Carrion Comfort
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?
Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.
Gerard Manly Hopkins was a Jesuit priest and poet in the 19th century, almost unpublished in his lifetime, tortured by depression and self-doubt, and deeply conflicted. He seems to have been pulled toward both poetry and God, and to have felt those pulls as contradictory—to the point that he infamously burned all of his poems before joining holy orders as a priest.
Hopkins was lonely at the time of writing, working as an unpopular professor of Greek and Latin in Dublin, and his poems from this time are gloomy and melancholy. This poem is one Hopkins’ so-called “Terrible Sonnets”, written while he was teaching in Dublin: terrible because they approach the “terrible crystal” (a reference to Ezekiel 1:22) of spiritual isolation and despair.
“Carrion Comfort” is indeed a sonnet: fourteen lines in iambic pentameter (sort of). The rhyme scheme makes it a Petrarchan sonnet, not a Shakespearian one; it’s a older sonnet form, which is what we might expect from Hopkins. The rhyme and his formatting both break this sonnet into two parts, an octave (the first eight lines) and a sextet (the last six).
All sonnets have (if they’re following the form strictly) a volta, or turn, where the topic, tone, focus, or mood of the poem shifts. In a Shakespearian sonnet the volta is in before the last two lines, but in a Petrarchan one the volta usually comes between the octave and the sextet.
Hopkins’ poetry is usually challenging; it’s dense in the imagery and ideas, and obscure in its language. Every word is purposeful.
Let’s take a little look at the first half of the octave:
Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
I said that Hopkins doesn’t use filler words. He rarely repeats a word at all, even conjunctions and grammatical words. But here he says the word “not” four times in the first two lines. This poem begins with a negation; he’s insistently refusing something—a something that is either very tempting or very insistent. And that tempting something is to feast on Despair, which he calls a “carrion comfort”. The image of feasting on despair is profound and compelling. There are moods—moods that are certainly familiar to me and clearly to Hopkins, perhaps not to you—when we not only feel despair but we want to revel in it and let it overwhelm us. But feasting on Despair only creates more despair, and it is a carrion comfort. Hopkins personifies Despair in these lines, by giving it the capital letter of a proper noun and by addressing the poem to it, but also imagines it as a corpse. Despair is carrion, and feasting on it is like scavenging on rotting flesh. Or, because the density of the language creates deliberate ambiguity, perhaps Despair is the comfort for carrion. Perhaps Hopkins is imagining himself as carrion and Despair as a potential but ultimately unsatisfying comfort.
Feasting on Despair would “untwist” the “last strands of man” in Hopkins. And I think we should definitely read that “man” as humanity, not masculinity. Feasting on Despair would make Hopkins somehow inhuman, and it is tempting or he wouldn’t need to insist so strongly that he’s not going to do it. But the strands of man are slack, and he is “most weary”.
Not, he’ll not, not, not give into that weariness though, and cry that he can’t go on. The final lines of these four lines have more repeated words: “I can”. In the face of despair and exhaustion all Hopkins can manage at this point is to assert that he can still do something. That hoping and wishing are still doing something. He comes back to the “not”s to undo them. He can “not choose not to be”. This seems like a pretty direct allusion to Hamlet. Hopkins here suggests that even if he can’t actively choose to be, he can not choose not to be, and that is still something. It’s a sentiment I also see in the last line of Milton’s most famous sonnet: “They also serve who only stand and wait.” Hopkins, in the midst of the temptation to despair, is giving himself credit, asserting that just not giving in to despair is still doing something.
December is often a very hard time for me. I think it is for a lot of people. I don’t know when Hopkins wrote “Carrion Comfort” (I mean the month. I do know it was 1885), but Advent is a dark time in the Church year. Most people know that since the actual date of Jesus’ birth is unknown, early Christians choose to celebrate Christmas in December fairly arbitrarily. A popular theory is that the date was chosen because it was the same time as other winter festivals, like the Roman Saturnalia and the Norse Yule. And all of those winter festivals are times of celebration and light set in the midst of the darkest coldest time of the year. Christmas is at the winter solstice because that’s when we need light the most. I certainly do.
I’m not feeling the joy of the holiday right now. I’m feeling the temptation toward Despair that Hopkins describes. But this gloomy poem, in early December, isn’t feasting on Despair, it’s helping me to remember not to.