike in the previous two sonnets, is explicitly stated: Hell runs deep and
our comforters let us fall. Line 6 points to the “age-old” anvil of God’s wrath against the chosen
men, but even when underneath this anvil, the faithful soul, while wincing, can “sing”. More: the
pain of man is short-lived, seeing as fury shrieked “‘No ling- / Ering! Let me be fell: force I must
be brief.’”
The turn at the sestet is subtle; in fact, line 9 seems only to expand upon the previously
stated assumption that the falls of man’s conscience are great if not infinite. The only shift, really,
is that while in the octave the grief seemed external, here Hopkins speaks psychologically. On
these steep slopes in the mind of man, man himself can barely hold on, if he can at all. “Nor does
our small / Durance deal with that steep or deep.” Hopkins seems to assert—as did T.S. Eliot
5
Cf. Paradise Lost, Book iv, Line 73:
Which way shall I fly

Infinite wrath and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep,
Still threat’ning to devour me, opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.
almost 50 years later—that “… human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.” Even under
whatever comfort we may be granted there thrives a whirlwind; it is the very foundation of our
being. It follows that suffering, then, is inevitable, and that the only stable comfort we find, as the
speaker concludes in line 14, is in death: “all / Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.”
Unlike Carrion Comfort, this poem truly offers no hopeful consolation. Its structure is
similar in that he offers a problem, confronts, begs and questions heaven, expands upon the
problem and moves on, but the major difference is that the final lines are conclusive, as opposed
to intentionally open-ended. Again, the poem is a personal lament—any external relationship is
mentioned only tangentially. Hopkins’s biggest concern is his relationship with himself.
There is another poem that I can’t help but think of as this sonnet’s twin. ‘I wake and feel’
is perhaps slower, more pensive, more resigned than ‘No worst,’ but the message is the same: this
life is fraught with the suffering begotten by our own minds and even our Creator is passive in
the face of our inborn torment. The tonal shifts read as visually theatrical.
1 I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.

2 What hours, O what black hours we have spent
3 This night! what sighs you, heart, saw, ways you went!
4 And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.
5 With witness I speak this. But where I say

6 Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
7 Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
8 To dearest him that lives alas! away.
9 I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree

10 Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
11 Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
12 Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see

13 The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
14 As I am mine, their sweating selves but worse.6
6
Once again, McChesney makes an interesting note: “Had this poem had an epigraph, it might well have
come from Job’s description of his nightly torments.” Cf. Job 7:13-16.
“Fell” in this context has several possible meanings: it could be an adjective—malign,
malevolent; but one could also read it as a noun—a beast’s hairy hide. Of course, it is both at
once. Gardner suggests there is an echo of Macbeth in these lines: “… my sense would have
cooled / To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair / Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir / As
life were in’t.” Notice the stanza’s only enjambed line (2)—“this night” is held off. Interesting
since it is this same declaration which the speaker will correct in the next lines.
The shift at line 5 is one of Hopkins’s most striking: the speaker almost self-consciously
corrects himself; calls attention to a poetic understatement in the previous quatrain. Not only that;
he claims authority: “With witness I speak this.” The second quatrain not only expands upon the
first, but twists it, refocuses it and refracts it through a different lens. The “I” of the first stanza is
explicated and given vague face in the context of a clearer situation. Whereas the first quatrain
contained three end-stopped lines, the second contains only one. The effect is a blanketing of the
rhyme; one instinctively hears the chiming of “say” and “away” but without the poem at-hand
(i.e., if one were only listening, not reading), the last word’s antecedent rhyme is slightly
ambiguous. This all makes for a more colloquial tone, in contrast to the highly poetic first four
lines—almost as if the speaker has leaned in toward the reader.
At the sestet he leans in even further—or perhaps he hangs his head: “I am gall, I am
heartburn.” His mental torments become physical here; in fact, the speaker himself shrinks into
identifying himself as existing only those tormenting physical attributes. God has imposed on the
speaker a sort of meta-torture: “My taste was me.” Drawn back, the speaker finds within himself
a unique self-damnation.
The only thing that separates him from “the lost” (i.e. those in hell) is that he is not
actually in hell; it is only that his experiences are relatively analogous to the damned. McChesney
makes note of a line in one of his sermons, saying the lost are worse in their complete and
beyond-repair isolation from God: “… taste as with taste of tongue all that is bitter there, the
tears ceaselessly and fruitlessly flowing; the grief over their hopeless loss; the worm of
conscience, which is the mind gnawing and feeding on its own miserable self,” (164).
The tension of relationship is more interesting here than in any other sonnet I have
examined: it is at once inward and outward; his relationship with God takes the form of passive
acceptance of himself, of his own condition. There is no unattainable; there is no protest. There is
only a resignation to the torment this world offers through the eyes of someone completely
devoted to the Creator.
These four sonnets collectively exemplify several things: the extent to which Hopkins
experimented with rhythmic form; the extent to which he used the sonnet as an outward and
inward meditative and religious lament; how his points of tension turn, at the volta, not toward a
definite solution, but generally toward a summary of his argument or, at best, to an open-ended,
up-for-debate conclusion. I would like to close, then, with a slightly different poem—one that has
always stood out to me as crushingly hopeful; crushing in that even hope in its context feels
hopeless.
1 My own heart let me more have pity on; let

2 Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
3 Charitable; not live this tormented mind
4 With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
5 I cast for comfort I can not more get
6 By groping round my comfortless, than blind
7 Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
8 Thirst’s all-in-all in a world of wet.
9 Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise

10 You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
11 Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
12 At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
13 ’S not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather—as skies
14 Betweenpie mountains—lights a lovely mile.
To be brief, this poem is an inward prayer—a prayer that the speaker might be kinder to
himself, that his mind might let go of itself and “call off thoughts awhile / Elsewhere.” He has
hitherto “…cast for comfort [he] can no more get / By groping round [his] comfortless” (that is,
his unchanging uncomfortable situation) “than / Blind eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
/ Thirst’s all-in-all in a world of wet.” A confusing phrase, to be sure, but the message is clear:
the speaker has sought comfort where there is none and had no more luck finding it than blind
eyes can find light, or thirst can find its essence in a world composed entirely of water.
Without getting too heavy-handed in metrical analysis, let us look at the octave versus the
sestet. The octave seems to be set in relatively standard rhythm. The first line is a bit strange,
beginning with a trochaic substitution, enjambed with a feminine ending, but the next line is
straight iambic pentameter. The proceeding lines follow that pattern—one of oddities mixed in
with traditional rhythm, but still it is not Hopkins at his most bizarre.
The enjambed lines make for a rapid, flowing tempo which almost hides the end-
rhymes—an effect also produced by the internal rhyme and repetition. However, the repetition
also slows the tempo down at times. Take, for instance, lines 3 and 4: “…not live this tormented
mind / With this tormented mind tormenting yet.” The thrice-repeated “torment” slows the logic
and rhythmic syntax. In the following line—“I cast for comfort I can no more get”—the reader is
tempted by the rhyme to ignore the enjambment, which creates a tension between motion and
stillness, not unlike a continually unresolved chord in a piece of music.
The sestet immediately moves into sprung rhythm. “Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do
advise / You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile / Elsewhere…”. The newfound staccato of
this poem elicits a feeling of hesitation, and yet of urging—perhaps of begging—himself to let go
of thoughts, to be free of himself.

Finally, we must mention the most striking gesture of this poem: “… whose smile / ’S not
wrung, see you…”. He splits a silence between two lines, as if placing a microsecond rest
between two bars of music. Obviously, there are various ways to read this: Namely, one could
read this with an ever-so-slight pause before the “’s,” or one could read it with no pause
whatsoever—that is, as merely a typographical peculiarity. I hesitate, though, to read it as the
latter, as Hopkins was so obviously concerned with the sound of words, and as so many of his
poetic choices were aurally-influenced. I believe we have to read this oddity as a slowing down
of something normally read so quickly that we forget a contraction is indeed two words. He is, to
an extent, insisting on the separation of “smile” and “is,” while still maintaining the
contraction—perhaps he is unable to fully split it, just as he is unable to split himself, his mind,
from his thoughts.
Hopkins creates a beautiful harmony in the midst of a thematic and rhythmic dissonance.
Indeed, perhaps it is his very dissonance that is his harmony. The very tensions he creates add to
the buoyancy of his verse. But all that aside, his use of the sonnet is remarkable; a form so
traditionally visceral, so perfectly devotional, it meshes well with his acute sense of the dialogue
between the outer and inner physical worlds. It is indeed a meditation—something to which, as a
Jesuit, Hopkins was no stranger. The form caters to a physical relationship with the object of
devotion, and naturally gives rise to associations of its roots in the tradition of praise for the sake
of approaching divinity. In both Hopkins’s case and in Donne’s, we see the tensions of outwardly
and inwardly directed lament; perhaps Donne exemplifies more readily the outward prayer,
whereas Hopkins seemed much more comfortable in solitude, but in either case we see the sonnet
functioning as a purely religious form. The fruit of their efforts is arresting, and if we owe
anybody for the re-situation of this structure, it is them.

Conclusion
It was my aim in these pages to provide an account of the sonnet as an erotically religious
form. I also aimed to make a case for its capacity to hold both meditation and argument. I chose
Donne and Hopkins because I think that each of them deviates from the historical standards set
forth by their sonneteer predecessors in ways that evocatively demonstrate the effect of God’s
presence (tangential or direct) in the form. As the sonnet is generally a form of mortal erotic
devotion, that both these priest-poets would use the form to address God struck me as an
indication that through the study of the lyric we can attempt to investigate the multifaceted
dynamics of man’s relationship with the divine.
At the beginning of my discussion, I posed several questions, namely, does God’s
presence in this form elevate his status or reduce it? Does His presence elevate or reduce the
status of man, and especially that of the speaker of the poem? And finally, are the ways we
attempt to love and be loved by God necessarily different than or possibly similar (or identical) to
the ways we attempt to love and be loved by another human? I think the first two questions are
usefully debatable, while the third gives rise to such vast (and deeply personal) philosophical
issues that its solution may—indeed, should—exist beyond these pages. After this discussion,
though, I would argue that romantic, erotic and divine love are not mutually exclusive categories.
After all, desires and emotions do not fit so cleanly into categories: how and why should divine
love necessarily exclude Eros?
That said, there is certainly no easy answer to any of these questions. Even after in-depth
investigation of the above poems, I would argue that the very nature of the sonnet—or, indeed, of
any devotion—is to place the object of devotion on a sort of pedestal. That said, one wonders
whether the pedestal is lower or higher than the pearly gates. If we are to visualize Vendler’s
vertical and horizontal extensions of the lyric as X and Y axes, then Donne’s tone of address
generally extends diagonally while Hopkins’s may exist at the meditative collapse of X and Y—
that is, where man, God, nature and the universe co-inhabit one timeless point. As with any rule,
though, there are exceptions: ‘Death be not proud’ stands out in my mind as a poem in which
Donne in fact lowers the status of his object of devotion (though devotion here seems a slight
misnomer). In ‘As kingfishers catch fire,’ Hopkins most definitely exists on a plane below the
sestet’s Christ-figure. Indeed, perhaps if we were to draw the Vendler Graph, each poem would
have a distinct point on its map, and each poet would have only general trends.
No matter: my main goal has been to demonstrate how the object of devotion’s stand-in
for the unattainable mortal beloved is reflected formally, while also making a case for each poet
as an embodiment of a tonal tendency (or perhaps it is better to say “possibility”) of the sonnet. It
is my hope that these pages have shed light on the form as a possible religious structure, and on
the fact that vertical and horizontal addresses are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Works Cited
Bloom, H. John Donne : comprehensive research and study guide. New York: Chelsea House, 1999.
Carey, J. (Ed.) John Donne: The Major Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Gardner, W.H. Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Study of Poetic Idiosyncrasy in Relation to Poetic Tradition. London:
Oxford University Press, 1949.
Hopkins, G.M. Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works. London: Oxford University Press, 1986.
McChesney, D. A Hopkins Commentary. New York: New York University Press, 1968.
Oliver, P.M. Donne’s Religious Writing: A Discourse of Feigned Devotion. New York: Addison Wesley, 1997.
Vendler, H. Invisible Listeners. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Vendler, H. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.

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‘Batter My Heart’:

An Examination of the Sonnet as a Religious Form

Katie Peterson (Thesis Advisor)

Marguerite Feitlowitz (Second Reader)

John Donne …………….………….. 8

As due by many titles (8)

Gerard Manley Hopkins….……….. 22

As kingfishers catch fire (26)

questions raised by placing the sonnet in a religious context.

abstractions—namely, God, Death, Despair—necessarily stand in for the unattainable mortal

tendencies of the sonnet—argument and meditation—and it is my hope that their proximity in

The sonnet is traditionally associated with earthly, corporeal love—Petrarch’s Laura,

an inaccessible beloved often becomes, upon closer inspection, a profoundly personal,

introspective trial of devotion.

My ship laden with forgetfulness passes through a harsh sea, at midnight,

My galley chargèd with forgetfulness

And every oar a thought in readiness,

A rain of tears, a cloud of dark disdain,

for a tone of disdainful complaint not present in the literal translation.

first tear is already torn.

the stars; Durling’s remembers them fondly.

speaker begins despairing of the port.

own diction describes his tone—sharp, cruel, disdainful.

also detailing the tonal propensities of the English sonnet.

certainly damned…—above all…utilizes them to explore the position of a believer passionately

sighs and tears return again.’

1 As due by many titles I resign

10 Why doth he steal, nay ravish that’s thy right?

himself, and therefore God, in some unnamed sinful act.

is repaying him for his labors.

fight against the evil that inhabits and ravishes him.

Except thou rise and for thine own work fight,

And Satan hates me, yet is loth to lose me.

subjects, however, I would like to examine ‘Batter my heart’.

1 Batter my heart, three-personed God; for, you

captured in the usurped town that is his inner-self.

with Satan in the depths of his sin.

Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,

brutally sexual terms, to enter him.

seeking the seemingly unattainable. Moreover, it is undeniably an argument, and Donne’s

speaker cries to God in a tone comparable to that of a rejected lover.

1 I am a little world made cunningly

dual self—contaminated on both ends by sin—will die.

begs, let those tears wash his sin.

new, as he does in ‘Batter my heart.’

1 Death be not proud, though some have called thee

moves from c-d-e-c-d-e to c-d-d-c-e-e—presumably an aesthetic choice to maintain an already

relatively straightforward iambic pentameter.

It begins by personifying a relative abstraction—death—and approaching it not in

Death of much of its power simply by addressing him as mortal; as powerless.

pleasurable, but it is altogether a non-act, as life itself never fades.

a child—not insulted as much as explained-to—now he is defamed and slandered. “Thou art

slave but his company is putrid.

and power it once claimed over men.

and tears return again.’

1 O might those sighs and tears return again

is not explicitly invoked in a second-person address.

happiness that left him only in more pain.

despairing than repentant.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

poetry an inner mathematical and musical logic at work.

later sonnets. As W.H. Gardner noted in 1949,

The seven or eight sonnets of ‘desolation’ (for Patience may perhaps be