'I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day'
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light's delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.
I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.
I have wondered how to wake from this poem many times in my life, and so my thoughts are abundant.
I’m caught first by the contrast between “wake” and “feel.” The term “wake” is related to “watch” and carries connotations of sight and seeing. What’s more, darkness is perceived by the eyes, and one would never say, “it feels dark tonight.” Instead, we speak of darkness as a state of being that occludes sight—“it is dark.”
But there is a felt aspect to darkness. There is a sense of the oppressive weight of it. Darkness eliminates the distances that sight illuminates, which in turn points perception inward. There is a presence to darkness—a presence that is somehow also an absence. It interests me that Hopkins names this aspect the fell of dark. What could a fell be?
A brief jaunt through the OED has yields a number of different possibilities, the most obviously appropriate being the final:
- Skin, or a membrane that covers an organ of the body
o I wake and feel the skin of dark not day—this meaning would extend the visceral quality of the poem
- A hill or mountain
o Darkness is weighty and vast
- An elevated stretch of uncultivated land
o And wild
- A marsh or a fen
o And mysterious
- A blow capable of knocking a person down
o The broken expectation of morning’s light hits like a fist
- The last line of weft at any given time when weaving on a loom
o This is my favorite possibility. Using this definition evokes for me the long weave of what came before this moment—the hours, the black hours
- Gall, bitterness, animosity, rancor
o Darkness personified as bitter enemy holding feelings of animosity for the speaker
The word fell encompasses a variety of possible meanings. In this, it matches the felt ambiguity of the dark and evokes a sense similar to the confusion of waking to the expectation of day and meeting dark instead.
I’m also interested in the prosody of the first sentence. I wake and feel the fell of dark is perfectly iambic, even sing-songily so. It builds an expectation of iambic pentameter that is broken emphatically by the spondee, “not day.” The percussive triple-beat of “dark not day” belong so closely together rhythmically that the comma between “dark” and “not” violates their unity with a visual separation. This all works to emphasize the contrast between what was expected upon waking (and our own lexical expectation of sight upon waking) with the reality of a felt darkness.
The next line utterly violates any iambic expectations we may cling to as the speaker laments to his heart, jumping foot by foot between meters. An iamb (What hours) followed by a trochee (O what) followed by a spondee (black hours), and then concluded by a cretic (we have spent).
In these two lines, we learn something critical about our speaker—that there is a split between himself and his heart. The eyes of his heart saw sights in the night, and the legs of his heart walked countless ways. Through it all, he must have been nothing more through those black hours than a detached observer: with witness I speak this. He witnessed his heart seeing and wending, but from a distance.
And then a prospective lament: the heart must continue its bitter path in yet longer light’s delay. In yet a longer delay of light, or in the delay of yet longer light? This ambiguity prefigures the amendment of the subsequent line and affords reference both to the time before the dawn of morning and before the dawn of some far off salvation.
The amendment puzzles me. But where I say hours, I mean years, mean life. To this point, I see in my mind’s eye a figure not unlike that depicted on the Nine of Swords, woken abruptly in the night by piercing thoughts. But here Hopkins offers us a tempting way out of the picture—I’m not actually here in my bed in the middle of the night—he tells us—I’m speaking metaphorically about life itself. I find this interpretation too simple—too easy—and too similar to the way sadness works upon the mind to really constitute the interpretative key to this poem.
I turn, instead, outside the poem to Emily Dickinson for a key:
Pain has an element of blank.
It cannot recollect when it began
Or if there were a time when it was not.
It has no future but itself.
Its infinite realms contain its past,
Enlightened to perceive new periods of pain.
I take the universalizing amendment of Hopkins’ line about hours, years, and life to be a performance of the blank of pain. It is the tendency of the mind to project its disposition onto all of time. Psychologists recognize this as the “present bias”—a shortcoming in our ability to remember different mental states or imagine to different mental states in the future. When one feels sad, one can easily begin to feel as though sadness was all they had ever known and begin to believe that it’s all they’ll ever know—that black hours are in fact years, in fact life.
I do not imagine this line—but where I say hours I mean years, mean life—to be the poet at his desk with a pen writing to the reader of how to interpret the poem. Instead, I imagine it to be the man of the Nine of Swords, upright in bed, noticing acutely his own incapacity to imagine a day where his pain was not, realizing that his lament has no future but itself (a realization that we might also call the fell of dark).
In the next line, the speaker goes beyond Emily’s blank and turns his sadness into a religion. His lament is not merely his own—it is the total reaction to life that all honest people must share, “cries countless.”
The second stanza continues the religious turn, and it is thick with biblical symbols in a way the first stanza is not. Our dark prophet has awoken from his bed in the night, and now he extemporizes a dense sermon on the fall of mankind and original sin.
“Gall” occurs throughout the bible, but most particularly in Jeremiah, where the speaker repeatedly says that God gives the people “the water of gall to drink.” It symbolizes bitterness, and it is the bitter bile that our own bodies produce. Heartburn is an interesting contrast to gall, because it doesn’t occur in the bible, and it’s an opposite etymological formation. Gall is literally bile and symbolically bitterness; as far as I can tell, heartburn first meant anger and bitterness, and then later came to refer to the painful sensation of stomach acid lurching into the throat. And so the speaker declares identity with both ends of a metaphorical loop: bitter bile, bitter heart.
But what is God’s most deep decree? My guess is that it’s the first commandment given to Adam and Even in the Garden of Eden: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat, for in the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die, and then later after they ate, cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow thou shalt eat of it all the days of thy life…in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground…
But what did the fruit of the tree of knowledge taste like when they ate it? My taste was me is so strange grammatically because it’s preceded by the subjunctive mood. God’s most deep decree would have me taste bitterness, my taste was me. Was me. A completed action. God’s most deep decree presages future tastes, but the fruit of the tree has already been tasted: the fruit of the tree is me and is therefore also gall and is therefore also heartburn. I taste the fruit and sense that my bones, my flesh, my blood—they are brimming with the curse that Eve brought onto the human race by abrogating God’s most deep decree. The fruit she digested lives on in my bile.
But the very words “blood” and “flesh” hold intimations of redemption in the figure of Christ—a figure notably absent from the poem. Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. What a twist! This line contains within it the tension between the traditional Jewish symbolism of yeast as sin and Jesus’ shortest parable: To what shall I compare the Kingdom of God? It is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, until it was all leavened.”
Although this redemptive potential exists in the line, it remains overwhelmingly sour. This is a poem that still awaits its Messiah, and so the selfyeast of spirit still reads as ruin. Indeed, the lost are like this: leavened but alone. Our speaker holds tight to some still-existing hope, for though he is separate from his heart, he is also apart from the lost. He sweats like them, but they are somehow worse.
I like to think that the speaker, upon finishing this stanza of thought, remains upright in his bed. He has merely given himself away to a waking nightmare. He sits, eyes wide, staring, ruminating on our fallen state, sweating the cold sweat of despair. How can he awake from this poem? He woke once to the fell of dark—to the blank of pain—he tastes the bitter bile of his own body—but how can he wake from the deeper sleep of the blank of these infinite realms?
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