R:
There is a big difference between understanding a poem overall and then asking how any element fits into that understanding. I believe I perfectly understand lots of poems, just as I perfectly understand jokes. If you now ask me to articulate that understanding I would begin with a paraphrase. "In this poem, the speaker, whom we know by convention has some attributes of the author, Gerard Hopkins, ie is a Catholic priest, first politely but with understated force, complains to god about his suffering when sinners around him are flourishing, and wonders what worse God might do to dim. He then says that even plants and animals, who do not love and devote themselves to you, go about their business without a constant sense of failure. I put all my heart and soul into serving you and nothing results.
Then suddenly the poet changes key and ends the poem by praying quietly to God that He bring new life to him.
If a student wrote that I would say he understood the poem. I could, but absolutely no longer care to ask whether the : "if" in line 1 simply means "even if" or if it implies that somehow and also the very existebnce of god's justice depends on Hopkins complaining. Actually I prefer the simpler one because the other makes the poem worse as an experience because I have to interrupt the eloquent expression of Hopkins state of mind to address a philosophical issue that seems irrelevant to me.
One might ask how the compression "How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost defeat thwart me" affects the meaning, and say something like it expresses his urgency, but one could find examples of such compression which didn't work and on and on. Not worth it. I have the experience of the poem down pat, it never changes and it never palls. (I don't do it every day). It does make me appreciate once more just how fucking good he is. The Auden poem will never be worth your noble efforts. If you find some hidden pattern of themes, that is your invention, as that is not how poems work on us. They get us to imagine compelling imagined states of mind. Once you get that you got it.
A friend once said that if Hopkins would get married and lead a normal life he would have avoided the misery, so it is not god who did it but himself. The poem was self-pitying and the sentiment expressed not deeply moving. Now that is real criticism. He hears pathetic self-pity I hear eloquent expression of suffering. That I get, thought I think it is a bad judgment.
He and I both understand the poem but we experience it differently so our judgment differs. That is what matters. Most people who read it agree with me, and it has survived and been read my way for a long time so the poem is good. No proof possible.
Me:
I don’t think “perfect understanding” is a helpful phrase. For there is no perfection possible if form makes content. The technical possibilities for discussion seem innumerable. And that is where judiciousness comes into it, some sense of proportion, which is a judgment not an absolute, and, therefore, an art not a science.
So I think that your distinction between overall meaning, or understanding what the poem “says,” and how its parts and means fit or form it is wrong in theory, if form and content are the same thing, two sides of one coin, aspects of each other, distinguishable but not, finally, detachable.
The overall meaning of the poem seems straightforward but the emotion of it is profound and is deeply affecting. So what you no longer care to ask about within the poem, its means, is ok certainly, but what point does your personal uninterest go to?
If you were teaching this poem to even a high school English class, it would be bad teaching not to examine what no longer interests you. If this is one of English literature’s great sonnets, then at a certain level of interest, either personal or professional, one would be interested in what no longer interests you about the poem, namely its technicality. Which isn’t to say, there’s anything wrong with where your interest ends, only that there is, I argue, no generalizable point that emerges from it.
Of course our personal experiences, who we are, will make for different reactions to the poem. And I’d agree that being deeply affected by it either empathically or even like your friend with some impatience is the key thing we want from art, to be compelled by it. We want and expect it from the greatest works and performances in all branches of the arts. But, again, and respectfully, so what? The greatness of art makes for its worthwhileness to study.
There’s an implication in your argument, as I take it in, of doubt about that worthwhileness. But the study of greatness is at the heart of a liberal arts, a humanities education, to pass on in a measure of detail and understanding the greatness of our cultural heritage, the highest that’s been created and thought. And for that note the puzzling ambiguity you note in the poem but that you no longer care to think through:
...”if" in line 1 simply means "even if" or if it implies that somehow and also the very existence of god's justice depends on Hopkins complaining...
Getting at this ambiguous “if” is proxy for, or a microcosm of, what a liberal arts education in necessary part consists of. And the very question you raise but no longer holds your interest belies, I think, both your, and the possibility of, a perfect understanding.
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