Despair

In what is an utterly barren period for me in terms of reading - I'll be so busy until Sunday that it's impossible to read anything in sustained fashion - I'm thinking back to last year when, for the first time, I bought an edition of Hopkins's poetry, well prose as well, as it was the Oxford World's Classics edition of The Major Works which has generous helpings of all sorts of material from the great Jesuit, including pretty much all the pre-Deutschland juvenilia, which is remarkably good.

Don't ask me why I'd never got hold of any kind of edition of Hopkins before this. I suppose he's so anthologised that he's never too far away, but I'd quite forgotten the power of the late sonnets, those dreadful dark night of the soul pieces. (These are the ones that rarely, if ever, make the anthologies.) Reading them again I was reminded of just how heart-breaking they are, and simply how sad Hopkins life was. For the likes of Dawkins and his crew and their claim that religion is some kind of comforting crutch they should be compulsory reading. Try the one beginning I wake and feel the fell. Some comfort. Some crutch.