Saturday, January 1, 2022

Looking Backwards & Forwards at Hopkins

 

For this new year, I'm reviewing for you all the Gerard Manley Hopkins entries on this blog.  There are works by Hopkins himself, plus references to his work.  Hopkins was a 19th century English Jesuit poet.  He both modernized and stuck with old forms in his work. Enjoy, and Happy 2021!

"Pied Beauty" [Best known; 2nd posting]

"Pied Beauty" [1st posting]

"God's Grandeur" [2nd best known]

"Spring & Fall"

"Peace"

"Spring"

"My Own Heart Let Me Have More Pity On"

"Moonrise"

"Patience"

"Easter"

"The Starlight Night"

"Music on the Wing"

Excerpt from "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection."

"Moonless Darkness Stands Between" [Christmas]

"He Hath Abolished the Old Drouth"

"May Magnificat"

Here is Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, reading "God's Grandeur":

Reading of "God's Grandeur"

Here's an original poem of mine, drawing from a line in God's Grandeur":

"Nature is Never Spent"

This is by a poetess who really admired Hopkins:

"A Song of Spring"

eastern Arizona, White Mountains, chokecherries
Chokecherries, White Mountains of Arizona
October 2021

2 comments:

David C Brown said...

Thanks; enjoy his appreciation of nature, and bringing the Lord into it. I have to "make allowances" for his Catholicism!
I like "Inversnaid". The place is by Loch Lomond and I visited it a good while ago.

C. Marie Byars said...

Glad you are liking the Hopkins. I, too, can't agree with all his beliefs. ("The Wreck of the Deutschland" has an expression that is very anti-Lutheran, though slightly coded. And whenever he writes on Mary, he goes off on a very different direction than I would agree with.)

But I did write my thesis for my 1st Master's Degree on his work... at a Lutheran seminary. (It was an MA degree; our church doesn't have women ministers.)

There's a lot in his style. And where his beliefs are similar, a lot in his convictions and his perseverance through the times he felt dark, depressed feelings.