Gerard Manley Hopkin and the Sins of the Flesh

Warning: sinful desires and blatant Augustinian condemnation abound!


The Poetry Foundation has a new iPhone app out today, which I highly recommend. (If, that is, you are a user of the iPhone, what one of my friends has termed "the magic Futurebox.") The app basically works like "Wheel of Fortune," where you get to spin two wheels of topics to get poems that fit a variety of subjects. I'll try: "Frustration" and "Spirituality."


The first of 19(!) poems is from Gerard Manley Hopkins, and I can't say there's anything more apropos.

‘I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day’

Gerard Manley Hopkins

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

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




I had to read this three times before I realized it was a sonnet, and I think this is the first time I've read this that I understood there's some homosexual longing and self-loathing in it, too. (I'm pretty late to ths party, judging by his Wikipedia entry.)When I was man-crushing on Hopkins at my worst, I never saw that - I just felt him a kindred Christian spirit. I guess he was, in a way. 


I discovered his work, like so many others I'm realizing, in high school. At that time I was as lusty as any teenage guy, but also deeply resentful and distrustful of myself and my urges. There were times when I had a forced regimen where anytime I had lustful thoughts I would force myself to stop whatever I was doing no matter where I was and do ten push-ups. I've got several embarrassed buddies who can attest to the veracity of that.


There's nothing like pent-up sexual desire to make you simultaneously cling to and fear God. There's some deep-seated distrust of sex that seems to just go hand in hand with the kind of needy longing that spiritual matters provides. Fortunately, there's an upside - some art that makes the two impulses both more conflated and more distinct. 


Thank God for art.