Rhyming with an Absent God: Gerard Manley Hopkins' Sonnets of Desolation

Abstract

This essay considers how Gerard Manley Hopkins’ views on aesthetics apply to his six “Terrible Sonnets” or “Sonnets of Desolation” (written in 1885). For Hopkins, beauty is always a relation between two distinct entities (or two distinct parts of the same entity) which are similar to one another. He believed their similarities and differences harmonise to create beauty, which he describes metaphorically as rhyme. However, Hopkins also saw beauty as dependent on God: God’s infinite complexity gives every finite creation an individual distinctness while connecting them all as his personal handiwork, fulfilling the conditions for beauty. So integral is God to beauty that to Hopkins all artistic endeavour becomes an attempt to harmonise with him; the artist remains an individual yet seeks to attune themselves to God. This essay examines how God’s apparent silence and distance during Hopkins’ time in Dublin obstructed this artistic and personal need to harmonise with him. By losing his sense of God’s immediateness, Hopkins lost the foundation which allowed him to appreciate beauty and produce art, causing the feeling of helpless desolation which the Terrible Sonnets express. Nevertheless, a close reading of such sonnets as “Carrion Comfort” and “Patience” reveals that Hopkins found ways of overcoming this problem by harmonising with those divine qualities demonstrated by God’s apparent absence. As “Carrion Comfort” devolves into a tormented cry, that cry echoes Christ’s similar experience of separation from God, introducing the strategy of using God’s distance itself as a means of harmonising with him. “Patience” then develops this, focusing on a temporal virtue analogous to the specific divine quality which is evidenced by God’s silence. Overall, any resolution in the Terrible Sonnets comes from accepting God’s distance, rather than rediscovering the sense of his immanence. Crucially, this acceptance involves attuning oneself to God’s silence in the same way one would attune oneself to his overt presence. Hopkins eventually applies his conception of beauty to the situation in which God has placed him, rhyming with God’s absence instead of resisting it.