There aren’t perhaps many canonical poems written about Liverpool blacksmiths, but there is ‘Felix Randal’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89), which is one of the poet’s most famous poems and, like all of Hopkins’s work, deserves closer analysis. Before we offer some notes towards a commentary on this wonderful poem, […]
‘My own heart let me more have pity on; let / Me live to my sad self hereafter kind, / Charitable’: so begins this sonnet by one of the Victorian era’s most innovative poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89). Written in the mid-1880s in Ireland, when Hopkins was suffering from depression, […]
A commentary on one of Hopkins’s ‘Terrible Sonnets’ The mid-1880s was not a good time for Gerard Manley Hopkins. Lonely in Ireland, the poet fell into a black pit of depression, out of which came the ‘Terrible Sonnets’ which represent, after his flurry of creativity in 1876-77, the most productive […]
A commentary on one of Hopkins’s ‘Terrible Sonnets’ ‘No Worst, There Is None’ is one of a group of sonnets the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) wrote when he was suffering from depression in the 1880s, while living in Ireland. These are known as the ‘Terrible Sonnets’ because of the […]
A summary of a classic Hopkins poem ‘That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection’ is a sonnet, but not as we know it. Or rather, it isn’t strictly a sonnet but the rhyme scheme puts us in mind of the sonnet. Gerard Manley Hopkins […]