I suggest reading this poem out loud (that exquisite “ah” at the end … it just makes a difference if it is spoken, rather than read silently). It feels good to say. The language itself.
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;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears mans smudge and shares mans 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;
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.
“He belonged to that culture of sentimental and erotic male friendships shaped by both Greece and (Catholic) Rome to which Newman and Faber belonged before him.” — Gregory Woods
“At university Hopkins’s discipline began: self-denial in the interest of the self. He evokes the effect of religious faith on the imagination. Imagine, he says, the world reflected in a water drop: a small, precise reflection. Then imagine the world reflected in a drop of Christ’s blood: the same reflection, but suffused with the hue of love, sacrifice, God made man, and redemption. Religious faith discovers for a troubled imagination an underlying coherence which knows that it cannot be fully or adequately explained. In its liberating, suffusing light, Hopkins could relish out loud the uniqueness of things, which made them “individually distinctive.” This he called “inscape” – an artist’s term. “Instress”, another bit of individual jargon, refers to the force maintaining inscape. Inscape is manifest, instress divine, the immanent presence of the divine in the object.” — Michael Schmidt, “Lives of the Poets
“I might as well say what I should not otherwise have said, that I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like my own than any other man’s living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession. And this also makes me the more desirous to read him and the more determined that I will not.” — Gerard Manley Hopkins, in 1882
“The onomatopoeic theory has not had a fair chance. Cf. Crack, creak, croak, crake, graculus, crackle.” — Gerard Manley Hopkins
“It seems to me that the poetical language of an age shd. be the current language heightened, to any degree heightened and unlike itself, but not (I mean normally; freaks and graces are another thing) an obsolete one. This is Shakespeare’s and Milton’s practice and the want of it will be fatal to Tennyson’s Idylls and plays, to Swinburne, and perhaps to Morris.” — Gerard Manley Hopkins, in letter to his friend and encourager Robert Bridges, poet laureate
“The dark sonnets are his most astonishing work, for here ruptured syntax, inversions, and sound patterning answer a violence of negative spiritual experience. In the work of George Herbert, which Hopkins loved, Christ is the wooer, the soul that wooed. In Hopkins, the soul, painfully aware of its own fallen nature, deliberately woos Christ. There is almost despair, for a beautiful and vigorous Christ has withdrawn, grace is withheld. The earlier ease of loving faith — “I say that we are wound / With mercy round and round / As if with air” — is gone. After the dark sonnets there is silence.” — Michael Schmidt
“No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness … I hope in time to have a more balanced and Miltonic style.” — Gerard Manley Hopkins
“I am so happy, I am so happy.” — Gerard Manley Hopkins’s last words
More on this fascinating poet here.
great post – i *love* gerald manley hopkins. i’ve pasted my favourite of his poems below:
Spring and Fall: To a Young Child, G M Hopkins
Márgarét, are you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
Oh God, that is such a beautiful poem, ateenyi. What language – it’s so emotional! Thank you for posting it!
ima post a couple more and then i am done.
would like to throw up “city of your heart, i would.
just can’t tho, without heather eatmans “city of your heart”
fraternal twins conjoined only by the title.
sweet and pretty and hopefull as that poem is.
the song seems sweet, but is dark and yellow as a bruise.fingerprint bruises hid under a short sleeve, the kind that is never uglier than when it just starts to heal.
“Chitchat with the Junior League Women”
A Junior League woman in blue
Showed me enough panty
To keep my back straight,
To keep my wine glass lifting
Every three minutes.
Do you have children? she asked.
Oh, yes, I chimed. Sip, sip.
Her legs spread just enough to stir
The lint from my eyelashes,
Just enough to think of a porpoise
Smacking me with sea-scented kisses.
The Junior League woman in yellow
Turned to the writer next to me,
Bearded fellow with two remaindered books,
His words smoldering for any goddamn reader.
This gave me time. Sip, sip,
Then a hard, undeceitful swallow
Of really good Napa Valley wine.
My mind, stung with drink,
Felt tight, like it had panty hose
Over its cranium. I thought
About the sun between delightful sips,
How I once told my older brother,
Pale vampire of psychedelic music,
That I was working on a tan.
That summer my mom thought I had worms
I was thin as a flattened straw,
Nearly invisible, a mere vapor
As I hiked up and down the block.
I rolled out an orange towel in the back yard
And the sun sucked more weight
From my body. After two hours,
My skin hollered… I let the reminiscence
Pass and reached for the bottle,
Delicately because I was in a house
With a hill view held up by cement and lumber.
A Junior League woman in red
Sat with her charming hands
On her lap, studying us two writers,
Now with the panty hose of drunkenness
Pulled over our heads and down to our eyes.
What do you do exactly, Mr. Soto?
And I looked at her blinding
Underwear and sip, sip said, Everything.
–Gary Soto
“Echo
James Cummins
Lovers check each other-“How are you?”-
when love is going, but before it’s gone.
“Oh I’m better. The nausea’s settled down.
The mad howling stopped the other night.”
Some ruefull laughter at the other end.
“Me, too,” she whispers, in her quiet voice,
“me, too.” He thinks: I love her quiet voice.
“Yesterday, at the market, I saw you”-
she catches, laughs. It’s hard for love to end.
It’s hard to wake up, certain that it’s gone.
He says, “I thought about you last night,
but I’m better. The nausea’s settled down.”
They never say that love has settled down,
that it no longer uses its sweet voice
to carry them in boats across the night.
If you deny love, love will deny you;
the nighttime of its daytime voice is gone,
as you will be. It’s hard for love to end.
But any love is difficult to end;
all endings seem to whisper, then lie down-
an old man dying by the fire, soon gone,
as if he’d never lived. Her quiet voice,
that only yesterday spoke just to you,
will soon become a whisper in the night,
then disappear forever from the night.
And there’s no preparation for that end.
She laughs again. “I want to be with you.”
He understands. He puts the phone back down.
How will he live without her quiet voice?
What will he do, when she’s finally gone?
Within a week the moving van is gone.
He works all day, and dreads the quiet night.
The day will come when he’ll forget her voice;
he has no need for longing for that end.
He’ll settle now for keeping dinner down.
He hears again: I want to be with you.
He stares into the pool of night, her voice
behind him, gone. He monitors the end:
he lies down, hears the faint refrain”…with you…”