Friday, January 30, 2009

I've been idling through the works of Gerard Manley Hopkins this sunny morning. Here's a remark from his notebooks, dated April 14, 1864:

It is a happy thing that there is no royal road to poetry. The world should know by this time that one cannot reach Parnassus except by flying thither. Yet from time to time more men go up and either perish in its gullies fluttering excelsior flags or else come down again with full folios and blank countenances. Yet the old fallacy keeps its ground. Every age has its false alarms.

I copied out one of his sonnets, and I was thinking as I did so that you might like to try copying it out yourself. The music of his metrics as well as his quite remarkable use of repetition became exquisitely apparent, once the poem was under my fingers. In his notebooks and letters, Hopkins frequently talks about Milton's prosody; and clearly his syntax alone shows a striking resemblance to the strange and beautiful grammatical contortions of Paradise Lost.

My Own Heart

            Gerard Manley Hopkins

My own heart let me more have pity on; let

Me live to 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 groping 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.

 

Soul, 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 not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather—as skies

Betweenpie mountains—lights a lovely mile.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I love Hopkins, love his language use and his quirky syntax, love reading it out loud and out loud in my own head--this was not a poem I knew, and I have read it again and again in these last few days, thinking about how wonderful that last stanza is, especially, the advice to the self, the poor, jaded, soul, to "let be", the call to "leave comfort root-room"--and that last, lovely line. . .thanks for sharing this!

Dawn Potter said...

Yes, Hopkins continually surprises me. I hear echoes of Shakespeare in there as well . . . the way in which he uses the poem as a voiced soliloquy rather than as a meditation.

Anonymous said...

Hopkins is extraordinary. He minds me so much of a Zen master giving a Koan!

Dawn Potter said...

I'm so not-Zen that I don't even know what a koan is. You'll have to instruct me.