"Man Jack the man is": An Analysis of Gerald Manley Hopkins' sonnet The Sheperd's Brow

Abstract

Although the sonnet The Shepherd’s Brow, written by G. M. Hopkins only a few months before his death, has been considered by Robert Bridges an unfinished work, critics have gradually tended to agree that it is one of the poet’s most refined and powerful poems, structurally and thematically. W. H. Gardner has read in it a “Swiftean cynicism”, while other more recent scholars have defined it “conflicted” (Mariani), “ironic and damned” (Feeney), and above all “cryptic” (Sobolev). Often studied as an ideal appendix to the so called “terrible sonnets”, by offering a close-reading of the sonnet this article argues that The Shepherd’s Brow is one of Hopkins’ most powerful poems, marking an important final turn in his poetic production.