With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by the Sun’s poetry editor, Joseph Bottum of Dakota State University, with the help of a North Carolina poet, Sally Thomas. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

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One of what Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) called his “Terrible Sonnets” of the 1880s, written in a time of fallow hope and spiritual emptiness, “No worst, there is none” nonetheless shows Hopkins’s technical genius. A Petrarchan sonnet — 14 lines, rhymed abbaabba in the opening octet, and cdcdcd in the closing sestet — the poem uses sprung meter and forced stresses to grind down to the core the feeling of despair. Even as he finds unanswered his prayers, he sees that his condition is the human condition. “The Mind … has mountains,” he knows, and even death and sleep are weak protection. A poem for Lent.

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief.
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old anvil wince and sing—
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked ‘No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief.’

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.