Summary:

The author feels "a funeral in my brain"--mourners treading, drums beating. They "lift a Box" and tread across her soul with "Boots of Lead" until "a Plank in Reason" breaks.

View full annotation

Summary:

In this sonnet Hopkins reflects on the long illness and death of Felix Randal, the farrier. The poet watched this "big-boned and hardy-handsome" man decline, until he was broken by "some / fatal four disorders" and his "reason rambled . . . . " At first Randal had railed against his fate, but later, anointed by the poet-priest, he developed a "heavenlier heart" and "sweet reprieve."

The poet reflects on his role as a spiritual healer: "This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears." While the priestly tongue and touch refreshed Felix Randal in his illness, Randal's tears also touched the priest's heart, and so he is left with a sense of loss and mourning when the man dies.

View full annotation

Summary:

The poet addresses Margaret, a young child, who grieves over the falling of leaves at Goldengrove and the turning of seasons. She may not now be able to understand or name the source of her grief. When she gets older, though, and learns more of the world ("such sights colder / By and by . . . "), she will become less sensitive to external things and more aware of the true loss in human life--the loss of oneself. "It is the blight man was born for, / It is Margaret you mourn for."

View full annotation

Summary:

An old man bending I come upon new faces . . . . The old poet is asked by the young to tell of his experience during the war. In silence and in dreams, he returns to the battlefield: "Bearing the bandages, water and sponge, / Straight and swift to my wounded I go, / Where they lie on the ground after the battle brought in, / Where their priceless blood reddens the grass . . . . "

He describes the rows of the hospital tent, where one man has a bullet through his neck, another an amputated arm. The poet cleans and dresses each wound. Even though he never knew these soldiers before, "Yet I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that would save you." At the end of the poem, he remarks, "Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips."

View full annotation

Summary:

A doctor is called to the home of a poor, immigrant family. A beautiful little girl is quite ill. As diphtheria has been going around, the doctor attempts to examine her throat. The girl, however, won't open her mouth. She fights him off and all attempts to cajole her into compliance fail. Yet, the doctor is resolved to see that throat. He forces the girl's father to hold her down, while he manages to wrest open her mouth after a long battle. She does, in fact, have diphtheria.

View full annotation

Summary:

The pregnant Olga Mikhaylovna plods through the name-day party she is throwing for her husband, Peter. The party is interminable; she is uncomfortable and tired of being pleasant. As Olga walks through the garden for a moment of peace, she notices her husband has also left the house and is talking with one of their guests, the lovely Lyubochka; she interprets their conversation as lovemaking. Has her husband only married her for her money? Doesn't he love her? She decides he is unfaithful and resolves to confront him.

Later, everyone decides to go to the island for tea. But it begins to rain and they rush back. Much later, when the guests leave, Olga and Peter argue in their room; they are both dead tired. Suddenly, Olga goes into a difficult and prolonged labor that results in a stillborn child. In the last section, Olga is "muzzy from the chloroform," but happy to be alive. Peter sincerely protests his love.

View full annotation

Summary:

The philosophy student Kovrin is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. His doctor suggests a rest in the country and so Kovrin decides to visit his childhood friend Tanya Pesotsky on her father's estate. While there he tells Tanya the legend of the black monk: a desert monk whose image has been reflected in mirages for a thousand years and who will soon return in the flesh.

One day in the garden, the black monk appears to the young man. This gives him joy and energy, even though he realizes that it is a hallucination. "What harm is in it?" Kovrin asks himself. As the summer goes on, the black monk continues to visit. Kovrin asks Tanya to marry him, they wed and move to the city. At one point Kovrin's hallucinations and disordered thinking overwhelm him; he agrees to medical treatment which evidently cures his mental disorder. Yet, his feelings of energy and creativity also disappear, along with the black monk.

Kovrin realizes that he hates his wife and she hates him. She returns to her father and his beloved garden, while Kovrin receives a professorship, a position he never actually takes because he is too ill--he has begun to hemorrhage from the lungs. Soon after receiving news of his father-in-law's death, he sees the black monk again and dies of a hemorrhage.

View full annotation

Summary:

The author's father killed himself "in a public park . . . while I was waiting to be born." His mother never forgave his father. When the author found a portrait of him in the attic, his mother "ripped it into shreds / without a single word."

View full annotation

Summary:

No loud noise will wake the author's son ("For I can snore like a bullhorn . . . "), but the "stifled come-cry" of his parents' making love brings him to their bedroom, where he "flops down between us . . . his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child." The parents look at one another and "touch arms across his little, startlingly muscled body."

View full annotation

Summary:

A sharp poem, directed to the sons of men. The poet wishes them periods, cramps, clots, and hot flashes. She wishes them the difficulties and embarrassments of the female gender. Mostly, she wishes that they experience the arrogance of gynecologists, "not unlike themselves."

View full annotation