Hopkins never shies away from using archaic and near forgotten words, and he uses one right off in the first line. This one is titled I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark. Hopkins suffered from severe depression, and he expressed it in verse.

Within four years of writing it, Hopkins was dead the poem would not be published, like so much of Hopkins’s poetry, for another thirty years.Here is another poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, that rather difficult impressionistic poet whose use of language, though it makes his verses a task to unravel, is nonetheless brilliant. Its vivid imagery and powerful use of language make it a memorable sonnet, deeply personal and yet of universal appeal. (Again here, the word ‘heartburn’ offers a suggestion of this, with its burning imagery – and, of course, dough is transformed into bread through being fired in the heat of the oven.)Įven if we don’t subscribe to Hopkins’s religious beliefs, ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark’ is a heartfelt poem about lying awake at night worrying (something the Anglo-Saxons, whom Hopkins admired, had a special word for), about self-analysis and soul-searching. But things must be even worse for those who are ‘lost’ to Christianity (something of a preoccupation with Hopkins: see his poem about the composer Henry Purcell, whom he fears may be in hell because he was not a Catholic): they are ‘sweating selves’ like him but ‘worse’, not least because of the heat and torment of hell that awaits them.

Hopkins has not helped himself, as his baking metaphor makes clear: ‘Selfyeast a dull dough sours.’ You reap what you sow. As so often with Hopkins, the spiritual and psychological are experienced as a vivid visceral force that is physical as well as metaphysical: his depression and doubt weigh upon him like heartburn or indigestion (‘heartburn’ picking up on the poet’s more abstract address to his ‘heart’ in the third line of the poem, but also leading into the ‘blood’ mentioned a couple of lines later). One should go to sleep at night and wake only in the morning, when day has arrived but because the speaker wakes up and finds he cannot get back to sleep, he is doomed to lie awake, in the ‘black hours’ (black because it is literally night, but also because of the speaker’s depression).īut this sleepless night is no isolated incident: ‘when I say / Hours I mean years, mean life.’ Hopkins’s depression is related to his religious vocation (he was a Jesuit priest) and he feels as if his prayers have been going unanswered, like ‘dead letters’ which are returned to sender, unopened. In the first quatrain, ‘delay’ is not merely the rhyme for ‘day’: it is an elongation of it, a delaying act, reminding the speaker of the poem – and us, the reader – that day remains far off.

The fell of dark