Hopkins's Mind: Between Allegory And Madness

Sobolev, Dennis

English Studies 2001 82 (1)34-43
(ReLIS:jul:juljig:y:2001:v:82:i:1:p:34-43)

Abstract:

The mental life that Hopkins depicts in his ‘terrible’ sonnets is that of over-whelming darkness, incessant pain and the self-destroying work of the mind; the world of these sonnets is tragic and comfortless. In the sonnet ‘My Own Heart Let Me More  ’ Hopkins writes: ‘ not live this tormented mind / With this tormented mind tormenting yet. // I cast for comfort I can no more get / By groping round my comfortless than blind / Eyes in their dark can day’. Thus, the mind is both the object, the conductor of pain and its source; furthermore, the mind cannot control the pain it produces: it cannot help torturing itself. This presentation of the mind evokes the conventional image of hell, whose inhabitants also cause pain and suffer from it; and, as the mind in ‘My Own Heart’, they are unable to cease to cause pain. This suggestion is not the imposition of an imported meaning on the texture of the sonnet. In the ‘terrible sonnets’ Hopkins often represents his inner life as hell.

Keywords: Literatura inglesa ; Poesía
Pages: 34-43
Volume: 82
Year: 2001
Issue: 1

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