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| NOT, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; |
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| Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man |
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| In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; |
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| Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be. |
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| But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me |
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| Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan |
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| With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan, |
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| O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee? |
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| Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear. |
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| Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod, |
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| Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer. |
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| Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród |
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| Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year |
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| Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God. |
I love this poem, but I insist that nobody practically understands it who hasn’t taken in the argument made by Julia Saville, in her book that is ground-breaking in Hopkins criticism, A Queer Chivalry, The Homoerotic Asceticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
People who love Hopkins and who nevertheless remain convinced of the right of the Church to exclude men of homosexual orientation from sacerdotal orders really need to read this book.
People whose idea of art and poetry is that it is all goodness and beauty also need to read this book: Hopkins’ greatest poetry was probably produced by feelings of tremendous conflict between his vocation and what he knew to be his nature.