No Worst, There Is None

Gerard Manley Hopkins · Leaving Cert Poetry

No worst there is none is the bleakest of the sonnets Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in his last years in Dublin. In fourteen lines it refuses grief a bottom, calls twice on help that never arrives, then turns the mind itself into a mountain range with cliffs in it. What it offers at the close is not hope. It is the fact that things stop.

No worst there is none by Gerard Manley Hopkins: grief with no floor under it

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 to 1889) was an English poet and a Jesuit priest whose work stayed unpublished in his lifetime; Robert Bridges brought the poems out in 1918, nearly thirty years after his death. This sonnet belongs to the group called the terrible sonnets, written in Dublin at the end of his life, and is the most extreme of them. Its claim is not that the speaker is in pain. It is that pain has no ceiling and no floor.

Stanza by stanza, line by line

Octave · Lines 1 to 4

Line 1 states the argument in one breath: there is no worst, because every depth reached turns out to have another under it. Hopkins repeats the word pitch inside the line so that the second use pushes past the first. Line 2 supplies the mechanism: he invents the word forepangs, so earlier pains school the pains that follow to wring harder. Lines 3 and 4 turn outward, calling on the Comforter, a traditional title for the Holy Spirit, and then on Mary. Both questions are left hanging inside their own lines.

• “No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,”Your opening quote for any answer on despair in Hopkins: it holds the whole argument. Point at the repeated word, not at the mood.
• “Comforter, where, where is your comforting?”The doubled where stumbles like someone speaking through tears, and no answer comes: evidence the despair is religious, not only emotional.

Octave · Lines 5 to 8

In line 5 the cries stop being separate sounds. Herds-long is another Hopkins coinage, crowding them into one animal mass past the speaker’s control. Line 6 sets that mass on an anvil, so private suffering is hammered out on something ancient and shared, and the printed accents force the stress onto the words that carry the claim. In line 7 the cries quieten, and behind that is a shriek from Fury demanding the pain be brief. Hopkins snaps the word lingering in half across the line ending.

• “Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked ‘No ling-“The best form and meaning evidence in the poem: the layout itself refuses to linger on the word lingering. Name the enjambment and say what it performs.

Sestet · Lines 9 to 12

The turn lands exactly at the stanza break. Line 9 stops describing the sound of suffering and starts mapping it, the repeated mind forcing two heavy stresses before the pause drops you into the cliffs. The language is cooler than the octave’s cries, and more frightening for it. Line 10 stacks three hard adjectives with no conjunctions, then coins no-man-fathomed, never measured by anyone. Lines 10 to 12 answer anyone who would hold those cliffs cheap, concede that our small endurance cannot last on ground that steep, and shrink to a single instruction: creep.

• “O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall”The volta quote. Use it for a structure paragraph, or for the argument that Hopkins gives mental suffering scale by making it terrain.
• “Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap”Good for the coinages, and for the poem’s warning against underestimating what it describes.

Sestet · Lines 13 to 14

Line 13 has the speaker name himself Wretch and tell himself to get under whatever shelter exists in a whirlwind. The word comfort is there, so read what is on offer: all life ends in death, and, on the only scale he can reach, each day ends when sleep comes. The near repetition of Life death and day dies makes a droning loop, and the plain monosyllables slow the last line right down.

• “Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.”The closing quote for any answer on how the poem resolves, and the one to use if you argue the ending is anticlimax rather than recovery.

The ideas the poem keeps returning to

• Suffering with no limit. Line 1 denies grief a worst point and line 2 gives the reason: pain learns from itself. That is a harder claim than saying this hurts badly, and it governs everything down to the sestet’s bottomless cliffs.
• Consolation that never answers. Lines 3 and 4 name the two figures a Catholic reader would expect to bring relief, and neither replies. Treat the poem as ordinary distress and you lose half its argument, because what is missing is God’s own comfort.
• The mind as terrain. From line 9 the poem stops reporting feelings and builds a landscape: cliffs, sheerness, ground too steep to stand on. That gives psychological suffering a scale plain statement could not reach.
• What endurance is worth. Line 11 defends the reality of this suffering against anyone inclined to dismiss it, and line 12 admits our small capacity to bear things does not hold out long.

Sound and image

Sprung rhythm, Hopkins’s term for his irregular, heavily stressed metre, is not decoration in No worst there is none; it does the arguing. Line 2 packs its stresses so tightly through the p and w sounds that the line feels wrung. Line 6 carries printed accent marks, Hopkins telling you which syllables take the weight. Line 9 pauses after the mountains and then drops into the cliffs, a small fall inside a line about falling.

The voice you hear

Track who the speaker addresses and the sonnet organises itself. In lines 3 and 4 he calls on the Comforter and on Mary and gets nothing back. In lines 5 to 8 he describes his own cries from slightly outside them, quoting an inner voice not quite his own. In the sestet he argues about the mind in general terms, then in line 13 turns on himself, and the name he chooses is Wretch. By line 14 the voice is barely raised.

Taking this sonnet into the exam

In No worst there is none the safest ground is technique tied to meaning. You are not asked to describe suffering; you are asked to show how the poem is built. Every point below can be evidenced from one named line.

Where marks are lost

Questions to test yourself

• Which conveys despair more powerfully, the octave’s cries or the sestet’s mountain landscape?
• Is the final line genuine consolation, or a second despair dressed as comfort?
• Does the sprung rhythm’s technical control sit oddly with a mind at breaking point?
• How would you pair this sonnet with I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day?

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