To search one's heart is not an easy task

   


        To search one's heart
            is not an easy task.
                I took a stand
                    on what I still assert.
        I must do this.
            I can't do what you ask,
                Not even
                    if you make yourself be hurt.
        Yet each complaint
            still breaks me down again.
                You catalogue
                    each sacrifice you've done.
        Your pleas show so much fondness
            through the pain.
                Why do they all assume
                    on my part none?
        The more you call me stubborn
            when we fight,
                The more you tell me
                    your love I repel,
            The harder it is for me
                not to write as if it's true,
                    when I would wish you well.
        You tell me how you suffer,
            and you do.
                Yet sometime you might see
                    I suffer too.



 

Author's Note

now before you think this is a great effort of imagination and personal revelation: read what's below:


Gerard Manley Hopkin's letter to his parents October 20, 1866 regarding his conversion to Catholicism.

"About communicating you are also mistaken...Strictly I owed no duty whatever to the Church of England, because it is not what it claims to be, a lawful church, but I did pay a provisional loyalty and eve to the extend of keeping its fasts, until you induced me to give them up...I could not otherwise have obeyed you... These things I have wished to explain but they are not so important, but this is....In not warning you of my state of mind long ago I strongly think I was perfectly right. But if I was wrong in both cases, I of course thought only of the way which I believed would give you the least pain: indeed if you can think I did otherwise it would be useless of me to assure you of it... Until then the comforts you take are delusive, after it they will be real. And even for me it is almost a matter of necessity, for every new letter breaks me down afresh, and this could not go on. Your letters, which show the utmost fondness, suppose none on my part and the more you think me hard and cold and that I repel and throw you off, the more I am helpless not to write as if it were true. In this way I have no relief. You might believe that I suffer too. I am your very loving son, Gerard M. Hopkins Oct. 20, 1866."

Some of the awkwardness of the sentences is, of course, the effect of trying to rhyme. But some of it I think comes from trying to echo the lines that jumped off the page when I read this letter.

The sonnet almost wrote itself.