Justus quidem tu es, Domine, si disputem tecum;
verumtamen justa loquar ad te: Quare via impiorum prosperatur?
Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners’ ways prosper? And why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?
Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? O, the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes
Now, leaved how thick! Laced they are again
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build—but not I build; no, but strain,
Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.
I don’t know of any other prayer that addresses God as “Sir.” This dark and difficult sonnet, written in 1888 after five years that seemed to the poet dry and wasted, articulates discouragement, desperation, frustration, and spiritual exhaustion with dark and disturbing accuracy. But that little address in the second line always makes me smile. I imagine the speaker drawing himself up to full height, straightening his cravat (not a tie—this is the nineteenth century, and Oxford) and waistcoat, and facing the divine Judge like a lawyer ready to make his case. And he has a case: he is pleading a just cause. Some things just aren’t fair. And he has confidence in the justice of the judge, so the poem, bleak as it becomes, begins with assurance and a sturdy faith that has survived the thwarting and defeat and jealousies that assail the weary plaintiff. So he begins with a clear if disgruntled declaration of that faith: God is indeed just. However, the “but” clause that follows thrusts the other prong of paradox into the poem like a pitchfork. If we’re required to believe that God is just, responsive to our prayers, one who honors our efforts and sends the Spirit to sustain our faith, what do we do with fruitlessness, fatigue, and unwarranted failure?
Recently I heard on public radio a program devoted to stories of failure. One of them stood out as unusually honest, as this poem is: the writer admitted that she had no final success story that would make her story of failure into a parable or an encouraging teaching tale. What failed, failed. She picked up and went on, but had found as yet no obvious redemptive value in the experience. She did tell her story with simplicity and eloquence that seemed to me itself to be a gift plucked from the ruins she described. We need those stories, too. We need to know that bad things often just sit there like burnt trees on the hillside, signs of loss. Eventually, as the story gets longer, as life goes on and shadow and light mingle in a more complicated design, we may find ourselves on new plateaus of understanding. In the meantime, failure looks a lot like failure, and we may feel we are being, as Yeats put it, “bred to a harder thing than Triumph.”
The common and reasonable questions raised in the poem’s third and fourth lines might sound peevish—a bit of a whine, especially since it’s hard not to hear the “all” as the kind of hyperbole that petulant children or fed-up adults resort to when they want to make a point. One imagines the plaintiff in his professional garb just barely restrained enough to resist stamping his foot. He does, in fact, hit the stressed syllables in the iambic pentameter particularly hard in this line. And then his complaint becomes more bitter, and his lament more poignant: “Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend, / How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost / defeat, thwart me?” Or, as we have doubtless heard the question in more colloquial circumstances, “With friends like you, who needs enemies?” Yet the poem holds us to the paradox; the speaker breaks his slide into simple bitterness with an interruption that seems to come from a breaking heart: “O thou my friend” goes a good way further even than the opening concession that God is indeed just. God, in Christ, is the One who called us friends. Even in the midst of near despair, even as he rails, the speaker remembers and clings to that bond.
He imagines (if he can’t see them out his leaded window roaming the streets of his ancient university town) addicts (“sots”) and prostitutes and their patrons (“thralls of lust”). They seem to go unpunished by remorse or disease—they eat well, enjoy laughter, and even remain healthy in the midst of slow self-destruction. It’s a familiar feeling; I think of the barrage of glamour magazines, films, and celebrity events that feature what we now call the one percent looking their fit and beautiful best, who seem favored by fortune beyond all reasonable measure. Even if we know what a masquerade it all is, envy comes easily, and occasions for it are ubiquitous. The habit of comparison is hard to avoid.
My husband often quotes a friend who reminded him, in moments of emergent professional envy, “There’s no competition in the kingdom of heaven.” It is the message of Rabbi Zusya, who tells his congregation that when he stands before God, he will not be asked, “Why were you not Moses?” but “Why were you not Zusya?” Comparison and competition in spiritual life don’t end well. But they aren’t just bad habits to be shaken off. They run deep along our interior fault lines.
The speaker in this poem, like many among us who might bang their fists on desks where sermons are being prepared or on tables where food is being served to the hurried and ungrateful, is one who has dedicated his life to God. And God’s rewards seem, at least in this bleak moment, to remain behind a cloudbank. No illumination. No transformation. No mystical moments. Not to mention money, recognition, or intimate companionship. Hopkins, a Jesuit and an academic, must have felt these lacks keenly on winter days in the chilly English Midlands, where he suffered from severe gastro-intestinal afflictions, bleeding, and weakness even as he prepared the lectures and wrote the poems that have comforted generations of the afflicted.
Even in springtime, when the “banks and brakes” are in full leaf and the trees in blossom, when birds build their nests, it feels to this exhausted soul as though all nature mocks him in its resilient abundance. The lusty month of May holds no charms for this young Jesuit, a devout convert to Roman Catholicism: he finds himself out of step, out of tune, and deeply out of sorts even when spring and divine love encircle him with beauty and promise. He is “time’s eunuch,” incapable, he believes, of transmitting life, or even the liveliness of work done well and shared, bound in lifetime servitude that seems, in this moment, utterly sterile.
Most of us have been there. When the work of a morning or a month seems wasted or our efforts appear undone by circumstances beyond our control; when—as happened to several friends—manuscripts are burned in house fires or artworks that were labors of love are lost in transit. We need time to grieve these losses. This poet knows that. Thirteen of the sonnet’s fourteen lurching lines are given to lament. But in the end we come to a prayer so simple and pure, so utterly given over to the God whose justice is inscrutable and whose love is unsearchable, that the lament returns to trust like waves returning to the sea. It is the prayer of a man who knows the ways of the natural world—that water must reach the deep roots to feed the living tree. That it comes when it will, in God’s time, not ours. That it will come, as it has come. “Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain” is a prayer that returns to me in my own most desiccated moments, and one for which I have had reason repeatedly to be thankful. As I am for the whole poem, for the way it honors the uneasy relationship of feeling to faith, for its odd, endearing formalities, for its impulsive moments of yielding to love even in the midst of outrage, for its emotional honesty and its poetic complexity.
That last, by the way, is part of its teaching. To honor the complexity of the truth one tells is the task of a good poet—to find, as Wallace Stevens put it, “what will suffice.” Hopkins’s prayer is a sonnet for good reason: a sonnet is traditionally a love poem. Though it has been turned to other purposes, often for the sake of irony, it is, first and always, an address to or reflection on the beloved. And so this sonnet is. The Lord of life who is “mine,” “my friend,” and a just judge is also the One who gives us, because we need even this, roots whose thirst drives us back to prayer.