Rain again this morning, and in the wet darkness a Carolina wren urges tea kettle, tea kettle, tea kettle, tea. I didn't sleep very well last night, and this morning I'm not bleary exactly but a bit brittle.

I spent much of yesterday drafting an essay I don't like, one that I'll probably abandon on account of its dull thinking but that, subject-wise, is still niggling at me. I never know if these false leads are useful or a waste of time. And I write so few essays these days that prose-work itself is mystifying. I can't call the day a failure, given that I cranked out a lot of sentences, but it wasn't a transcendent one by any means. I wrote an awkward draft about an awkward topic, and I never found the portal.

On the bright side I did get rid of the weird smell in the dishwasher.

Today I'll bake a peach cobbler, and I'll walk down to the farmers' market in search of new potatoes, and in the evening I'll go out to my poetry group. Maybe that essay will decide to be written; but, if so, it will have to do a lot of nagging to make me take it seriously.

I'm still poring over "Grecian Urn," though, and I've been thinking about Hopkins's notions of inscape and instress. In an article in Commonweal, Anthony Domestico explains:

Hopkins coined the terms inscape and instress to describe the overflowing presence of the divine within the temporal. Inscape, for Hopkins, is the charged essence, the absolute singularity that gives each created thing its being; instress is both the energy that holds the inscape together and the process by which this inscape is perceived by an observer. We instress the inscape of a tulip, Hopkins would say, when we appreciate the particular delicacy of its petals, when we are enraptured by its specific, inimitable shade of pink.

I feel these distinctions more than I understand them intellectually, perhaps because, for me, they are elements of the process of moving from inarticulate sensation into the framing of language. I daresay they also have some connection to why I'm presently writing good poems and bad prose.