Hope in the Fell of Dark

Today--this whole week, actually--I've been thinking a lot about life and it's purpose and where mine is going; perhaps it's the looming-ness of graduation...and perhaps it has to do with an acute awareness today of how very broken and frail I am in my humanity, and how prone I am to sin. To want to sin.
And I find myself thinking on this poem (yes, yes, more poetry), by Gerard Manley Hopkins:

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hoürs we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.

I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

I wish I could say that I resonate with his words less than I do; the taste of "me" is indeed a bitter, sour taste. Yet then I think on the end of the poem: "I see the lost are like this...but worse," I give pause. The "lost" are no worse in what they do or think than I, but their curse is certainly more bitter: they cannot, as I can, cast themselves on the incomprehensible fact that God has redeemed them, cannot fling themselves onto His grace and find acceptance every single time. What despair there must be to be stuck tasting only of oneself. Yet conversely, what hope there is for us who are lost no longer, who have been hid in Christ, who can taste of the richness of Him and his infinite compassion.
I don't understand why I still seem to crave and seek out such nastiness when such glory is offered to me instead, but I think I understand less why He takes me back each time.
-pause-
That's a crazy beautiful thing.
(And it makes me want to tell the lost how to be found.)