College, Dublinwhere he was Professor of Greek, where he often felt isolated, impotent, and bleak, and where he composed what are known as the "terrible sonnets" or the "sonnets of desolation." In these last, some of the most harrowing in the English language, Hopkins wrestles with the appalling solitude of God's absence and with the spiritual dryness, desolation, anguish, and self-loathing that are its consequence. Never is God's absence ontological, however; rather, Hopkins's "lament / Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent / To dearest him who lives alas! away." The chastened language of these late sonnets forfeits none of the intensity of his earlier exuberance over the beauty of a world upheld by God; but the plainer style he once hoped for has been achieved at a terrible cost. Yet even this series of sonnets, written in Dublin, contains moments of hard-won calm, patience, self-irony, and, in "My own heart let me more have pity on," wan cheer.
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Formally, Hopkins's favored vehicle is the sonnet; over two-thirds of his finished poems are in this form. In his hands, however, the form underwent some notable transformations, from the ten-and-one-half-line "curtal sonnet" (reduced by arithmetic ratio) to the "caudated sonnet," whichbuilding on a Miltonic modelappends one or more additional tercets (codas, or tails). An example of the former is "Pied Beauty". Of the latter, "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection" is the most daringa triply caudated (twenty-four-line) sonnet in alexandrines enormously swelled by metrically irrelevant slack syllables authorized by sprung rhythm.
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Since for Hopkins no aspect of experience was alien to religion, two in particular have appeared to some of his modern readers as worthy of high relief. First, his experience of the appalling conditions of urban life in industrial England led to an assertion to Bridges the enormity of which provoked a hiatus of over three years in their correspondence. Referring to the ideals of the Paris Commune, Hopkins wrote:
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 | | I must tell you I am always thinking of a Communist future. . . . Horrible to say, in a manner I am a Communist. Their ideal bating some things is nobler than that professed by any secular statesman I know of. . . . Besides it is just.I do not mean the means of getting to it are. But it is a dreadful thing for the greatest and most necessary part of a very rich nation to live a hard life without dignity, knowledge, comforts, delights, or hopes in the midst of plentywhich plenty they make.
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