Duty becomes friendship….and maybe more?

After spending most of this morning trying and failing to acquaint myself with his poetry, for want of a better world, I’ve decided to dedicate this blog to my favourite God-bothering manic depressive. That’s right, Hopkins.  I thought Dickinson was a bit of a downer, this guy makes her stuff look like an anthology of limericks written by the Barney kids.

By the way, that title is an in-joke between me and my friends…we think Hopkins may have been slightly too fond of Felix Randall. You don’t generally describe your friends as ‘big boned and hardy handsome’. If you do, stop, you’re probably scaring them.

So,why do I hate Hopkins? Well, it is pretty hard not to hate him, if you ask me. For one thing, there’s waaay too much Jesus in his poems for liking. Yes, the man was a priest/parson/ whatever you want to call it, but does there have to be religious connotations and/or a moral message in every damn thing you write? In my head, he talks in Ned Flander’s voice, and wags his finger with disapproval at the end of each verse.

Even his ‘happy’ poems evoke suicidal feelings in me, because of sheer boredom. If I want twee descriptions of the wonder of God’s creation,I’ll go read my essays from primary school about my day in the countryside.  Every time  read that opening line ‘Nothing is so beautiful as Spring…’, I feel my eyelids getting heavy. Sure all I have to do to experience nature is turn on the Discovery Channel (or actually go outside if I’m feeling really crazy), I don’t need to decipher century old poems. The subject of nature, suffice to say, isn’t quite my cup of tea.

On the subject of nature (sort of), anyone ever noticed how obsessed he is with horses? It’s weird. Go look at his poems now, I guarantee you’ll find a reference to horses in every single one of them.  My prediction for a Hopkins question next year : ‘Hopkins was a poet of extreme highs,lows and an advocate of horse fetishism. Discuss ‘.

And now we come to my real bone of contention with Hopkins; the Terrible Frickin Sonnets.  Never has anything been given a more apt title, ever. I could never force myself to study them, nothing’s worth that, not even a pass in English. So I don’t even know the titles. What I do know, is that in one of them Hopkins compares himself to a woman in labour. Lovely image before bedtime, that.  I know he was severely depressed and I should try and be sympathetic, but why does he have to depress generations of English students because of his own suffering? I know misery loves company, but come on. My patience is wearing thin with these emo poets and their tales of woe.

Petty and unfair as this might be, I even hate his name. It somehow conveys in one word how boring and annoying all his poetry is. And makes me think of rabbits.

So yeah, for all those reasons, it just ain’t a party without Hoppy. Gotta love anyone who can condense God, mentally scarring images and bipolarism into one convenient little sonnet.