My own heart let me more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; 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 or thirst find
Thirst's all-in-all in a world of wet.
Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
's not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather—as skies
Betweenpie mountains—lights a lovely mile.
-Gerard Manley Hopkins
1 comment:
Here's some of what Buechner has to say about this poem (from Speak What We Feel, 41-42):
"In the sestet he becomes his own Dutch uncle, speaking to himself with a kind of deprecatory affection as "poor Jackself"...And then he reduces to two syllables the best advice that he has it in him either to give or to hear--"Let be," as in let go, let happen, let lie, let live. "Call off thoughts awhile," he says, as you call off yammering dogs, and the thoughts he means, that most inward-looking and self-analytic of men, are of course thoughts about himself. Call them off "elsewhere," meaning anywhere in the sense that any blessed thing in the world would be more profitable for him than to think about than his own endlessly yammering predicament. Instead of groping around like a blind man for some comfort of his own manufacture--some comforting belief, or prayer, or friend, or memory--he tells himself simply to let comfort happen the way flowers happen when properly rooted...
"There is no way to know when joy will happen or what will occasion it, only that there is no way to make it happen because then it would not be God's joy. It is not wrung like a promise or an admission. Instead--and suddenly Hopkins the coiner of outlandish words is the one who is speaking again--it is "unforseen times," like the time he saw the "dapple-dawn-drawn" bird hovering in the sky above him...
"...The smile comes unbidden and unexpected the way sometimes a ray of sun will break through clouds to "betweenpie mountains," meaning that, although the mountains are still in shadow, the space between them is pied, dappled, with light. It may not seem all that much at any given time, but it is enough. At the very least it "lights a lovely mile" of the road--wherever in the world the road may be leading to next."
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