Hopkins

This last page is gratuitous.  Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) is the poet I most admire.  His knowledge of prosody and etymology, the astounding creativity of his imagery, and the attention he pays to rhythm, rhyme, syntax, and sound make his style immediately recognizable.  They also make his poems a unique recitative experience wherein the sense of each poem often recedes, leaving only sound.  "My verse is less to be read than heard," Hopkins once wrote, and he strove to reproduce in his poetry what he thought was the natural rhythm of speech. Here are some selections from Hopkins's sonnets.

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                                           Poem 1: "The Windhover"

I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,	5
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion	10
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion. _________________________________________________ Poem 2: "Pied Beauty" GLORY be to God for dappled things—   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;     For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;   Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;         5     And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange;   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)     With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:         10                   Praise him. _________________________________________________ Poem 3: "As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame" AS kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme; 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:         5 Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came. Í say móre: the just man justices; Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;         10 Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is— Chríst—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. ______________________________________________ Poem 4: "God's Grandeur" THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.   It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;   It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;         5   And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;   And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. And for all this, nature is never spent;   There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;         10 And though the last lights off the black West went   Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs— Because the Holy Ghost over the bent   World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. _______________________________________________ Poem 5: "No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief" 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 main, a chief         5 Woe, 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         10 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.