Category: Gerard Manley Hopkins

“Nothing is so beautiful as spring”

Karen

There were swallows singing and fresh green undergrowth and a blue sky in the canyon yesterday, and it was just like Hopkin’s poem “Spring” (minus the Christian overtones):

…and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness;

“Wildness and wet”

Karen

It was a brisk 45 degrees and threatening rain but we made it up the canyon for a bit yesterday. I had to look up this Hopkins poem when I got back home–because who cares about the weather when you can write ecstatic verse in sprung rhythm about nature?

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.

(from “Inversnaid,” by our buddy Gerard Manley Hopkins)


Juice and Joy

Karen

It was a beautiful spring weekend here: some trees are leafing out, some others are blooming, the foothills are getting green, and the robins have started singing in the mornings and evening (they do “so rinse and wring the ear”). I thought of the first line of this poem yesterday evening so here it is for your Monday.

(I’m only leaving the second stanza in for the line “all this juice and all this joy”–I can live without original sin in  my sonnets, but Hopkins was a priest so there you go.)

Spring

BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –
   When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
   Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
   The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
   The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
What is all this juice and all this joy?
   A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,
   Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
   Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

Dappled Things

Karen
So all this talk of paint horses, and spotted animals (did we all like the alpaca’s ear pom-poms?), coupled with constantly wiping ups drips of latex paint, made me think of the Gerard Manley Hopkins (great name) sonnet on spotted things.
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 all trades, 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.