I first discovered Gerard Manley Hopkins when I was 18. I was working as a community service volunteer for eight months between leaving school and starting university.  I had recently split up with my girlfriend. I knew nobody at all in the area. I was desperately lonely.  One evening I stood for a while, looking over the edge of a motorway bridge, wondering what it would be like to jump off. 

Someone – I wish I could remember who – gave me a copy of William Gardner’s selection of Hopkins’ poetry and prose, and there I found Poem 42:

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,

More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder ring.

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, wórld-sorrow; on an áge old anvil wince and sing –

Then lull, then leave off.  Fury has 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.

Click here to listen to Jasper Britton reading this poem.

These one hundred and twenty-six words resonated so strongly with me, not for any hope they offered, but because I’d found somebody else who felt like I did. Hopkins had been there himself, was talking my language.

Like Edgar in King Lear, he cannot say ‘This is the worst.’ There is no worst. Like the overpowering waves of a stormy sea or the unrelenting gusts of a hurricane, his pangs of grief come back at him, time and time again.  He is huddled like a herd of cattle, caught in the eye of a storm. He is battered on an anvil and at the mercy of evil furies. He is in full awareness of his ‘wórld-sorrow’,  the pain that in German is called Weltschmerz and is close to the Buddhist noble truth of dukkha: the sadness of simply existing in a world of suffering and transience.  

I followed him up into the mountains of his mind, and then over his ‘cliffs of fall/Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed’, on his downward spiral into emptiness.  He had experienced and shared my anguish and distress, my sense of devastating emptiness.

Alongside frequent late-night listenings to the final adagio lamentoso from Tchaikovsky’s Symphonie Pathétique, with its fading into nothingness, Hopkins’ poem somehow kept me going.  I no longer felt so alone. 

Hopkins has been my frequent companion ever since, sometimes haunting but more often inspiring me. I owe him a lifelong debt of gratitude.