It’s not all songs and lyrics here—as I’ve already dissected
a church sign—so I’m going to tackle a poem as well, Gerard
Manley Hopkins’ “[No worst, there is none].” I’m doing it
partly because it is one of my favourite poems, but also because
someone who I recently recommended it to asked if
this was my writing on it, which it is not. (Not that I wouldn’t be
happy to claim it, but it’s not.) But in the interest of presenting
a fuller and more comprehensive (dare I say comprehensible)
exposition of what I find fascinating about this poem, here it goes.
Here’s the text of the poem:
No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More
pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter,
where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is
your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a
chief
Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and
sing—
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked ‘No
ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief’.
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful,
sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung
there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or
deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a
whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
It’s pretty intense and compressed stuff, and if you need help
untangling some of the wordage the above link is useful, but for what
I want to discuss, which is more the overall meaning of the poem,
then it is more useful to attend to the comment by Catherine Madsen
that is at the bottom of the page that I have linked to. There Madsen
writes:
“Re: the line “No worst, there is none,” the meaning is
surely not “There is nothing worse than this” but “There is
ALWAYS something worse than the worst we can imagine.” Hopkins is
echoing lines from King Lear, Act IV Scene i:
EDGAR
[Aside] O gods! Who is’t can say ‘I am at the
worst’?
I am worse than e’er I was.
…
And worse
I may be yet: the worst is not
So long as we can say ‘This is
the worst.’
Hopkins can’t know how much worse the “more pangs” will be
than the “forepangs,” and this is part of the desperation of the
experience; there is no limit to suffering. Except perhaps the
exhaustion of death or sleep, whichever comes first.”
Madsen’s point about the fact that the worst is potentially
limitless—that there can always be something worse than what is
currently the worst, up to the point of death—is spot on, and I
think it is the tension between the awful infinitude of life and the
awful finitude of death that gives this poem its power and
speculative depth. (As a side note in terms of speculative depth, the
Lear connection is a good one—and not just because Lear is my
favourite Shakespearean work—because of the way that it works with
the same kind of logic that Hegel used against the Kantian notion of
the thing-in-itself, namely, the idea that if we have the knowledge
necessary to set down a limit to our knowledge, then have already
technically gone beyond those limits.)
In terms of what I have called the awful infinitude of life, there
is the process described in the early lines, namely, the way that
“More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.” The idea
here is that grief and pain and anxiety are not set, stable things.
To a far greater degree than in the case with our existence in the
external world, our thoughts and feelings and experiences are
relatively unconstrained in terms of their “size” and
“complexity.” Pains and fears and sufferings do not come over us
as isolated occurrences, they are connected to each other and to our
own history and can build upon each other (not unlike the cries that
huddle “herds-long”). Not only can pangs we have felt before
provoke new ones, but they can also help to determine—and
intensify—the form and the degree of pangs to come (in Hopkins’
terms, they “schooled” by them). In this way they can deepen and
expand and intensify and thereby seem to almost take on a life of
their own (or, in especially unfortunate cases, take on our lives as
their own); in this possibility lies the continual possibility of an
ever-new “worst.”
The image of the mountains of the mind in the second section of
the poem is important because it points out the connection between
our intelligence and the (potentially) limitless suffering detailed
in the first section. In a kind of spiritual equivalent to the idea
“what goes up must come down,” or in other words, that the
heights to which our minds can aspire are also the source of so much
misery. The higher one goes the further the potential fall—and the
fall is much faster and gathers momentum much faster than the
ascent—hence the image of the cliff as a revelation of the
precariousness of that height. (As a side note, the abyss was a
favorite Romantic image for the experience of infinite negativity for
just this reason.)
In intellectual terms, the idea is that it is our higher
capacities for memory and anticipation and projection, our awareness
of ourselves and of others—all of which go so far to making up the
complexity of our thoughts and reactions—that can also serve as the
perfect medium for the development of a potentially infinite spiral
of misery (infinite at least in terms of their being no internal
limit to it—there is no necessary end to the forms of our misery,
no reason it can’t just keep going on and on; as for external
limits to it, well that’s a matter of our analysis a little further
on). As potentially infinite, these depths are “no-man-fathomed,”
they cannot be exhaustively mapped or experienced.
If this sounds a little melodramatic, consider the “whirlwind”
of the second last line—could it not be the maddening rush of
miserable thoughts going round and round someone’s head without end (and don't forget that the circle is an image of infinity). And
furthermore, have you not yourself seen the effects of this in those
people whose lives seem to be absolutely twisted up in misery in the
most complex and convoluted ways—the knot they have made of their
lives seems endless. (Although there is much to admire in complexity,
such people are fascinating only at a distance such as in a work of
art, in real life they are likely to be as destructive as whirlwinds
themselves.)
Ok, to pull back for a moment, if what I have been describing is
the potentially infinite negativity inherent in life (particularly
self-conscious life), there is also the other rather distressing pole
to this poem, that of finitude of life (i.e., mortality, death). In
my little parenthetical note about the potentially infinite nature of
misery two paragraphs ago I mentioned that misery didn’t
necessarily need to recognize any internal limits but that external
limits still applied. The most obvious limit is our own mortality, we
can after all, only be miserable as long as we are alive. (To
continue the parenthetical party, while it seems relatively
uncontroversial to say that we don’t feel any misery before we
live, there are lots of people who would disagree with the idea that
there is no misery once we are dead. I don’t have any reason to
think things are much different for us after we are dead than before
we were alive, but if you are attached to a horrifying idea like the
truly infinite misery of a hell, well, this poem will say different
things to you.)
The fact that “each day dies with sleep” speaks to the relief
that an end can bring, although that sense of relief is definitely
mitigated by its alignment with death, but hey they don’t call them
the “terrible sonnets” because they are focused on the lighter
sides of existence (or, as the low-hanging joke goes, because they
are poorly written). Our finitude both serves as a relief and a
prompt for our sorrows. Time in particular is the mechanism (?) or
medium (?)--god knows what to say of time in this regard—of our
suffering and our relief. Time heaps on the misery and in time our
misery will end: our sorrows, in Hopkins’ words, “on an age-old
anvil wince and sing— / Then lull, then leave off.”
This anvil image leads to what might be the strangest part of the
poem, the lines: “Fury had shrieked ‘No ling- / ering! Let me be
fell: force I must be brief.’” I take the personalization of fury
to be a reference to the Greek furies (the Erinyes) who were
goddesses of vengeance. The furies arose when an oath was broken and
they would hound the oath-breaker endlessly. Orestes was their most
famous target for killing his mother Clytemnestra (who he killed
because she killed her father—basically, the story is more
convoluted....). The furies are thus figures representing the
necessity and potential endlessness of suffering. I think the single
fury here enforces the administration of the “chief woe,
world-sorrow” that is the human condition, this misery that hounds
us throughout all of our days, not letting us linger. There is, of
course, the fun little lingering of “ling-ering” across the
divide of the lines, or maybe the break in the word illustrates the
brevity and inevitable falling-off of any lingering. Either way, in
attempting to hold off or to dramatize the flow of time, the line
ultimately draws our attention to the flow of time (and the abuse
that it brings—consider the image of the anvil). And to top it all
off, the hounding of the fury, our time-bound condition, is even more
cruel (“fell”) because our lives are brief. Whatever comfort
there is in this life is merely relative, provisional, it is whatever
can serve as such—poorly, no doubt—in this whirlwind.