Graduation Year
2016
Date of Submission
4-2016
Document Type
Open Access Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Literature
Reader 1
Robert Faggen
Rights Information
© 2016 Joel H. Kirk
Abstract
Gerard Manley Hopkins suffered deeply. His “Terrible Sonnets” are confessional poetry that demonstrate his struggle with his God and with himself. This work analyses the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, starting Noah and ending with Jesus’s promise of a Paraclete, to analyze how both God and Man approach earthly and heavenly comfort. The work will then turn to Hopkins’s poetry to show that Hopkins’s unshakable faith and deep understanding of the Bible is both the cause and the cure of his suffering. This essay concludes that it is only through suffering that Hopkins, like Job, Jesus, and King Lear, is able to achieve both comfort and wisdom.
Recommended Citation
Kirk, Joel, "“Let Joy Size at God Knows When to God Knows What”: Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Struggle for Comfort, and the Illuminating Nature of Unwarranted Suffering" (2016). CMC Senior Theses. 1339.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/1339
