“My cries heave, herds-long”: Metaphor, Posthumanism and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘No Worst, There Is None’

Abstract

Taking its cue from the dense mesh of imagery in the lines "my cries heave herds-long, huddle in a main, a chief/ Woe, world sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing-/ Then lull, then leave off" (Gerard Manley Hopkins' Terrible Sonnets), this article explores the entanglement and permeability of the human, the animal and the prosthetic in the poem 'No worst there is none', and argues that Hopkins' use of figurative language effects a valuable 'decreation' which enables us to interrogate the human, and prefigures a complex posthumanist understanding of our imbrication in earth's matrix. The article draws upon the emergent framework of ecomaterialism, in which the world is viewed as a "densely intertwined and improvisational tissue of experience" (Abram), and which recognises the agency of all matter, the biosemiotic voice of the more-than-human, moving towards a concept of the metaphorical for our times which demonstrates the potential of metaphor to explore that relational ontology and to develop our apprehension of natura loquens and natura agens.