From now until the launch event on Sep 30th, I’ll be posting daily excerpts from Cold World. Here’s today’s, on Hopkins and damnation:

Just as “[t]he world is charged with the grandeur of God” is a statement as much about the world as it is about the state of mind of the poet, so the bleak vista presented by the Terrible Sonnets is not merely an interior landscape but also an existential situation, opening out onto a dark constellation of which the suffering individual is only a part. Let us explore this constellation, starting with the sonnet which begins:

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

More pangs will, schooled at fore-pangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?

If Hopkins had written “no worse, there is none”, this would have been readily intelligible as an expression of extremity: this is the worst, it doesn’t get any worse than this. But to deny the existence of a worst is to say something different, akin to Edgar’s aside in King Lear that “the worst is not, so long as we can say ‘this is the worst’”. Edgar’s statement implies that the very worst is beyond the power of utterance: that dying, which brings an end to all utterance, is the worst thing that can happen. The worst and the naming of the worst cannot coincide. What Hopkins says, however, is that “the worst is not”, without qualification: there is none. Even dying is not the worst; indeed, it may be only one in an infinite series of catalepses, turns from bad to worse. “No worst, there is none” is a metaphysical statement: it asserts the possibility of an unlimited intensification of anguish. As the demonically possessed Dr Weir declares in the space horror movie Event Horizon: “hell is only a word. The reality is much, much worse”.