No Worst There Is None

Line 1: No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,

For an overworked and alienated priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins was able to exert an immense amount of creativity during and memorable lines into his poem ‘No worst, there is none.’, as its named in short. Let’s begin the analysis right away at the first half of the first line. Immediately, Hopkins uses assonance with the “o” in “No Worst,…None”, and also alliteration with the “n” in no and none, the first and last words in the opening sentence. The use of these devices makes the sentence very memorable and geometric, yet so far the reader is left unknowing and curious about what it is that there is nothing worse then. There is a pause at the period and then a heavy and tightly packed
A pang is defined as a sharp and sudden pain or painful emotion, which connects with grief in a similar manner of language description depression. The reader is told that there will be more pangs, or fits of depression, which schooled to mean learned from earlier pangs. The speakers current burden of suffering was learned in-front of or before the point he is currently at. Ending with an evermore heavy dose of alliteration, the phrase “Wilder wring” completes the first two lines some excellent rhyming of pang, forepangs and wring, and also wilder and wring. The effect of the heavy rhyming and alliteration in the first two lines on the reader is that it makes for very memorable and excitable phrases, even when contextually the speaker is describing a pain wilder than to be wring, as in a painful squeezing and twisting. In short, the entangle and sharp pains of grief outmeasure any physical pain the speaker is experienced
The alliteration has toned down from the first two lines, but not by much as the speaker describes that his cries “heave, herds-long; huddle in a main”. Some explanation and diction is needed to unpack the phrase; the word heave is a very describing when forces is exerted to move a thing, in this case at the speakers cries move a herds-long to huddle in a main. Its difficult to makes sense of what huddle in a main is purposed for besides clearly being the place someone would not want their cries to be. The line has three noteworthy breaks which occur at the two comas and the one semicolon. These line breaks help slow the reader down so that they do not read the series of phrases as a list, but instead a compact description that uses caesurae, breaks in the middle of the line, and counterpoints, two or more rhymes at the same time, to display a depth of meaning in a very short amount of words. An enjambment is placed at the end of 5th line that completes at the first word of line 6 to read “a chief woe”, as to say a grand and old pain. The significance of the speakers woe being relative to new is intensified by the religious diction of the word woe used both biblically and in christian poetry like Danta’s Inferno which describes the entering of hell as the passing into a city of woe, Canto 3. With this rich background in mind, Hopkin’s use of woe to describe the speakers