My Heart Lapped Strength

Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;

Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man

In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;

Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.

 

But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me

Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan

Glory Be To God For Dappled Things

Another from Gerard Manley Hopkins.



PIED BEAUTY

Glory be to God for dappled things--
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

Christ At All Hazards

Gerard Manley Hopkins was converted to Roman Catholicism as an adult, and soon committed himself to the strict life of a Jesuit monk. Along with his renunciation of the world, he renounced poetry, though he secretly longed to be reunited with it, until such a time as his superiors would give it back to him. In fact he burned most of his earlier poetry (what a loss to the world!).

In reality, there was nothing in the vows that forbade poetry. He was free to pursue a literary life and be a devout Jesuit. It seems that he turned his back on poetry in some sort of extrapolation of a vow of silence. He makes a couple of veiled references to a similar idea.

But while he longed to return to poetry

If We But Knew What We Do

When I was small I lived in the far north country of Minnesota. A twenty minutes walk could bring me to a dozen lakes, or to two houses. Besides that it was all forest, glorious forest that had not been touched in thousands of years. That was my land, my playplace, my sanctuary, my kingdom. I roamed those forests from sun-up to sun-down, getting to know the trees, the shrubs, each lady-slipper and violet that grew in their shade.

The World Is Heartsick . . . Or Is It?

Ever notice how sometimes it seems that when you listen to one person, you agree; you listen to someone else arguing with them and agree with that person too?

It reminds me of the scene in Fiddler On The Roof when there is an argument between a young radical student and an old villager. The men of the village stand around enjoying the spectacle.

The boy makes a good point, to which Tevye heartily chimes in, "He is right."

Playing The Part Of Poet

Garbage can be literature. The voice is all. That is the main concept that I always strove to leave with my literature students. The filth on bathroom walls might be literature, albeit a low form of it. And eloquence might fall short.

To qualify as literature, a group of words (usually but not always written) must leave us access to the real voice of the author or authors.

Fire-Featuring Heaven

Here is part (slightly revised for this blog) of an article I wrote a few years ago for CHRISTIANITY AND SOCIETY JOURNAL. I wanted to include it here in part because it has to do with a sonnet written by Gerard Manley Hopkins: Spelt From Sibyl's Leaves. This sonnet does not conform to the standard of five stressed syllables per line; it goes for eight. Yet he wrote it as a sonnet and it has been generally so accepted. There is room, even in so strict a form as the sonnet, for some deviation.

Reading Difficult Poetry as a Christian Endeavor
Tears began welling up in my oldest daughter's eyes.

Spotted Teeth and Lepers Cleansed

John Collop wrote in the mid 1600's what I think to be one of the greatest prayer poems outside of the Bible. Its halting, jumping, eager rush and fearful stop perfectly reflect the tears with which he calls out to his God.

The tone, intimacy and vehemence, and the writhing/evolving pace of the poem put one in mind of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Francis Thompson, but it is almost certain that neither of them ever read him (very unlikely they read each other either, although it is slightly possible that Hopkins late in his life may have read some Thompson). Collop simply wasn't known during their lifetimes. In fact he wasn't known in his own lifetime.

He was a doctor and many of his poems are medical lessons set to verse. Rather dull! Others are a mockery of the fashion of writing poems in praise of beautiful women; ie, "There is a garden in your face where roses and white lillies grow. . ."

ON PENTEPICTA

The wiseman Teeth call'd flocks of sheep;
Sure Jacob's speckled flocks here keep.
Where teeth are checker'd black and white,
Nay gilt too to inrich delight:
Her mouth ope, you at Chesse may play,
With teeth resembling night and day.
Each fondling reach will praise what's white;
Is there in Choak such strange delight?
Give me the mouth like th' Temple floor,
With speckled Marble paved o're,
Or oh more rich in gold thus set,
A row of pearl then one of jet.

Still other of Collop's poems are diatribes against the state of politics or the state of the Church. These are really a mixed bag, sometimes pointed and sharp, witty jabs with his pen, sometimes they descend into what seems to be juvenile name calling.

But in his personal religious verse he shines.

THE LEPER CLEANSED

Hear, Lord, hear
The rhetoric of a tear.
Hear, hear my breast;
While I knock there, Lord, take no rest.

Open! ah, open wide!
Thou art the door, Lord! Open! hide
My sin; a spear once entered at thy side.

See! ah, see
A Naaman's leprosy!
Yet here appears
A cleansing Jordan in my tears.

Lord, let the faithless see
Miracles ceased, revive in me.
The leper cleansed, blind healed, dead raised by thee.

Whither! ah, whither shall I fly?
To heaven? my sins, ah, sins there cry!
Yet mercy, Lord, O mercy! hear
Th'attoning incense of my prayer.
A broken heart thou'lt not despise.
See! see a contrite's sacrifice!

Keep, keep, vials of wrath, keep still!
I'll vials, Lord, of odors fill:
Of prayers, sighs, groans, and tears a shower;
I'll 'noint, wash, wipe, kiss, wash, wipe, weep.
My tears, Lord, in thy bottle keep,
Lest flames of lust, and fond desire,
Kindle fresh fuel for thine ire,
Which tears must quench; like Magdalene
I'll wash thee, Lord, till I be clean.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins only published a couple of poems during his lifetime. Perhaps they would not have found a home in many publications because they were so far out of the ordinary. Some people say that he was fifty years ahead of his time, a Modern poet before Modernism had arrived.

Much of it is difficult to read. One does not skim through a Hopkins poem. "Light," "playful," and "funny" are words that have never been used in any review of his poems. Yet, if light is taken not as fluffyness but as brilliance, then there is in many of his poems a blinding glare that startles us as it pierces through between the words. It is the glare as "the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings."

And there is a joyful freedom and playfulness throughout his poetry. It is far from the goofiness of Edward Lear or Shel Silverstien; it is not childish, though in a way it is childlike. Hopkins plays extravagantly with sounds (as young children also do), mixing them up and turning them around. And his verse is heavy with alliteration, taking it to new extremes never before seen and never since done successfully. "Lét life, wáned, ah lét life wind Off hér once skéined stained véined variety."

And while the word funny does not describe his poems, there is in them what would once have been called "Wit." It is difficult to describe how it comes about, but often in reading them they evoke a warm mother's-arms glow. They give a sense that although all is not right in the world, still all is right beyond the world and that beyond the world is where we really live , despite appearances to the contrary.

Yet don't take that to mean that they exalt the "spiritual" and denegrate the "physical." Far from it! His poems are extremely physical, in their themes, images, and even in the work to which he puts our tongues, teeth and vocal cords in trying to read them aloud. Hopkins exulted in the meat and dirt of our earthly lives, but in it all he saw sparkles of more than an earthly sun.

His poem Inversnaid contains all of the elements: brilliant light, playfulness, wit, and the glory of the physical.


INVERSNAID

THIS 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 fáwn-fróth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
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.