To a Beautiful Child*

 

...thy book

Is cliff, and wood, and foaming waterfall;

Thy playmates-- the wild sheep and birds that call

Hoarse to the storm; -- thy sport is with the storm

To wrestle; -- and thy piety to stand

Musing on things create, and their Creator's hand.

 --Manley Hopkins (father of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J.), c. 1875

Valentine's Day is for more than "couples' love."  In fact, the legends of the original Saints Valentine (there were up to three men possibly) were about sacrificial, spiritual love. This is a good time to reflect on other types of love.

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]

"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"

Here's a portrait of Hopkins, done in "icon" style:

Hopkins as Icon

Chokecherries, White Mountains of Arizona
October 2021

Posh Hopkins

   

Here is Prince Charles reading Gerard Manley Hopkins' second most famous poem, "God's Grandeur."

"God's Grandeur" Prince Charles 2021 Easter Message

Here is the text for this poem, with explanatory notes, from an earlier post in this blog:

"God's Grandeur"

This is not a strong "resurrection poem"; Hopkins did write some Easter specific poems.  If you click the "Easter" link, you will pull some up.  But at least it does mention "the Holy Ghost."  At one time, Charles seemed to be drifting away from Christian-specific matters, but that does not seem to be the case anymore.

I imagine Charles chose this, partly, because of the environmental theme.  I also wonder if, as Prince of Wales, he did it for the Welsh connection.  Hopkins was an English Jesuit priest, but his most favorite place of serving was Wales.  He learned some Welsh.  (For a poetry day event several years ago, the Prince of Wales read a poem by the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas.)

Just for "fun", here is a poem I wrote as a "riff" off of a line in "God's Grandeur."

"Nature is Never Spent" 

Nature is Never Spent (*)

"For all this, nature is never spent."*
As unto urban wastelands sent
Was this poetic English gent
Ourselves are now to parched lands lent,
Absorbing well what Hopkins meant.

I see no British Isles lush~
I look on desert city rush~
Adapting as that orange-breast thrush**
I find my own internal hush.  

"There lives the dearest freshness deep-down things,"*
As I admire our flowerings
And still the robin gamely sings.**

"For all this, nature is never spent."
On earth, this comes as form of rent
Until we dwell in Christ's new tent.***
--C. Marie Byars, 2020 (c) 
[during covid and unrest times, but not in direct response] 

*From Gerard Manley Hopkins', SJ, 1877 poem
God's Grandeur

**A robin is a type of thrush. Its wide range suggests it's adaptable.

***Tent/tabernacle/dwelling.  The Old Testament Tabernacle was a durable, highly ornate tent with a special purpose for worship. There, God's visible presence on earth could be found.  In John 1: 14, "The Word [Christ] became flesh and 'tabernacled' among us."  The Greek word for 'dwelling' means more literally 'tented.'

A Song of Spring

[more apropos to the colder climes; our spring came suddenly & summer's practically here!]

The Spring comes slowly up this way,
Slowly, slowly,
Under a snood* of hodden** grey.

The black and white for her array,
Slowly, slowly,***
The Spring comes slowly up this way.

Where is her green that was so gay?
Slowly, slowly,
The Spring comes slowly up this way.

Unto a world too sick for May,
Slowly, slowly,
The Spring comes slowly up this way.

Where are the lads that used to play?
Slowly, slowly,
The Spring comes slowly up this way.

She has no heart for holiday,
Slowly, slowly,
The Spring comes slowly up this way.
The trees are out in Heaven they say^.
Slowly, slowly,
The Spring comes slowly up our way.

                 ---- Katherine Tynan***8; 1859-1931

*Snood:  a mesh, cloth or yarn bag used for gathering up a woman's hair, especially a long mass of hair.  (Often had the idea of keeping a woman's sexuality "hidden" or "protected."  Here the author suggest that spring is too long hidden.)
**Hodden: coarse cloth worn by the peasants of Scotland.  Hodden Grey was known for being worn by certain military regiments
***This poem is a bit somber, sober, even "down" for a spring poem.  It reflects life in a more northern climate. Also, it reflects some the "zeitgeist" of our current times: seeing so many challenging things on so many fronts, waiting, hoping; waiting, ultimately, for Christ to return.
^A picture of the new life in heaven.

****Katharine Tynan (23 January 1859 – 2 April 1931) was an Irish-born writer  educated at St. Catherine's, a convent school in Drogheda. Her poetry was first published in 1878. She met and became friendly with the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1886.  Hopkins' work is featured frequently in this blog.

 

 

 

 

 

He hath abolished the old drouth

He hath abolished the old drou[g]ht,


And rivers run where all was dry**,
The field is sopp’d with merciful dew.
He hath put a new song in my mouth,
The words are old, the purport new*,
And taught my lips to quote this word

That I shall live, I shall not die,
But I shall when the shocks are stored
See the salvation of the Lord.
We meet together, you and I,    
Meet in one acre of one land,
And I will turn my looks to you,
And you shall meet me with reply,
We shall be sheaved with one band   

Van Gough

In harvest and in garnering,
When heavenly vales so thick shall stand
With corn*** that they shall laugh and sing.
---Gerard Manley Hopkins

* “the words are old, the purport new”  Psalm 118:17: “I shall not die, but live.” This is the “new song" Psalm 40:3. 

**Psalm, 65,  Running rivers and the fields sopping with water

***Biblical "corn" is actually "wheat"

May Magnificat*

(Happy Mother's Day!)**

May is Mary's month, and I
Muse at that and wonder why:
Her feasts follow reason,
Dated due to season—

Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
Grass and greenworld all together;
Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
Throstle above bird nested

Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin
Forms and warms the life within;
And bird and blossom swell
In sod or sheath or shell.

All things rising, all things sizing
Mary saw, sympathising
With that world of good,
Nature's motherhood.

Their magnifying of each its kind
With delight calls to mind
How she did in her stored
Magnify the Lord.

Well but there was more than this:
Spring's universal bliss
Much, had much to say
To offering Mary May.

When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple
Bloom lights the orchard-apple
And thicket and thorp are merry
With silver-surfed cherry

And azuring-over greybell makes
Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes
And magic cuckoocall
Caps, clears, and clinches all—

This ecstasy all through mothering earth
Tells Mary her mirth till Christ's birth
To remember and exultation
In God who was her salvation.       

---Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1878

[edited for prominent Roman Catholic Marian theology; cmb, 2013]

*Mary's song during her pregnancy with Christ:  "My soul magnifies the Lord..."
**Rose & Blue are traditionally "Mary's colors."  Blue for faithfulness & Rose for femininity, motherhood & the color of the fresh, pure rose.

Moonless darkness stands between

Moonless darkness stands between. 

Past, the Past, no more be seen! 

But the Bethlehem-star may lead me 

To the sight of Him Who freed me 

From the self that I have been. 

Make me pure, Lord: Thou art holy; 

Make me meek, Lord: Thou wert lowly; 

Now beginning, and alway: 

Now begin, on Christmas day.

---Gerard Manley Hopkins

Pied Beauty (Redux)

Always nice to repeat some of Hopkins work:

Glory be to God for dappled things,For skies of couple-color as a brindled cow,
For rose-moles in stipple** upon trout that swim.Fresh-firecoal chestnut falls***, finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced---fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.All things counter, spare, original, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled, (who knows how?)With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:Praise Him.
---Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1877

*Pied: Having patches of more than one color; i.e. the "Pied Piper"
**Rose-colored dots or flecks
***Fallen chestnuts, red as burning coals

 

My Own Heart Let Me Have More Pity On

[originally untitled]
(Forgiveness in Christ brings joy; but sometimes a tender conscience is hard on a person for a period of time. Hopkins experienced a period of what appears to be depression in connection with this.)

My own heart let me have more pity on; let
Me live to see my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
I cast for comfort I can no more get
By going round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find*
Thirst's all-in-all in all a world of wet.

Would, self; come, poor Jackself*, I do advise
You, jaded, let be;*** call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile****
's bit wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather---as skies
Betweenpie mountains---lights a lovely mile.
---Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1885


*The poet is "groping around" in the manner of a blind man, searching for comfort that eludes him
**Hopkins often used "Jack" as a stand in for "anyone", the "man on the street", himself
***"Let it go", in modern language; he's telling his soul this hanging on to jadedness & sad thougts needs to go
****No, the poet doesn't really believe that God (the Father) has a physical smile; it's figurative, and he's comparing it to the "dappled" bright "U" of sky in the saddle between two dark mountains

Music on the Wing*

Let me be to Thee as the circling bird,
Or bat with tender and air-crisping wings
That shapes in half-light his departing rings**,
from both of whom a changeless note is heard.

I have found my music in a common word,
Trying each pleasurable throat that sings
And every praised sequence of sweet strings,
And know infallibly which I preferred.

The authentic cadence was discovered late
Which ends those only strains that I approve,
and other science all gone out of date
And minor sweetness scarce made mention of;
I have found the dominant of my range*** and state--
Love, O my God, to call Thee Love and Love.
---Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1865
*Originally untitled
**The bats circling to depart at sunset ("half-light")
***The author found his "true singing voice" late, or so he says. His "range" (literally, how low & high one can sing) is all wrapped up in Love for God. (This love can come only as a response to knowing that Christ has died for our sins.)

Change & the Comfort of the Resurrection

(from the longer poem "That Nature is a Heraclitean (1) Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection.")

...Vastness blurs and time beats level. Enough! the Resurrection
A heart's clarion (2)! Away grief's grasping, joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck (3) shone
A beacon, and eternal beam. Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; world's wildfire, leave but ash (1):
In a flash, at a trumpet crash (4)
I am all at once what Christ is, since He was what I am, and
this Jack(5), joke poor potsherd, patch(6), matchwood, immortal diamond
Is immortal diamond.(7)
---Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1888
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_Manley_Hopkins

(1) Heraclitus [(c) 535-(c) 475 B.C.); Greek philosopher who taught that the basis of all existence was change or "fire." "Strife" changes fire into water, water into earth, and then the process reversed. Hopkins didn't truly believe this philosophy but used it to symbolize the change of the corrupted nature and of the corrupting body in the grave into something immortal & beautiful (Diamonds also come out of the earth & are processed by fire.)
(2) Clarion--a clear, trumpet-like, beckoning call
(3) Foundering deck: shipwreck as a symbol of death. (Again, the "water.")
(4) Trumpet: borrowed directly from II Corinthians 15:25.
(5) "Jack": common fellow; this name was well-used in England.
(6) Patch (archaic): fool, ninny; also, a detached piece, a make-shift fragment, such as the potsherd Job used to scrape his sores (Job 2:8)
(7) "Immortal Diamond": Hopkins, as a Roman Catholic, believed that people carried the "scintilla", the spark of original good, within themselves, even after Sin entered the world. As a Lutheran, I take the immortal diamond, already there alongside the corrupt things, to be the new person that is created in Christ when the person is saved. (The term "immortal diamond" has also been used as a title for Hopkins himself.)

The Starlight Night

Look at the stars! look. look up at the skies!
O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
The bright boroughs*, the circle-citadels* there!
Down in the dim woods the diamond delves**! the elves' eyes!
The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold*** lies!...
Ah, well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.****
---from Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1877

*city images, as if the constellations were fortified cities
**the diamond-like stars dive down to the "land of elves"; (Hopkins nor I really believe in elves--it's just a fanciful & joyful flight of poetic symbolism)
***the light of the heavenly bodies is like "free gold" to anyone who takes the trouble to take it in, but it's gold in motion---it won't be there forever
****the prize comes from the purchase made by Jesus Christ; He died for your sins so all this, too, can be yours, along with the forgiveness and life you have in Him

Spring

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 rise and wring
The ear, it strides 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 limbs, 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***
Innocent mind and Mayday**** in girl and boy,
Most, O Maid's Child*****,
Thy choice and worth the winning.
---Gerard Manley Hopkins, may 1877

*Eggs the color of the sky & reminders of it
**Thrush: the songbird, not the yeast-related infection (ha, ha!!)
***Cloy: to satiate, us. w/something pleasing. Basically, hurry to enjoy this fleeting reminder of Eden before it is spoiled, as the first Eden was by sin
****Mayday: May 1st. Celebrated in Europe with flowers & folk dances. (Happy Mayday! Also, Blessed Ascension. This year, the day commemorating Jesus's bodily Ascension through the clouds, after which we could no longer see Him physically, is also May 1st.)
*****Maid's Child: The Virgin's Son, Jesus. (Roman Catholics devote all of May to Mary.) This suggests that Jesus would choose the "innocent" boys & girls more than anyone else. Actually, no one's innocent & God loves all us rotten sinners just the same.

Pied* Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things, 

For skies of couple-color as a brindled cow, 

For rose-moles in stipple** upon trout that swim. 

Fresh-firecoal chestnut falls***, finches' wings; 

Landscape plotted and pieced---fold, fallow, and plough; 

And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim. 

All things counter, spare, original, strange; 

Whatever is fickle, freckled, (who knows how?) 

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; 

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise Him.

---Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1877 

*Pied: Having patches of more than one color; i.e. the "Pied Piper" **Rose-colored dots or flecks ***Fallen chestnuts, red as burning coals

Spring and Fall

to a young child

Margaret, are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leaves like the things of man, you 

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you? 

Ah, as 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 will weep and know why***.

Now no matter, child, the name: 

Sorrows springs are the same. 

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed, 

What heart heard of, ghost guessed****: 

It was the blight man was born for.

It is Margaret you mourn for. ---Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1880 

"Leafmeal"; akin to "piecemeal", a work coined by Hopkins **although Margaret might someday see a whole LOT ('worlds') of leaves laying around decaying, ***when she someday does, she will know why it moves her: the decay of leaves triggers thoughts of her own mortality ****before she had expressed it or heard it expressed, Margaret's own inner spirit knew the truth of this

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 (1)?
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(2).

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 (3)
World broods (4) with warm breast
                 and with ah! bright wings (5).

---Gerard Manley Hopkins, , 1877
(1) Psalm 2:9. Jesus wields a rod to smash prideful kings.
(2) Shod feet. The loss of pristine innocence, the need to be clothed after sin entered the world.(3) Bent world. (a) tired (b) bent but not broken; crooked, inperfect (c) curved, as an egg over which the Spirit broods
(4) Brooding of the Holy Spirit---see Genesis 1.
(5) As one turns from the dark west horizon (earth's tiredness, coming as a result of man's sin) back to the eastern horizon, where the sun is rising, he sees the promise of a new day under the Spirit's care. This borrows from the Bible's Dove symbolism (breast and wings), which are bright and colorful as the beautiful sunrise.

The Spirit "brooded over the waters", in a sense, at Jesus' baptism, also.  In choosing colors for these, I was mindful that the Jordan River is muddy & turgid, but I also wanted it to still look like "water" to the casual observer. Due to the way the 2nd picture drew the Holy Spirit coming, I made a choice to have rainbow-like light below Him.  This also reminded me of the "ah! bright wings" of Hopkins' poem.

Though the second picture has more "immature" art, one thing is more accurate:  the Holy Spirit and the voice came after Jesus had come back up out of the water.  The art in this photo, for whatever reasons, is either sunrise or sunset.  (The time of day isn't mentioned in the Bible.)  But it does remind the observer of Hopkins' allusion to sunrise in his poem.

Moonrise

I awoke in the Midsummer not-to-call night,
in the white and the walk of the morning*:
The moon, dwindled and thinned to the fringe
of a fingernail** held to the candle,
Or paring of paradisaical fruit,***
lovely in waning but lustreless. . .
This was the prized, the desirable sight,
unsought, presented so easily,
Parted me leaf and leaf****, divided me,
eyelid and eyelid of slumber.
---Gerard Manley Hopkins; June, 1876

*A moon just before the new moon will come up just before sun up
**Slim crescent moon, seeming as translucent as a fingernail held up in front of a candle in a dark room (a waning moon)
***Fruit parings also seem translucent; reminds one of the "waning" of the fruit of paradise after sin
****The "magic" of this night cut right through the poet, as if leaves of a book or of a tree parting from each other, then his eyelids were parted from his eyes as he could no longer sleep with such a "spell" on his room


Technorati Labels Gerard Manley Hopkins moon night summer change nature religion Catholic poetry literature poetry

Peace

When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace?
I'll not play hypocrite
To my own heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?

O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu
Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite,
That plumes* to Peace thereafter. And when Peace does house**
He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,
He comes to brood and sit.***
---Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1879

*plumes out, grows into a full-fledged bird
**make a dwelling
***to hatch something new & more special

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[Patience]

Patience, hard thing! the hard thing but to pray,
But bid for, Patience is! Patience who asks
Wants war, wants wounds; weary his time, his tasks;
To do without, take tosses, and obey.*

Rare patience roots in these, and, these away,
Nowhere. Natural heart's ivy, Patience masks**
Our ruins of wrecked purpose. There she basks
Purple eyes*** and seas of liquid leaves all day.

We hear our hearts grate on themselves: it kills
To bruise them dearer. Yet the rebellious wills
Of us we do bid God bend to him even so.
And where is He who more and more distills
Delicious kindness?-- He is patient. Patience fills
His crisp combs****, and that comes those ways we know.
---Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1885

*we don't like to be 'patient' waiting for 'patience'; we strive & try to make it happen
**ivy covers over ruined homes & covers the cracks beneath
***berries
****God's sweet patience, like honeycombs

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