On a late December morning, I began the first of many trips out to my car. A gorgeous sun was emerging through the clouds at the same time my stomach was experiencing a rumbling of sickening knots, and my mind was playing host to a thousand worries.
Every trip out to my car—then back inside my apartment for another load of belongings—made me feel like Sisyphus rolling his giant, unforgiving ball up the hill. Meaninglessness and futility seemed right around the corner, feelings I’d feared my entire life.
Three weeks prior to that morning, I’d made a significant move for a new job. I was excited and cautiously optimistic that maybe—maybe—this would finally be a turning point in my life. I knew that a change of location and a new job wouldn’t change everything, but I felt justified in thinking that it was at least a starting point for a fresh start to life. And I was grateful for it.
But I had moved knowing there were some bizarre issues going on with my left eye. The symptoms were oddly difficult to articulate; I could barely even describe them to myself, internally. All I knew was that something was not right. My eye felt frozen and immobile, like it was locked in place. There were also odd, pressurized sensations around the eye socket. On top of that, there were times when I felt a dull pain on the left side of my face as well on the back of my head, on that same side. Yet after multiple visits to ophthalmologists and optometrists, they found nothing wrong.
This was promising news, but hardly reassuring. The issues remained frustratingly unsolved. Nonetheless, I didn’t feel as though I could pass up a job opportunity just because of this. I already felt embarrassingly behind in life, and the thought of becoming even more embarrassed about my life seemed intolerable. I wanted to move, I wanted a new job. Worst case scenario, I would just learn to cope with these bothersome issues.
Upon the first week of moving, however, the symptoms became more and more interfering. And combined with the stress that was already in my life, the frustrations mounted to a degree that I just couldn’t handle. I ended up backing out of the job orientation, paid a very hefty sum of money to get out of an apartment lease (an apartment that I’d barely even lived in), and moved back home. What I had hoped would be an exciting turn in my life had become a complete nightmare.
The following months I was in a state of despair. For reasons I’m not entirely sure of, I turned to poetry. I woke up early in the mornings, and for 45 minutes or so I read and memorized poems. The specific routine was this: brew a pot of coffee, relish the silence of the early morning, sit down with my back against the wall (a pillow placed behind me), and read a couple dozen poems. I would then pick out one or two that particularly resonated with me and begin to memorize them.
The next morning, same thing. After a few days, I’d have a poem or two pretty much locked into my head. After a few months, I had poems flowing through my head—from Gerard Manly Hopkins and Matthew Arnold to Emily Dickison and Stephen Crane.
Digesting poetry was one of the few ways I could cope with the situation. It was a way for me to get much needed intellectual stimulation when other kinds of reading—novels and long books of nonfiction—felt upsettingly impossible.
But maybe poetry is what I needed at that time. I had emotions of every kind rushing through me, yet articulating them felt next to impossible. Reciting poetry gave me a voice I lacked and the energy I needed.
The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins
More than anyone else, I turned to Gerard Manley Hopkins, a 19th-century Victorian poet. His “terrible sonnets” were a particular source of power. When his poems are memorized and said aloud, they feel as natural as if they have been in you forever—like a hidden reservoir of inner strength and insight that naturally springs forth in a time of unmitigated chaos. The diction and cadence; the roller coaster ride of hope and despair; the candid expressions of feeling utterly lost and without hope… they mirror so well what it’s like to experience a depressing descent into a world of grief and despair.
These sonnets of Hopkins became for me a kind of personal attestation to the various pains of my life. In a way that I wish were not true, reciting the first stanza of “I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day,” felt as though I were giving voice to some of the deepest and most recurring feelings of my life.
“I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day”
There are beautiful horrors in every line of this poem. One which runs throughout is the confidence of the speaker. He’s surrounded by darkness as he sits in the depths of despair, yet he articulates his experience with astounding precision. One shouldn’t be able to do that. The reason he can (so it seems to me) is because he’s done it countless times. And that is a frightening thing to recognize, when you identify so strongly with the speaker. His sorrowful pangs have been intimately explored for so long that he knows how to express them with utter seamlessness. And there’s a driving cadence to the poem which has its existence in the deep ruts of the path that were made by his own shoes, his own sad repeated torments.
I became almost infatuated with this poem. More than any other of Hopkins’ sonnets, this one spoke to me. When I felt horrible, the repetition of saying it kept me going. But after reciting it for many weeks, again and again, a word suddenly jumped out at me — “spent.” I actually remember pausing — and being horrified. I don’t know what it was that made me suddenly so hyperfocused on the word in the lines “O what black hours we have spent/This night!” (lines 2-3). Maybe I was reading the line in a bit of an odd way (I don’t know), but I felt this overwhelming feeling when thinking about how the minimal, precious, and uncertain time I have in this life would be “spent”—used up, wasted, not to be gotten back—on days filled with nightmares and awful thoughts. It was devastating. Life goes by fast enough as it is; to think that my time would be “spent” in such a way stopped me cold.
On top of that, at any moment, I realized, I might no longer even have the chance to say “I wake.” Nothing about life is guaranteed. So with the blessing of life still given to me, how I could I possibly allow my days to be lost to the twisting horrors of dark feelings and and depressing thoughts.
“My own heart let me have more pity on”
But I also didn’t =know what to do. As much as I found satisfaction in memorizing and reciting Hopkins’ sonnets, I can’t say that they always did something for me, at least not in the sense of practical action. They kept me afloat — which was critical — but often even the optimistic lines of the “terrible sonnets” (or his other poems) spawned so little practical effect.
“My own heart, let me have more pity on,” for instance, did not propel a kind of inner action, despite my strong sympathy for the speaker and the poem’s simple yet profound and sensible statement. Dozens and dozens of times I had recited the poem with a kind of cheering on of the speaker, glad that this troubled soul was getting himself closer to a practical revelation and plane of kindlier feelings. Yet it felt next to impossible, even absurd, to turn that same kind of gentleness onto myself.
Even my favorite line of the poem—indeed my favorite line of any of Hopkins’ poems—bounced off me: “Call off thoughts awhile/elsewhere/leave comfort root room” (lines 10-11). What a beautiful line. How nice it would be if we could give our troubled minds a self-willed moratorium on the thoughts, feelings, and images that plague us — and how sensible, too. Yet I couldn’t do it.
“In the Valley of the Elwy”
Progress was gradual. One morning, at a coffee shop, I found myself writing out “In the Valley of the Elwy.” It’s not one of Hopkins’ “terrible sonnets,” and it wasn’t a poem of his that I had gravitated toward in the past. But on that morning, it resonated with me in a profound way.
It reminded me of all the blessings I’d been given in my life, including a wonderful home full of warmth, love, and support. And it further reminded me—even if it was difficult to accept—that life and the world around me was a deliciously beautiful thing.
And yet, like the speaker of the poem, I also felt the out-of-placeness: “Only the inmate does not correspond” (line 11) and the deformities of myself. I felt the intense desire and longing to somehow be fixed.
Those months struggling with the eye situation and having no idea what was going were agonizing. There were times that I’d ball my eyes out while lying face down on the floor, practically clawing the carpet with my hands. The pain and regret, the frustration and loneliness, the utter despair… it all seemed too strong to be real. Yet I felt it second after second with an unforgiving intensity.
Part of what made the experience so difficult and emotional is because I didn’t know what was going on; this, on top of the fact that I felt like my life was rapidly going down the drain.
Consequently, some of the scenarios that I played out in my mind — while certainly possible down the road (indeed I had been carefully warned of them) — weren’t part of the immediate, and separate, set of particular eye symptoms. Yet the worry over them greatly magnified the more genuine fears and stress. I feared the possibility of a retinal detachment — particularly experiencing the symptoms during a time and a place that was cruelly inconvenient. What if I happened to be in some situation where I literally could not get the kind of help I needed? The consequences of a retinal detachment take place so quickly, and it was terrifying to think that I could end up blind in one of my eyes, all because of a chance of circumstance. But far worse than that, was thinking that I’d allowed my life for so many years to go in directions I didn’t want it to go. I failed to fix it. A waste of life because of my pathetic weaknesses.
“No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief”
From thoughts like that, you travel to dark and sinking places. You drop down level after level, where it becomes even colder and scarier, and you fumble around with ever more desperation. Anguished calls for help are unheeded — “Comforter, where, where is your comforting?” (line 3) — and you’re left hearing the pangs of your own voice.
And things become increasingly frightening as you realize the horrors inherent in being a human being: “O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/ frightful, sheer, no man fathomed.” (lines 9-10). For anyone who has ever gone through perilously dark times, these are especially poignant and cathartic lines. And for a long time, that’s exactly the kind of experience that the poem was for me.
But after reciting the poem hundreds of times, there was a moment when I stopped, almost immediately, and found myself objecting to a thought of the speaker’s. It was the first time it had happened with any of Hopkins’ poems, and I felt almost elated that it had. I needed to engage: with art, with life, with myself, with the world. I needed to speak up, be assertive, and claim the life that was given to me.
In lines 11-12, the speaker asserts “Nor does long our small / Durance deal with that steep or deep.” I disagreed with him because, I realized, our patience and endurance is often too expansive, too accommodating, not the opposite. Our patience for misery and suffering, or at least our passive willingness to accept it, is far too welcoming. We stay hanging on the cliff of our individual (and often self-made) perilous mountains, instead of climbing to a solid place. And we suffer because of it.
“The Wreck of the Deutschland”
Yet where do you go? How do you climb? Like certain other personality types, I was full of worry when growing up. I worried about everything under the sun, and consequently was unable to breathe. Some worries were warranted, others were not. But the problem didn’t lie with failing to better rationalize those worries. At least, that wasn’t the root of the problem.
It was bigger than that. I thought about life in such a way that every strand of thought and every feeling turned into uncertainties, fears, contradictions, tensions, and debilitating questions. I made my world an abyss despite wanting to put my arms around something solid.
Nonetheless, life seemed far too pointless if certain questions couldn’t at least partially be resolved. Many of them were questions of theodicy. Questions that can feel overwhelming at times — indeed debilitating — yet so essential to pursue. But that is never an easy task. For me, dwelling on those kinds of questions too much seemed obviously unhealthy, yet understandable. Dwelling on them too little seemed ignorant and intellectually irresponsible. And dwelling on them via some kind of middle ground seemed unsatisfactory.
In one of Hopkins’ longest poems, “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” many of these types of questions are either directly or indirectly pursued. And within the poem are some of Hopkins’ most beautiful and transfixing lines. I never memorized the whole of it — though nearly all of part I — and when said aloud there’s a musicality that rushes forth in so many passages. It can be absolutely meditative to recite. But, for me, little more than that, as I discovered.
“Carrion Comfort”
For me, the heart of Hopkins’ poetry is in much of this poem. And it was this sonnet that became — though not my favorite — the most elevating, the most powerful, and ultimately, the most redeeming.
Poetry — all art – is up against so many challenges. It can feel mighty good to relish in the powers of art when things are going fairly well (and, to be sure, also when they are going quite poorly). But how powerful, too, is a good practical outcome? How powerful is a genuinely happy life filled with success and love and health? The absence of tragedy and pain?
To find power in words, in an image, the sounds of a musical composition, is very difficult when one’s life genuinely feels like it’s hanging on by a thread. There are pieces of art that have taken me through incredibly low points, just as there are pieces of art that have heightened my feelings in times of intense joy.
But there are times where I think I’d rather trade in a great piece of art (maybe even all art) — and my experience with it — and just be happy. Just be happy, and unworried, and unstressed with things that I don’t know and probably never will know. Horrors and evils that can never be comprehended. Masses taken by senseless acts; an entire family wiped out in a car accident; a child ravished by disease.
“I can;” says the speaker of “Carrion Comfort.” “Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be” (line 4). I don’t know how much that counts, but it’s something. The dizzying chaos and horrors of this world — which so often eludes any explanation, and, at times, even a reprieve — is countered by an affirmation of life. A stance. And though it’s a position that can feel grotesque and awful and test one’s endurance to the very limit, it can lead to — as the speaker gives credence to in the final lines of the poem — a kind of beautifully mysterious “wrestling” between us and the transcendent.
Hopkins’ poetry, and his “terrible sonnets” in particular, infused in me that kind of hopeful power as I struggled through the months and months of despair, trying to cope with so much confusion in my life. My struggles were put against the backdrop of a world of suffering yet extraordinary beauty — one that allows for a path of descent to lead back up to a state of exhilarating mysteriousness, brought about in no small part by the powers of poetry.
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“Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins.” Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins – Wikisource, the free online library. Accessed October 24, 2019. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Poems_of_Gerar
Spectatio 