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Gerard Manley HopkinsToday I shall celebrate the first poet I fell in love with, head over heels: Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889). Hopkins was a shy man, a Jesuit priest who wrote poetry in obscurity. Many of his papers went up in smoke the day after he died, simply because his superiors had no inkling that their cohort was, in the words of his biographer Robert Bernard Martin, “the most original English poet of the century.” What made him so original? First, his poems did not scan in conventional ways. He enjambed with aplomb and wrote in a syncopated cadence which he called “sprung rhythm.” His syntax was springy as well; he torqued ordinary word order, used verbs as nouns, and coined words willy-nilly. The coinages were usually compounds of some kind, and some are breathtaking: “dapple-dawn-drawn falcon” . . . “the womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all-night.” Some are silly, “betweenpie” being, in my view, the very silliest. But a poet as playful, and as ecstatic, as Hopkins was bound to be silly now and then. Hopkins was God’s fool. Was his subject matter as original as his writing style? Hopkins took up some unadventurous nature themes and his religious verse was firmly rooted in his beloved Catholicism, to which he was a convert. Still, his conviction that each person could embody Christ seems nearly Buddhist in its sensibility; it strikes me as a revolutionary stance for the Victorian era. A series of his sonnets, commonly called the “Terrible Sonnets,” portray a dark night of the soul even darker than that of John of the Cross; he embodies despair in these poems as he embodies Christ in others. They have a psychological depth that seems modern, post-Freudian. Hopkins also celebrated ordinary people, a blacksmith, a ploughman, a recently canonized saint who had done little more in his life than serve as a doorkeeper. These “working-man” poems take a new slant on things; they don’t depend on pastoral conventions. Hopkins did not bequeath many poems to us; despite its scant heft, his opus is amazingly expansive. He wrote about the soul, the flesh, nature, work, longings, fellowship, everything really except romantic love. Someday, if I am fortunate, someone somewhere will note the same things about my own work, and credit the influence of the sensuous Jesuit who came before me. Hurrahing in HarvestSummer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks riseAround; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies? I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes, Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour; And, eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies? And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder Majestic—as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet!— These things, these things were here and but the beholder Wanting; which two when they once meet, The heart rears wings bold and bolder And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet. The Candle IndoorsSome candle clear burns somewhere I come by.I muse at how its being puts blissful back With yellowing moisture night’s blear-all black Or to-fro tender trambeams truckle at the eye. By that window what task what fingers ply, I plod wondering, a-wanting, just for lack Of answer the eager a-wanting Jessy or Jack There/God to aggrandize, God to glorify.— Come you indoors, come home; your fading fire Mend first and vital candle in close heart’s vault: You there are master, do your own desire; What hinders? Are you beam-blind, yet to a fault In a neighbor deft-handed? Are you that liar And, cast by conscience out, spendsavour salt? Felix RandalFelix Randal the farrier, O is he dead then? my duty all ended,Who have watched his mould of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome Pining, pining, till time when reasons rambled in it and some Fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended? Sickness broke him. Impatient, he cursed at first, but mended Being anointed and all; though a heavenlier heart began some Months earlier, since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom Tendered to him. Ah well, God rest him all road ever he offended! This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears. My tongue had taught thee comfort, touch had quenched thy tears, Thy tears that touched my heart, child, Felix, poor Felix Randal; How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years, When thou as the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers, Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal! InversnaidThis darksome burn, horseback brown,His rollrock highroad roaring down, In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam Flutes and low to the lake falls home. A windpuff-bonnet of fawn-froth Turns and twindles over the broth Of a pool so pitchblack, fell-frowning, It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning. Degged with dew, dappled with dew Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through, Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern, And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn. What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. As Kingfishers Catch FireAs kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying What I do is me: for that I came. I say more: the just man justices; Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is— Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men’s faces. (Terrible Sonnet)No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring. Comforter, where, where is your comforting? Mary, mother of us, where is your relief? My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a man, a chief- wo, world sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing— Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked: ‘No ling- ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief’. O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep, Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all Life death does end and each day dies with sleep. (Terrible Sonnet)I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.What hours, O what black hours 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. That Nature is a Heralclitean Fire and of
Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth, then |
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