Justus quidem tu es, Domine, si disputem tecum; verumtamen
justa loquar ad te: Quare via impiorum prosperatur?

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, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes
Now, leavèd how thick! lacèd 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.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

This powerful poem is a Petrarchan sonnet — or Italian sonnet, if you prefer (the two terms are synonymous) — which means that beyond having fourteen total lines, the first eight lines (the octet) follows a strict ABBAABBA rhyme-pattern, and in the second section (the sestet), the final six lines are patterned CDCDCD. In Petrarchan sonnets, sestets can vary in their rhyme scheme, but the pattern Gerard Manley Hopkins chose for this poem is the most traditional.

Hopkins penned Thou Art Indeed Just (as this poem is most often titled) exactly 131 years ago (March of 1889), only two-and-a-half months before the genius priest-poet died of typhus, at the age of forty-four. It’s often considered Hopkins’s last great poem, and I myself regard it as an unequivocal masterpiece — perhaps the greatest of all his great poems.

This sonnet is also the last among a handful of his poems sometimes called — though never by Hopkins himself — the “terrible sonnets.” The terrible sonnets are impassioned sonnets-as-supplications — supplications that explode with anguish, yearning, and a tortured frustration, all of it directed toward God.

The title and the epigraph of this poem come from Jeremiah 12:1 of the Vulgate.

The Vulgate is the first full translation of the Bible from Hebrew into Latin. It was written in the late 4th century AD by Jerome — now Saint Jerome, whose real name was Eusebius Hieronymus Sophrinius Jerome — who painstakingly produced an opus magnum which is unquestionably one of the great literary feats in human history.

The Vulgate for Hopkins towered over all other translations of the Bible — Latin, English, or otherwise — and the first two lines of the poem are Hopkins’s English translation of the Latin epigraph, which Hopkins got from Jeremiah 12:1 of the Vulgate, which is from Jerome’s Latin translation of the Hebrew bible. Got it?

Good! That makes one of us. My hope is that the day will come at last when you can explain it to me in such a way that I’m able to keep it straight in my brain.

Read how the King James Bible translates the exact same passage from the Vulgate:

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? wherefore are all they happy that deal very treacherously?

— King James Bible, Jeremiah 12: 1

Now reread the opening of Hopkins’s poem — the exact same passage, from Jeremiah 12:1 of the Vulgate, which you just read directly above, in the King James translation. But the following is Hopkins structuring that passage into a Petrarchan sonnet  — meeting the demands of the metric and rigorous rhyme-pattern of the Petrarchan:

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?

For all the poetic license Hopkins took in his syntax and reshuffling and restructuring of these first four lines, he remained at the same time scrupulously true to the style of Jerome’s Latin. Hopkins is more faithful to the style and voice of Jerome’s Latin than even the King James translation is. Hopkins is more attuned to the cadences and rhythms of Jerome’s voice, more intimately familiar. Thus the echoes with Psalm 22 which many readers hear in this Hopkins’s poem belong primarily to Jerome — not Hopkins — because Hopkins was at such great pains to render Jerome’s voice and style faithfully, even while transforming that voice into a singer of sonnets.

Pslams 22 contains the very words Christ cried out when he was dying on the cross:

“My God, my God! Why hast thou forsaken me?”

One might very loosely paraphrase Thou Art Indeed Just in the following way:

Your grievances against me, Lord, are entirely justified, and I see this clearly every time I grapple with my belief in you. But I, too, have justified grievances — grievances against you. Why does everything I strive to achieve only ever end in disappointment? Even if you were my enemy — which you’re not — it would be difficult to imagine your dashing my dreams more thoroughly than the way you do now, as my friend. The drunk, meanwhile, and the profligate, the sexually obsessed and the pleasure-seeking party girls and party boys, who waste their time in pursuit of fleeting pleasures, seem to flourish far more than I do, who spend my hours in sheer devotion to you. Look also at the natural world, where the banks of rivers and the bushes [i.e. “brakes” — which is an Old English word that means “bracken fern,” also a marshy land overgrown with bracken fern, a fact I mention because this usage of “brakes” here is so obscure that if one isn’t familiar with it, as I wasn’t when I first read this poem, the meaning of the entire piece can easily at this point in the poem get lost], they are thick with fertile-growing leaves and bursting bands of cow-parsley [i.e. “fretty chervil” — and isn’t that a delightful phrase the likes of which you and I have never heard before]. The wind shakes them. Nature thrives. She prospers. Birds build nests. But I don’t build anything. I labour with all my strength, a slave to time, and yet I haven’t produced a single thing that lives and grows. Oh, Lord of all living things, send rain to water my roots and give me life.

The poet John Milton after having been struck with irreparable blindness wrote a sonnet titled “On His Blindness” — a poem with which Hopkins was familiar — and I think it not possible but probable that in his opening lines Hopkins is obliquely echoing the same sort of cadence we hear in Milton’s opening line to his sonnet “On His Blindness”:

“How can I serve you when I am blind?”

There’s clearly much in this poem inspired by the Book of Job. Yet less clearly there’s perhaps also a suggestion of Psalms 37:2, wherein the Psalmist says “for like the grass the wicked will soon wither/like green plants they will soon die away.”

This entire poem can and I think should be read as a kind of agonized prayer — an entreaty when discouragement transmutes into hopelessness — culminating in the shattering final line which a later priest named Celestine Bittle described as “an existential cry from the depths”:

O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.