I think Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “terrible sonnets…written in blood” are just crying out for a depressive black metal interpretation, don’t you?

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,

More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing -
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling-
-ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief'.
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

“Nor does long our small / Durance deal with that steep or deep” is incidentally a very late-Geoffrey Hill-ish sort of line. And of the late (but not yet late) Geoffrey Hill, A Treatise of Civil Power is the best in a while, I think. Although The Triumph of Love is monumentally awesome, and Speech! Speech! a whirlwind of profane invention, I felt he lapsed a bit into Steinerian sententiousness after that, which may have pleased the “greatest living English poet / soul-harrowing high-moral-seriousness” crowd but for me represented a deviation from Hill’s real forte, which is making you feel passionately ambiguous about things rather than essaying cunningly (more often than not grammatically) ambiguous moral propositions about them. Like - I suspect - many admirers of Hill’s, I often find myself wanting to rescue him from his other admirers, who are clearly a bad influence. Fortunately, he’s more than capable of rescuing himself - are there any two books of English verse by the same author more unalike than Speech! Speech! and Tenebrae?

PS: People tangling with Ranciere’s “axiom of equality” or other appeals to certain kinds of rational capacity could do worse than consider Hill’s insistence that he is not a “difficult” poet, and that trusting in the general intelligence of “the common reader” is a profoundly democratic act. I’ve seen Hill read; nothing in his verse is opaque when read intelligently out loud, however recondite the domain from which it draws its references - except where the opacity is intentional and part of the poem’s presentation of the “clear-obscure” contexture of its objects (Hill insists on the poet’s right to be enigmatic, as a correlative of the reader’s right not to be condescended to). Hunting down the source materials and points of departure is not a wholly pointless exercise; it may lead one into all sorts of fascinating areas, and I think Hill does wish to stimulate interest in the often unjustly forgotten heroes of his texts. But a detailed acquaintance with the De Causa Dei of Thomas Bradwardine is not necessary for salvation.