The final daily excerpt from Cold World:

Whether or not they were truly “written in blood”, and whether or not they are “the feeling itself” of misery transmuted into poetic form, it is true that the Terrible Sonnets do not merely treat misery as a theme, but bear in their very composition the trace of an intense mental anguish. Hopkins’s image in “Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves” of “a rack / Where selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe-and-shelterless, thoughts against thoughts in groans grind” captures precisely the Terrible Sonnets’ quality of setting thought grindingly against thought without “sheathe” or “shelter” of syntax to separate them. As Martin suggests, the nearest thing in English verse is the poetry of the Metaphysicals, with its abrupt juxtapositions of heterogeneous matter. Instead of the tranquil temporal flow of lyrical consciousness mulling over its recollections, there is an effect of stark simultaneity: each poem composes a fractured present.

Once again, we will speak of this fractured present as the “world” of the poems, and specifically as the “cold world” of disenchantment. 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.

You can get the book through Amazon, but I recommend taking note of the ISBN and ordering a copy through your nearest independent bookseller.