G. M. Hopkins: "[No worst, there is none.]"

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.