ABSTRACT
Spelt from Sybil's Leaves is the first and much the longest of the self-torturing sonnets Hopkins wrote in Dublin. Drafts of the first part of it exist in his Dublin Note-book, in October and December 1884; he reworked it and added to it during the following six months, in which he composed his six 'terrible sonnets'. He did not send the final version to Robert Bridges until December 1886; but its mood is the desolation of his first Dublin winter of 1884-85. The first half of the sonnet gives a haunting picture of evening becoming, straining to be, night: a darkness that, after the last rays of the dying sun, swallows up all earth's variety and colour, the 'dappled things' Hopkins had celebrated in Pied Beauty. The title refers both to the prophetic books of the Cumaean Sybil, who guided Aeneas to the underworld, and to the Dies Irae, 'The Day of Wrath', from the Burial Mass.
