The English poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) is regarded as one of the leading Victorian poets for his innovations with prosody (the use of syllables, meter, rhyme, and the pattern of words in poetry). Prone to depression and struggles with religious doubt, Hopkins’ melancholy found expression in his ‘sonnets of desolation.’ Among them is “Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord” (1889), which echoes the sentiment of Jeremiah 12:1: “Righteous art thou, O Lord, when I plead with thee: yet let me talk with thee of thy judgments: Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper?” (KJV)
“Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord”
Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?
Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, then thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lusts
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and breaks
Now, leaved how thick! laced they are again
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build – but not I build; no, but strain,
Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes,
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, gen. ed. M. H. Abrams, 6th edn. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), II. 1553.