Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord

Gerard Manley Hopkins · Leaving Cert Poetry

Thou art indeed just lord is a sonnet in which Gerard Manley Hopkins takes God to court. He grants in line 1 that God is just, argues for thirteen lines that his own case is just as well, then stops arguing in the last line and asks for rain. That movement, from courtroom to plea, is the poem.

Thou art indeed just lord by Gerard Manley Hopkins: a case brought before a judge

A Petrarchan sonnet, fourteen lines rhyming abba abba cdcdcd. It prints as one unbroken block, but the rhyme divides it into an octave of eight and a sestet of six, and that division is where it turns. Hopkins wrote it in Dublin in his final years, a Jesuit priest who felt spiritually and creatively barren, and it is one of the sonnets of desolation, or terrible sonnets. None appeared in his lifetime; Robert Bridges printed them in 1918.

Working through the argument, line by line

Octave, first quatrain · Lines 1 to 4

The poem opens by conceding the point, the way a barrister concedes something before turning it. Contend in line 1 is a legal word for arguing a disputed case, so you are in a courtroom, not a chapel. Line 2 holds that register with the address sir: after a concession it lands cool and almost insolent, a complainant speaking to a judge. Lines 3 and 4 lay the charge: why do wicked people prosper while everything he attempts ends in disappointment? Line 4 inverts the word order so Disappointment arrives ahead of the grammar that explains it.

• “Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend”The poem’s method in one verb: he argues from inside belief rather than leaving it.

Octave, second quatrain · Lines 5 to 8

Line 5 is the sharpest thing here. Balanced phrases either side of the comma set enemy against friend, then collapse the difference: Hopkins cannot tell how an enemy would treat him worse. The archaic wouldst and dost in line 6 keep the address formal while the feeling turns raw. Line 7 then snaps: two clipped verbs, a question mark, and the contempt is out. Drunkards and people enslaved to lust do better in their idle hours, lines 7 and 8 say, than he does after a whole life spent on God’s cause.

• “Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,”The central paradox, and the one line every essay should produce. Friend is part of the accusation.
• “the sots and thralls of lust”The alliteration spits. Use it for tone, or for an envy most religious verse hides.

Sestet, the turn · Lines 9 to 11

The imperative See swings the poem from argument to evidence: Hopkins stops asserting and starts pointing. Lines 9 to 11 fill with hedgerow, thickets thick with new leaf, branches laced again, fretty chervil frothing white, fresh wind moving the lot. The grave accents on leavèd and lacèd in line 10 force an older pronunciation, adding a syllable to each, so the writing is as crowded as the growth it describes. This is not nature as consolation but nature as exhibit: everything in the field is growing except him.

• “See, banks and brakes”Two words that mark the turn into the sestet. Use them when a question asks how the poem develops.

Sestet, the close · Lines 12 to 14

Line 12 does the damage. The verb build is handed to the birds and taken back from the speaker in the same line, and two semicolons and a dash break the sentence up before it reaches strain. In line 13 he calls himself Time’s eunuch, incapable of generative power, unable to father one finished work. Then line 14 changes the poem: the plaintiff stops making a case and makes a request instead, in soft monosyllables after all those hard consonants. He asks not for a verdict, not to be proved right, but to be made fertile again.

• “Them; birds build – but not I build; no, but strain,”The central image of creative sterility. Use it for any question on vocation or thwarted work.
• “Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.”The plea that replaces the argument. Ask whether it settles the complaint or redirects it.

The ideas the poem keeps returning to

• An argument conducted inside faith. Hopkins never doubts that God exists; he disputes how God is treating him. Contend and plead assume a court he still accepts, so reading this as lost faith throws away its tension.
• Barrenness in the work he was called to do. The wound is vocational, not doctrinal. Lines 12 and 13 describe a man who can finish nothing: no nest, no offspring, no completed work. Priest and poet, both callings are failing at once.
• Nature as evidence, not comfort. The hedgerow of lines 9 to 11 is fertile and busy, and Hopkins takes no consolation from it. He produces it in support of his case: its abundance measures his emptiness.
• An envy he refuses to tidy away. Lines 7 and 8 admit he resents the morally careless for prospering, and that honesty is what stops the poem sounding pious.

Sound and image

The metre moves. Lines 1 and 2 stay close to a regular iambic pentameter, calm and controlled against what they are actually saying. After that sprung rhythm takes over, crowding stresses in line 7 and breaking line 10 into fragments. The metre strains as the speaker strains. Every image in the sestet is fertile and belongs to something other than him: new leaf, laced branches, chervil, nesting birds. The final line gives him an image of his own at last, a plant whose roots have not been watered.

The voice you hear

Track how Hopkins addresses God and you have the emotional arc. The cool sir of line 2 returns in line 9, set beside a lifetime given to God’s cause, and by then it has hardened into bitterness. Line 5 calls God friend, inside the poem’s harshest accusation. Only in line 14 does he reach for a title of praise, at the exact moment the arguing stops. The tone runs from accusatory through envious to self-lacerating, never once resigned.

Taking this sonnet into the exam

Expect it in a question on Hopkins and God, or on how he handles suffering. Argue that the subject is not losing faith but the difficulty of holding on to it while feeling abandoned, with the legal vocabulary of lines 1 and 2 set against the plea of line 14. For despair across the terrible sonnets, pair Thou art indeed just lord with I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, since both argue with their suffering rather than confessing it. For range, God’s Grandeur is the harder contrast: the same God, addressed from confident celebration.

Where marks are lost

Questions to test yourself

• Where exactly does the poem stop arguing and start asking, and what changes in the language?
• Does sir carry the same weight in line 9 as it does in line 2?
• What does the verb build in line 12 achieve that another verb would not?
• If line 14 were removed, what kind of poem would be left?
• Which is more convincing to you, the anger of the octave or the plea of the sestet?

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