I Am Once Again Asking

How to Write a Poem Using Gerard Manley Hopkins' Curtal Sonnet Method

The poem titled I Am Once Again Asking is not a song or a meme — it's a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins written in 1882. Hopkins was a Victorian poet who also happened to be a Jesuit priest, and he spent most of his adult life struggling to publish his work while holding down a teaching position at University College Dublin. He died almost completely unknown. That context matters because this poem, like most of his writing, was composed under real conditions of professional frustration and personal doubt. The poem is a curtal sonnet, which is a term Hopkins invented for a compressed form of the sonnet. A standard Petrarchan sonnet has 14 lines arranged in an octave and a sestet. A curtal sonnet has roughly 10 and a half lines. The proportions are preserved, not the exact count. The octave shrinks to three-and-a-half lines and the sestet to three-and-a-half lines with a concluding couplet. Most beginners try to force this structure and end up producing something that reads like a normal 14-line sonnet with the last few lines chopped off. That breaks the form. The mathematical ratio is roughly 3:3:1 rather than 8:6. Hopkins uses that ratio to create a sense of exhaustion and restraint in the very shape of the poem.

When I was editing a class assignment that attempted this form last year, the student had written a full 14-line poem and called it a curtal sonnet. I pointed out that the ending felt overstuffed because the compression wasn't there. They removed four lines from the middle octave and the piece landed much better. The form demands that you say less and leave more hanging.

The Technical Core: How Hopkins Built This Poem

The poem begins with the speaker asking a question about inspiration or grace — the exact referent has been debated by scholars for over a century. The poem moves from questioning toward an image of a daffodil bent by wind, and ends with a moment of spiritual or aesthetic tension where the speaker remains unresolved. The rhyme scheme of the opening section roughly follows abbacid, with internal rhymes creating additional texture. Hopkins is known for sprung rhythm, a metrical system where each foot has one stress but can contain between one and four unstressed syllables. In this poem, the sprung rhythm is more controlled than in his wilder work like "The Windhover," but it still operates beneath the surface. When you read it aloud, you will notice that the line lengths do not match conventional iambic patterns. They follow the natural pitch accents of spoken English, which is intentional. One specific technical detail that trips people up: the title references an earlier poem or earlier moment of asking. The word "once again" signals repetition of a prior attempt. Hopkins is aware that he has tried to write this kind of poem before and is attempting it again. That self-reference is structural, not decorative.

How to Use This Method in Your Own Writing

If you want to work with the curtal sonnet approach, start with a single image or a single question. Don't plan 14 lines. Plan a compressed movement. Here is a practical workflow: Write your core image or problem in one or two sentences. Whatever you are addressing — loss, desire, a physical scene, a spiritual doubt — get it onto the page quickly without worrying about form. Compress that material into roughly three-and-a-half lines. This means roughly 10 to 14 lines total across the whole poem, not a fixed number. The key is proportion. The first third should establish the question or image. The middle should deepen it with a concrete turn. The ending should leave the tension visible without resolving it cleanly.

Check your rhyme and sound patterns. Hopkins rarely used perfect end rhymes alone. He layered internal rhymes, slant rhymes, and alliteration. If your draft feels too even, add consonance between lines rather than relying on couplets. Read it aloud. If you find yourself pausing in predictable places, the sprung rhythm may be slipping into regular meter. Adjust the line breaks until the natural speech stress drives the rhythm instead of the other way around.

Common Pitfalls and Where the Form Actually Fails

The most common mistake is treating the curtal sonnet as a gimmick. It is not a constraint challenge. If you write a shortened poem without doing the proportional compression work, you just have a short poem. The difference between a good curtal sonnet and a mediocre short poem is the mathematical ratio holding the structure together. Hopkins calculated this precisely, which is why it works. Another failure mode is using the form for content that demands expansion. If your subject requires narrative development or argumentation across multiple stages, the curtal sonnet will force you into vagueness. I have seen poets abandon this form mid-draft because their topic was inherently expansive. That is not a flaw in the form. It is a mismatch between form and content. There is also a risk of sounding artificial. Hopkins wrote in a period when religious verse could be genuinely devotional without irony. Modern readers sometimes bring a layer of performance to spiritual poems that makes them ring hollow. If you are attempting this method for a genuine spiritual or existential question, do so honestly. The form will expose any insincerity faster than almost any other poetic structure.

A Note on Downloading or Accessing the Text

Because this poem is over 140 years old, it is in the public domain. You can find the full text on Project Gutenberg, the Dartmouth Poetry Archive, or the Hopkins Society of America website. Do not pay for access to this poem. It appears in most academic editions of Hopkins' complete poems under the title I Am Once Again Asking, and it is also catalogued under its first line. The standard citation is Hopkins, Gerard Manley. "I Am Once Again Asking." The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by Robert Bridges or later editions by Norman Hunter or Gardner Jones. The reason people keep returning to this particular poem is not because of its historical novelty. It is because Hopkins captures a specific human moment: the attempt to retrieve a lost feeling or insight and the recognition that the attempt itself may be all you have. The poem does not resolve the asking. It simply continues the asking. That restraint is the entire point of the form and the entire point of the poem. If you are studying this for a course, focus on the relationship between the compressed structure and the spiritual question. If you are writing your own version, focus on proportion rather than line count. The rest will follow.