April soft and cold: All his goings graces

For Easter, I don’t think I could give you any better poet than Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose short life (1844-1889) perhaps contributed to the intensity of his works. He converted to Roman Catholicism while at Oxford and spent his adult years as a Jesuit priest. He wrote some poems while at university, but almost nothing was known of his poetry until after his death. Had he not sent some to his friend Robert Bridges (eventually Poet Laureate of Britain, I shudder to consider what we might have lost.

Hopkins used assonance, onomatopoeia and alliteration as well as rhyme. He had no fears about pushing the limits of form to make his point. His “Pied Beauty” is one of the most beautiful I’ve ever heard, and I dare you to read it without your face wanting to smile and your heart wanting to lift. It is joy captured like a butterfly resting momentarily in your cupped hands.

I’m hard pressed not to shower you with sonnets from this man; I’m hard pressed to pare the offerings down to two, which is kind of my limit for a post. But what the hell—it’s Easter, and this is Hopkins. Bugger the form, I’ll give you three, for the Trinity.

“The Windhover”

            To Christ our Lord

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,

  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

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

  No wonder of it, sheer plod makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

  Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

Yes, dedicated to Christ, through the imagery of a falcon; “windhover” is English dialect for the kestrel.

“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 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;

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.

And finally, one I cannot resist—it makes me want to reach out and touch the kingfishers and the dragonflies, and consider how the just man justices. It’s astonishing to me that this was written in the 19^th Century.

“As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame”

As 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 Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;

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.