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Analysis Of Gerard Manley Hopkin's Carrion Comfort

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“Carrion Comfort,” one of Gerard Manley Hopkin’s Terrible Sonnets, expresses a sentiment atypical of Hopkins’s usually ecstatically worshipful poems. Hopkins was deeply religious, and much of his poetry invoked a euphoric, worshipful experience of the natural world and its connection to God. Toward the end of his career and his life, however, Hopkins wrote his Terrible Sonnets, which dealt with darker emotions and internal conflict; “Carrion Comfort” is one such sonnet. The original sonnet structure is preserved, for the most part, in its rhyme scheme as well as the traditional tonal shift at the end of the octavo. However, Hopkins separated the octavo into two quatrains and discarded the iambic pentameter. This dismissal of certain rules …show more content…

The poem’s introspective process suggests that Hopkins was familiar with the inner struggles he depicted. The narrator of “Carrion Comfort” slowly succumbs to the despair he so vehemently rejects in the first stanza as he suffers a crisis of faith and identity, reflected in the coherency – or lack thereof – of each line. The first stanza of the poem begins with the explicit and confident rejection of despair and death. The rejection of despair operates as a thesis of some kind, as the speaker announces that he will “not feast on [Despair]” in the first line. He shall not, as it were, enjoy the morbid satisfaction of giving up. Rather, he goes on, he has the power to act; he “can something, hope,” and this refuses to relinquish that power. The repetition in these lines illustrates the depth of the speaker’s commitment; the word not is emphatically reinforced, and the speaker’s list of what he could do rather than despair is born of his sense of his own agency. The narrator insists on remaining human, with human ties, but nevertheless he betrays his doubts. “These last strands of man in [him]” are evidently slack and weak. The speaker resists the untwisting of these strands and thus the dissolution of his humanity, but still recognizes his weakness. He clings to his humanity and disavows death, or rather, rejects the possibility of killing himself out of hopelessness. He asserts that he will not cry that he “can no more;” giving up and resigning himself to nihilism is

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