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-importuning — importuning and cries that explode with anguish, yearning, and a tortured frustration, all of which is directed toward God.

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

The Vulgate is the Latin translation of the Bible from Hebrew. It was primarily written by Saint Jerome, in the latter part of 4th century (AD). The word “vulgate” comes from the Latin vulgata — as in vulgar — which in Jerome’s time meant  “common” or “popular.” The reason it was given this name was that Pope Damasus commissioned Jerome to write a translation of the Bible that was more accessible to the masses than any which yet existed, while at the same time being more faithful to the original Hebrew.

What existed in Latin at that time, when literacy wasn’t the norm, were translations of a strictly academic style — a scholarly, prolix, highbrow style, more concerned with diction and flourish than clarity and accuracy — though it should also be noted that during this time translations in common Greek, of both the New and Old Testament (the Septuagint), were widely available.

Jerome — whose real name was Eusebius Hieronymus Sophrinius, and who by every account I’ve ever read wasn’t an overly pleasant person — possessed great erudition indeed, as well as a rare and refined literary acumen. Cicero’s unmatched writing style remained dear to Jerome all his life, even in later years, when Jerome grew more and more to loathe such philosophically inquiring subject-matter.

As a writer, Jerome’s slow exactitude and devotion to accuracy were surpassed only by his discipline and herculean work-ethic, and though it took him between twenty and twenty-five years, Jerome produced an opus magnum which is unquestionably one of the great literary feats in human history. Jerome’s translation would endure for over a thousand years, its influence incalculable. In many ways, inasmuch as it forever reshaped the Latin language and insofar as Latin-based languages influence the world today, Jerome’s translation resounds right up to the present moment. The Vulgate still stands undated and monumental.  

Like all priests of his era, Gerard Manley Hopkins studied the Bible almost exclusively in Latin. Priests were at that time required by Roman Catholic law to speak each mass entirely in Latin. Priests of that era, therefore, no matter their nationality or where on planet earth they’d been born, knew the Latin language as well or better than they knew their native language.

For Hopkins, the Vulgate towered over all other translations of the Bible and was on many different levels, for many different reasons, the most important book in his life. It was from the Vulgate that he composed his weekly sermons, and it was from the Vulgate that his poetry is predominantly informed.

Hopkins never officially titled this poem. The opening words are a title de facto.

The entire epigraph is duplicated in the opening four lines of the poem.

Those opening four lines are Hopkins’s poetic translation of the exact same passage from the Vulgate. This is something to take special note of because it can get oddly confusing the more you think about it: the first four lines of the poem are the same as the epigraph, which is from Jerome’s Vulgate and the first four words of which, translated into English,  make up the title. Hopkins takes poetic license in the first four lines, and why?

To meet the rigorous requirements of the Petrarchan form, of course.

Yet even in spite of Hopkins’s poetic license, he remained true to Jerome’s voice. This is why the echoes in the opening four lines which many readers hear of Psalms 22 belong primarily to Jerome, not Hopkins: because Hopkin’s translation of Jerome’s Latin was scrupulously true to Jerome’s style.

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?”

The opening four lines of the poem, however — as distinguished from the title-and-epigraph, which are Hopkins’s interpretation of Jerome’s Latin, which was translated from Hebrew — are translated poetically, not literally. Hopkins took liberties with the opening lines for metrical function and poetic effect — rewording and restructuring these lines for their rhythm and rhyme and scansion, all of which are crucial to crafting compelling sonnets, especially those of the Petrarchan, with its rigorous rhyme-scheme and attention to syllable count and line count. For its prosody alone, Thou Art Indeed Just is especially instructive.

Read, for instance, how the King James Bible translated Jerome’s Latin in the very same passage with which Hopkins opens his poem (from 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? wherefore are all they happy that deal very treacherously?

Compare that now with how Hopkins adapted the same passage to fit the Petrarchan form. As you read the passage below, imagine how you yourself might structure these same line were you assigned this same task. (Remember: the passage need not take up for lines. It could be less. It could be more — depending, of course, on what you wanted to say after the first four lines.) In doing this, I predict you’ll be amazed at how much you learn — not just about the technical construction of a Petrarchan sonnet (although certainly that) but also about the motions of Hopkins’s mind, which moved in a musical way:

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?

To understand the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins is to understand the depth of influence that Latin had upon his thought.

Hopkins thought in the syntax and grammar of Latin.

He didn’t just write in the grammar and syntax of Latin. He thought in it.

Whether the vocabulary of his thought was English or whether it was Latin, or whether it was English and Latin admixed, doesn’t in this context matter. The poetical grammar and syntax of his thought — the thought he employed when writing poetry — are clearly in the grammar and syntax of Latin. The more you read Hopkins poetry, the more you begin to understand it.

I’m now theorizing that you the reader only come to see this when, through reading Hopkins poetry and striving to understand exactly what he meant — why he used this particular word or why he phrased that particular passage in this particular way — you one day find yourself also beginning to think in the style and grammar of Latin.

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 already do it 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, they seem to flourish far more than I do, who spend my hours in sheer devotion to you. Look, too, 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, a fact I mention because this usage of “brakes” is so obscure here 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 just been stricken with irreparable blindness, wrote a sonnet titled “On His Blindness” — a poem with which Hopkins was very familiar — and I believe Hopkins in Thou Art Indeed Just was obliquely echoing Milton’s opening line: “How can I serve you when I am blind?” This is speculation on my part, however, based strictly on the similarity in tone I hear. I could never prove it.

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, a tortured pleading with God, culminating in those shattering final words which are “an existential cry from the depths,” as a later priest named Celestine Bittle described it:

O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.